Why is he here? In this house, so empty, so silent, with his Yorkie, Kip curled by his feet. He is lying in a bed, white sheet on white sheets. He sits up, sees something move on the opposite side of the room, and starts, making Kip growl slightly. He sees it was only his reflection in a mirror. He looks around the room, taking in the clean white walls, the swept floor.
He tries to remember why he’s here, the fight comes back, the screams of his parents, as he cowers in his closet, squeezing Kip to his face. Finally, he had leapt up, sprinted past his parents and out the door. He’s not sure if they even saw him. He had run, and run, finally stopping by the abandoned house downtown, ignoring the childish voice inside that said, ‘everyone says its haunted’. He had peered in the window, and seen that the inside was clean, the walls a fresh white, the floors newly swept. He had crawled in this bed, the sheets new and clean, and slept.
He patted Kip. ‘It’ll be ok.’ He caught another glimpse of movement in the mirror. He looked up, something was moving on the wall. He squinted at the mirror. It was a crab. A brown and red speckled crab the size of his hand. He whipped his head up, looking at the wall. There was no crab, crabs couldn’t climb walls anyway. He shook his head. Stupid ghost stories. ‘It’s ‘cause a crab selling guy disappeared by this house. Mom said it once, and my subconnie-whatchamacallit remembered and seen a crab.’ He stroked Kip again.
He felt something move near his knee. He moved the sheets away, and there was the crab, scuttling across the sheet towards the edge of the bed. He squealed with revulsion and flapped the sheet, flinging the crab across the room. It hit the floor and began creeping towards him again. Kip began to bark, his high-pitched yipping echoing in the room. . .which was changing.
The crisp white walls were turning yellow, then brown, the paint peeling, the floor began to accumulate dust, the crab was wading in dust by the time we was half-way across the room. And the sheet- the boy screams, it is covered in bugs, all shapes and sizes, and crabs, those disgusting mottled crabs, and other creatures so disgusting his panicking mind can’t put a name to them. He leaps from the bed, Kip is already gone.
‘Kip!’ he cried, and heard the dog’s frightened yip. Somehow, Kip has gotten into the bathtub, in a small bathroom off the now crumbling bedroom. The fixtures are flaking with rust, a shattered bulb hangs from the ceiling. And something dropped from the bathtub tap. The boy edges closer, trying to see his dog. Another shape drops from the tap, and another. He peers into the tub and sees his poor dog struggling against dozens of snakes. They are wrapped around the small, furry body, their fangs deep in his skin. The dog’s struggles weaken, and his eyes begin to turn glassy. The boy screams, fleeing down the hall. The house is awful, pipes jut from walls like bones, wires hang like moss, the walls have crumbled in places, showing the lattice inside. The door, where’s the door?!
He turns a corner, and there he sees two figures. He recognizes them immediately.
‘Mommy! Daddy!’ he cries, and runs to them, his fear of them is great, but the fear of this house is greater. He throws his arms around his mother. ‘I’m so scared!’ He sobs.
‘Don’t be afraid, dear. None of these things can hurt you. They’re all someone’s fears. You can’t get hurt by someone else’s fears. The crab man was scared of crabs, he’d seen them all day for years, and he grew to loathe them, so only his crabs could hurt him.’ His mother rubs his back soothing. ‘Kip was scared of snakes, remember when he got bitten?’
‘So only my greatest fear can hurt me?’ The boy says, ‘Then what-’ He tries to pull back, but it’s too late, his mother’s hands have clamped around his neck.
‘Stay, darling.’ She whispers, but her voice has changed, and her breath stinks of rotting meat. Her skin changes, becomes putrid, ‘I’m ever so hungry.’
*Heeheehee, this is a giant nostalgia bomb for me. I wrote it when I was 13! I found an old CD of stuff I wrote back in high school, most of which sent me into cringes so hard my eyebrows broke, but this one wasn't too terrible for 13. I'm pretty sure it was the first scary story I ever wrote...
Monday, June 6, 2011
What Are Friends For?
My friend John asked me to help him move into his new house. He asked if I could stay a few days, help him get his stuff in and sort through the old owner’s stuff that had been left behind. He asked me because I’m one of those people who can’t say no when a friend asks for a favor.
“Of course.” I answered. “What are friends for?”
The place freaked me out from the moment I laid eyes on it. It was at the end of a long winding driveway that ran through the woods, one of those 1960’s modern jobs, with angles and glass and strange little 5 step staircases all over the place.
“Why would you buy such a butt ugly thing?” I asked he parked the rental van next to my car. “It’s in the middle of nowhere, and it looks like something out of ‘A Clockwork Orange’.”
“The owners died, no relatives, so it was dirt cheap, and it came with all the furnishings.” He replied.
“If there’s a big rocking penis sculpture in there, I call shotgun.” I said, and we laughed as we walked up to the front door. He unlocked the door and proudly swung it open.
I tried to smile and praise the place, it was his first house, and he was really excited. But my guts turned to lead as soon as I stepped inside. It was like the air inside was pressing down on me. The furniture was a mish-mash of old Victorian stuff and 60’s “modern” plastic. Most of the plastic stuff was a sick flesh color. And the way the house was laid out was just bizarre. Instead of the central hallway running from one end of the house to the other, it spiraled inward, with rooms branching off in odd places, leading into a small guest bedroom at the center of the house. That was the strangest room in the house to me, there was some kind of religious shrine against the wall opposite the bed, with dried flowers glued to the wall in layers over a side table littered with candles and a wooden box the size of a toaster oven.
After my tour, we began unloading the truck. We piled his boxes in the living room and kitchen, and decided to start going through the bedrooms and load the truck up with all the stuff he didn’t want. We would start in the first bedrooms and spiral our way to the middle. Most of it was junk, boxes of old letters written in German or Polish or something, old pictures of the last couple to own the house. They were both short, fat and mean-eyed. There pictures of six different kids, but only up until they were toddlers.
I spent a lot of time sitting on the floor, and something about the carpet grossed me out. It was old shag carpeting, a dirty red color, but it felt grimy, sticky like a movie theatre floor. I told John to either have it steamed to death or to replace it.
“Really? Why?” He rubbed his hand on it.
“Ug, doesn’t it gross you out?”
“No.” He gave me a weird look and went back to sorting. I noticed that he was spending more time looking at the old pictures and letters than I was, even pulling some out of the garbage bag I’d been filling.
“Why are you looking at those? You don’t even speak German or whatever it is.”
“They’re interesting. It’s someone else’s life.”
“Well, if you keep screwing around looking at old photos of some ugly old people, we’ll be here for the rest of our lives.”
He gave me another look, this one kind of pissed, and I sighed.
“I’m going for a smoke.” I got up, stretched and went back to the living room. The floor to ceiling windows were dark, reflecting myself back from the light of the hallway. I found the switch and flipped it on, and now the window was a mirror of the living room. It was kind of freaky, seeing myself, but not knowing if there was someone outside, looking in. There weren’t any curtains or blinds, and I made a note to tell John to get some. I found a switch for the outside light and flicked it on, opening the door slowly and peeking out. Nothing but trees. This place was getting to me something awful.
I smoked my cigarette slowly, not wanting to go back into the house. Something moved in the corner of my eye. I turned quickly, and saw a cat, lurking just outside of the circle of light thrown by the patio light bulb.
“Here, kitty, kitty.” I bent down, rubbing my fingers together and making that “Psss, psss, psss” sound. The cat just walked around the circle of light, meowing softly. The meow sounded wrong, like the cat was meowing into a hollow gourd. I’m a big cat softie, so I moved closer, thinking the poor thing might be hurt.
I was still bent over, with my hand outstretched, when it turned to face me. The left half of it’s face was a ruin, the skin peeled away, the eye gorged out. It meowed again, and it’s mouth opened far too wide, like a snake unhinging it’s jaw. Blood began to run from its ears and mouth. Its remaining eye fell from the socket and hit the ground with a plop. I screamed, backing away and clawing for the door. I managed to get it open and still shrieking, scrambled in and slammed it shut.
I stumbled down the hall, screaming for John. When I burst into the bedroom, he looked up from the photos he’d been looking at.
“What the hells gotten into you?” He said calmly.
“Didn’t you hear me screaming? There’s some kind of messed up cat outside! It’s bleeding and it’s eyes fell out! Right on your patio!”
He shrugged. “A coyote probably got it.” And went back to the box of papers he was sorting through.
“Are you listening to me? There’s a mutilated cat outside!” I was crying now, I couldn’t believe he was just sitting there looking through papers he couldn’t even read.
“Fine.” He snapped and threw the papers back in the box. “You want me to go look at a torn up cat? Fine. I will.” He pushed past me, slamming my shoulder into the door as he did.
“What’s wrong with you?” I yelled.
“You’re the one who wants me to watch some poor animal die!” He yelled back, and yanked the front door open. He stood looking out, then turned back to me. “This is sick.”
“I told you, it came up to me and-” I stopped next to him, looking out the door. There was a cat on the patio, but it had been dead for a while. Maggots crawled in and out of the patched remains of its fur. “That wasn’t there, John. We walked across this patio 50 times today, bringing in your boxes.”
“Did you put it there?”
“No! How could I? If you tried to pick that up, it would fall apart!”
“Whatever. We must not have seen it earlier.”
“How could we miss it? We would have had to step over it!” I was beyond scared, and getting panicked. “I’m going home.”
“Well, gee thanks for the help.” He snapped. “I guess this is what friends are for.”
“Come with me. There’s something really wrong here.”
“Screw you.” He said and slammed the door shut behind me. A second later, the patio light went off.
I ran towards my car, leaping over the cat, trying to dig my car keys out of my pocket as I ran. I kept jamming down the unlock button, making the woods seem to leer and reach towards me as the parking lights flashed on and off. Finally I reached the car, slammed the door behind me and locked the doors. It took me a full minute to get the key into the ignition, it kept straying off to the side and scraping across the dashboard. I finally got them in and burned rubber reversing, almost slamming into the moving van trying to turn around.
I forced myself to slow down on the driveway, it was narrow and winding, and I did not want to get wrapped around a tree out here. Suddenly there was something in the middle of the road. I slammed on my brakes, stopping less than 10 feet from a large, dirty pig. It stood on the cracked asphalt, nosing the air with its snout and making soft pig noises.
“What the fu-” I began, when the pig reared up, squealing madly. It stood on its hind legs, pawing at the air with its front hooves. A red line began to trace down its belly, and suddenly split open, slipping the pig’s guts onto the pavement. Screaming, I smashed my foot down on the gas, swerving around the pig, which was still trashing around on its hind legs.
I got home late, and spent the rest of the night in my bed, curled up and crying. I tried to call John’s cell dozens of times but got no answer. I managed a few hours of sleep, but kept being awakened by nightmares where the pig danced and jerked in my headlights while its guts and blood ran out onto the asphalt.
I called some of our other friends, but none of them could get through to John either. I was worried sick, and ashamed I’d left him out there, so I got 2 of my biggest, brawniest friends to drive back out to his house with me. There was no pig in the driveway, but the cat was still festering on the patio. We knocked and knocked, but he didn’t answer. We walked around the side of the house, to see if we could see him through one of the big windows. Around back there was a pool full of dark, filthy water. On the cracked concrete next to the later was the rotting, gutted remains of a pig. We went back to the car and left. I called the police from my cell phone.
They found the remains of hundreds of animals on the property around the house. Most of them had been mutilated in some way, then left to rot where they lay. In the wooden box in the strange center bedroom they found the skeletons of 6 toddlers. By translating and reading some of the letters in the house, they discovered that the couple who owned the house had had 6 children. They’d had parties on each child’s third birthday, inviting a select group of their friends from Germany. At the party the child was killed and eaten. The cops tried to trace the letters, to find their friends in Germany, but they never did.
They never found John, either. I’m still ashamed and sad that I left him there that night. But I’m glad I left. God knows where he went to. I’ve drifted away from most of my other friends, too. They think I’m depressed over John. But honestly, I’m scared that one of them will ask me for a favor. Like helping them move. Because I’m the sort of person who can’t say no. Because, really, what are friends for?
*This was actually the (much) embellished version of some spooky shit that happened to me in 2 different modern architecture houses. One that my friend had just moved into and one that I cleaned when I used to work for Merry Maids. I am NOT a fan of that style, those houses ruined it for me, and now I think all those angles and glass are sinister as fuck.
“Of course.” I answered. “What are friends for?”
The place freaked me out from the moment I laid eyes on it. It was at the end of a long winding driveway that ran through the woods, one of those 1960’s modern jobs, with angles and glass and strange little 5 step staircases all over the place.
“Why would you buy such a butt ugly thing?” I asked he parked the rental van next to my car. “It’s in the middle of nowhere, and it looks like something out of ‘A Clockwork Orange’.”
“The owners died, no relatives, so it was dirt cheap, and it came with all the furnishings.” He replied.
“If there’s a big rocking penis sculpture in there, I call shotgun.” I said, and we laughed as we walked up to the front door. He unlocked the door and proudly swung it open.
I tried to smile and praise the place, it was his first house, and he was really excited. But my guts turned to lead as soon as I stepped inside. It was like the air inside was pressing down on me. The furniture was a mish-mash of old Victorian stuff and 60’s “modern” plastic. Most of the plastic stuff was a sick flesh color. And the way the house was laid out was just bizarre. Instead of the central hallway running from one end of the house to the other, it spiraled inward, with rooms branching off in odd places, leading into a small guest bedroom at the center of the house. That was the strangest room in the house to me, there was some kind of religious shrine against the wall opposite the bed, with dried flowers glued to the wall in layers over a side table littered with candles and a wooden box the size of a toaster oven.
After my tour, we began unloading the truck. We piled his boxes in the living room and kitchen, and decided to start going through the bedrooms and load the truck up with all the stuff he didn’t want. We would start in the first bedrooms and spiral our way to the middle. Most of it was junk, boxes of old letters written in German or Polish or something, old pictures of the last couple to own the house. They were both short, fat and mean-eyed. There pictures of six different kids, but only up until they were toddlers.
I spent a lot of time sitting on the floor, and something about the carpet grossed me out. It was old shag carpeting, a dirty red color, but it felt grimy, sticky like a movie theatre floor. I told John to either have it steamed to death or to replace it.
“Really? Why?” He rubbed his hand on it.
“Ug, doesn’t it gross you out?”
“No.” He gave me a weird look and went back to sorting. I noticed that he was spending more time looking at the old pictures and letters than I was, even pulling some out of the garbage bag I’d been filling.
“Why are you looking at those? You don’t even speak German or whatever it is.”
“They’re interesting. It’s someone else’s life.”
“Well, if you keep screwing around looking at old photos of some ugly old people, we’ll be here for the rest of our lives.”
He gave me another look, this one kind of pissed, and I sighed.
“I’m going for a smoke.” I got up, stretched and went back to the living room. The floor to ceiling windows were dark, reflecting myself back from the light of the hallway. I found the switch and flipped it on, and now the window was a mirror of the living room. It was kind of freaky, seeing myself, but not knowing if there was someone outside, looking in. There weren’t any curtains or blinds, and I made a note to tell John to get some. I found a switch for the outside light and flicked it on, opening the door slowly and peeking out. Nothing but trees. This place was getting to me something awful.
I smoked my cigarette slowly, not wanting to go back into the house. Something moved in the corner of my eye. I turned quickly, and saw a cat, lurking just outside of the circle of light thrown by the patio light bulb.
“Here, kitty, kitty.” I bent down, rubbing my fingers together and making that “Psss, psss, psss” sound. The cat just walked around the circle of light, meowing softly. The meow sounded wrong, like the cat was meowing into a hollow gourd. I’m a big cat softie, so I moved closer, thinking the poor thing might be hurt.
I was still bent over, with my hand outstretched, when it turned to face me. The left half of it’s face was a ruin, the skin peeled away, the eye gorged out. It meowed again, and it’s mouth opened far too wide, like a snake unhinging it’s jaw. Blood began to run from its ears and mouth. Its remaining eye fell from the socket and hit the ground with a plop. I screamed, backing away and clawing for the door. I managed to get it open and still shrieking, scrambled in and slammed it shut.
I stumbled down the hall, screaming for John. When I burst into the bedroom, he looked up from the photos he’d been looking at.
“What the hells gotten into you?” He said calmly.
“Didn’t you hear me screaming? There’s some kind of messed up cat outside! It’s bleeding and it’s eyes fell out! Right on your patio!”
He shrugged. “A coyote probably got it.” And went back to the box of papers he was sorting through.
“Are you listening to me? There’s a mutilated cat outside!” I was crying now, I couldn’t believe he was just sitting there looking through papers he couldn’t even read.
“Fine.” He snapped and threw the papers back in the box. “You want me to go look at a torn up cat? Fine. I will.” He pushed past me, slamming my shoulder into the door as he did.
“What’s wrong with you?” I yelled.
“You’re the one who wants me to watch some poor animal die!” He yelled back, and yanked the front door open. He stood looking out, then turned back to me. “This is sick.”
“I told you, it came up to me and-” I stopped next to him, looking out the door. There was a cat on the patio, but it had been dead for a while. Maggots crawled in and out of the patched remains of its fur. “That wasn’t there, John. We walked across this patio 50 times today, bringing in your boxes.”
“Did you put it there?”
“No! How could I? If you tried to pick that up, it would fall apart!”
“Whatever. We must not have seen it earlier.”
“How could we miss it? We would have had to step over it!” I was beyond scared, and getting panicked. “I’m going home.”
“Well, gee thanks for the help.” He snapped. “I guess this is what friends are for.”
“Come with me. There’s something really wrong here.”
“Screw you.” He said and slammed the door shut behind me. A second later, the patio light went off.
I ran towards my car, leaping over the cat, trying to dig my car keys out of my pocket as I ran. I kept jamming down the unlock button, making the woods seem to leer and reach towards me as the parking lights flashed on and off. Finally I reached the car, slammed the door behind me and locked the doors. It took me a full minute to get the key into the ignition, it kept straying off to the side and scraping across the dashboard. I finally got them in and burned rubber reversing, almost slamming into the moving van trying to turn around.
I forced myself to slow down on the driveway, it was narrow and winding, and I did not want to get wrapped around a tree out here. Suddenly there was something in the middle of the road. I slammed on my brakes, stopping less than 10 feet from a large, dirty pig. It stood on the cracked asphalt, nosing the air with its snout and making soft pig noises.
“What the fu-” I began, when the pig reared up, squealing madly. It stood on its hind legs, pawing at the air with its front hooves. A red line began to trace down its belly, and suddenly split open, slipping the pig’s guts onto the pavement. Screaming, I smashed my foot down on the gas, swerving around the pig, which was still trashing around on its hind legs.
I got home late, and spent the rest of the night in my bed, curled up and crying. I tried to call John’s cell dozens of times but got no answer. I managed a few hours of sleep, but kept being awakened by nightmares where the pig danced and jerked in my headlights while its guts and blood ran out onto the asphalt.
I called some of our other friends, but none of them could get through to John either. I was worried sick, and ashamed I’d left him out there, so I got 2 of my biggest, brawniest friends to drive back out to his house with me. There was no pig in the driveway, but the cat was still festering on the patio. We knocked and knocked, but he didn’t answer. We walked around the side of the house, to see if we could see him through one of the big windows. Around back there was a pool full of dark, filthy water. On the cracked concrete next to the later was the rotting, gutted remains of a pig. We went back to the car and left. I called the police from my cell phone.
They found the remains of hundreds of animals on the property around the house. Most of them had been mutilated in some way, then left to rot where they lay. In the wooden box in the strange center bedroom they found the skeletons of 6 toddlers. By translating and reading some of the letters in the house, they discovered that the couple who owned the house had had 6 children. They’d had parties on each child’s third birthday, inviting a select group of their friends from Germany. At the party the child was killed and eaten. The cops tried to trace the letters, to find their friends in Germany, but they never did.
They never found John, either. I’m still ashamed and sad that I left him there that night. But I’m glad I left. God knows where he went to. I’ve drifted away from most of my other friends, too. They think I’m depressed over John. But honestly, I’m scared that one of them will ask me for a favor. Like helping them move. Because I’m the sort of person who can’t say no. Because, really, what are friends for?
*This was actually the (much) embellished version of some spooky shit that happened to me in 2 different modern architecture houses. One that my friend had just moved into and one that I cleaned when I used to work for Merry Maids. I am NOT a fan of that style, those houses ruined it for me, and now I think all those angles and glass are sinister as fuck.
Sunday, March 6, 2011
Report, Soldier
Credit to: Sgt Hoffman
*A few people asked if they could add their own stories, and this was the first to send one to me. Send in one and I'll add it to the blog.
Saturday, March 5, 2011
Tape Log
START TAPE:
Male voice:
I didn’t see the end of the world. I heard it. I haven’t seen anything since I was 4. I kind of remember seeing, but I’m 25 now, and most of the stuff I remember is blurs of color. I remember color. Red fire trucks and the endless expanse of blue that was the sky. But I don’t remember my parents’ faces, or what color my big sister’s eyes were.
PAUSE (BREATHING)
I killed her. I didn’t push her off a roof, or shoot her, but it‘s my fault. I promised her, but I broke that promise, and it’s my fault she’s dead. She came home one day, about 18 months ago, when the Stone began to spread. She was babbling, screaming about people standing stock still in the streets, and killing anyone who touched them. She had bags and bags of canned food, and began tearing the furniture apart, nailing the pieces over the windows. I’d heard a lot of commotion that day, but figured it was just people getting excited over the Sox being in the World Series. I liked listening to baseball game son the radio. I wish the radio towers around here still worked. There’s no more Red Sox to cheer for, but I guess I could have learned to like the Twins or something. (LAUGHTER) At least I know New York went down, too. No more fucking Yankees.
(MORE LAUGHTER, BECOMES WEEPING, WEEPING CONTINUES FOR 10 MINUTES)
Kris had always taken good care of me, and she was reeling off instructions to me as she boarded up the house. Things were getting louder and crazier outside. I was begging her to slow down, she didn’t make any sense, I didn’t know what she was talking about. She wouldn’t, though, not until she’d sealed off all the windows, and the dim grey that I think of as ‘daylight’ had become the black of ‘nighttime’. She pulled me to her, and told me she’d seen men and women standing still as statues in the streets, and when people touched them, they’d attack them. And then the people stood up and stood still in the streets, even though they were dead. She’d been running in the park when she saw the first one, and as she ran first to the grocery store to get supplies, then home, she’d seen more and more, more dead people too.
“You can’t touch anyone but me, do you hear me? They kill people who touch them! People tried to attack them, but nothing happened, not until they touched them, so you can’t touch anyone but me! Promise me you’ll never touch them! Promise me! Promise me!” I promised. I … promised her…
(TAPE PAUSES, THEN RECORDING CONTINUES)
We stayed in the house for 4 days, eating canned food, she said she couldn’t hear much through the boards, just the really loud screams, and gunfire, sometimes men yelling over megaphones. I heard things, though. I heard lots of things. Dry snaps like sticks being snapped over a knee. The far-off grinding of heavy equipment. Lots and lots of trucks, military trucks, it turned out. And many times I heard a gristly ripping sound, the sound a turkey leg makes when you rip it off the bird. People crying, children screaming, glass breaking, the screech of tires and the crunch of a car hitting something immobile and hard. The meatier thud of a car hitting something smaller, and fleshier. I tried wearing earplugs, but they didn’t help much. The only way I could sleep was by putting in earplugs, then putting my headphones on over them and playing bass-heavy classical music.
On the 5th day, I heard many feet running up our front walk. I screamed for Kris. She hugged me against her, and we hid in a closet, but the men found us anyway. They smelled like leather and gunpowder, their voices were cracked and hysterical with exhaustion and fear. They told us we had to come with them, it wasn’t safe here, it was a single story building. They grabbed my arm and pulled me up, out of the house. I screamed for Kris, heard her screaming and struggling behind me. I flailed like a fish. One of the men yelled and pinned my arms to my sides.
“Jesus, he almost touched it!” One of them yelled, and I went limp with fear in his arms. He carried me to the truck like a rag doll. They brought us to an apartment building, told us to get to the second floor or higher, the Stone couldn’t go up stairs. I started laughing.
“They can’t climb stairs? They can’t climb fucking stairs?”
The soldiers got mad, they didn’t hear the panic and fear humming through every note of my words like I did. They thought I was being a smartass. They yelled at Kris to get my ass upstairs. There were other people upstairs, it was a terrible din of crying, moaning, people praying and children asking “Where’s Mommy? Where’s Peter? Where’s Nanny?” Kris kept leading me up, it felt like we were climbing forever, my thighs burned. But slowly, the noise dropped away. Finally she opened a door and led me down a echoing corridor. She found an open door and called inside, but it was empty. There was a little air moving through the apartment, the window was open. She told me to be careful, the safety grate was gone. I heard her bend over and look out the window, heard a small mew of disgust, then she slammed the window shut. She found the bedroom and told me to lie down for a while. This far up, any sounds were far away, and unimportant. I slept for a long time.
(TAPE PAUSES, THEN RECORDING CONTINUES)
The other people came up eventually, most of them were pretty nice, Kris cleaned out the apartment we’d commandeered, we settled into a life. I can hear the helicopters coming form way off, and I have to go downstairs. I count the landings carefully, 23, and then I’m on the second floor. The sound of the chopper’s blades and the roar of the engine gives me a wicked migraine. If my name ever comes up in the lotto, I’ll probably throw up all over that godawful loud thing. Kris used to follow me everywhere, but after a while, the apartment building became our home. I knew where everything was. I knew how many steps from our door to the stairwell door, I knew how many landings to the second floor, I knew the sound of all our neighbors footsteps and voices. So after a while, Kris stopped following me downstairs when the choppers came. She wanted to hear news from the soldiers, she hated the long climb back upstairs, and the second floor smelled. There’s no running water here, so most people dump their garbage and…septic out the 20th floor windows. Kris says all the buildings with people have a ring of filth 20 feet around them. I wonder about the people in the other buildings. It get kind of boring talking to the same 21 people all the time. But those other people may as well be in China. I’ll certainly never meet them.
I normally started the long trek back upstairs when I heard the helicopter engine winding up to take off again, but one day I felt lazy. I was fighting a bit of a head cold, and felt rundown. So I stayed where I was a bit longer, in an apartment Kris had opened up and cleaned out for me to use when I was hiding down here. I was stretched out in a recliner, and I must have snoozed a bit. I was woken up to soft, soft sobbing. I went out into the hallway, but the sound got dimmer. It was coming from outside! I ran back into the apartment and ran up the window. There was someone outside, beneath the window, crying softly. I thought, “It has to be a person! Kris says the Stone don’t make any noise!”
I thought about running upstairs, getting help. But what if that person was hurt? What if a Stone was slowly creeping towards them? I decide I would just stick my head out the stairwell fire door and yell to them. They could come in the door, and we’d escape upstairs. I went down the stairs quietly, my ears pricked for the slightest sound. I heard someone far up in the stairwell, but nothing below me, just that crying getting louder. Quietly, I opened the fire door. Sobbing roared into my ears. That person was crying so hard now.
“Hello?” I called, opening the door further and stepping out, but not quite daring to let go of the door handle. “Come inside! Where are you?” I started to lift my hand up to feel for them, they were close.
Then Kris screamed “NO!” and shoved me aside. She barreled past me, shoving me back into the stairwell. I heard her gasp, then the door was swinging shut. I felt hot, thick liquid splash across my face, then it slammed shut. I screamed for her, over and over, but there was only that sobbing, endless, and I realized it was them sobbing, all of them, all of the Stone sobbing together, so low no one but me could hear them. I ran back up the stairs, sweat burning my stupid useless fucking eyes, and a taste like the way lightning smells in my mouth. I ran up to our room, and slammed the door. I locked it and shoved all the furniture against it. The neighbors were banging on the door, asking me what’s wrong, where’s Kris, what happened? But they’ve given up now. I wonder if they heard me through the walls. I hear them, fighting and making love, and crying. But I hear a lot they don’t hear. They’ll break in eventually, someone will spot my body down in the ring of filth when they dump their bucket of shit out, and they’ll break in here to see if I left a note.
This is my note. This is why I deserve to die in the garbage and waste down there. I’ll die on top of the body of the last guy who jumped out this window. There’s no safety bar on the window, and it’s what I deserve. I can’t live with the thought that Kris might be down there, endlessly sobbing. I can’t live knowing if I’d kept my promise she’d be alive. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry, Kris.
(SOUND OF WINDOW OPENING, RUSTLING, TAPE CONTINUES TO RECORD SILENCE FOR 3 HOURS)
(END RECORDING)
End
*Well you asked for it. I couldn't sleep and decided to try another one. I have a few more ideas for Stone stories, you may get more out of me yet. God, I've been awake too long.
Male voice:
I didn’t see the end of the world. I heard it. I haven’t seen anything since I was 4. I kind of remember seeing, but I’m 25 now, and most of the stuff I remember is blurs of color. I remember color. Red fire trucks and the endless expanse of blue that was the sky. But I don’t remember my parents’ faces, or what color my big sister’s eyes were.
PAUSE (BREATHING)
I killed her. I didn’t push her off a roof, or shoot her, but it‘s my fault. I promised her, but I broke that promise, and it’s my fault she’s dead. She came home one day, about 18 months ago, when the Stone began to spread. She was babbling, screaming about people standing stock still in the streets, and killing anyone who touched them. She had bags and bags of canned food, and began tearing the furniture apart, nailing the pieces over the windows. I’d heard a lot of commotion that day, but figured it was just people getting excited over the Sox being in the World Series. I liked listening to baseball game son the radio. I wish the radio towers around here still worked. There’s no more Red Sox to cheer for, but I guess I could have learned to like the Twins or something. (LAUGHTER) At least I know New York went down, too. No more fucking Yankees.
(MORE LAUGHTER, BECOMES WEEPING, WEEPING CONTINUES FOR 10 MINUTES)
Kris had always taken good care of me, and she was reeling off instructions to me as she boarded up the house. Things were getting louder and crazier outside. I was begging her to slow down, she didn’t make any sense, I didn’t know what she was talking about. She wouldn’t, though, not until she’d sealed off all the windows, and the dim grey that I think of as ‘daylight’ had become the black of ‘nighttime’. She pulled me to her, and told me she’d seen men and women standing still as statues in the streets, and when people touched them, they’d attack them. And then the people stood up and stood still in the streets, even though they were dead. She’d been running in the park when she saw the first one, and as she ran first to the grocery store to get supplies, then home, she’d seen more and more, more dead people too.
“You can’t touch anyone but me, do you hear me? They kill people who touch them! People tried to attack them, but nothing happened, not until they touched them, so you can’t touch anyone but me! Promise me you’ll never touch them! Promise me! Promise me!” I promised. I … promised her…
(TAPE PAUSES, THEN RECORDING CONTINUES)
We stayed in the house for 4 days, eating canned food, she said she couldn’t hear much through the boards, just the really loud screams, and gunfire, sometimes men yelling over megaphones. I heard things, though. I heard lots of things. Dry snaps like sticks being snapped over a knee. The far-off grinding of heavy equipment. Lots and lots of trucks, military trucks, it turned out. And many times I heard a gristly ripping sound, the sound a turkey leg makes when you rip it off the bird. People crying, children screaming, glass breaking, the screech of tires and the crunch of a car hitting something immobile and hard. The meatier thud of a car hitting something smaller, and fleshier. I tried wearing earplugs, but they didn’t help much. The only way I could sleep was by putting in earplugs, then putting my headphones on over them and playing bass-heavy classical music.
On the 5th day, I heard many feet running up our front walk. I screamed for Kris. She hugged me against her, and we hid in a closet, but the men found us anyway. They smelled like leather and gunpowder, their voices were cracked and hysterical with exhaustion and fear. They told us we had to come with them, it wasn’t safe here, it was a single story building. They grabbed my arm and pulled me up, out of the house. I screamed for Kris, heard her screaming and struggling behind me. I flailed like a fish. One of the men yelled and pinned my arms to my sides.
“Jesus, he almost touched it!” One of them yelled, and I went limp with fear in his arms. He carried me to the truck like a rag doll. They brought us to an apartment building, told us to get to the second floor or higher, the Stone couldn’t go up stairs. I started laughing.
“They can’t climb stairs? They can’t climb fucking stairs?”
The soldiers got mad, they didn’t hear the panic and fear humming through every note of my words like I did. They thought I was being a smartass. They yelled at Kris to get my ass upstairs. There were other people upstairs, it was a terrible din of crying, moaning, people praying and children asking “Where’s Mommy? Where’s Peter? Where’s Nanny?” Kris kept leading me up, it felt like we were climbing forever, my thighs burned. But slowly, the noise dropped away. Finally she opened a door and led me down a echoing corridor. She found an open door and called inside, but it was empty. There was a little air moving through the apartment, the window was open. She told me to be careful, the safety grate was gone. I heard her bend over and look out the window, heard a small mew of disgust, then she slammed the window shut. She found the bedroom and told me to lie down for a while. This far up, any sounds were far away, and unimportant. I slept for a long time.
(TAPE PAUSES, THEN RECORDING CONTINUES)
The other people came up eventually, most of them were pretty nice, Kris cleaned out the apartment we’d commandeered, we settled into a life. I can hear the helicopters coming form way off, and I have to go downstairs. I count the landings carefully, 23, and then I’m on the second floor. The sound of the chopper’s blades and the roar of the engine gives me a wicked migraine. If my name ever comes up in the lotto, I’ll probably throw up all over that godawful loud thing. Kris used to follow me everywhere, but after a while, the apartment building became our home. I knew where everything was. I knew how many steps from our door to the stairwell door, I knew how many landings to the second floor, I knew the sound of all our neighbors footsteps and voices. So after a while, Kris stopped following me downstairs when the choppers came. She wanted to hear news from the soldiers, she hated the long climb back upstairs, and the second floor smelled. There’s no running water here, so most people dump their garbage and…septic out the 20th floor windows. Kris says all the buildings with people have a ring of filth 20 feet around them. I wonder about the people in the other buildings. It get kind of boring talking to the same 21 people all the time. But those other people may as well be in China. I’ll certainly never meet them.
I normally started the long trek back upstairs when I heard the helicopter engine winding up to take off again, but one day I felt lazy. I was fighting a bit of a head cold, and felt rundown. So I stayed where I was a bit longer, in an apartment Kris had opened up and cleaned out for me to use when I was hiding down here. I was stretched out in a recliner, and I must have snoozed a bit. I was woken up to soft, soft sobbing. I went out into the hallway, but the sound got dimmer. It was coming from outside! I ran back into the apartment and ran up the window. There was someone outside, beneath the window, crying softly. I thought, “It has to be a person! Kris says the Stone don’t make any noise!”
I thought about running upstairs, getting help. But what if that person was hurt? What if a Stone was slowly creeping towards them? I decide I would just stick my head out the stairwell fire door and yell to them. They could come in the door, and we’d escape upstairs. I went down the stairs quietly, my ears pricked for the slightest sound. I heard someone far up in the stairwell, but nothing below me, just that crying getting louder. Quietly, I opened the fire door. Sobbing roared into my ears. That person was crying so hard now.
“Hello?” I called, opening the door further and stepping out, but not quite daring to let go of the door handle. “Come inside! Where are you?” I started to lift my hand up to feel for them, they were close.
Then Kris screamed “NO!” and shoved me aside. She barreled past me, shoving me back into the stairwell. I heard her gasp, then the door was swinging shut. I felt hot, thick liquid splash across my face, then it slammed shut. I screamed for her, over and over, but there was only that sobbing, endless, and I realized it was them sobbing, all of them, all of the Stone sobbing together, so low no one but me could hear them. I ran back up the stairs, sweat burning my stupid useless fucking eyes, and a taste like the way lightning smells in my mouth. I ran up to our room, and slammed the door. I locked it and shoved all the furniture against it. The neighbors were banging on the door, asking me what’s wrong, where’s Kris, what happened? But they’ve given up now. I wonder if they heard me through the walls. I hear them, fighting and making love, and crying. But I hear a lot they don’t hear. They’ll break in eventually, someone will spot my body down in the ring of filth when they dump their bucket of shit out, and they’ll break in here to see if I left a note.
This is my note. This is why I deserve to die in the garbage and waste down there. I’ll die on top of the body of the last guy who jumped out this window. There’s no safety bar on the window, and it’s what I deserve. I can’t live with the thought that Kris might be down there, endlessly sobbing. I can’t live knowing if I’d kept my promise she’d be alive. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry, Kris.
(SOUND OF WINDOW OPENING, RUSTLING, TAPE CONTINUES TO RECORD SILENCE FOR 3 HOURS)
(END RECORDING)
End
*Well you asked for it. I couldn't sleep and decided to try another one. I have a few more ideas for Stone stories, you may get more out of me yet. God, I've been awake too long.
The Stone
Sasha,
I hope you get this. I paid a soldier over $10,000 to sneak this letter across the Q-line and mail it. Ha, $10,000. Somewhere in this city, my shitty apartment (with my cat rotting inside, no doubt) cost me $600 a month and I could barely scrape that together, but I’m going to hand a man $10,000 cash to deliver this letter. There’s plenty of money on this side, just lying around, in banks and stores, it just got left there in the panic, and if you’re brave enough to go downstairs, it’s yours for the taking. I went into a mall nearby and looted every cash register I could lay hands on, I almost backed into one of them once, I was so scared I actually pissed myself, but I went. I need you to get this letter. They check outgoing mail, and they’ll never let this one through.
I’ll start at the beginning. I know the TV shows and newspapers in the West are lying their asses off about what really happened here. It started with one man, standing all alone on the Summer Street Bridge. He was just standing there. A woman walked up to him and put her hand on his shoulder. He grabbed her arms and pulled until she came apart like a doll. The cops came out and yelled at him through megaphones for a while, but he just stood there. A trooper approached him, and thinking he wouldn’t be a threat, tried to cuff him. The man reached out and snapped his neck. The other troopers opened fire. The bullets passed through him like smoke. They tried hitting him with batons. They went right through him. They threw things at him. They went right through him. Another trooper tried to retrieve the body of the dead trooper. The dead trooper sat up and tore his head right off his shoulders.
From there, it just spread. It was slow, but steady. It was slow enough that they managed to built the wall at the Q-line, and Canada built one at their southern border, now the Northeast is it’s own little country. The Stone’s country. We call them the Stone because for the most part, it doesn’t even seem like they’re moving. It’s like the minute hand on a watch. You can see it move, but only if you stare for a really long time. But as soon as you touch them, they move fast. One lady I’m with now says they must get a burst of heat from the living in that contact, enough to fire them for one quick moment. It’s all they need, that moment. You wouldn’t believe how fast one of those things can dismantle a person. Less than 4 seconds. I counted once. Some of the people get up, some don’t. I’ve seen people with their limbs torn completely off slowly come back together and get up. I’ve seen people with no mark at all, except the odd tilt of their necks rot to mush in the streets.
They’re smart, too. Remember I said I almost backed into one? They sneak up behind you and wait for you to back into them. Ooops, sorry mister! Then your head is rolling across the floor. They also know, somehow, if you know the person they’re inside of. There’s 40 people with me, and most of them are like me, alone. The ones with family, have long since been lured downstairs by their children and mothers and wives standing on the sidewalks and looking up, sometimes they cry, sometimes they mouth words. In rain or sun or snow. A lot of them are naked now, or close to it, their clothes either torn off by the initial attack or simply tattered by all the endless hours of standing outside. People can’t stand to see their grandmother standing in a snow storm in a thin summer dress and no shoes and run down to hold them. Bye-bye. They never change once they’re Stone. Never get thinner or fatter, never eat, their hair doesn’t grow.
They do go into buildings, but only the first floor. For some reason they can’t climb. Not up stairs, not up walls, or ladders. We technically could be on the second floor and be safe, but we were scared. We found a 26 story apartment building, and we’re all on the top 5 floors. The apartment I took over isn’t much nicer than the one I left. Some cops came to door, told me to come with them. They wouldn't let me bring my cat, or even a change of clothes. I miss my cat. He must have starved to death ages ago. They brought us to a hospital, but after it got really bad, we decided to come here. It's taller. We feel safer farther away from them. We have no water, no electricity. The Army brings us food and water and other supplies in helicopters. Every 3 weeks, they have a lotto drawing, and one person goes in the helicopter with the soldiers. They say that the person is checked out in a government hospital, then released to their family in the West, but for all we know they kick them out of the helicopter as soon as they get over the horizon. I can’t wait until my name comes up in the lotto. And I can’t trust that they won’t kill me when it does.
I saw something scary last week. I have a pair of binoculars, there’s not a whole lot to do, so I watch the Stone. A girl, no more than 7, in a pink rag that might’ve been a dress walked slowly towards a wall. I watched because there’s people in 4 other buildings around us, but she was walking towards an empty one. She walked right at a blank wall, no door or windows. I watched for over 5 hours, (I told you they were slow) watched her walk right through the wall. Like she was a ghost. Like how if you throw a rock, it goes right through them. And if a little girl Stone can walk through a wall, couldn’t they walk through the wall at the Q-line?
That’s why I risked going downstairs, finding all that cash, so I can bribe a soldier on the next helicopter into mailing this letter from the other side of the wall. So I could warn you, so you could find a nice tall building and stock it, and get off the ground. Take Ma, and Daddy and Nana and the kids. Take anyone who might lure you down later. Because if they’re inside someone you love, they’ll come right for you. It’s funny, you were so against me moving here, and you were right. I should have stayed home. I love you big sister. I pray to God you get this letter. I love you all so much.
End
* I was doing a RP letter swap, and we had to write a letter from 'the end of the world' and make it look according. I wrote the original in Sharpie on torn pieces of a brown paper bag. I wrote the whole thing in about 5 minutes, the handwriting was sloppy and paniced. I re-read it, and realized I'd written creepypasta. I got a few suggestions on /x/ to make a series of stories from different people in the other buildings, and I'm thinking about doing it. I've been toying with the idea of a short series, and there's so many different tones and concepts to play with with this story.
I hope you get this. I paid a soldier over $10,000 to sneak this letter across the Q-line and mail it. Ha, $10,000. Somewhere in this city, my shitty apartment (with my cat rotting inside, no doubt) cost me $600 a month and I could barely scrape that together, but I’m going to hand a man $10,000 cash to deliver this letter. There’s plenty of money on this side, just lying around, in banks and stores, it just got left there in the panic, and if you’re brave enough to go downstairs, it’s yours for the taking. I went into a mall nearby and looted every cash register I could lay hands on, I almost backed into one of them once, I was so scared I actually pissed myself, but I went. I need you to get this letter. They check outgoing mail, and they’ll never let this one through.
I’ll start at the beginning. I know the TV shows and newspapers in the West are lying their asses off about what really happened here. It started with one man, standing all alone on the Summer Street Bridge. He was just standing there. A woman walked up to him and put her hand on his shoulder. He grabbed her arms and pulled until she came apart like a doll. The cops came out and yelled at him through megaphones for a while, but he just stood there. A trooper approached him, and thinking he wouldn’t be a threat, tried to cuff him. The man reached out and snapped his neck. The other troopers opened fire. The bullets passed through him like smoke. They tried hitting him with batons. They went right through him. They threw things at him. They went right through him. Another trooper tried to retrieve the body of the dead trooper. The dead trooper sat up and tore his head right off his shoulders.
From there, it just spread. It was slow, but steady. It was slow enough that they managed to built the wall at the Q-line, and Canada built one at their southern border, now the Northeast is it’s own little country. The Stone’s country. We call them the Stone because for the most part, it doesn’t even seem like they’re moving. It’s like the minute hand on a watch. You can see it move, but only if you stare for a really long time. But as soon as you touch them, they move fast. One lady I’m with now says they must get a burst of heat from the living in that contact, enough to fire them for one quick moment. It’s all they need, that moment. You wouldn’t believe how fast one of those things can dismantle a person. Less than 4 seconds. I counted once. Some of the people get up, some don’t. I’ve seen people with their limbs torn completely off slowly come back together and get up. I’ve seen people with no mark at all, except the odd tilt of their necks rot to mush in the streets.
They’re smart, too. Remember I said I almost backed into one? They sneak up behind you and wait for you to back into them. Ooops, sorry mister! Then your head is rolling across the floor. They also know, somehow, if you know the person they’re inside of. There’s 40 people with me, and most of them are like me, alone. The ones with family, have long since been lured downstairs by their children and mothers and wives standing on the sidewalks and looking up, sometimes they cry, sometimes they mouth words. In rain or sun or snow. A lot of them are naked now, or close to it, their clothes either torn off by the initial attack or simply tattered by all the endless hours of standing outside. People can’t stand to see their grandmother standing in a snow storm in a thin summer dress and no shoes and run down to hold them. Bye-bye. They never change once they’re Stone. Never get thinner or fatter, never eat, their hair doesn’t grow.
They do go into buildings, but only the first floor. For some reason they can’t climb. Not up stairs, not up walls, or ladders. We technically could be on the second floor and be safe, but we were scared. We found a 26 story apartment building, and we’re all on the top 5 floors. The apartment I took over isn’t much nicer than the one I left. Some cops came to door, told me to come with them. They wouldn't let me bring my cat, or even a change of clothes. I miss my cat. He must have starved to death ages ago. They brought us to a hospital, but after it got really bad, we decided to come here. It's taller. We feel safer farther away from them. We have no water, no electricity. The Army brings us food and water and other supplies in helicopters. Every 3 weeks, they have a lotto drawing, and one person goes in the helicopter with the soldiers. They say that the person is checked out in a government hospital, then released to their family in the West, but for all we know they kick them out of the helicopter as soon as they get over the horizon. I can’t wait until my name comes up in the lotto. And I can’t trust that they won’t kill me when it does.
I saw something scary last week. I have a pair of binoculars, there’s not a whole lot to do, so I watch the Stone. A girl, no more than 7, in a pink rag that might’ve been a dress walked slowly towards a wall. I watched because there’s people in 4 other buildings around us, but she was walking towards an empty one. She walked right at a blank wall, no door or windows. I watched for over 5 hours, (I told you they were slow) watched her walk right through the wall. Like she was a ghost. Like how if you throw a rock, it goes right through them. And if a little girl Stone can walk through a wall, couldn’t they walk through the wall at the Q-line?
That’s why I risked going downstairs, finding all that cash, so I can bribe a soldier on the next helicopter into mailing this letter from the other side of the wall. So I could warn you, so you could find a nice tall building and stock it, and get off the ground. Take Ma, and Daddy and Nana and the kids. Take anyone who might lure you down later. Because if they’re inside someone you love, they’ll come right for you. It’s funny, you were so against me moving here, and you were right. I should have stayed home. I love you big sister. I pray to God you get this letter. I love you all so much.
End
* I was doing a RP letter swap, and we had to write a letter from 'the end of the world' and make it look according. I wrote the original in Sharpie on torn pieces of a brown paper bag. I wrote the whole thing in about 5 minutes, the handwriting was sloppy and paniced. I re-read it, and realized I'd written creepypasta. I got a few suggestions on /x/ to make a series of stories from different people in the other buildings, and I'm thinking about doing it. I've been toying with the idea of a short series, and there's so many different tones and concepts to play with with this story.
Stop That Banging!
“Why do you keep banging like that?”
I looked up. My boyfriend, Paul, was at the kitchen table, clicking away at his laptop.
“Like what?” I asked.
“What?” He looked up, shoving his glasses onto his forehead and rubbed the bridge of his nose.
“You said, “why do you keep banging like that?”. I’m not banging. I’m just folding clothes.” I walked over to the closet in the hallway and hung his sweatshirt up.
“I didn’t say anything. I’ve got to get this done before tomorrow, I should have been doing it yesterday, but someone-” He rolled his eyes toward me. “-really needed to go get ice cream. And go to the mall.”
“Hmmmm, and someone-” I rolled my eyes back at him. “-really didn’t have to come, but convinced himself with the words, “Fuck this shit, I want some cookies and cream.”. It must have been the upstairs neighbor. That guy’s a douche.”
“A douche who can hear you call him a douche if he can hear you folding clothes and think you’re banging.” He pulled his glasses down his nose. “So quit banging and let me finish this, or you’re sleeping alone tonight.”
I shut up, and finished folding the laundry, walking quietly between the sofa and the bedroom, and forgot about the voice. It must have just been the douche upstairs, after all.
A few days later, Paul was in class, and I was reading a textbook on the sofa, arm flopped off the sofa and onto the floor. I tapped a finger gently against the floor as I read.
“Stop banging!”
“I’m not banging! Shut up!” I yelled up at the ceiling. I continued reading and tapping.
“I’m trying to sleep! Quit the damn banging!”
“Are you on drugs? I’m not fucking banging, asshole!” I rolled over onto my back, holding the book up with both hands.
A bit later, I heard footsteps thumping up the stairs and the lock turn in the apartment upstairs.
“What’s he bitching about banging? Shit man, he’s like a herd of elephants.” I grumbled to myself. I thought for a minute. Had I heard him leave? He must have, since he’d been yelling before, and now he was tromping up the stairs. He didn’t have a roommate, the last one had left over a month ago, in a screaming fight that had been in turns both humorous and frightening. Paul and I had wavered between making popcorn and calling the cops for 2 hours before the roommate left in a final shriek of curses and trailed by a whiskey bottle flung from the top of the stairs.
I saw it was getting late and got up to start dinner.
“This is your last god dam warning! Keep banging and I’m gonna come up there!”
I opened my mouth to yell back a slew of obscenities, when my mind replayed the comment. “Up there”? Paul and I lived on the first floor of a two story house. There was a 3 foot crawlspace under the house, but there wasn’t even a proper basement.
I bent down and tapped my finger against the floor. I paused, and something slammed against the floor under my feet. I screamed and skittered away, retreating into the kitchen. The pounding continued, following me, making books jump off the shelves in the living room, and the dishes in the cabinets clatter against each other.
“Hey, quit that fucking noise!”
This time it really was the guy upstairs, stomping his foot against the floor to emphasize his point. I turned my head up, was about to start screaming again, when something grabbed my foot. I looked down. A hand, palest white with greenish veins pulsing beneath the surface, was wrapped around my ankle. I tried to pull away and it clamped down tighter. It was coming right out of the floorboards, there was no hole in the floor, and this was no see-through movie ghost, but it passed right through the wood like smoke. I began to scream.
The hand pulled down, and my foot passed through the boards with no resistance. It was like stepping into a deep puddle of ice water. I lurched forward, then backward, trying to tear my foot away from that grasping hand, but it only pulled down harder. My shin began to slide through the floor. I braced my other foot against the floor and pulled as hard as I could, then put my hands down on the floor and began to push with my arms, too. The hand let go of my foot, and I pulled it back a little, it came slowly, like pulling your foot out of deep, thick mud.
Then hands closed over my wrists, both of them, and began pulling. For a moment, a face seemed to be pushing at the wood between my palms, a old, angry, mean face, then I went into full panic, wrenching at my hands and leg, twisting and bucking like a beast caught in a trap. But my arms sank deeper, and in a few moments my face was pressed against the floor.
“I’m sorry!” I gasped. “I’m sorry!” Then my face sank under the floorboards.
I’ve been asleep for a while now. I know Paul moved out, the racket of the movers was almost unbearable, but I resisted the urge to tell them to shut the hell up for a while. I liked Paul a lot, and didn’t want to have to go up there and yell at him. But theses new people, ug. They have a dog. A little yapping thing that scurries around all day, slamming it’s nasty little feet against the floors, screeching it’s nasty little head off every time a fucking leaf blows past the window. I might have to reach up there and pull it down here, so it can sleep. It can sleep right here, between me and the old man. It might be nice for a little company. The old man talks in his sleep sometimes, giggling about things he did while he was alive, none of them nice, most of them ending with a child buried in the woods somewhere in Pennsylvania. I could roll over and pull the dog to my chest, and put my face in its fur. Sure it was a little yapper up there, but down here, there was just sleep and the old man muttering to himself. Company would be nice.
Slowly, my hand heavy with sleep, I place my palm against the underside of the floorboards and wait for the dog to pass within grabbing distance.
End
*I got hit by a car when I was 8. My back has been messed up ever since. Sometimes, when it's acting up, it actually helps to sleep on the floor. One night as I was lying on the floor of my room, something banged hard against the floor under me. It turns out it was the cats fighting under the house, but holy crap did it scare me!
I looked up. My boyfriend, Paul, was at the kitchen table, clicking away at his laptop.
“Like what?” I asked.
“What?” He looked up, shoving his glasses onto his forehead and rubbed the bridge of his nose.
“You said, “why do you keep banging like that?”. I’m not banging. I’m just folding clothes.” I walked over to the closet in the hallway and hung his sweatshirt up.
“I didn’t say anything. I’ve got to get this done before tomorrow, I should have been doing it yesterday, but someone-” He rolled his eyes toward me. “-really needed to go get ice cream. And go to the mall.”
“Hmmmm, and someone-” I rolled my eyes back at him. “-really didn’t have to come, but convinced himself with the words, “Fuck this shit, I want some cookies and cream.”. It must have been the upstairs neighbor. That guy’s a douche.”
“A douche who can hear you call him a douche if he can hear you folding clothes and think you’re banging.” He pulled his glasses down his nose. “So quit banging and let me finish this, or you’re sleeping alone tonight.”
I shut up, and finished folding the laundry, walking quietly between the sofa and the bedroom, and forgot about the voice. It must have just been the douche upstairs, after all.
A few days later, Paul was in class, and I was reading a textbook on the sofa, arm flopped off the sofa and onto the floor. I tapped a finger gently against the floor as I read.
“Stop banging!”
“I’m not banging! Shut up!” I yelled up at the ceiling. I continued reading and tapping.
“I’m trying to sleep! Quit the damn banging!”
“Are you on drugs? I’m not fucking banging, asshole!” I rolled over onto my back, holding the book up with both hands.
A bit later, I heard footsteps thumping up the stairs and the lock turn in the apartment upstairs.
“What’s he bitching about banging? Shit man, he’s like a herd of elephants.” I grumbled to myself. I thought for a minute. Had I heard him leave? He must have, since he’d been yelling before, and now he was tromping up the stairs. He didn’t have a roommate, the last one had left over a month ago, in a screaming fight that had been in turns both humorous and frightening. Paul and I had wavered between making popcorn and calling the cops for 2 hours before the roommate left in a final shriek of curses and trailed by a whiskey bottle flung from the top of the stairs.
I saw it was getting late and got up to start dinner.
“This is your last god dam warning! Keep banging and I’m gonna come up there!”
I opened my mouth to yell back a slew of obscenities, when my mind replayed the comment. “Up there”? Paul and I lived on the first floor of a two story house. There was a 3 foot crawlspace under the house, but there wasn’t even a proper basement.
I bent down and tapped my finger against the floor. I paused, and something slammed against the floor under my feet. I screamed and skittered away, retreating into the kitchen. The pounding continued, following me, making books jump off the shelves in the living room, and the dishes in the cabinets clatter against each other.
“Hey, quit that fucking noise!”
This time it really was the guy upstairs, stomping his foot against the floor to emphasize his point. I turned my head up, was about to start screaming again, when something grabbed my foot. I looked down. A hand, palest white with greenish veins pulsing beneath the surface, was wrapped around my ankle. I tried to pull away and it clamped down tighter. It was coming right out of the floorboards, there was no hole in the floor, and this was no see-through movie ghost, but it passed right through the wood like smoke. I began to scream.
The hand pulled down, and my foot passed through the boards with no resistance. It was like stepping into a deep puddle of ice water. I lurched forward, then backward, trying to tear my foot away from that grasping hand, but it only pulled down harder. My shin began to slide through the floor. I braced my other foot against the floor and pulled as hard as I could, then put my hands down on the floor and began to push with my arms, too. The hand let go of my foot, and I pulled it back a little, it came slowly, like pulling your foot out of deep, thick mud.
Then hands closed over my wrists, both of them, and began pulling. For a moment, a face seemed to be pushing at the wood between my palms, a old, angry, mean face, then I went into full panic, wrenching at my hands and leg, twisting and bucking like a beast caught in a trap. But my arms sank deeper, and in a few moments my face was pressed against the floor.
“I’m sorry!” I gasped. “I’m sorry!” Then my face sank under the floorboards.
I’ve been asleep for a while now. I know Paul moved out, the racket of the movers was almost unbearable, but I resisted the urge to tell them to shut the hell up for a while. I liked Paul a lot, and didn’t want to have to go up there and yell at him. But theses new people, ug. They have a dog. A little yapping thing that scurries around all day, slamming it’s nasty little feet against the floors, screeching it’s nasty little head off every time a fucking leaf blows past the window. I might have to reach up there and pull it down here, so it can sleep. It can sleep right here, between me and the old man. It might be nice for a little company. The old man talks in his sleep sometimes, giggling about things he did while he was alive, none of them nice, most of them ending with a child buried in the woods somewhere in Pennsylvania. I could roll over and pull the dog to my chest, and put my face in its fur. Sure it was a little yapper up there, but down here, there was just sleep and the old man muttering to himself. Company would be nice.
Slowly, my hand heavy with sleep, I place my palm against the underside of the floorboards and wait for the dog to pass within grabbing distance.
End
*I got hit by a car when I was 8. My back has been messed up ever since. Sometimes, when it's acting up, it actually helps to sleep on the floor. One night as I was lying on the floor of my room, something banged hard against the floor under me. It turns out it was the cats fighting under the house, but holy crap did it scare me!
Girl of My Dreams
The first time I dreamed about her, she was naked, but her body was wrapped in movie film, like some kind of sexy mummy. She didn’t say anything, just turned to me and started crying, her big eyes filling up, then overflowing with huge shiny tears. “Kids’ tears.” I thought in my dream. She wasn’t the kind of girl I usually dreamed about, she was slender, with hardly any breasts at all, and only the barest hint of hips. She had a small, heart-shaped face, with a splatter of light freckles across her small, upturned nose. Her eyes were a deep green and her black hair was cut in one of those bobs that’s longer in the front. I remember thinking she was too cute for a wet dream. The film was wrapped around her torso, as she moved it shifted, revealing glimpses of her teacup breasts and the dark hair below, winding down to her thighs, and trailing onto the floor behind her.
I woke up the next morning feeling sad and worn out, which was weird. Normally I woke up from naked girl dreams feeling ready to face the day, kick ass and take names, but that morning I felt like I was dragging myself through my morning routine. I couldn’t shake that crying girl’s face out of my mind. As I lethargically clicked buttons on my keyboard at work, I tried to place her face. Had I seen her here at work? Maybe in the coffee shop downstairs? I felt like I knew her from somewhere…High school? It was driving me nuts.
I was still brooding about it on my way home, leaning against the glass wall of the bus stop and chewing on the corner of my lip. Something caught my eye on the ground. There was a little cluster of litter trapped in the corner, a coffee cup, a flier for some rock concert, cigarette butts, and a short strip of film. My heart shivered a little, but I bent down and picked it up. It was six frames of dark movie. I held it up to the sunlight, and there she was. My dream girl.
The first frame showed her cowering in a corner, trying to cover her nakedness with her arms, her feet pulled up under her, with her face turned to the wall. Her neck was pale and smooth, but there was a bruise rising there, like someone had grabbed her roughly where it met the shoulder. There was a shadow cast over her, it got bigger in each frame and in the sixth one, I could see the barest sliver of an arm. A big, muscular one, covered in dense, dark hair. She hardly moved in the frames, just curled a little deeper into the corner.
I looked around, but couldn’t find any more film on the ground. I went home feeling ill, my heart heavier than ever. I tossed and turned that night, and when I finally feel asleep, I dreamed of her again. She turned towards me again, her big eyes full of tears. “Who are you?” I tried to ask her, but I couldn’t make any sound. She began crying. “Help me.” She said, and her voice was thick with sadness.
I woke up with my pillow soaked with tears.
I called out of work that day, I felt like my heart was breaking. I hadn’t felt that way since my Dad’s funeral, three years before. I stayed in bed, curled up and moping until ten or so, then got up to use the bathroom. I stood over the toilet, and peeking out from behind the tank was a strip of film. My hands shook as I picked it up. It was longer than the first, about 20 frames.
The man drew closer to her in each frame, his hand reaching for her. The angle of the camera cut him off at chest level, never showing his face. He was broad and built, covered in dark hair. He was naked, and the hair even covered his ass. She cringed further down, but in the last frame, his hand closed around her upper arm.
I was shaking hard all over. My heart seemed to actually ache in my chest. I could feel it throb with every heartbeat. I spent the day in bed, with my blanket pulled over my head and drowsed a little in the afternoon. And dreamed.
She was crying harder than ever, her whole body shaking and her chest was hitching madly in and out. “Stop!” I tried to scream at her. “Stop crying! You’re breaking my heart!”
“Please.” She sobbed, “Please help me.”
I woke up, my own chest hitching with tears. “Who the hell are you?” I shrieked, the sound of my own voice scared me so bad I let out another thin shriek. My neighbor pounded on the wall in retaliation. I jumped out of bed, and threw on clothes, needing to get out of the apartment, feeling I’d suffocate if I didn’t. I pounded down the two flights of stairs to the lobby and ran out into the twilight. I stood on the bottom stair a second, sucking in deep breaths and trying to calm myself. And there on the ground, fluttering in the light breeze was another strip of film, over six feet long.
I held it up, and as I did, the streetlight above me flickered on. The man was dragging her across the room, throwing her face down across a table, yanking her legs around, than began to rape her. My stomach turned and I had to look away. But I felt my eyes drawn back, dragged back, and ran them down the rest of the film. She tried to fight, tried to crawl away, but the man punched her hard in the back, then grabbed her by the hair and slammed her face down onto the table. In the last frame, there was a trickle of blood running across the table, dripping from her nose and mouth.
I threw it back on the ground, the breeze picked it up and it went curling down the street, tangling around a stop sign. I followed it, and saw another strip down the street, tied to a sign reading, “SLOW CHILDREN AT PLAY”. It wound and curled its way around the corner and disappeared on the next street. My feet began walking that way. I tried to stop, I didn’t want to know where that film led, but they continued moving anyway.
It felt like I followed that film for miles, weaving thru neighborhoods I didn’t know, neighborhoods that got trashier and trashier, stepping over hobos sleeping on sidewalks, dead cats in the gutters. Sometimes the film wound up poles and signs, and I caught bits of the movie, he raped her, beat her, raped her some more, and beat her some more, she was covered in cuts, welts, she was hardly recognizable anymore. Finally, the film began winding down a narrow alley, choked with garbage. It dove under a pile of metal scraps that had fallen against a wall, and disappeared there. I began pulling the metal aside, it was heavy, and there was a lot of it. I began to uncover a rusty steel door, held shut by the debris for god knows how long. I kept pulling the metal aside until I could yank the door open.
It was dark inside, and I could hear a fan blowing endlessly. I went in, pulling my lighter out of my coat pocket as I did. I flicked the wheel, and saw the room from the film. There was an old projector set up on the table, and a man was sitting in a chair next to it, facing the blank white wall.
“Hey.” I said, but the man didn’t move. The fans whirred on and on. I stepped closer. “Hey.” Nothing. I drew closer, and my lighter’s flame finally fell on him fully. He was dead. Long dead. The fans whirring endlessly somewhere in the darkness had dried him completely, his skin stretched tight over bones, his pants were a moldy puddle around his ankles. His left hand was lying on the reel of film in the projector, like he’d died caressing it. His right hand was in his lap, curled around what was now a scrap of old, old leather.
Someone sobbed softly behind me.
I spun around so fast, my lighter blew out. I fumbled with it again, trying to light it, but my shaking hands only spun the wheel, then slipped off the button.
“Help me.” It was her voice, the dream girl, the film girl, and I knew what movie that man had been watching as he died, trapped in this room by the pile of metal that had fallen over, trapped in here with his dying, broken toy and his sick masterpiece.
I finally struck the lighter, and I saw a bundle of cloth in the corner. My heart gave a final lurching bolt of agony, then fell back into the normal, steady rhythm it had been keeping for 27 years. I knelt at the cloth and peeled it back. She was cringing in the corner, her skin pale white, those big tears running down her cheeks. She turned her face to mine and whispered, “Take me out of here, please. I don’t want to be in here anymore with him.”
“Ok.” I said, wrapping the cloth around her body, covering her naked body. “Ok, let’s get out of here.” I picked her up, she was so light, she hardly seemed to weigh anything. She pressed her face into my neck, her tears beginning to slow, then stop. I carried her through the door, and she sighed as we passed out of that awful chamber. She seemed to get lighter still, and I looked down at her. She was gone, I was carrying a pile of bones, broken and splintered from all the beatings. A single tear rolled down my cheek and struck the top of her skull, ran into a wide fissure and disappeared. The skull caved in with a soft whispering sound, and then crumbled into fine dust. As I watched, the rest of her bones broke apart into dust and blew away in the night breeze.
End
*I actually had this dream, and woke up crying for no reason. I never had it again, but it made me really sad all day for some reason. I kept feeling like I knew her, but I'm absolutely sure I don't. I guess my head just crossed wires with someone elses.
I woke up the next morning feeling sad and worn out, which was weird. Normally I woke up from naked girl dreams feeling ready to face the day, kick ass and take names, but that morning I felt like I was dragging myself through my morning routine. I couldn’t shake that crying girl’s face out of my mind. As I lethargically clicked buttons on my keyboard at work, I tried to place her face. Had I seen her here at work? Maybe in the coffee shop downstairs? I felt like I knew her from somewhere…High school? It was driving me nuts.
I was still brooding about it on my way home, leaning against the glass wall of the bus stop and chewing on the corner of my lip. Something caught my eye on the ground. There was a little cluster of litter trapped in the corner, a coffee cup, a flier for some rock concert, cigarette butts, and a short strip of film. My heart shivered a little, but I bent down and picked it up. It was six frames of dark movie. I held it up to the sunlight, and there she was. My dream girl.
The first frame showed her cowering in a corner, trying to cover her nakedness with her arms, her feet pulled up under her, with her face turned to the wall. Her neck was pale and smooth, but there was a bruise rising there, like someone had grabbed her roughly where it met the shoulder. There was a shadow cast over her, it got bigger in each frame and in the sixth one, I could see the barest sliver of an arm. A big, muscular one, covered in dense, dark hair. She hardly moved in the frames, just curled a little deeper into the corner.
I looked around, but couldn’t find any more film on the ground. I went home feeling ill, my heart heavier than ever. I tossed and turned that night, and when I finally feel asleep, I dreamed of her again. She turned towards me again, her big eyes full of tears. “Who are you?” I tried to ask her, but I couldn’t make any sound. She began crying. “Help me.” She said, and her voice was thick with sadness.
I woke up with my pillow soaked with tears.
I called out of work that day, I felt like my heart was breaking. I hadn’t felt that way since my Dad’s funeral, three years before. I stayed in bed, curled up and moping until ten or so, then got up to use the bathroom. I stood over the toilet, and peeking out from behind the tank was a strip of film. My hands shook as I picked it up. It was longer than the first, about 20 frames.
The man drew closer to her in each frame, his hand reaching for her. The angle of the camera cut him off at chest level, never showing his face. He was broad and built, covered in dark hair. He was naked, and the hair even covered his ass. She cringed further down, but in the last frame, his hand closed around her upper arm.
I was shaking hard all over. My heart seemed to actually ache in my chest. I could feel it throb with every heartbeat. I spent the day in bed, with my blanket pulled over my head and drowsed a little in the afternoon. And dreamed.
She was crying harder than ever, her whole body shaking and her chest was hitching madly in and out. “Stop!” I tried to scream at her. “Stop crying! You’re breaking my heart!”
“Please.” She sobbed, “Please help me.”
I woke up, my own chest hitching with tears. “Who the hell are you?” I shrieked, the sound of my own voice scared me so bad I let out another thin shriek. My neighbor pounded on the wall in retaliation. I jumped out of bed, and threw on clothes, needing to get out of the apartment, feeling I’d suffocate if I didn’t. I pounded down the two flights of stairs to the lobby and ran out into the twilight. I stood on the bottom stair a second, sucking in deep breaths and trying to calm myself. And there on the ground, fluttering in the light breeze was another strip of film, over six feet long.
I held it up, and as I did, the streetlight above me flickered on. The man was dragging her across the room, throwing her face down across a table, yanking her legs around, than began to rape her. My stomach turned and I had to look away. But I felt my eyes drawn back, dragged back, and ran them down the rest of the film. She tried to fight, tried to crawl away, but the man punched her hard in the back, then grabbed her by the hair and slammed her face down onto the table. In the last frame, there was a trickle of blood running across the table, dripping from her nose and mouth.
I threw it back on the ground, the breeze picked it up and it went curling down the street, tangling around a stop sign. I followed it, and saw another strip down the street, tied to a sign reading, “SLOW CHILDREN AT PLAY”. It wound and curled its way around the corner and disappeared on the next street. My feet began walking that way. I tried to stop, I didn’t want to know where that film led, but they continued moving anyway.
It felt like I followed that film for miles, weaving thru neighborhoods I didn’t know, neighborhoods that got trashier and trashier, stepping over hobos sleeping on sidewalks, dead cats in the gutters. Sometimes the film wound up poles and signs, and I caught bits of the movie, he raped her, beat her, raped her some more, and beat her some more, she was covered in cuts, welts, she was hardly recognizable anymore. Finally, the film began winding down a narrow alley, choked with garbage. It dove under a pile of metal scraps that had fallen against a wall, and disappeared there. I began pulling the metal aside, it was heavy, and there was a lot of it. I began to uncover a rusty steel door, held shut by the debris for god knows how long. I kept pulling the metal aside until I could yank the door open.
It was dark inside, and I could hear a fan blowing endlessly. I went in, pulling my lighter out of my coat pocket as I did. I flicked the wheel, and saw the room from the film. There was an old projector set up on the table, and a man was sitting in a chair next to it, facing the blank white wall.
“Hey.” I said, but the man didn’t move. The fans whirred on and on. I stepped closer. “Hey.” Nothing. I drew closer, and my lighter’s flame finally fell on him fully. He was dead. Long dead. The fans whirring endlessly somewhere in the darkness had dried him completely, his skin stretched tight over bones, his pants were a moldy puddle around his ankles. His left hand was lying on the reel of film in the projector, like he’d died caressing it. His right hand was in his lap, curled around what was now a scrap of old, old leather.
Someone sobbed softly behind me.
I spun around so fast, my lighter blew out. I fumbled with it again, trying to light it, but my shaking hands only spun the wheel, then slipped off the button.
“Help me.” It was her voice, the dream girl, the film girl, and I knew what movie that man had been watching as he died, trapped in this room by the pile of metal that had fallen over, trapped in here with his dying, broken toy and his sick masterpiece.
I finally struck the lighter, and I saw a bundle of cloth in the corner. My heart gave a final lurching bolt of agony, then fell back into the normal, steady rhythm it had been keeping for 27 years. I knelt at the cloth and peeled it back. She was cringing in the corner, her skin pale white, those big tears running down her cheeks. She turned her face to mine and whispered, “Take me out of here, please. I don’t want to be in here anymore with him.”
“Ok.” I said, wrapping the cloth around her body, covering her naked body. “Ok, let’s get out of here.” I picked her up, she was so light, she hardly seemed to weigh anything. She pressed her face into my neck, her tears beginning to slow, then stop. I carried her through the door, and she sighed as we passed out of that awful chamber. She seemed to get lighter still, and I looked down at her. She was gone, I was carrying a pile of bones, broken and splintered from all the beatings. A single tear rolled down my cheek and struck the top of her skull, ran into a wide fissure and disappeared. The skull caved in with a soft whispering sound, and then crumbled into fine dust. As I watched, the rest of her bones broke apart into dust and blew away in the night breeze.
End
*I actually had this dream, and woke up crying for no reason. I never had it again, but it made me really sad all day for some reason. I kept feeling like I knew her, but I'm absolutely sure I don't. I guess my head just crossed wires with someone elses.
Turn Off Cell Phones and Two Way Radios
Have you ever driven by a construction site and seen a sign that says, “TURN OFF ALL CELL PHONES AND TWO WAY RADIOS”? They’re kind of unnecessary nowadays, but back in the day, if the weather conditions were just right, a cell phone or walkie-talkie signal could set off a blast prematurely. My boss, Luke, says he saw a state trooper accidentally set off a blast with a cell phone back in the 80’s. Now the blasts are set off with different wires and blasting caps, so the only way to set them off is with a detonator box, or if something manages to electrify the wires. Luke could tell you more about it, he’s been in the blasting business since he was old enough to walk, and his father and grandfather were in it before him. I just drill holes, and load them, and stand back to watch the rocks fly.
The day I died, the day all three of us died, me, Luke, and Mike, the other driller, was hot, clear and dry. We’d spent six days drilling 150 production holes and spent the entire morning loading them with Blastex and ANFO. The detonator caps were hooked up with the proper timing wires, so the blast would start at one end of the long rock face and finish at the far end, blowing the huge chunks of slate and feldspar into small, manageable pieces. I remember they were teasing me about my shirt as we finished the last hole and gathered our stuff to head back to the first hole. It was a pink tank top, tied up in the back so the end didn’t flap around and get caught in one of the drill’s dozens of levers. They’d picked on me a little when I first started working with them, women’s lib my ass, female laborers were still easy pickings for big tough males in construction, but after a while they realized I was just as crude and perverted as they were, and I’d just become one of the guys. Who sometimes wore pink tank tops under my safety vest.
“You’re so purty today, Ronnie.” Mike was saying. Shouting really to be heard over the noise of machinery. Wait. There shouldn’t be any machinery up here, we were about to blow this ridge to little bits. I squinted down the line of rocks, and my heart stopped. A excavator with metal tracks was trundling up the ridge towards us. If those metal tracks hit the detonation wire and made a spark, it could set the whole thing off with us standing up here.
“Oh, shit.” Luke said weakly. Mike was looking around wildly. To our right was a rock face going up, which we had no chance of climbing. Behind us and to our left was a rock face dropping down 60 feet to more jagged rocks. We had nowhere to run but forward, into the blast.
“HEY! STOP! STOP!” I screamed, waving my arms and leaping into the air. “STOP! WE HAVEN’T BLASTED YET! STOP!” The operator didn’t hear me over the noise of his machine.
“JESUS CHRIST, STOOOOOP!” As Luke screamed, I saw a spark of light flash out from under the excavator. I had just enough time to see the front of the machine disappear into a flash of dust before the blast reached us, 30 milliseconds later, just the way we’d set it up.
I don’t remember any pain, or how exactly it felt to be blown into the air on a wave of fly rock.
I woke up in a hospital. But not in a bed, I was sitting in the corner of an operating room, my knees drawn up, and my head bent low between them. When I sat up, I wasn’t in any pain, or have any cuts or bruises. My neck was a little stiff is all.
“Maybe it was a dream.” I said. Then I got a good look around. The floor was gritty with dirt and littered with all kinds of debris, scraps of rusty metal, IV bags of blood so old the blood had turned to loose flakes, a child’s picture book with all the pictures scribbled out with black crayon. The operating table in the center of the room was bent in the middle, like a giant had sat down on it. The circle of light fixtures above it was dark except for one flickering bulb. By the uneven light, I could see a set of foot prints coming in one door and leaving by another. There were no footprint around where I sat, though. When I stood, I left a trail of them in the grit, but there were none leading to the corner.
“Did I fall out of the sky? What the hell?” I thought. I couldn’t hear anything, no voices or sounds of anyone coming or going. I looked at the footsteps and decided to follow them, even though part of me was screaming that I was being a typical woman in a horror movie for doing so. But I couldn’t just sit there forever.
The trail lead into a hallway as filthy and littered as the operating room. A tangle of wheelchairs was piled at one end, looking like a nest of metallic spiders to me.
“Hello?” I called. “Is anyone here?” Silence. I followed the footsteps down the hall, and they turned into another room halfway down. There was a small glass window set in the door, but it was so dirty, I couldn’t see anything through it. I tried rubbing it with my palm, and the door swung open when I pushed. From inside came a rustling noise, then panting. I backed away from the door, but it continued to swing open.
It looked like a recovery room, with several beds lined up haphazardly along the length of it, and a few shredded remains of privacy curtains fluttering on rusted loops. Three beds in from the door, Mike lay on the bed, his hands gripping the edges, his eyes open wide in terror. He was breathing harshly, and was trying to push him towards the head of the bed with his feet. I saw why.
Standing at the foot of the bed was a monster. It was short, it body rail thin, except for a round pot belly that sloped downwards, nearly touching it’s cocked, bowed knees. It was covered in sparse tufts of coarse hair that writhed with some kind of black worm-like insects. It’s face was thin and oozed with a noxious sweat I could smell from across the room. It grinned at Mike with lazy pleasure, watching his struggles and teasingly plucking at his work boots with it’s long fingered hands. Suddenly, it leaned forward, seeming to elongate the length of the bed, until it’s face was hanging over Mike’s. Mike froze, his eyes locked onto the monster’s. The thing hadn’t seen me in the doorway.
I looked around for something, anything to get that monster away from Mike. I saw that part of the wall had crumbled, and a cinderblock had fallen out. I heaved it in my arms, raising it high and charged, bringing it down with a crack on the monster’s neck. It stood up, shrieking and clutching at the block, and I swung it again, sideways and smacked it across the face. It fell, and I brought the brick down on it’s head, again and again, until it finally broke in two. I turned to Mike, panting.
“I couldn’t look away from it.” He said in a voice that trembled up and down. “I went into it’s eyes, and I couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe.” I stumbled over to him and hugged him tight. He clutched back with shaking hands. He was shaking all over.
“Where the hell are we?” I asked. “I thought I dreamed we got blown up, but then I woke up here.”
“We did get blown up.” He said. “Is this hell?”
“I don’t know.” I said, and helped him stand up. “But if we did get blown up, where’s Luke?”
He shook his head. He was looking down, and I followed his gaze. The monster was laying in a messy heap, bits of bone and blood lay scattered around it. I looked at my hands, they were spattered with the same mess, as was the front of my shirt and pants. I realized it must be on my face too, and snatched at one of the dangling scraps of curtain. I squeezed my eyes shut tight and scrubbed at my face with it.
When I opened them, Mike was gone. The room was gone. I was now in what looked like the reception hallway, lit only by several red exit signs lined up over a heavy metal door, bolted shut with at least ten bolts. The long lines of bolted together chairs were shoved into the receptionist’s window, like someone trying to shove a whole handful of fries in their mouth at once. They stuck out in jagged angles that cast shadows across me.
“Mike?” I called. “Where are you?” Only silence again. Maybe this was hell, after all. I looked around, but this time, there were no footprints to guide me. I turned away from the bolted door and began down the hallway, stepping quietly and listening for any sounds.
I passed two elevators, one set of doors gaped open to reveal a elevator car sitting crooked in the shaft. As I passed the other, the doors began to grate open, squalling in protest. I spun to face it, glancing around for a weapon, but there were no handy cinderblocks this time.
Squatting in the center of the car was another monster, his bony hands wrapped casually around Luke’s neck. Luke hung limply in his arms, his eyes big double zeros. The monster let out a rumbling growl, dropping Luke to the floor and leapt at me. I tried to throw my arms up, but it was too fast. It hit me in the chest, and I fell to the floor with it on top of me. I remembered how limp Mike had gone when he looked in its eyes and quickly shut my own. It was scrambling for my neck, it’s fingernails, ragged and broken, scratching my skin. I felt some of those black worms fall out of it’s filthy hair and land on my face. One tried to squirm into the corner of my mouth. I flailed blindly with my arm and it pinned it to the ground next to my head. It was still trying to get the other around my neck, and finally succeeded. It began choking me, and I almost opened my eyes in shock when it clamped down. It’s face was inches from mine, breathing rancid breath into my face. I could feel it rather than smell it, and reached for it with my other hand, just trying to get that stink away from me. My finger first bumped it’s nose, then the shelf of bone above his eye. I hooked my finger and plunged it into its eye socket.
I thought the other had shrieked when I brained it, but this one let out a screech so loud, I felt blood trickle out of my ear. It let go of my right arm and tried to pull back, but I twisted my hand, hooking my finger around the edge of his eye socket and pulled him back. I plunged my right thumb into his other eye, and felt it pop. It shoved me hard, my head slammed against the floor and I saw stars. I sat up, whooping in air, and finally dared to open my eyes. The monster was careening down the hall, it’s hands clapped over its face, bouncing off of the walls, and wailing like a fire engine. Luke stirred in the elevator and sat up.
“Ronnie?” he asked.
“Yeah.” I answered. “Are you ok?”
“I think so. I think we’re dead, Ronnie. We got blown up.”
“Maybe. I saw Mike. One of those monsters was trying to get him, too. I bashed its head in. Then he disappeared.” I began to cry. “ Don’t know what’s happening. I’m scared. I don’t want to see anymore monsters.” I covered my face with my hands, sobbing.
“They’re gone.” Mike said. “They’re gone, Ronnie.”
I opened my eyes. I was lying in a bed, looking up at a white ceiling. I tried to turn my head, and couldn‘t. I was in a hospital, but a normal one. Everything was bright white and scrubbed to a sterile shine. Mike was sitting next to my bed in a big comfy looking chair. His face was a mess of cuts, both his eyes were black, and his arm and leg were in casts. Part of his head was shaved, and there was a big white bandage taped there.
“What-” I started.
“We got blown up.” Mike said simply. “The operator died in the blast. We were thrown up and into the field at the top of the ridge. We landed in those bushes we park our cars by. Me, you, and Luke, that is.”
“Is Luke ok?”
“Both his hips are broken, along with 3 shattered vertebrae, a couple broken ribs, and his face and body look pretty much like mine. You broke your collarbone, both legs, the right one in 5 places, the left one in 3, you cracked your skull, a couple of your ribs are busted, and your nose will never be strait again. The blast was 16 days ago. I woke up nine days ago, Luke a few days after me. ”
“How did we survive? We were right there, on top of the dynamite. We should be dead.”
“You were.” His eyes were serious.
“What?” I tried to turn and look at him again, but my head felt like it was bolted in place.
“You were dead for four minutes. While they were reviving you, my heart stopped for 45 seconds, then started again, before they could start CPR on me. Then a minute later, Luke’s heart stopped for almost a minute, then started again. A minute after that, you started breathing on your own, before they could give you a third dose of juice from the defibrillator.” He leaned forward in his chair. “I remember the other hospital, Ronnie. So does Luke. Our hearts stopped when we looked into those monsters’ eyes. It started again when you killed them.”
“That was a dream.” I whispered. “I was there a lot longer than four minutes.”
“It wasn’t.” Mike said, and struggled his way out of the chair. He managed to hobble over to my bed, and picked up a hand mirror from the bedside table. He held it up so I could see my face and neck. My face was a mess, cuts and bruises worse than Mike’s, and he was right. My nose had a definite tilt up and to the left.
Then my eyes dropped to my neck. Fading, but still visible, was a bruise in the shape of a long fingered hand, surrounded by long, nasty looking scratches.
End
*Here's a piece of trivia for you: What does Three Eyed Toad do when she's not writing creepypasta? Answer: She's a highway construction inspector. I do a lot of stuff like earthwork and paving, but this past year I covered rock blasting for the first time. One day, we actually had a excavator run over some of the wires while we were still loading holes. Thankfully it didn't spark and blow us up, but it was a terrifying moment of us screaming for him to stop as we ran for our lives. I had to write a story about it, and what could have happened.
The day I died, the day all three of us died, me, Luke, and Mike, the other driller, was hot, clear and dry. We’d spent six days drilling 150 production holes and spent the entire morning loading them with Blastex and ANFO. The detonator caps were hooked up with the proper timing wires, so the blast would start at one end of the long rock face and finish at the far end, blowing the huge chunks of slate and feldspar into small, manageable pieces. I remember they were teasing me about my shirt as we finished the last hole and gathered our stuff to head back to the first hole. It was a pink tank top, tied up in the back so the end didn’t flap around and get caught in one of the drill’s dozens of levers. They’d picked on me a little when I first started working with them, women’s lib my ass, female laborers were still easy pickings for big tough males in construction, but after a while they realized I was just as crude and perverted as they were, and I’d just become one of the guys. Who sometimes wore pink tank tops under my safety vest.
“You’re so purty today, Ronnie.” Mike was saying. Shouting really to be heard over the noise of machinery. Wait. There shouldn’t be any machinery up here, we were about to blow this ridge to little bits. I squinted down the line of rocks, and my heart stopped. A excavator with metal tracks was trundling up the ridge towards us. If those metal tracks hit the detonation wire and made a spark, it could set the whole thing off with us standing up here.
“Oh, shit.” Luke said weakly. Mike was looking around wildly. To our right was a rock face going up, which we had no chance of climbing. Behind us and to our left was a rock face dropping down 60 feet to more jagged rocks. We had nowhere to run but forward, into the blast.
“HEY! STOP! STOP!” I screamed, waving my arms and leaping into the air. “STOP! WE HAVEN’T BLASTED YET! STOP!” The operator didn’t hear me over the noise of his machine.
“JESUS CHRIST, STOOOOOP!” As Luke screamed, I saw a spark of light flash out from under the excavator. I had just enough time to see the front of the machine disappear into a flash of dust before the blast reached us, 30 milliseconds later, just the way we’d set it up.
I don’t remember any pain, or how exactly it felt to be blown into the air on a wave of fly rock.
I woke up in a hospital. But not in a bed, I was sitting in the corner of an operating room, my knees drawn up, and my head bent low between them. When I sat up, I wasn’t in any pain, or have any cuts or bruises. My neck was a little stiff is all.
“Maybe it was a dream.” I said. Then I got a good look around. The floor was gritty with dirt and littered with all kinds of debris, scraps of rusty metal, IV bags of blood so old the blood had turned to loose flakes, a child’s picture book with all the pictures scribbled out with black crayon. The operating table in the center of the room was bent in the middle, like a giant had sat down on it. The circle of light fixtures above it was dark except for one flickering bulb. By the uneven light, I could see a set of foot prints coming in one door and leaving by another. There were no footprint around where I sat, though. When I stood, I left a trail of them in the grit, but there were none leading to the corner.
“Did I fall out of the sky? What the hell?” I thought. I couldn’t hear anything, no voices or sounds of anyone coming or going. I looked at the footsteps and decided to follow them, even though part of me was screaming that I was being a typical woman in a horror movie for doing so. But I couldn’t just sit there forever.
The trail lead into a hallway as filthy and littered as the operating room. A tangle of wheelchairs was piled at one end, looking like a nest of metallic spiders to me.
“Hello?” I called. “Is anyone here?” Silence. I followed the footsteps down the hall, and they turned into another room halfway down. There was a small glass window set in the door, but it was so dirty, I couldn’t see anything through it. I tried rubbing it with my palm, and the door swung open when I pushed. From inside came a rustling noise, then panting. I backed away from the door, but it continued to swing open.
It looked like a recovery room, with several beds lined up haphazardly along the length of it, and a few shredded remains of privacy curtains fluttering on rusted loops. Three beds in from the door, Mike lay on the bed, his hands gripping the edges, his eyes open wide in terror. He was breathing harshly, and was trying to push him towards the head of the bed with his feet. I saw why.
Standing at the foot of the bed was a monster. It was short, it body rail thin, except for a round pot belly that sloped downwards, nearly touching it’s cocked, bowed knees. It was covered in sparse tufts of coarse hair that writhed with some kind of black worm-like insects. It’s face was thin and oozed with a noxious sweat I could smell from across the room. It grinned at Mike with lazy pleasure, watching his struggles and teasingly plucking at his work boots with it’s long fingered hands. Suddenly, it leaned forward, seeming to elongate the length of the bed, until it’s face was hanging over Mike’s. Mike froze, his eyes locked onto the monster’s. The thing hadn’t seen me in the doorway.
I looked around for something, anything to get that monster away from Mike. I saw that part of the wall had crumbled, and a cinderblock had fallen out. I heaved it in my arms, raising it high and charged, bringing it down with a crack on the monster’s neck. It stood up, shrieking and clutching at the block, and I swung it again, sideways and smacked it across the face. It fell, and I brought the brick down on it’s head, again and again, until it finally broke in two. I turned to Mike, panting.
“I couldn’t look away from it.” He said in a voice that trembled up and down. “I went into it’s eyes, and I couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe.” I stumbled over to him and hugged him tight. He clutched back with shaking hands. He was shaking all over.
“Where the hell are we?” I asked. “I thought I dreamed we got blown up, but then I woke up here.”
“We did get blown up.” He said. “Is this hell?”
“I don’t know.” I said, and helped him stand up. “But if we did get blown up, where’s Luke?”
He shook his head. He was looking down, and I followed his gaze. The monster was laying in a messy heap, bits of bone and blood lay scattered around it. I looked at my hands, they were spattered with the same mess, as was the front of my shirt and pants. I realized it must be on my face too, and snatched at one of the dangling scraps of curtain. I squeezed my eyes shut tight and scrubbed at my face with it.
When I opened them, Mike was gone. The room was gone. I was now in what looked like the reception hallway, lit only by several red exit signs lined up over a heavy metal door, bolted shut with at least ten bolts. The long lines of bolted together chairs were shoved into the receptionist’s window, like someone trying to shove a whole handful of fries in their mouth at once. They stuck out in jagged angles that cast shadows across me.
“Mike?” I called. “Where are you?” Only silence again. Maybe this was hell, after all. I looked around, but this time, there were no footprints to guide me. I turned away from the bolted door and began down the hallway, stepping quietly and listening for any sounds.
I passed two elevators, one set of doors gaped open to reveal a elevator car sitting crooked in the shaft. As I passed the other, the doors began to grate open, squalling in protest. I spun to face it, glancing around for a weapon, but there were no handy cinderblocks this time.
Squatting in the center of the car was another monster, his bony hands wrapped casually around Luke’s neck. Luke hung limply in his arms, his eyes big double zeros. The monster let out a rumbling growl, dropping Luke to the floor and leapt at me. I tried to throw my arms up, but it was too fast. It hit me in the chest, and I fell to the floor with it on top of me. I remembered how limp Mike had gone when he looked in its eyes and quickly shut my own. It was scrambling for my neck, it’s fingernails, ragged and broken, scratching my skin. I felt some of those black worms fall out of it’s filthy hair and land on my face. One tried to squirm into the corner of my mouth. I flailed blindly with my arm and it pinned it to the ground next to my head. It was still trying to get the other around my neck, and finally succeeded. It began choking me, and I almost opened my eyes in shock when it clamped down. It’s face was inches from mine, breathing rancid breath into my face. I could feel it rather than smell it, and reached for it with my other hand, just trying to get that stink away from me. My finger first bumped it’s nose, then the shelf of bone above his eye. I hooked my finger and plunged it into its eye socket.
I thought the other had shrieked when I brained it, but this one let out a screech so loud, I felt blood trickle out of my ear. It let go of my right arm and tried to pull back, but I twisted my hand, hooking my finger around the edge of his eye socket and pulled him back. I plunged my right thumb into his other eye, and felt it pop. It shoved me hard, my head slammed against the floor and I saw stars. I sat up, whooping in air, and finally dared to open my eyes. The monster was careening down the hall, it’s hands clapped over its face, bouncing off of the walls, and wailing like a fire engine. Luke stirred in the elevator and sat up.
“Ronnie?” he asked.
“Yeah.” I answered. “Are you ok?”
“I think so. I think we’re dead, Ronnie. We got blown up.”
“Maybe. I saw Mike. One of those monsters was trying to get him, too. I bashed its head in. Then he disappeared.” I began to cry. “ Don’t know what’s happening. I’m scared. I don’t want to see anymore monsters.” I covered my face with my hands, sobbing.
“They’re gone.” Mike said. “They’re gone, Ronnie.”
I opened my eyes. I was lying in a bed, looking up at a white ceiling. I tried to turn my head, and couldn‘t. I was in a hospital, but a normal one. Everything was bright white and scrubbed to a sterile shine. Mike was sitting next to my bed in a big comfy looking chair. His face was a mess of cuts, both his eyes were black, and his arm and leg were in casts. Part of his head was shaved, and there was a big white bandage taped there.
“What-” I started.
“We got blown up.” Mike said simply. “The operator died in the blast. We were thrown up and into the field at the top of the ridge. We landed in those bushes we park our cars by. Me, you, and Luke, that is.”
“Is Luke ok?”
“Both his hips are broken, along with 3 shattered vertebrae, a couple broken ribs, and his face and body look pretty much like mine. You broke your collarbone, both legs, the right one in 5 places, the left one in 3, you cracked your skull, a couple of your ribs are busted, and your nose will never be strait again. The blast was 16 days ago. I woke up nine days ago, Luke a few days after me. ”
“How did we survive? We were right there, on top of the dynamite. We should be dead.”
“You were.” His eyes were serious.
“What?” I tried to turn and look at him again, but my head felt like it was bolted in place.
“You were dead for four minutes. While they were reviving you, my heart stopped for 45 seconds, then started again, before they could start CPR on me. Then a minute later, Luke’s heart stopped for almost a minute, then started again. A minute after that, you started breathing on your own, before they could give you a third dose of juice from the defibrillator.” He leaned forward in his chair. “I remember the other hospital, Ronnie. So does Luke. Our hearts stopped when we looked into those monsters’ eyes. It started again when you killed them.”
“That was a dream.” I whispered. “I was there a lot longer than four minutes.”
“It wasn’t.” Mike said, and struggled his way out of the chair. He managed to hobble over to my bed, and picked up a hand mirror from the bedside table. He held it up so I could see my face and neck. My face was a mess, cuts and bruises worse than Mike’s, and he was right. My nose had a definite tilt up and to the left.
Then my eyes dropped to my neck. Fading, but still visible, was a bruise in the shape of a long fingered hand, surrounded by long, nasty looking scratches.
End
*Here's a piece of trivia for you: What does Three Eyed Toad do when she's not writing creepypasta? Answer: She's a highway construction inspector. I do a lot of stuff like earthwork and paving, but this past year I covered rock blasting for the first time. One day, we actually had a excavator run over some of the wires while we were still loading holes. Thankfully it didn't spark and blow us up, but it was a terrifying moment of us screaming for him to stop as we ran for our lives. I had to write a story about it, and what could have happened.
My Little Sister
My kid sister Becky has always been the odd one in our family. We weren’t a super religious family, but her interest in occult stuff has always made our parents uncomfortable. I think it was because she genuinely seemed to have some kind of psychic ability. She never floated tables around the room, or foretold disasters, but she once when we were walking to a friend’s house, she pointed to a wadded up paper bag on the shoulder of the road and said, “There’s some change in that bag.” Sure enough, when we peeled back the soggy wet paper, there was a handful of change in there. Once, she did some kind of ‘money spell’ that involved her staring at a candle for over an hour, while rubbing some smelly leaves on a dollar bill, then putting the dollar under the welcome mat of our house. We didn’t suddenly become filthy rich, but she won every scratch-off lotto ticket she played for a month. Most were $1 or $5, but she won $200 on one. I remember because she bought me a new pair of shoes with some of it.
Her room was cluttered with candles, jars of herbs, piles and piles of books, and 5 Ouija boards. It always had an earthy, herbal smell, with an undertone of snuffed candles. My friends, mostly football players like me, would tease her when they came over to hang out, calling her Sabrina, or trying to twitch their noses like that actress on ‘Bewitched’. I always told them to cut the crap, she was weird, but she was my kid sister. She could be strange sometimes, standing in the yard in a long dress and throwing salt around, or waving a wooden knife I’d helped her carve out of an ash branch, but she had a strange, sarcastic sense of humor, and she was kind almost to a fault. I loved her.
Since I was the older one, I was put in charge when our parents went out. Which was often because both of them served on several charity boards, and there always seemed to be a charity ball for the homeless, or pot luck supper for battered women, or penny auction for blind kid’s summer camp. Mostly Becky would curl up with one of her books or watch Twin Peaks on YouTube, but one night she got bored and wanted me to talk to the spirits on the Ouija board with her.
“Please? It’s no fun by yourself. No one believes me when he talks to just me. If you’re with me, you can tell Mom it’s real.”
“You mean your gangster ghost?” Lately our mother had been trying to get Becky to clean some of the weird crap out of her room, and Becky said she had been too busy talking to a ghost named Magnus on her Ouja board. I usually just rolled with whatever stories she told, but honestly, she talked about that board like it was text messaging. I figured she just didn’t want to clean her room.
“He’s not a gangster. He was set up! And the police shot him. He’s just lonely. Please?” She had a line between her eyebrows that I recognized. She wasn’t going to stop bugging me until I gave in.
“Fine. But bring it down to the kitchen. I get a headache in your smelly room.” She gave a shriek of delight and ran up to her room to get her board. I waited at the kitchen table, drinking a glass of iced tea. Becky had made it, so it had a weird under taste, probably had eye of newt in it to promote luck.
She came pounding back downstairs with one of her boards, the pointer thing and a few candles tucked under her arm. She closed all the curtains and pulled the shades down, lit the candles and turned the lights out. She arranged the board on the table, and put the plastic pointer down.
“Now put your fingers on it. Lightly, like this.” She put just the tips of her fingers on the pointer. I did the same. She closed her yes and took a deep breath. “Magnus? It’s Becky. My big brother is here, too.”
The pointer began to move swiftly around the board, twisting and turning to point at different letters.
“HEY BABE”
“Babe?” I laughed. “Did your ghost just call you ‘babe’?” Becky blushed a little, and the pointer began to move again.
“SURE DID CHUMP”
“Don’t be rude, Magnus. My brother doesn’t really believe me. Neither does my mom. If you start insulting him, he’s going to tell her I’m making it up.”
“SORRY WANT ME TO POP A LIGHTBULB”
“No! I had to replace the bulb in my room twice. Make the candle flames move.”
“OK”
And the flames suddenly got bigger, the small orange flames rose to about 8 inches, growing fatter and hotter, the centers becoming a bright white. Wax began to waterfall down the sides, pooling on the lip of the candleholders. The hair on the back of my neck began to creep up.
“Becky.” I said, and my voice came out husky. My mouth was suddenly dry as the Gobi. I swallowed and tried again. “Becky, is this a trick?”
“No, it’s real. I told you. Magnus, tell him your story. How that detective killed you.” The pointer began to move again, moving faster and faster until I could hardly keep up with it. I glanced at Becky a few times, at her arms. The muscles were totally relaxed. If she’d been shooting that pointer around like that, I could have seen the muscles in her thin pale arms moving under the skin, bunching and flexing. But they hardly budged.
“I WAS NO SAINT BUT I DIDNT DESERVE WHAT THAT BASTARD COP DID TO ME I DID SMALL TIME STUFF FOR A FEW GUYS WHO WERE REALLY DANGEROUS I HAD TO OR THEYD KILL ME THEY KNEW WHERE MY KIDS LIVED THEYD HAVE KILLED THEM TOO AND MY EXWIFE THE COPS COULDN’T CATCH THE REAL BIG FISH SO THEY NEEDED SOMEONE TO CATCH TO PARADE IN FRONT OF THE FUCKING TAXPAYING ASSHOLES SO THEYD LOOK LIKE THEY DID SOMETHING BESIDES EATING FUCKING DONUTS AND TAKE BRIBES FUCKING COPS THEY SET ME UP WITH A BUNCH OF GUNS SOME DRUGS MADE IT LOOK LIKE I WAS MOVING ALL THAT SHIT AND THAT FUCKING TWITCHING DICK REYNOLDS SHOT ME DOWN LIKE A FUCKING DOG”
“Magnus. You don’t have to use such bad language.” Becky said calmly when the pointer came to a halt.
“SORRY I GET CARRIED AWAY YOU WOULD TOO YA KNOW”
“I would.” She said soothingly. “We’re going to stop now, though. I think my brother is a little freaked out. He’s never talked with spirits before.”
“SEE YOU LATER BABE”
She took her fingers off the pointer, and I practically snatched mine back, folding them together and squeezing them between my thighs. Becky looked at me thoughtfully.
“You ok?”
“Yeah. That was just… Different.”
“Do you believe me now?”
“I… yeah, I guess I do.”
“Thank you.” She said and smiled. She turned on the kitchen lights, blew out the candles, and brought her stuff back up to her room. I figured she’d run strait to our mom as soon as she came home and tell her how I was a believer now, but she never said a thing. I guess it was enough that I believed her. My mom eventually gave up on trying getting her to clean her room.
A week later, my laptop crashed, and I was forced to use our ancient family desk top computer while it was being repaired. Our parents rarely used it for anything but email, so it was almost exclusively Becky’s. She had been declared ‘too young for a laptop’, which I figured meant my parents didn’t want her to have a mobile computer. She might then disappear into her room forever.
I was looking up a bunch of stuff for school, and accidentally closed a tab I needed to look at again. I pulled up the browser history to find it again, and saw a list of occult websites in there. I was hardly surprised, but they all seemed to be about ‘mediums’ and ‘possession’. Curious, I opened a few of them, and read a few of the articles.
“Inviting a spirit into your body was once thought to be a gift granted to few, but it can be accomplished by almost anyone with enough practice and meditation. It is not something to be taken lightly, as some spirits are evil, and will use your body for evil deeds. Care should be exercised to prevent the spirit from taking over the body completely.”
I would have thought that utter crap a few weeks ago, but that was before I’d seen that angry message pouring across that Ouija board. I looked at the history again. One link didn’t seem to be from an occult website. I clicked it. The web site for the local paper came up. It was an article about the attempted capture of a wanted felon that had resulted in a shootout, the wounding of 5 officers and the death of the felon. There was a video interview with the detective in charge.
Detective Michael Reynolds was about 40, with a receding hairline who looked tired as he spoke into the reporter’s microphone. He was still wearing a bulletproof vest over his button-down shirt, and there was a small cluster of red drops on his left shoulder.
“I feel that we were somewhat successful, we’ve stopped a major shipment of both automatic weapons and heroin. We hoped to bring the man responsible in alive, but he did not come peacefully. 5 of my fellow officers were wounded, 2 quite seriously, and we had to use deadly force to subdue him.” He paused, and his left eye suddenly cramped in a twitch.
There was more to the video, but I didn’t watch it. I went upstairs to Becky’s room and knocked on the door.
“What?” She yelled. Her voice sounded strained, like she was in there lifting weights.
“Becky? Can I come in? I wanna ask you something.”
“No! I’m busy! I’m doing something!”
I opened the door anyway. Becky was sitting at her desk, her head lowered. On her desk was an assortment of candles and bundles of herbs smoking in ceramic dishes. She was breathing hard, her back heaving. She made a sharp whistle when she inhaled.
“Becky!” I ran to her and put my hand on her back. I immediately snatched it away. It felt like she had hundreds of tiny bugs squirming around under her shirt. No. They felt like they were under her skin. “Stop! Don’t let him in! He’s not a good guy!”
“He just needs to explain! To that detective! That he was wrong, he shot the wrong guy!” She said. Her breathing got more and more strained. “He’s going to go after that! He can’t move on!”
She suddenly jerked backward in her chair, she would have fallen to the floor, but I caught her wrist. It had that same squirming feeling under the skin. I wrapped my arm around her waist and tried to set her on her feet. She seemed to shiver violently in my arms, then went totally limp. The squirming feeling stopped.
“Becky?” I placed her gently on the floor. “You ok now?”
Her right hand shot up, balled tight, and smashed into my mouth. I felt my lips split open on my teeth. I staggered backward, and she pistoned her legs out, catching me in the shin and knocking me over. I hit the floor with a hard thump.
“You kids cut it out up there!” My mother yelled up the stairs. I opened my mouth to scream to her, but Becky was up like a flash, and kicked me square in the stomach. My scream woofed out in a big huff.
“Sorry, Mom!” She called. But it wasn’t her. I knew it wasn’t. She turned to me, and her bright, sweet eyes had gone cold as lake ice. “I should just kill you. But I got some shit to take care of first, and I don’t need anyone looking for this girl yet. So, you’re gonna take a little nap instead.”
He dropped to her knees quickly, and pulled my head against her chest. He wrapped her arm around my neck and tightened the muscles in her forearm. I suddenly couldn’t breathe, and the room got dimmer and dimmer. As I passed out, I shrieked her name over and over in my mind.
I don’t know how long I was out. I woke up with my shoulder bent uncomfortably upwards, pressed against my ear. I tried to move, but I was squeezed into somewhere narrow, my right arm wrapped around my head. I shifted a little more and got my head turned around. I was looking at the floor of Becky’s room. He’d shoved me under the bed. I had to twist and grunt and shuffle for 2 minutes to get myself out. I looked wildly around the room. How was I going to find where that Detective Reynolds lived? I doubted cops who hunted down drug lords were listed in the phone book. Something white caught my eye. Along with her 5 Ouija boards, Becky owned an old fashioned planchette, the kind with a pencil attached to it, so messages from the spirits were written in pencil, instead of being spelled out. The white was the notepad she used with it.
I snatched it up, and saw ghostly dents of past conversations in the smooth surface, and a series of scribbles that was deeper than the others. She’d really been bearing down on the planchette. I grabbed a pencil out of the cup and began running it lightly over the paper. The word that had been gouged in was Freemont.
“Freemont Avenue.” I said, and bolted for the stairs. My mother called to me as I hit the bottom step, but I kept running. It was a quarter mile to Freemont Avenue, but I never stopped or slowed down. I silently thanked my football coach for all the extra laps he’d had us run that fall. It was a nice neighborhood, quiet in the ending dusk. The road ended in a cul-de-sac, and I began reading the mailboxes, working my way around the circle. Four mailboxes had no names, just numbers, and there were no Reynolds. I was about to panic, I’d have to start knocking on random doors, and I doubt any of his neighbors would point his house out to a wild-eyed sweaty kid with a big fat lip. I looked around hopelessly, and I leaned against a car parked at the end of a driveway, breathing heavy. I looked in the window, and saw something on the floor. A blue light. The kind you plugged into the cigarette lighter and could pop on the dashboard when you needed it. I ran up to the house and knocked on the door. No answer. I knocked harder, and the door swung in, just a bit. A smell came out, metallic and bitter. I pushed the door open a bit more.
“Detective Reynolds?” I called. “I need to talk to you, it’s important!” It was dark in the house, and suddenly, the streetlight behind me on the curb flickered on, casting a wedge of light across the foyer. There was a splash of blood on the wall, still red and running in big drips down the wall. There was a handprint, too. It was small and neat. It had a narrow palm and long graceful fingers. Becky and I had made our mom one of those concrete garden stones for Mother’s Day once, with bits of seashells and colored glass surrounding our handprints. My broad, wide one, and her narrow, graceful one.
I stepped in the foyer, and was careful not to touch the blood as I made my way down the hall. I passed a living room cluttered with paper and file folders, and came out in a small kitchen. The fridge was open, and by it’s bright white light, I could see a lot of blood. It swirled and looped and splattered across the linoleum, and ended in a big puddle by the sink. In the middle of the puddle was a smeared red shape that I assumed had been Detective Reynolds. I think he had been almost entirely skinned. I turned away, trying not to puke all over the place. I saw something else. Small foot prints leading out of the puddle to the back door.
He was gone, and had taken Becky with him.
Almost a year has passed since then. I thought I’d miss Becky less as time went on, but I miss her more and more every day. The cops assumed Detective Reynolds was killed by a drug addict or an insane person. There was never any mention in the papers about the small hand and foot prints they must have found at the scene. My mom and dad seem like ghosts, and they hardly talk to me. They saw my busted face, and assumed I’d done something really mean to Becky and she hit me and ran away.
I don’t care. I’m going to be leaving soon too. Those websites are right. Anyone can be possessed, if they put in the effort and have a willing ghost. It just took me a little longer to get the hang of things, since I don’t have Becky’s natural talent. But I had someone to help me. I’m going to find Magnus. He’s probably smashed Becky into the furthest corner of her mind, taken completely over. I’ll probably have to kill her body to get rid of him. But I know there’s such things as ghosts. She’ll be free to wander the earth, or disappear into the universe. And I can go with her. I’ll have to kill myself when this is over. To set the ghost in me free.
I finish packing a few things in a duffel bag. I put on my heavy coat and head for the door. As I pass the mirror in the front hall, I see my left eye scrunch up in a twitch.
End
*I wanted to write a ghost story, and I also wanted to try writing as a guy. I think I wound up writing as the big brother I always wanted. I also have a thing for revenge, it's one of my favorite themes.
Her room was cluttered with candles, jars of herbs, piles and piles of books, and 5 Ouija boards. It always had an earthy, herbal smell, with an undertone of snuffed candles. My friends, mostly football players like me, would tease her when they came over to hang out, calling her Sabrina, or trying to twitch their noses like that actress on ‘Bewitched’. I always told them to cut the crap, she was weird, but she was my kid sister. She could be strange sometimes, standing in the yard in a long dress and throwing salt around, or waving a wooden knife I’d helped her carve out of an ash branch, but she had a strange, sarcastic sense of humor, and she was kind almost to a fault. I loved her.
Since I was the older one, I was put in charge when our parents went out. Which was often because both of them served on several charity boards, and there always seemed to be a charity ball for the homeless, or pot luck supper for battered women, or penny auction for blind kid’s summer camp. Mostly Becky would curl up with one of her books or watch Twin Peaks on YouTube, but one night she got bored and wanted me to talk to the spirits on the Ouija board with her.
“Please? It’s no fun by yourself. No one believes me when he talks to just me. If you’re with me, you can tell Mom it’s real.”
“You mean your gangster ghost?” Lately our mother had been trying to get Becky to clean some of the weird crap out of her room, and Becky said she had been too busy talking to a ghost named Magnus on her Ouja board. I usually just rolled with whatever stories she told, but honestly, she talked about that board like it was text messaging. I figured she just didn’t want to clean her room.
“He’s not a gangster. He was set up! And the police shot him. He’s just lonely. Please?” She had a line between her eyebrows that I recognized. She wasn’t going to stop bugging me until I gave in.
“Fine. But bring it down to the kitchen. I get a headache in your smelly room.” She gave a shriek of delight and ran up to her room to get her board. I waited at the kitchen table, drinking a glass of iced tea. Becky had made it, so it had a weird under taste, probably had eye of newt in it to promote luck.
She came pounding back downstairs with one of her boards, the pointer thing and a few candles tucked under her arm. She closed all the curtains and pulled the shades down, lit the candles and turned the lights out. She arranged the board on the table, and put the plastic pointer down.
“Now put your fingers on it. Lightly, like this.” She put just the tips of her fingers on the pointer. I did the same. She closed her yes and took a deep breath. “Magnus? It’s Becky. My big brother is here, too.”
The pointer began to move swiftly around the board, twisting and turning to point at different letters.
“HEY BABE”
“Babe?” I laughed. “Did your ghost just call you ‘babe’?” Becky blushed a little, and the pointer began to move again.
“SURE DID CHUMP”
“Don’t be rude, Magnus. My brother doesn’t really believe me. Neither does my mom. If you start insulting him, he’s going to tell her I’m making it up.”
“SORRY WANT ME TO POP A LIGHTBULB”
“No! I had to replace the bulb in my room twice. Make the candle flames move.”
“OK”
And the flames suddenly got bigger, the small orange flames rose to about 8 inches, growing fatter and hotter, the centers becoming a bright white. Wax began to waterfall down the sides, pooling on the lip of the candleholders. The hair on the back of my neck began to creep up.
“Becky.” I said, and my voice came out husky. My mouth was suddenly dry as the Gobi. I swallowed and tried again. “Becky, is this a trick?”
“No, it’s real. I told you. Magnus, tell him your story. How that detective killed you.” The pointer began to move again, moving faster and faster until I could hardly keep up with it. I glanced at Becky a few times, at her arms. The muscles were totally relaxed. If she’d been shooting that pointer around like that, I could have seen the muscles in her thin pale arms moving under the skin, bunching and flexing. But they hardly budged.
“I WAS NO SAINT BUT I DIDNT DESERVE WHAT THAT BASTARD COP DID TO ME I DID SMALL TIME STUFF FOR A FEW GUYS WHO WERE REALLY DANGEROUS I HAD TO OR THEYD KILL ME THEY KNEW WHERE MY KIDS LIVED THEYD HAVE KILLED THEM TOO AND MY EXWIFE THE COPS COULDN’T CATCH THE REAL BIG FISH SO THEY NEEDED SOMEONE TO CATCH TO PARADE IN FRONT OF THE FUCKING TAXPAYING ASSHOLES SO THEYD LOOK LIKE THEY DID SOMETHING BESIDES EATING FUCKING DONUTS AND TAKE BRIBES FUCKING COPS THEY SET ME UP WITH A BUNCH OF GUNS SOME DRUGS MADE IT LOOK LIKE I WAS MOVING ALL THAT SHIT AND THAT FUCKING TWITCHING DICK REYNOLDS SHOT ME DOWN LIKE A FUCKING DOG”
“Magnus. You don’t have to use such bad language.” Becky said calmly when the pointer came to a halt.
“SORRY I GET CARRIED AWAY YOU WOULD TOO YA KNOW”
“I would.” She said soothingly. “We’re going to stop now, though. I think my brother is a little freaked out. He’s never talked with spirits before.”
“SEE YOU LATER BABE”
She took her fingers off the pointer, and I practically snatched mine back, folding them together and squeezing them between my thighs. Becky looked at me thoughtfully.
“You ok?”
“Yeah. That was just… Different.”
“Do you believe me now?”
“I… yeah, I guess I do.”
“Thank you.” She said and smiled. She turned on the kitchen lights, blew out the candles, and brought her stuff back up to her room. I figured she’d run strait to our mom as soon as she came home and tell her how I was a believer now, but she never said a thing. I guess it was enough that I believed her. My mom eventually gave up on trying getting her to clean her room.
A week later, my laptop crashed, and I was forced to use our ancient family desk top computer while it was being repaired. Our parents rarely used it for anything but email, so it was almost exclusively Becky’s. She had been declared ‘too young for a laptop’, which I figured meant my parents didn’t want her to have a mobile computer. She might then disappear into her room forever.
I was looking up a bunch of stuff for school, and accidentally closed a tab I needed to look at again. I pulled up the browser history to find it again, and saw a list of occult websites in there. I was hardly surprised, but they all seemed to be about ‘mediums’ and ‘possession’. Curious, I opened a few of them, and read a few of the articles.
“Inviting a spirit into your body was once thought to be a gift granted to few, but it can be accomplished by almost anyone with enough practice and meditation. It is not something to be taken lightly, as some spirits are evil, and will use your body for evil deeds. Care should be exercised to prevent the spirit from taking over the body completely.”
I would have thought that utter crap a few weeks ago, but that was before I’d seen that angry message pouring across that Ouija board. I looked at the history again. One link didn’t seem to be from an occult website. I clicked it. The web site for the local paper came up. It was an article about the attempted capture of a wanted felon that had resulted in a shootout, the wounding of 5 officers and the death of the felon. There was a video interview with the detective in charge.
Detective Michael Reynolds was about 40, with a receding hairline who looked tired as he spoke into the reporter’s microphone. He was still wearing a bulletproof vest over his button-down shirt, and there was a small cluster of red drops on his left shoulder.
“I feel that we were somewhat successful, we’ve stopped a major shipment of both automatic weapons and heroin. We hoped to bring the man responsible in alive, but he did not come peacefully. 5 of my fellow officers were wounded, 2 quite seriously, and we had to use deadly force to subdue him.” He paused, and his left eye suddenly cramped in a twitch.
There was more to the video, but I didn’t watch it. I went upstairs to Becky’s room and knocked on the door.
“What?” She yelled. Her voice sounded strained, like she was in there lifting weights.
“Becky? Can I come in? I wanna ask you something.”
“No! I’m busy! I’m doing something!”
I opened the door anyway. Becky was sitting at her desk, her head lowered. On her desk was an assortment of candles and bundles of herbs smoking in ceramic dishes. She was breathing hard, her back heaving. She made a sharp whistle when she inhaled.
“Becky!” I ran to her and put my hand on her back. I immediately snatched it away. It felt like she had hundreds of tiny bugs squirming around under her shirt. No. They felt like they were under her skin. “Stop! Don’t let him in! He’s not a good guy!”
“He just needs to explain! To that detective! That he was wrong, he shot the wrong guy!” She said. Her breathing got more and more strained. “He’s going to go after that! He can’t move on!”
She suddenly jerked backward in her chair, she would have fallen to the floor, but I caught her wrist. It had that same squirming feeling under the skin. I wrapped my arm around her waist and tried to set her on her feet. She seemed to shiver violently in my arms, then went totally limp. The squirming feeling stopped.
“Becky?” I placed her gently on the floor. “You ok now?”
Her right hand shot up, balled tight, and smashed into my mouth. I felt my lips split open on my teeth. I staggered backward, and she pistoned her legs out, catching me in the shin and knocking me over. I hit the floor with a hard thump.
“You kids cut it out up there!” My mother yelled up the stairs. I opened my mouth to scream to her, but Becky was up like a flash, and kicked me square in the stomach. My scream woofed out in a big huff.
“Sorry, Mom!” She called. But it wasn’t her. I knew it wasn’t. She turned to me, and her bright, sweet eyes had gone cold as lake ice. “I should just kill you. But I got some shit to take care of first, and I don’t need anyone looking for this girl yet. So, you’re gonna take a little nap instead.”
He dropped to her knees quickly, and pulled my head against her chest. He wrapped her arm around my neck and tightened the muscles in her forearm. I suddenly couldn’t breathe, and the room got dimmer and dimmer. As I passed out, I shrieked her name over and over in my mind.
I don’t know how long I was out. I woke up with my shoulder bent uncomfortably upwards, pressed against my ear. I tried to move, but I was squeezed into somewhere narrow, my right arm wrapped around my head. I shifted a little more and got my head turned around. I was looking at the floor of Becky’s room. He’d shoved me under the bed. I had to twist and grunt and shuffle for 2 minutes to get myself out. I looked wildly around the room. How was I going to find where that Detective Reynolds lived? I doubted cops who hunted down drug lords were listed in the phone book. Something white caught my eye. Along with her 5 Ouija boards, Becky owned an old fashioned planchette, the kind with a pencil attached to it, so messages from the spirits were written in pencil, instead of being spelled out. The white was the notepad she used with it.
I snatched it up, and saw ghostly dents of past conversations in the smooth surface, and a series of scribbles that was deeper than the others. She’d really been bearing down on the planchette. I grabbed a pencil out of the cup and began running it lightly over the paper. The word that had been gouged in was Freemont.
“Freemont Avenue.” I said, and bolted for the stairs. My mother called to me as I hit the bottom step, but I kept running. It was a quarter mile to Freemont Avenue, but I never stopped or slowed down. I silently thanked my football coach for all the extra laps he’d had us run that fall. It was a nice neighborhood, quiet in the ending dusk. The road ended in a cul-de-sac, and I began reading the mailboxes, working my way around the circle. Four mailboxes had no names, just numbers, and there were no Reynolds. I was about to panic, I’d have to start knocking on random doors, and I doubt any of his neighbors would point his house out to a wild-eyed sweaty kid with a big fat lip. I looked around hopelessly, and I leaned against a car parked at the end of a driveway, breathing heavy. I looked in the window, and saw something on the floor. A blue light. The kind you plugged into the cigarette lighter and could pop on the dashboard when you needed it. I ran up to the house and knocked on the door. No answer. I knocked harder, and the door swung in, just a bit. A smell came out, metallic and bitter. I pushed the door open a bit more.
“Detective Reynolds?” I called. “I need to talk to you, it’s important!” It was dark in the house, and suddenly, the streetlight behind me on the curb flickered on, casting a wedge of light across the foyer. There was a splash of blood on the wall, still red and running in big drips down the wall. There was a handprint, too. It was small and neat. It had a narrow palm and long graceful fingers. Becky and I had made our mom one of those concrete garden stones for Mother’s Day once, with bits of seashells and colored glass surrounding our handprints. My broad, wide one, and her narrow, graceful one.
I stepped in the foyer, and was careful not to touch the blood as I made my way down the hall. I passed a living room cluttered with paper and file folders, and came out in a small kitchen. The fridge was open, and by it’s bright white light, I could see a lot of blood. It swirled and looped and splattered across the linoleum, and ended in a big puddle by the sink. In the middle of the puddle was a smeared red shape that I assumed had been Detective Reynolds. I think he had been almost entirely skinned. I turned away, trying not to puke all over the place. I saw something else. Small foot prints leading out of the puddle to the back door.
He was gone, and had taken Becky with him.
Almost a year has passed since then. I thought I’d miss Becky less as time went on, but I miss her more and more every day. The cops assumed Detective Reynolds was killed by a drug addict or an insane person. There was never any mention in the papers about the small hand and foot prints they must have found at the scene. My mom and dad seem like ghosts, and they hardly talk to me. They saw my busted face, and assumed I’d done something really mean to Becky and she hit me and ran away.
I don’t care. I’m going to be leaving soon too. Those websites are right. Anyone can be possessed, if they put in the effort and have a willing ghost. It just took me a little longer to get the hang of things, since I don’t have Becky’s natural talent. But I had someone to help me. I’m going to find Magnus. He’s probably smashed Becky into the furthest corner of her mind, taken completely over. I’ll probably have to kill her body to get rid of him. But I know there’s such things as ghosts. She’ll be free to wander the earth, or disappear into the universe. And I can go with her. I’ll have to kill myself when this is over. To set the ghost in me free.
I finish packing a few things in a duffel bag. I put on my heavy coat and head for the door. As I pass the mirror in the front hall, I see my left eye scrunch up in a twitch.
End
*I wanted to write a ghost story, and I also wanted to try writing as a guy. I think I wound up writing as the big brother I always wanted. I also have a thing for revenge, it's one of my favorite themes.
Mr. Toad
This all started six months ago. I was raised by my grandmother, in a small town smack in the middle of New York. I had met a guy, Alan, who swept me off my feet and promised me cozy life, with a neat house, and a wedding ring, and a golden retriever puppy. What I got was a crappy apartment, in a city that was taking the last few staggering steps towards being a ghost town. But Alan said he loved me, and I knew I loved him, so I saw the flea-bag apartment and my three part time jobs as a stepping stone towards our happy life, and trudged onward. I had been moved out for about 9 months, when I got a call from Mrs. Easting, my grandma's next door neighbor.
"You'd better come home and say your good-byes." She said after we'd exchanged pleasantries. "May's fading fast."
"Fading? Nana's fine. I talked to her day before yesterday." I said, puzzled.
"She didn't tell you." She paused for a long time. "It's the cancer. Started in her guts. Now it's all through her lungs, and her. . .her lady parts."
I thought of how Nana had kissed my forehead the day I moved out. How she'd smoothed my hair back and told me no matter where I went, this would always be my home, if I needed it to be. Had she been sick even then? Had it been eating away at her?
"I'll be there tomorrow." I said.
"Hurry." Mrs. Easting said, and hung up.
I had to wait for Alan to get home, I gave him my paychecks, so he could pay the bills, and put the tiny bit left over into our savings account, for the future. He didn't get home until after 11, and I told him I needed $50 for a bus ticket home. He looked at me blankly for a moment, then grinned. Well, his teeth were showing, anyway.
"You really haven't figured it out."
"Figured-" I started, then he began laughing. It was hard and flat and mean, like the laughter of a school kid who just kicked a cat.
"I haven't saved a dime of that money. I spent it on my girlfriend. Her apartment is way nicer than this shit hole, and someone had to pay her rent. I just wanted to get every dime out of you I could before I moved in with her full time."
My brain processed what he said, and I suddenly saw my hand flying out and breaking his lying, cheating jaw. My knuckles ached, I saw it so clearly.
"Have you paid any of our bills here?" As if in answer, the lights snapped off. I heard footsteps rising from the basement, and there was a loud pounding at the door.
"Pay your fucking rent and I'll turn the breaker back on!" The landlord shouted through the door. I could feel the muscles in my whole arm twitching, wanting to punch him until he fell down, until his face became another shape in the dark, red liquid lit by the red neons from China Palace across the street.
Instead, I turned on my heel and went into the bedroom. Somehow, I found my old school backpack and began stuffing clothes and things into it. In the dark, I didn't know what I was packing, his things or mine, but I grabbed and stuffed until the pack bulged. When I returned to the living room, Alan was gone. I was glad. I never wanted to see him again. I scanned the room, lit by dull red light, for anything else I wanted. I almost missed the framed picture on top of our second hand TV, it was hidden behind a bank of empty beer cans and Alan's filthy, smelly bong. I picked up the frame and looked at the picture. It was me and Nana, when I was 12 or 13. She's sitting in her rocker on her front porch, mouth wide in a laugh, her hands thrown up in the air. I'm sitting on the porch steps at her feet, in cutoffs and a torn tee shirt, eating a wedge of watermelon longer than my arm. I think Mrs. Easting took it. I know Nana has the same picture hanging on her fridge. Alan had given me the frame, and I didn't want to take it with me, so I pried off the back, and pulled the photo loose, letting the cheap wood and glass fall to the floor. The glass shattered. Good. I hoped Alan came back and cut his foot. I hoped he fell face first into it and put out his eye.
I knew I'd have to walk and hitch, I doubted I'd get there by the next morning. "Please, Nana." I thought. "Wait for me. If it doesn't hurt to bad, wait for me."
The following afternoon, I'd probably walked 20 miles, and hitched maybe a little further. I hated hitching, the only people who wanted to stop for girls in their late teens were middle aged men who wanted to know if you'd like to make $50. Or $10, if they were really cheap. I'd been walking about 3 hours, cutting across a country highway, rather than the turnpike. The sky was starting to look black and heavy, and thunder growled in the distance. There was going to be a bitch of a thunderstorm.
In this part of the world, you may have seen them elsewhere, but I never have, there are little three sided huts, placed seemingly at random on the sides of roads. Most of them have an advertisement for OTB
on the sides (This one said "MAY THE HORSE BE WITH YOU!" on one side and "THE BETTOR LOVERS!" on the other). I have no idea what they're for, most of them aren't near any houses, and seem to be tucked into odd corners that wouldn't be on a bus route, but they seem to be everywhere out here. With the sky looking the way it did, this one seemed a blessing, and I ducked inside. It was too short to stand in, so I wound up crouched in a far back corner, waiting for the rain to start. The clouds built and built, and thunder began to bang louder and louder. Lightning began to flash, bright enough to leave blue spots on my eyes. And finally, the rain came, like a waterfall. I scooted all the way to the back of the little shed, leaning against the board back.
"Hell of a storm." A deep voice said just to my right. I spun clumsily on my heels, and wound up falling on my ass in the dirt.
Squatting beside me was a short, plump man. His neck was so fat, it kind of melted into his shoulders, and his shiny bald head gleamed in the lightning flashes. His eyes... His eyes made me feel sick. They were bulging so much they seemed ready to fall right out of his head, and they were a bright gold-ish orange. As soon as they locked onto mine, my stomach turned over, my heart seemed to stop, then stutter to life.
"You scared me." I whispered. He laughed, a short bark, but it reminded me of something else, too.
"Sorry, sorry, sorry. Just wanted to get out of the rain. I like a little, but too much! Too much tonight!"
He peered out into the storm. "Got to go! Got to go! Hurry, hurry, hurry! But this rain! So cold! And hungry, too!" That barking laugh. I shivered.
"Want some melon?" I asked. I dug into my pack, finding the slightly smooshed plastic container of cantaloupe one of my rides had bought for me. I saw fruit flies had gotten into it, covering the orange fruit. "Oh, sorry. It got buggy. Never mind."
"No! Fine, fine!" And to my disgust, he took the plastic box from my hand and began pouring the bug coated melon into his mouth. I looked away, trying not to gag. "Thanks, thanks my dear!" BARK!
"I have a sweater, too." I said. It was Alan's sweater, and I hoped this creepy guy would take off if he had it. "And an umbrella." I fished them out of my back pack and handed them over.
"Perfect, perfect, perfect! You're a good girl." He patted my shoulder, I hope I concealed my disgust at his touch. Even through my shirt, he felt soft and moist and fleshy. "That's three! Three favors I owe you!" Saying this, he reached down and slapped the ground, hard, three times.
"No, it's ok-"
"Life and death, Death and life. Three favors!" BARK! And with that, he popped open the umbrella and crab walked out of the shack. He was lost to the driving rain in a moment.
I waited out the storm, and continued east, arriving at my Nana's house the next day at noon. Mrs. Easting was there, she frowned a little, but said nothing about my dirty clothes and tangled hair. I ran upstairs to Nana's room.
"Nana!" I cried and knelt next to her bed. She looked horrible, skin stretched over frail bones, her hair must have been gone, but Mrs. E had put a cap, knit from soft white yarn on her head. An IV stand stood next to her bed, and it seemed to me the needle taped in her arm was thicker than the arm itself. When she opened her eyes, they seemed dirty, cloudy.
"There's my baby." She whispered. Her voice was barely audible. "I missed you, so much."
"Shhh, Nana. You have to rest. Don't worry, I'm here."
"I missed you..." She trailed off, and her eyes shut again.
I sat with her that whole night, watching her sleep, and thinking of how she'd rub my back to wake me up for school, how she'd make me cucumber and egg salad, how she'd done my hair for my senior prom, and a million other things. Around three, I went downstairs to get a glass of water, and saw the picture on the fridge. Nana laughing, the watermelon juice running down my neck. I touched it with my fingertips.
"I'd give anything for you, Nana. Anything."
Something hit the floor hard upstairs, THUMP!
Thinking Nana must have fallen out of bed, I raced up the stairs.
"Nana?" I stopped cold in the doorway. The thump had been the IV stand falling over. It fell because Nana's bed was covered, overflowing with. . .toads. They were mounded high over her, spilling into a pile that stretched almost to the window. They didn't seem to be moving much, just sort of lying there in a pile, making a low throaty hum. I started to step forward, meaning to pull them off before she smothered under there.
BARK!
I whirled. Crouched in the hallway was the biggest toad of all. It was easily three feet across, maybe bigger. It made that harsh barking sound again, and I looked at it's eyes. Big, bulging, and gold-ish orange. My stomach fluttered madly and my heart began to pound. It raised one huge foot off the ground,
and slapped it down three times.
My head snapped back to Nana. The toads were gone, and Nana was sleeping, peacefully and deeply. Her cheeks seemed a little fuller, her arms and legs less like sticks. The gold-eyed toad slapped the floor twice, and barked his harsh laughter. I looked back, but he was gone.
"Life and death." I said. "Death and life."
Two months passed and Nana got better and better, eating more and sleeping less. The doctor's were baffled, they had no explanation for the sudden complete disappearance of her cancer. I did, but I doubt they would have believed me. Nana said I must have brought good luck home with me. Mrs. Easting decided I had sold my soul to the devil to cure Nana.
"Girl came home covered in filth, and was there one night. Suddenly May's all better? It's not natural." She'd tell anyone who'd listen. "What was she doing for two days? That girl was consorting with the devil."
I didn't care too much about Mrs. Easting's religious fanaticism, but Nana was pretty sad. Her and Mrs. E had been pretty good friends up until now. I probably would have gone on not caring, but one day I overheard her talking to Mrs. Pottsmith (the biggest bitch our town had produced) in the grocery store. She was in the next aisle over, but I recognized that whiny voice.
"I been waiting 2 years for that cancer to finish her off. She would have left everything to her whore grandchild- living with some strange man out in some seedy city? Shame!- but I could have talked the girl into selling me that house for nothing. She's too stupid to know what it's worth anyway. I could have sold it for a fortune, and lived easy. I knew the girl would come back to see her granny, that's why I called her. Figured I could get the deal signed and sealed while she was still crying over May, and she'd be too wrung out to know what hit her. Then out of the blue sky, May's better? I think she was faking it to get the little bitch home!"
The conversation continued, but I didn't hear it. My vision was going red and fuzzy at the edges, and I could hear my heart pounding like a machine about to blow a gasket. My hands tightened on my shopping cart's handle until it snapped between them. I left it where it stood and walked outside. I turned my face up.
"Mr. Toad." I said, feeling like an idiot, but somehow knowing he could hear me. "If you can make my Nana better, you can make that evil, lying bitch sick."
The next day, when I went back to the grocery store, the butcher asked me if I'd heard about poor Mrs. Easting.
"No." I said with a strait face. "Is she ok?"
"Not at all! She got some kind of a bowel disease! She's been puking shit, and shitting blood all night! Doctor says she'll keep at it till she dies! They can't do nothing but pray it happens quick." he leaned in, conspiratorially. "I have a drink with her doctor every now and again, and he told me she shoulda run out of shit and blood by now. And she won't pass out. Even when they pumped her full of sleeping pills, she won't pass out or go to sleep. Miserable way to go."
I agreed, and managed to pay for my groceries and get into Nana's old Buick before I began to laugh my head off. That Mr. Toad has a hell of a sense of humor. I saw something move out of the corner of my eye, and there he was, sitting on the passenger seat. He barked his laugh, and thumped the seat once with his big wide foot.
"Thank you." I said, and started the car.
It took Mrs. Easting three days to die. I heard rumors that the nurses refused to clean up the shit and blood after the second day, and she died in a lake of filth. The doctors of course deny this, they don't want the hospital to look bad, but I believe it. According to a old high school friend of mine who's a nurse now, Mrs. E was quite the little fire hose the last 10 hours or so.
"Buckets." She said after a few cold beers on my front porch. "We had to carry it out in buckets. The most foul-smelling-"
"This hardly talk for young ladies!" Nana said from inside the screen porch. "Can't you talk about hair or boys?"
"Nan-na!" I said, laughing.
Now, as I write this, I have one favor left. I've considered saving it, in case Nana or I get sick. But at the same time, I've been thinking about Alan lately. A lot. How he lied. How he stole all that money from me, spending it on some other girl, paying her bills and leaving me in the dark. I also think about what a rush Mr. Toad had been in when I met him the first time. I don't think he'll wait forever. I imagine Alan sitting up and spraying a gutful of liquid shit on his new girlfriend. Or maybe Mr. Toad will come up with something even more clever. Alan slowly turning himself inside out, or his skin falling off, slice by slice, and never healing. I've decided.
"Mr. Toad. Can you hear me?"
No sounds, but I knew he could.
"This is my last favor. Thank you for helping me out. Make Alan suffer for what he did to me."
I figured I wouldn't get to really find out what had happened to him, maybe a blurb in the news, but about a week later, I got a letter. It had no return address, no stamp, just my name scrawled three times across the envelope. Inside was a SD card. I had to go to the public library to use it, since Nana had no use for a computer, and I couldn't afford one yet. I wedged myself into a corner table, turned the monitor so no one passing by could see and put the card in. It contained one video file.
The camera is low to the ground, and shows Alan padding around a strange bedroom naked. He shuffles over to the dresser and begins fiddling with something up there. He bends his head over it, and inhales. Sniffing cocaine. Lovely habit. A girl walks in the room. She says something to him, but the video has no sound. He says something back, and slaps her hand away when she tries to take the cocaine. As soon as his wrist touches hers, it bends violently backwards, as if he has just slammed it into a steel pole, instead of just tapping another wrist. A sliver of bone breaks through the skin, and a thin stream of blood jets out. The girl is clearly screaming, and she reaches for his shoulder. When she touches it, it wrenches upwards, I can see his shoulder rotate out of the socket. He flails toward her, and falls against her, his ribs suddenly take on a sunken look, and I know they've all snapped inward. He falls to the floor, and the girl tries to pick him up. Everywhere her hand falls, a bone snaps, skin blisters, skin peels back to expose muscle and tendons. The girl runs from the room. Alan lies on the floor, breathing heavily. And suddenly, the film seems to be running backwards. His torn skin and broken bones snap back into place.
"It will always be like that, anyone he touches, man or woman or child. He'll live a long time too." I look at the floor beneath the desk. The toad squats there, and despite his eyes making me shudder, he seems to have a big smile on his toad mouth. "Now we're even. One life, one death, and one that's little of both. BARK!" I smile.
"Thank you." I say, and look back at the screen. The girl has poked her head back into the room, sees Alan is fine, runs to him and gives him a big hug. His intestines burst from his ass as his tongue bursts from his throat. "Thank you so much."
I watch the rest of the video, a full hour. Then go home to help Nana cook dinner.
End
*My first pasta. I actually got the idea at work. There's a couple of those weird little huts near my last jobsite, and I always wondered what the hell they were for. I still don't know.... Anyway, I thought they were kinda creepy, and one day I thought, "I bet some really creepy shit has happened in those things." And went from there. I was nervous to post it, but I bit the bullet and went ahead. I got some great reviews, and Matador even drew me a picture of Mr. Toad:
"You'd better come home and say your good-byes." She said after we'd exchanged pleasantries. "May's fading fast."
"Fading? Nana's fine. I talked to her day before yesterday." I said, puzzled.
"She didn't tell you." She paused for a long time. "It's the cancer. Started in her guts. Now it's all through her lungs, and her. . .her lady parts."
I thought of how Nana had kissed my forehead the day I moved out. How she'd smoothed my hair back and told me no matter where I went, this would always be my home, if I needed it to be. Had she been sick even then? Had it been eating away at her?
"I'll be there tomorrow." I said.
"Hurry." Mrs. Easting said, and hung up.
I had to wait for Alan to get home, I gave him my paychecks, so he could pay the bills, and put the tiny bit left over into our savings account, for the future. He didn't get home until after 11, and I told him I needed $50 for a bus ticket home. He looked at me blankly for a moment, then grinned. Well, his teeth were showing, anyway.
"You really haven't figured it out."
"Figured-" I started, then he began laughing. It was hard and flat and mean, like the laughter of a school kid who just kicked a cat.
"I haven't saved a dime of that money. I spent it on my girlfriend. Her apartment is way nicer than this shit hole, and someone had to pay her rent. I just wanted to get every dime out of you I could before I moved in with her full time."
My brain processed what he said, and I suddenly saw my hand flying out and breaking his lying, cheating jaw. My knuckles ached, I saw it so clearly.
"Have you paid any of our bills here?" As if in answer, the lights snapped off. I heard footsteps rising from the basement, and there was a loud pounding at the door.
"Pay your fucking rent and I'll turn the breaker back on!" The landlord shouted through the door. I could feel the muscles in my whole arm twitching, wanting to punch him until he fell down, until his face became another shape in the dark, red liquid lit by the red neons from China Palace across the street.
Instead, I turned on my heel and went into the bedroom. Somehow, I found my old school backpack and began stuffing clothes and things into it. In the dark, I didn't know what I was packing, his things or mine, but I grabbed and stuffed until the pack bulged. When I returned to the living room, Alan was gone. I was glad. I never wanted to see him again. I scanned the room, lit by dull red light, for anything else I wanted. I almost missed the framed picture on top of our second hand TV, it was hidden behind a bank of empty beer cans and Alan's filthy, smelly bong. I picked up the frame and looked at the picture. It was me and Nana, when I was 12 or 13. She's sitting in her rocker on her front porch, mouth wide in a laugh, her hands thrown up in the air. I'm sitting on the porch steps at her feet, in cutoffs and a torn tee shirt, eating a wedge of watermelon longer than my arm. I think Mrs. Easting took it. I know Nana has the same picture hanging on her fridge. Alan had given me the frame, and I didn't want to take it with me, so I pried off the back, and pulled the photo loose, letting the cheap wood and glass fall to the floor. The glass shattered. Good. I hoped Alan came back and cut his foot. I hoped he fell face first into it and put out his eye.
I knew I'd have to walk and hitch, I doubted I'd get there by the next morning. "Please, Nana." I thought. "Wait for me. If it doesn't hurt to bad, wait for me."
The following afternoon, I'd probably walked 20 miles, and hitched maybe a little further. I hated hitching, the only people who wanted to stop for girls in their late teens were middle aged men who wanted to know if you'd like to make $50. Or $10, if they were really cheap. I'd been walking about 3 hours, cutting across a country highway, rather than the turnpike. The sky was starting to look black and heavy, and thunder growled in the distance. There was going to be a bitch of a thunderstorm.
In this part of the world, you may have seen them elsewhere, but I never have, there are little three sided huts, placed seemingly at random on the sides of roads. Most of them have an advertisement for OTB
on the sides (This one said "MAY THE HORSE BE WITH YOU!" on one side and "THE BETTOR LOVERS!" on the other). I have no idea what they're for, most of them aren't near any houses, and seem to be tucked into odd corners that wouldn't be on a bus route, but they seem to be everywhere out here. With the sky looking the way it did, this one seemed a blessing, and I ducked inside. It was too short to stand in, so I wound up crouched in a far back corner, waiting for the rain to start. The clouds built and built, and thunder began to bang louder and louder. Lightning began to flash, bright enough to leave blue spots on my eyes. And finally, the rain came, like a waterfall. I scooted all the way to the back of the little shed, leaning against the board back.
"Hell of a storm." A deep voice said just to my right. I spun clumsily on my heels, and wound up falling on my ass in the dirt.
Squatting beside me was a short, plump man. His neck was so fat, it kind of melted into his shoulders, and his shiny bald head gleamed in the lightning flashes. His eyes... His eyes made me feel sick. They were bulging so much they seemed ready to fall right out of his head, and they were a bright gold-ish orange. As soon as they locked onto mine, my stomach turned over, my heart seemed to stop, then stutter to life.
"You scared me." I whispered. He laughed, a short bark, but it reminded me of something else, too.
"Sorry, sorry, sorry. Just wanted to get out of the rain. I like a little, but too much! Too much tonight!"
He peered out into the storm. "Got to go! Got to go! Hurry, hurry, hurry! But this rain! So cold! And hungry, too!" That barking laugh. I shivered.
"Want some melon?" I asked. I dug into my pack, finding the slightly smooshed plastic container of cantaloupe one of my rides had bought for me. I saw fruit flies had gotten into it, covering the orange fruit. "Oh, sorry. It got buggy. Never mind."
"No! Fine, fine!" And to my disgust, he took the plastic box from my hand and began pouring the bug coated melon into his mouth. I looked away, trying not to gag. "Thanks, thanks my dear!" BARK!
"I have a sweater, too." I said. It was Alan's sweater, and I hoped this creepy guy would take off if he had it. "And an umbrella." I fished them out of my back pack and handed them over.
"Perfect, perfect, perfect! You're a good girl." He patted my shoulder, I hope I concealed my disgust at his touch. Even through my shirt, he felt soft and moist and fleshy. "That's three! Three favors I owe you!" Saying this, he reached down and slapped the ground, hard, three times.
"No, it's ok-"
"Life and death, Death and life. Three favors!" BARK! And with that, he popped open the umbrella and crab walked out of the shack. He was lost to the driving rain in a moment.
I waited out the storm, and continued east, arriving at my Nana's house the next day at noon. Mrs. Easting was there, she frowned a little, but said nothing about my dirty clothes and tangled hair. I ran upstairs to Nana's room.
"Nana!" I cried and knelt next to her bed. She looked horrible, skin stretched over frail bones, her hair must have been gone, but Mrs. E had put a cap, knit from soft white yarn on her head. An IV stand stood next to her bed, and it seemed to me the needle taped in her arm was thicker than the arm itself. When she opened her eyes, they seemed dirty, cloudy.
"There's my baby." She whispered. Her voice was barely audible. "I missed you, so much."
"Shhh, Nana. You have to rest. Don't worry, I'm here."
"I missed you..." She trailed off, and her eyes shut again.
I sat with her that whole night, watching her sleep, and thinking of how she'd rub my back to wake me up for school, how she'd make me cucumber and egg salad, how she'd done my hair for my senior prom, and a million other things. Around three, I went downstairs to get a glass of water, and saw the picture on the fridge. Nana laughing, the watermelon juice running down my neck. I touched it with my fingertips.
"I'd give anything for you, Nana. Anything."
Something hit the floor hard upstairs, THUMP!
Thinking Nana must have fallen out of bed, I raced up the stairs.
"Nana?" I stopped cold in the doorway. The thump had been the IV stand falling over. It fell because Nana's bed was covered, overflowing with. . .toads. They were mounded high over her, spilling into a pile that stretched almost to the window. They didn't seem to be moving much, just sort of lying there in a pile, making a low throaty hum. I started to step forward, meaning to pull them off before she smothered under there.
BARK!
I whirled. Crouched in the hallway was the biggest toad of all. It was easily three feet across, maybe bigger. It made that harsh barking sound again, and I looked at it's eyes. Big, bulging, and gold-ish orange. My stomach fluttered madly and my heart began to pound. It raised one huge foot off the ground,
and slapped it down three times.
My head snapped back to Nana. The toads were gone, and Nana was sleeping, peacefully and deeply. Her cheeks seemed a little fuller, her arms and legs less like sticks. The gold-eyed toad slapped the floor twice, and barked his harsh laughter. I looked back, but he was gone.
"Life and death." I said. "Death and life."
Two months passed and Nana got better and better, eating more and sleeping less. The doctor's were baffled, they had no explanation for the sudden complete disappearance of her cancer. I did, but I doubt they would have believed me. Nana said I must have brought good luck home with me. Mrs. Easting decided I had sold my soul to the devil to cure Nana.
"Girl came home covered in filth, and was there one night. Suddenly May's all better? It's not natural." She'd tell anyone who'd listen. "What was she doing for two days? That girl was consorting with the devil."
I didn't care too much about Mrs. Easting's religious fanaticism, but Nana was pretty sad. Her and Mrs. E had been pretty good friends up until now. I probably would have gone on not caring, but one day I overheard her talking to Mrs. Pottsmith (the biggest bitch our town had produced) in the grocery store. She was in the next aisle over, but I recognized that whiny voice.
"I been waiting 2 years for that cancer to finish her off. She would have left everything to her whore grandchild- living with some strange man out in some seedy city? Shame!- but I could have talked the girl into selling me that house for nothing. She's too stupid to know what it's worth anyway. I could have sold it for a fortune, and lived easy. I knew the girl would come back to see her granny, that's why I called her. Figured I could get the deal signed and sealed while she was still crying over May, and she'd be too wrung out to know what hit her. Then out of the blue sky, May's better? I think she was faking it to get the little bitch home!"
The conversation continued, but I didn't hear it. My vision was going red and fuzzy at the edges, and I could hear my heart pounding like a machine about to blow a gasket. My hands tightened on my shopping cart's handle until it snapped between them. I left it where it stood and walked outside. I turned my face up.
"Mr. Toad." I said, feeling like an idiot, but somehow knowing he could hear me. "If you can make my Nana better, you can make that evil, lying bitch sick."
The next day, when I went back to the grocery store, the butcher asked me if I'd heard about poor Mrs. Easting.
"No." I said with a strait face. "Is she ok?"
"Not at all! She got some kind of a bowel disease! She's been puking shit, and shitting blood all night! Doctor says she'll keep at it till she dies! They can't do nothing but pray it happens quick." he leaned in, conspiratorially. "I have a drink with her doctor every now and again, and he told me she shoulda run out of shit and blood by now. And she won't pass out. Even when they pumped her full of sleeping pills, she won't pass out or go to sleep. Miserable way to go."
I agreed, and managed to pay for my groceries and get into Nana's old Buick before I began to laugh my head off. That Mr. Toad has a hell of a sense of humor. I saw something move out of the corner of my eye, and there he was, sitting on the passenger seat. He barked his laugh, and thumped the seat once with his big wide foot.
"Thank you." I said, and started the car.
It took Mrs. Easting three days to die. I heard rumors that the nurses refused to clean up the shit and blood after the second day, and she died in a lake of filth. The doctors of course deny this, they don't want the hospital to look bad, but I believe it. According to a old high school friend of mine who's a nurse now, Mrs. E was quite the little fire hose the last 10 hours or so.
"Buckets." She said after a few cold beers on my front porch. "We had to carry it out in buckets. The most foul-smelling-"
"This hardly talk for young ladies!" Nana said from inside the screen porch. "Can't you talk about hair or boys?"
"Nan-na!" I said, laughing.
Now, as I write this, I have one favor left. I've considered saving it, in case Nana or I get sick. But at the same time, I've been thinking about Alan lately. A lot. How he lied. How he stole all that money from me, spending it on some other girl, paying her bills and leaving me in the dark. I also think about what a rush Mr. Toad had been in when I met him the first time. I don't think he'll wait forever. I imagine Alan sitting up and spraying a gutful of liquid shit on his new girlfriend. Or maybe Mr. Toad will come up with something even more clever. Alan slowly turning himself inside out, or his skin falling off, slice by slice, and never healing. I've decided.
"Mr. Toad. Can you hear me?"
No sounds, but I knew he could.
"This is my last favor. Thank you for helping me out. Make Alan suffer for what he did to me."
I figured I wouldn't get to really find out what had happened to him, maybe a blurb in the news, but about a week later, I got a letter. It had no return address, no stamp, just my name scrawled three times across the envelope. Inside was a SD card. I had to go to the public library to use it, since Nana had no use for a computer, and I couldn't afford one yet. I wedged myself into a corner table, turned the monitor so no one passing by could see and put the card in. It contained one video file.
The camera is low to the ground, and shows Alan padding around a strange bedroom naked. He shuffles over to the dresser and begins fiddling with something up there. He bends his head over it, and inhales. Sniffing cocaine. Lovely habit. A girl walks in the room. She says something to him, but the video has no sound. He says something back, and slaps her hand away when she tries to take the cocaine. As soon as his wrist touches hers, it bends violently backwards, as if he has just slammed it into a steel pole, instead of just tapping another wrist. A sliver of bone breaks through the skin, and a thin stream of blood jets out. The girl is clearly screaming, and she reaches for his shoulder. When she touches it, it wrenches upwards, I can see his shoulder rotate out of the socket. He flails toward her, and falls against her, his ribs suddenly take on a sunken look, and I know they've all snapped inward. He falls to the floor, and the girl tries to pick him up. Everywhere her hand falls, a bone snaps, skin blisters, skin peels back to expose muscle and tendons. The girl runs from the room. Alan lies on the floor, breathing heavily. And suddenly, the film seems to be running backwards. His torn skin and broken bones snap back into place.
"It will always be like that, anyone he touches, man or woman or child. He'll live a long time too." I look at the floor beneath the desk. The toad squats there, and despite his eyes making me shudder, he seems to have a big smile on his toad mouth. "Now we're even. One life, one death, and one that's little of both. BARK!" I smile.
"Thank you." I say, and look back at the screen. The girl has poked her head back into the room, sees Alan is fine, runs to him and gives him a big hug. His intestines burst from his ass as his tongue bursts from his throat. "Thank you so much."
I watch the rest of the video, a full hour. Then go home to help Nana cook dinner.
End
*My first pasta. I actually got the idea at work. There's a couple of those weird little huts near my last jobsite, and I always wondered what the hell they were for. I still don't know.... Anyway, I thought they were kinda creepy, and one day I thought, "I bet some really creepy shit has happened in those things." And went from there. I was nervous to post it, but I bit the bullet and went ahead. I got some great reviews, and Matador even drew me a picture of Mr. Toad:
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)