heroinzero-blog

[heroinzero-blog]

[heroinzero-blog]

Update: new project & future plans

Hi folks! It’s been a busy few last months, but I’m glad this blog has been going strong, this past couple of months have been really tiresome with school always taking most of my time, most of my plans for this blog have been jeopardized by the time constraint, textbooks have kept my mind working out all day, but not now anymore, now that I’m free of any endeavours, I can finally manage to set time for preparing/reading and posting quality stories, not only that, but also putting time to mold my skills into all other sorts of forms to further improve the variety and the quality of this blog, as well my focus to bring my on original content and to collab with other fellow bloggers.

I also have my new art blog project I’ve set up, it’s called sky-ic0n, which it’s dedicated to art in all sorts of mediums, but it’s mostly themed with glitch/retro art. Here is the link to the blog sk4-1c0n.tumblr.com/ Hope you enjoy it!

[heroinzero-blog]

Feed the Pig

story from r/nosleep by Elias_Witherow ______________________________________________________________ I slowly opened my eyes. My head was swimming and a dull pain surrounded my throat. I was thirsty. That was the first thing I noticed. I licked my dry lips as my surroundings faded into focus. My body ached and I realized it was because I was tightly bound to a metal chair in the middle of an empty room. The barren concrete walls were stained and dirty, the floor beneath my bare feet was cold and slightly wet.

A single bulb lit the room, dangling from the ceiling by a string. It cast moving shadows and I blinked back darkness. An open door stood before me, but I couldn't see anything but the wall of a hallway.

I tried to clear my head, tried to remember how I got here. I squeezed my eyes shut and forced myself not to panic. I slowed my breathing and focused my thoughts, desperately trying to summon some recollection of why I was here.

I couldn't remember anything.

I opened my eyes and exhaled, my parched throat throbbing. I could hear sound echoing off the hallway walls outside the door. Screaming, clanging, howling, all very distant but that did nothing to help calm my nerves.

“Hello?!” I cried, the word tearing at my vocal cords. I felt my chest hitch in pain but I cleared my throat and yelled again.

“Is anyone there!? Hello!?”

The dark hallway remained silent except for the constant echoes. I shut my mouth and tried to wriggle free of my bindings, but the rope was knotted impossibly tight. I fought back against my imagination as it flooded my mind with horrific scenarios of what awaited me. If I could only remember!

Suddenly, footsteps erupted from outside the door, a rapid patter of small feet. My hopes rose and I trained my attention on the door, praying it was help.

A young boy ran into the room, dressed in a red onsey, complete with padded feet. Stretched over his face was a plastic Devil mask. The eye holes revealed massive blue eyes that greeted me curiously. Taken back, I opened my mouth to speak but that's when I noticed something was off. His eyes were huge, impossibly round and bulging from their sockets. It sent a shiver of unease down my spine, but I shook it off. This child might be able to free me.

“Hey!” I hissed, urgently, “Hey kid, can you get me out of here?!”

The boy took a step closer, cocking his head, but remaining silent.

I rattled my bound arms against the chair, “Cut me free, please, I shouldn't be here, this is some kind of mistake!”

The boy eyed me behind his strange mask and stopped directly in front of me. He leaned in close and whispered, his voice like wet silk, “You did a bad thing...”

Confused, I shook my head, “No! No this is a mistake! I didn't do anything!”

The boy's enormous blue eyes suddenly filled with sadness, “Oh, you did a really, really bad thing...”

I shook my head again, violently, “No! I'm sorry! I don't remember, just please get me out of this chair!”

Suddenly, before either of us could speak again, a man came charging into the room. He was overweight and dressed in overalls, his grizzled face twisted in seething anger. He was holding a sawed off shotgun in his arms.

“I didn't do anything!” I cried as he advanced on us, my voice cracking, “I'm not supposed to be here!”

The big man ignored me and instead grabbed the kid and shoved him hard against the wall. The boy grunted as his back struck the concrete and his eyes rose to meet the grizzled man's.

Wordlessly, the man raised his shotgun, placed it against the boy's forehead, and blew his head off. Chunks of gore splattered the wall as shock slugged me in the stomach like an iron fist. My ears rang and time seemed to slow as I watched in horror as the headless body crumpled to the ground.  

My breath rushed back into my lungs and time seemed to readjust.

“Jesus fucking CHRIST!” I screamed, straining against the ropes, my eyes bulging in horrific shock, “WHAT THE FUCK!?”

The man ignored my screams as he bent down and picked up the boy. He slung the ruined corpse over his shoulder and walked out the doorway.

Suddenly, the hallway erupted with malicious laughter, a chorus of voices all howling in glee. I shut my eyes, the noise deafening, as absolute terror filled my every pore.

After a few moments, the laughter faded and I cautiously opened my eyes, unable to believe what I had just witnessed.

“Hello.”

I jumped as I realized there was another man standing before me. He was dressed in a simple, white button down shirt and jeans. His brown hair was cut short and he appeared to be in his early thirties. His green eyes were dull and lifeless, his full lips pulled down at the corners.

“What is going on!? Where am I!?” I cried, new fear pooling in my stomach like hot blood.

The man crossed his arms, “So you're the new one huh?” He shook his head, “You people disgust me.”

Questions bubbled on my lips but he waved them off with a sharp chop of his hand, slicing the air and demanding my silence.

He ran his tongue over his teeth, sneering, “You look like you've already seen some of the horrors this place holds huh? Yes, I can tell by the look in your eyes. You're terrified. You've seen something haven't you? It doesn't seem all that bad now does it, looking back? You've been here five minutes and already you're shitting your pants.”

“Where am I?” I gasped, unable to hold back any longer, “What do you people want?”

The man crossed his arms behind his back, “I bet you want to get out of here don't you? I bet you'd like to go back to your home, your family, everything.”

“Please,” I interrupted, “Whatever I did to you...I'm sorry, I really am, but I don't remember!”

The man rolled his eyes, “You didn't do anything to me. You did it to yourself. You really don't remember anything?”

I shook my head and felt tears brimming in my eyes, liquid fear.

The man looked at me with contempt, “You waited until your wife left for work and then you went out to the woodshed and hung yourself. You're dead.”

The recent memory rose in my mind like a monster from a bog. My eyes went wide. As much as I wanted to deny it...he was right. I had killed myself. The incident tore through my brain like a bullet train and left me reeling.

“I'm Danny, by the way,” the man said, ignoring the shocked look on my face, “And I'm number two here. I run the orientation process. I want to make this quick because I'm tired of repeating this fucking thing to you pathetic Suicidals. You get one question before I begin.”

He stared down at me and I scrambled to organize my thoughts into something cohesive. This was all horrifying. Why had I killed myself? I fought against the fog and panic and the mists of confusion slowly began to lift. I had just lost my job. Yes...that was the start. I squeezed my eyes shut and forced more of the memory to emerge. I had lost my job and I was about to lose the house. My wife...Tess...she found out and was going to leave me. I didn't have any way out, didn't have any options. Getting fired had come out of the blue and I didn't have much in savings. I was broke, soon to be homeless, and my wife hated me for it. There was something else...yes...that's right. She had been cheating on me. I had seen texts on her phone while she slept one night and confirmed my suspicions. My life had degraded to shit and I had run out of options. Humiliated and ashamed, I had decided death was my only option.

“Hey, fucker, do you have a question or not?” Danny said, snapping his fingers in front of my face.

I was sucked back into reality and I asked the only question that mattered.

“Is this Hell?”

Danny snorted, “That's always what you people ask.” He began to pace back and forth in front of me, “No. This is not Hell. It's not Heaven either. This is the Black Farm. And no, I didn't name it that. This is where God sends the souls who have ended their own life. Suicidals. You see, he doesn't really know what to do with you...and neither does the Devil. There are genuinely good people who kill themselves. Seems cruel to banish them to Hell for all eternity for a moment of weakness right? Personally, I think God and the Devil were just tired of arguing about it. And so, they send them here, to the Black Farm.”

“Did...did God create this place?” I asked, growing more and more confused.

Danny spit on the floor, chuckling, “Sure, at some point. But he lost control of it when he put The Pig in charge.”

“What's The Pig?” I asked, unsure I wanted to know the answer.

Danny held up a hand, annoyed, “Can I fucking finish? God created this place, eons ago, put The Pig in charge, and then forgot about it for a while. Well, when his back was turned, The Pig decided to use his new powers to try and create his own little world. This mess you see around you is the fractured remains of that experiment. The Black Farm use to be a lot nicer, but The Pig wanted things to be different. He wanted to create his own vision. These people you see, these monsters? They are The Pig's attempts at creating functioning life. Instead of mirroring God's Earth, these mutated horrible creations are full of sin and hatred. They run rampant here, unabashed. This place is chaos. The Black Farm is a circus of freaks and monsters. And it's your eternity.”

Fear boiled in my gut like thick oil. No. No this couldn't be my end. I didn't believe in stuff like this. This wasn't real! I would wake up soon and realize I was just having a nightmare! That had to be it!

Danny stood before me and lightly slapped my face, “Hey, hey! Don't go into hysterics on me. I haven't finished yet.”

I raised my teary eyes to meet his.

Danny smiled, “You can always Feed the Pig.”

My breath pushed from my lungs like burning steam, “W-what does that mean?”

Danny spread his hands, still smiling, “It's as simple as that. Feed the Pig. If you do so, there's a chance he'll send you back to your life.”

“A-and w-what happens if it doesn't?” I bumbled.

“You get sent to Hell. So flip a coin if you have one. Stay here with us or Feed the Pig. If you choose to stay, I'll let you go...I'll let you go out there,” he said, pointing towards the door, “But let me assure you...what awaits you at the end of the hallway...well...let's just say Hell isn't that much worse.”

I swallowed hard, trying my best to digest everything. Why wouldn't I try Feeding the Pig? Whatever that meant. If there was even a sliver of hope, I would take it. An eternity in this place, the Black Farm, be sent to Hell, or...or Feed the Pig? I would do anything for a chance to go back. This nightmare made my problems seem nothing in comparison.

Danny raised a hand before I could speak, “I'll let you think on it a while. I'll be back later.”

“I want to Feed the Pig!” I cried, not wanting to spend another second in this awful room. I could hear a woman screaming down the hallway, her cries rising as something meaty pounded into her. My breath came in sharp pulls and my throat burned. Danny noticed the noise and grinned.

“Sounds pretty bad huh?” He said softly as the woman's voice creaked with agony. Something was still slamming into her, the sound of beaten flesh igniting my imagination with horrors.

“Please,” I gasped, breathless, “Just...just let me Feed the Pig. I don't want to stay here any longer.”

Danny turned away from me, “I'll be back later. Enjoy your time alone. Really think about your situation. Weigh your options. And remember...you put yourself here.”

And with that he was gone, leaving me in the dim room.

Tears streamed down my face.

The woman didn't stop screaming for hours.

At some point, I fell into a semi-sleep. The darkness in the room seemed to press in on me and my eyes fluttered shut. My body ached and my throat was a halo of fire. Thirst raked at my windpipe like sharp glass. My lips felt like crumpled paper. My head thundered like a drum. The room swam in and out of focus and my mind drifted towards the horrific sounds that never ended.

I was lost in a haze, unaware that something was sliding into the room until I felt a sharp prick on my big toe. I jolted out of my daze as my bare foot ignited with pain. I screamed and tried to move, but my bindings held me tight.

The room rushed back into focus and I blinked in agony as I felt blood trickle between my toes. I looked down for the source of pain and I felt a scream claw up my throat.

Staring up at me was an armless man. He slithered on the floor like a worm, his bald head scabbed and filthy. His legs were wrapped together in barbed wire, forcing him to wriggle his body to move. His eye were lidless and wide, two bloodshot white orbs that stared up at me with hungry intensity. His teeth had been removed and replaced with long screws which jutted from his bleeding gums like a broken rock formation.

Around his neck was a chain leash, which I followed across the floor to the open door. The end of the leash was held by a tall, naked man. His body was hairless and flabby, covered in similar scabs like his pet. A dirty bag was pulled over his head that hid his features except for a single red eye that peeked out at me from a crude cut in the cloth.

He stared at me and groped his engorged penis, his breath heavy and labored. As the armless man wriggled towards me again, his master started to masturbate. I screamed as the screw filled mouth bit at me again and my cries seemed to stimulate the naked man even more.

“Get off of me! Stop it!” I screamed, horrified. I tried to kick at the man, doing my best to avoid his sharp metal teeth. I brought my heel down on his head and he screamed as his face bounced off the floor.

A moan of pleasure escaped the bagged man's mouth and I turned away as a mist of black sprayed out onto the floor. There was a rattle of chains and I turned back to see the two of them leaving, the armless man dragged by his neck out the door. I looked at where the bagged man had ejaculated and saw a puddle of dead ants. I vomited onto myself, thick chunky curtains of bile and slime.

“GET ME OUT OF HERE!” I screamed, strands of puke running down my chin, “I DON'T BELONG HERE!”

I listened to the two men retreat down the hallway, the clank of chains accompanied by the sound of flesh being dragged across the concrete. I screamed again, but I knew no one was going to help me. I spit a wad of phlegm and bile onto the floor, ridding my mouth of its sourness. I forced myself to calm down. It wasn’t easy.

After some time, I heard someone else approaching. I had been in a miserable lull, my mind a blank canvas of dark despair, but the noise roused me from my trance like state. The muscles in my arms burned from being restrained for so long and I shifted them desperately, trying my best to prepare myself for whatever horror was about to walk through the door.

Footsteps drew closer and then a woman walked into the room. She stopped at the doorway and looked at me. One of her eyes was missing, a dark cavernous hole in her skull. Her hair was ratty and wild, a brown tangle like a forgotten nest. Her skin was pale and filthy and she was dressed in rags. I couldn’t tell how old she was, but there was maturity in her one good eye.

“Still thinking?” She asked, her voice course and brittle.

“What?”

She took a step closer, “Are you still deciding whether you’re going to Feed the Pig or not?”

I looked at her cautiously, “Yeah…I am. Who are you? What do you want?”

“I was once where you are now,” She said, “trying to decide my fate. I couldn’t believe that this was what happened…what happened after we die. It wasn’t what I was taught…religion didn’t warn me about this place.”

I tested my bindings again before asking, “You killed yourself too? You’re a person like me? You’re not one of those…those creations?”

She snorted, “Breaks my heart you have to ask, though,” she touched the hole where her eye should have been, “Though I can understand your caution. Yeah, I’m a Suicidal. I’ve been here a long, long time. But that was my choice. I decided to chance it here.”

I motioned with my head towards the door, “What’s out there? What is all this?”

She exhaled heavily and leaned against the wall, “I can’t even begin to describe this place. It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen. You walk down that hallway and go out…into it…and…” she swallowed,    “You’d have to see it to understand.”

“How bad is it? Why are all these mutated people hurting and killing each other?” I asked.

She let her head loll back against the wall, “It would take years for you to fully understand this place. Years you don’t have. Right now you have to make a decision. Stay or Feed the Pig. They tell me Hell is worse than here, but it can’t be by much. Monsters and Suicidals roam the Black Farm…killing, raping, brutalizing…and then you wake up and wonder how long you can survive before something else kills you. It’s an endless cycle.”

“So why did you stay?” I pressed, “Why didn’t you Feed the Pig? I don’t even know what that means, but I would do anything for a chance to go back. I can’t stay here, I…I just can’t!”

She smiled sadly at me, “Why? Why did I choose this? It’s simple really. I’m a coward. I was a coward when I was alive and I’m a coward in death. When it came down to it, when the moment presented itself, I chose to stay here. I didn’t know what awaited me outside. It boiled down to a simple choice fueled by my own fear.”

“What is The Pig? What does it do to you?” I pressed.

She suddenly turned to go, “I’m afraid that’s for you to find out. But let me warn you. Think hard before you make a decision. Sometimes suffering through your fear is better than suffering for eternity. Be brave.”

“What do I do!?” I yelled, shaking in my chair as she walked out the door.

She paused and took one last look over her shoulder. Her eyes darted around and she dropped her voice to a whisper, “Feed the Pig.”

And with that she was gone.

I sat in silence once again. My mind was spinning, desperately turning over my options. I still couldn’t fully understand the situation I was in. It was too much, too overwhelming. The other side of death wasn’t supposed to be like this. I didn’t know what I had expected, but it wasn’t this nightmare.    Questions crashed over my mind like cold waves onto a sinking ship. How was I supposed to make a choice when I didn’t even know what my actions entailed?

This place, the Black Farm…I couldn’t stay here. But what if I went to Hell? What if I didn’t get sent back? I would be out of the fire and into the frying pan. My existence would forever be damned to unending misery. Here though…here there were people like me. Suicidals. It wasn’t all monsters and mutilated murderers. Maybe I could hole up somewhere with them, try to scrape together a passable existence. Surely that would be better than getting sent to Hell!

No. No this wasn’t going to be how I spent my eternity. I refused to let it be. If there was even the slightest sliver of hope, I would take it. I didn’t want to wonder what could have been. I didn’t want to be tormented by doubt. I would Feed the Pig and accept whatever fate chose for me. When I boiled it down, that was the only option left.

I would Feed the Pig.

“Hey! Hello!? Danny!” I yelled, rattling in my chair. “I’ve made my decision! Danny!”

After a couple seconds, I heard footsteps echo down the hall towards me.

Danny walked through the doorway, an annoyed look on his face.

“I’ve made my choice,” I said, “I’m going to Feed the Pig.”

“Sounds like you’ve really thought a lot about it since I left you,” Danny said sarcastically.

I licked my lips, “You’d do the same thing if you were in my place.”

Danny walked behind me, “I was in your place once. And I chose differently.” My eyes widened and then Danny wrapped my entire head with a strip of thin cloth, blinding me. I sucked in as much air as I could, but each lungful felt empty.

I felt Danny cut me free from the chair and my body sighed as my stiff muscles were released. I rolled my shoulders as my hands were released and I moaned with relief. I dug my fingers into my back and I stretched, my bones creaking.

“Keep your blindfold on and follow me,” Danny said, pulling me up.

My legs shook as I put weight on them, my thighs trembling after their long cemented position. I groped blindly in front of me and found Danny’s shoulder. I rested my hand on it as he walked us out of the room.

As were entered the hallway, I could suddenly hear sound I hadn’t before. The clank of metal, a long fleshy tearing noise, something vomiting…these sounds sprang to life in my ears, painting the darkness before my eyes with imaginary scenes of horror. I gripped Danny’s shoulder tighter, stumbling behind him, my heart thundering.

I heard something trailing behind us, but Danny didn’t seem to notice. Or if he did, he didn’t care.    Flesh slapped the concrete mere inches behind me and I suddenly felt hot breath on my neck and the click of a wet tongue against gums. My breathing became even more labored as fear choked me.

“Go’in ta feed da piggy are ya?” Something whispered in my ear. I felt something press against the back of my head and I tried not to think about what it might be. It was wet and slimy and I heard the thing chuckle.

“Ee’s a ‘ungry piggy, you make shor’ ee gets iz meal now,” the thing whispered again, its voice low and unlike anything I had ever heard before. It was like a series of grunts and moans jumbled together to form broken words.

To my relief, I heard the thing retreat back to wherever it had come from and I continued to follow Danny. He remained silent as we walked and I could feel shifts in the air. The thick heat gave way to a cooler, almost pleasant temperature, but then it kept decreasing and soon I was shivering violently against the cold. I couldn’t see anything but I felt a breeze on my face, like we were outside. I didn’t hear Danny open any doors, but nothing about this place was natural. It was like reality blurred and bled into itself, like reels of film melting together.

Teeth chattering, I was suddenly blasted with intense heat and I gasped. My feet tripped over themselves as the terrain changed and I was suddenly walking on what felt like warm iron. My ears were filled with the sound of blazing furnaces and the clash of working machinery. I couldn’t see it, but     I felt like there was a vast open expanse overhead. I smelled ash and tasted dirt on my tongue, sweat already forming along my spine.

Suddenly, I crashed into Danny as he came to a halt. I backed up a few paces, quickly, and muttered my apologies. I could hear movement in front of us, a rustle of chains and an odd clicking sound on the metal floor. Something else too...something...snorting.

And then the room filled with a deafening sound of an immense pig squealing. I covered my ears, head splitting at the high pitched wail. I grit my teeth as the noise echoed off the metal and faded into a series of snorts and grunts.

It sounded absolutely enormous.

“I've brought another one,” Danny announced, a slight tinge of respect lining his voice. “He wants to Feed the Pig.”

I waited, expecting to hear some answer, the cloth around my eyes sealing my sight to darkness. I realized my knees were shaking and my back was coated in sweat. I was terrified.

“If that is what you wish,” Danny said and I felt him bow under my hand. Apparently some unseen conversation had just happened and Danny took my wrist and pushed me forward.

“Approach The Pig,” he instructed.

My whole body trembled and my knees locked into place. Robbed from sight, I raised my hands, trying to get my bearings, the heat and ash filling my head with nausea. I felt like I was going to throw up, my stomach rolling like a dead sea. I didn't know where I was or what horror lay before me. I felt lost and tiny, a fresh splash of tears dripping from my eyes and soaking into the cloth around my face.

“P-please,” I begged, “Let me see what's happening.”

Danny was suddenly behind me, pushing me forward. He guided my hands towards something as we stepped together in unison. Even with the cloth around my face, I could see a giant mass of towering darkness before me. It was a spot of black on an already darkened canvas.

As we walked forward, I was suddenly assaulted by a horrendous smell and I gagged, turning away. Danny's grip tightened and forced me to continue. I could sense something just in front of me, a living shifting mass of flesh. The smell increased to a wretched level and I gagged again. Then hot air was being blown on my face, a blast of heat that came in repeated short bursts.

I vomited into my cloth, the source of the smell stemming from the hot air. I choked as the bile gushed over the fabric, soaking it and momentarily cutting off my oxygen. Danny slapped my hands away and I took a few seconds to steady my breathing again. I was opening crying now, fear and misery collapsing my willpower.

The wet cloth stunk as I sucked in soggy breaths. My own stomach acid coated my skin and I begged for all of this to be over.

And then something squealed directly in front of me.

I felt my bladder go. I was standing before The Pig.

It was the source of darkness in my obscured vision; a fat, titanic creature that filled my senses with every breath it blew into my face.

Danny raised my hands and suddenly I was touching The Pig's snout. I recoiled immediately, but Danny forced my hands back. Its fur was stiff and brittle and as my shaking hands explored up its nose, the size of the animal became clear to me.

It was gigantic and had weight over a ton. Its flesh wiggled under my sweating hands and it opened its mouth slightly. My fingers curled around teeth the size of kitchen knives and I realized its mouth was absolutely cavernous.

The Pig squealed again and I heard its hooves clack against the ground. It sounded like thunder rolling across an open field in the middle of summer.

“Take this blindfold off, please,” I begged, my legs turning to jelly.

Danny had taken a few steps back and I heard reverence in his voice, “You don't want to do that.”

I jumped as The Pig nudged me with its nose, the wet circle of flesh squishing against the length of my face. I shuddered away, raising my hands and omitting a cry of fear.

“Feed the Pig,” Danny instructed, his voice like cold steel now. “You made your choice. Now live with it. It's the only chance you have of going back. Or maybe The Pig won't like how you taste and send you to Hell. Only one way to find out.”

My eyes widened behind the vomit soaked cloth, “Won't...like...how I taste?!”

“Climb into its mouth.”

My bladder let go again and I felt warm piss run down my leg, “N-no...no you can't mean...”

Danny's voice hardened, “Climb into its mouth and don't stop crawling forward until its done with you.”

“P-please,” I begged, turning towards Danny's voice, reaching out blindly, “Please there has to be some other way...don't make me do this!” I was a mess of snot and tears, my words bumbling from my mouth like a toddler.

Danny stepped forward and spun me back to face The Pig, “DO IT! You made your choice! It will all be over soon! This is your only CHANCE!”

I could feel The Pig breathing onto my face, its snout mere inches from mine. The smell and heat it omitted made me want to vomit again but I held it back. This was insane, this wasn't happening. My mind spun and twisted in chaos and fear. There had to be some other way. I couldn't do this, I COULD NOT do this!

Suddenly I remembered the words of the woman: Sometimes suffering through your fear is better than suffering for eternity. Be brave.

This was my only chance to get back to the world of the living. I had made such a terrible mistake in killing myself. If I could go back and change my life, I wouldn't have to spend eternity here. I could change my ways, ensure a spot somewhere else. Somewhere away from The Pig. But what if it decided to send me to Hell? How much more suffering could I endure?

I had to take the chance.

“Please, God,” I whispered, taking a step forward, “If you can hear me...please...have mercy on me.”

My shaking hands reached out for The Pig and I grasped its thick fur. I felt it slowly lower its head and open its mouth. It was waiting for me, its thick, hot breath stinking in my nostrils. This was it. No turning back now.

I slowly gripped its teeth and pulled myself forward into its jaws. Its head was at a downward angle and so I immediately fell onto my stomach at a forty-five degree angle. Its wet tongue squished under me and I was shaking so hard I could barely breath. Tears soaked my blindfold and my heart crunched against my ribs.

I slowly reached forward and found another tooth to grab onto. Gritting my teeth, I pulled my body inward past my knees. The Pig raised its head and I was suddenly completely horizontal on its tongue.

Saliva and mucus dripped around me and the heat was so intense I almost blacked out. My knees clacked against its front teeth as I pulled myself even deeper. Its inner cheeks pressed in around me, squeezing my body like a soaking fleshy coffin.

Crying, terrified, I reached ahead of me and found more teeth. I pulled myself deeper into its mouth and I felt my feet slide past its lips. My whole body was coated in slime and I openly wept, grasping in the darkness for another tooth.

And that's when The Pig started to chew on me.

I screamed in crushing agony as my body was compressed between its massive teeth. I heard my legs snap instantly and felt wet bone pop from my skin. I shook violently as my body spasmed in shock, a mangled twist of blood and pain.

Its tongue shifted me in its mouth and I felt it bite down on my shoulder. My eyes bulged in their sockets as I howled, a hot pillar crunching down on my collar bone. I threw up violently, unable to control myself, the pain overwhelming.

Keep crawling.

Screaming, bloodshot eyes rolling wildly, I reached forward with my good arm, wetly searching for another tooth. I grit my teeth, blood squirting between them, as my fingers wrapped around something solid.

The Pig bit down again, its tongue twisting my body so its molars could snap down on my knees. The pain brought darkness, but my howling screams forced my eyes to remain open.

“JESUS MAKE IT STOP!” I bellowed, my trembling hand still gripping the tooth ahead of me, “PLEASE MAKE IT FUCKING STOP!”

I ground my teeth together so hard they cracked, screaming as I slowly pulled my body deeper into the mouth.

Something was changing, the tights walls of its throat squeezed my head and I realized I was almost through.

“COME ON YOU MOTHERFUCKER! COME ON!” I begged, vocal cords cracking. I reached ahead of me and grabbed onto a thick wad of flesh. My head felt like it was splitting and The Pig bit down on me again.

I gasped, blood exploding from my mouth in a great gush of red.

It had pierced through my stomach, obliterating my insides like bloated noodles. Darkness rushed in on me and I was in too much shock to even scream.

With the last of my strength, right as the blackness took me, I pulled myself forward one last time and felt myself slide down its throat.

Darkness. Falling...screaming. I was screaming. Heat. Heat so intense I thought I would melt. Clanging. Something was hammering on a metal. Colors and images flew past me so quickly I could only make out their shape. Blood poured into my eyes.

I felt like I would keep falling forever.

Suddenly, my eyes snapped open and I was falling, my breath rushing back into my lungs in a great wave of purity. My face bounced off wood floor and I cried out as I felt my nose break. I tasted blood and saw stars.

I had stopped falling.

There was a ring of burning fire around my throat and I felt impossibly thirsty.

I was lying on the floor.

I slowly opened my eyes again and the darkness began to fade like morning mist under a hot sun. Colors blended together and shapes came into focus.

I was in my woodshed.

I reached up around my throat and grasped at the source of heat. It was the rope I had hung myself with, but now it was severed, releasing me from the grip of death.

Relief rolled over me in overwhelming waves of thanks. I curled up on the floor and sobbed, tears dripping from my eyes onto the dirty floor. My body shook, unbroken, as I wept, wet horse cries rising from my quivering lips.

I had been spared. I was alive again.

From my spot on the floor, I turned my eyes upward, my voice cracking, “Thank you God. Oh thank you.” I fell into another fit of uncontrollable sobbing, “I promise I won't waste my life again. I promise I'll make things right, I'll fix everything.”

I don't know how long it was before I got up. Time seemed to stretch for eternity. My mind refused to rebuild, the horrors of what I had just witnessed crushing me.

But I knew I would do everything I could to make the most out of my life. I was going to live every day to the fullest. I would devote myself to helping others in dark times. I would reach out to as many Suicidals as I could and try to save them from awaited on the other side.

I didn't want anyone else to have to witness the horrors of suicide.

I didn't want anyone else to have to Feed the Pig.

[heroinzero-blog]

I will NEVER wear a condom again

By iia/r/nosleep Show of hands: who actually likes wearing condoms? Exactly. They’re the worst. They’re uncomfortable, they destroy all feeling, and if you actually manage to complete the act without deflating like one of Tom Brady’s footballs, you have to waddle over to the bathroom to throw the thing away while it hangs off you like an eating-disordered grub. But you know what? We still wear them. Because we’re civilized people.

Here’s the thing: fuck being civilized. I’m not going near one of those latex pieces of shit for as long as I live. As if everything I said above wasn’t enough, I had to deal with what happened last night. God knows if I’ll ever be able to have sex again.

I’d only been on one date with Aimee before yesterday, but it was obvious there was a lot of chemistry between us. So, after we had dinner last night, things went their natural way. That’s a nice way of saying we were grunting and sweating all over one another in the cab on the way back to my apartment. I tipped the driver extra.

We made it back to my place and continued the various biological manipulations we’d started in the taxi. Added bonus to being at home: less clothing. Anyway, things progressed as we’d both anticipated, and a little while later, she was asking me to get a condom. Who was I to deny the lovely woman what she’d asked? I reached over and grabbed one from the nightstand. Aimee took it from me and tore off the wrapper. She looked like she was considering the options for a moment, then she leaned over and put the condom back on the nightstand and did something else to me for a little while. Something quite nice, I might add.

About nine seconds later, I had her stop. I knew the date would end pretty damn early if I let her continue. Aimee obliged, then she repositioned herself to the edge of the bed. Even I could figure out what that meant. I got up, grabbed the condom from the nightstand, rolled the thing over my stupid dick, and we went to work. This time, it was for about four seconds.

In that fourth second, something pinched the tip of my penis. Hard. I withdrew faster than the Republican Guard after the fall of Baghdad. I yelped as I pulled out. I heard Aimee mutter, “oh my fucking God, really?” I wasn’t particularly concerned with her annoyance, though. There was an intensely sharp pain directly at the entrance to my urethra. Something hard was inside the condom, no pun intended, and, I realized with growing horror, it was moving. My yelps turned into a sustained shriek as I peeled the condom off while pinching the tip and feeling something wriggling under my fingertips.

Whatever I was pinching crunched between my thumb and forefinger. Once I’d been freed from the condom, I saw what it was: one of the house centipedes the apartment would get whenever it rained outside. Do you know what house centipedes are? They’re these things. And there was one up my dick. And I’d broken it in half. The other piece, which still moved, was lodged firmly inside my urethra. I screamed and screamed and when Aimee turned around and saw what the commotion was, she made a sound I was certain would wake up the entire apartment complex.

I pinched the halved insect and tried to pull it out of me. Again, its crunchy body broke off in my fingers. I wanted to die. The piece that was still stuck in me - the piece that was STILL MOVING - was getting further inside my penis the longer I stood there.

And then something happened. It’s something I never expected and it’s something I still don’t believe could ever occur in real life. But it did. And the world has to know. Still, before I mention it, I need to say that the ordeal ended about 15 seconds later. Aimee left and I went to the hospital to get checked out.

The nurses laughed and the doctors looked disapprovingly at the nurses before turning around and shaking with laughter themselves. I was given a clean bill of health and told to make sure nothing crawls into my condom the next time I have sex. It was nice of them to give their medical opinion.

The part I left out, though, was when Aimee demonstrated the true nature of her character. Even though I never expect to see her again, I will be forever in love with that woman. It’s because in a time of great stress - in a time when a man is suffering and there’s only the act of a great person that can save him - someone will step up and do what needs to be done. Aimee was that person last night.

In the throes of my misery and pain as I flailed with terror and confusion to get the remaining fraction of the centipede out of my dick, Aimee put her hands on my shoulders. She stared at me; the light of Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives from the television casting an angelic glow on her dark skin. Then she uttered words that will both haunt and enrich my memories for the remaining years of my life: “Stop moving around so much.” She let out a long sigh of abject resignation. “I can probably suck it out.”

[heroinzero-blog]

At the drive-thru at Starbucks

(By EZmisery) I’m from a small town.  I mean SMALL.  Nothing much happened other than ‘take your tractor to work day.’    I was a high school senior in a class of 42 people.  We had all known each other since diapers.  I could give you the first, middle, and last name of every kid in my class.

The biggest thing to happen to our town was the day we got the Starbucks.  The only reason we got one was that we were right off the highway, and people passing through would make up for our small population size.  Needless to say, we were thrilled.  It was a small cafe with nothing much of an inside, but at least it had a drive-thru.

The building itself was stacked right next to a strip mall, so it had a tiny parking lot.  The actual drive-thru was pinned against a brick wall.  Once you were in line you had no choice but to keep going.  This was especially annoying when the people in front of you had long orders.  The line could fit about six cars back to back.  And it was always full.

Let me just say, the Starbucks didn’t last long.  Eight months after it opened it was shut down.

I got to see the reason why firsthand.

It was spring break.  My mom and I were heading to the mall, which was almost an hour away.  It was hot.  I was the one who suggested we stop at the Starbucks before heading out.  My mom didn’t want to.  She said it was a waste of money.  But I nagged her until she agreed.

We pulled up to the drive-thru and there were four cars ahead of us. My mom sighed but got in line.  Three more cars pulled in back of us.   We were all stuck like peas in a pod, sweating with the heat of the day.

“I want something cold,” I whined to my mom.

She rolled her eyes.  “Strawberries and cream?”

“Yes please!”  I pulled out my phone and snapchatted some friends.   “Getting fraps with the mom” I typed as I snapped a pic of us.  My mom laughed and pushed the phone away.

Suddenly a loud pop filled the air.  We looked at each other in surprise.  “It sounded like a gunshot,” I said softly.

“No way,” she responded, shrugging it off.  “It was probably just a car backfiring.”

We sat in silence for the next few moments.  I think we both sensed something change.

Then the scream came.  It was a man’s.  Instinctively I stuck my head out the window to see what was going on.  Because of how packed in we were against the buildings, we couldn’t actually open our doors.  But I was small enough that I could get half my body out the window to view the scene.

There was a figure standing on the hood of a car.  It was about four cars ahead of us.  He wore a gorilla mask.  In his hands was a gun.  He had it pointed down towards the windshield.  Someone inside the car was screaming, begging for help.  My mother pulled me in the car right before enough pop filled the silence.  The windshield shattered and it lit up the alley in fear.

“We need to get out of here,” my mom said under her breath.  She looked around wildly, knowing that we were blocked in.  The cars behind us weren’t moving, and obviously neither were the cars in front.  None of us could open our doors.  

“What the fuck,” I whimpered.

“It’s going to be ok.”  My mom put the car in reverse and slammed on the gas.  Because we weren’t moving, we couldn’t get enough speed.  She struck the car behind her, which faltered but didn’t move.  My mom’s panic was getting worse.  She tried going forward but the same thing happened.  We could see the people in the other cars panicking as well. The woman in front of us was banging her door against the brick of the building, trying desperately to climb through.  She managed to edge halfway out but got stuck.

The man in the mask calmly climbed over the car he had just shot into and moved on to the next one.  I watched in horror as he tapped on their windshield.  There was a couple in the front seat.  I could see them holding each other in dismay.

“Roll down your window,” the masked man said loudly.

The seconds ticked by.  People in the cars around us were screaming.  My mom and I were quiet.  

“Roll it down NOW.”

The driver’s side window slowly rolled down.  We could hear a man’s voice from inside.  “Please, we have kids in the car.  Don’t hurt us.   We are good people.  Please.”

The masked man leaned over towards the open window and shot the couple two times.  Blood erupted from the car.  Their windows were painted red.  Now we could hear the cries of children.  My mom grabbed my hand.  She swallowed slowly.  

“Get down,” she said.

“What?”  I couldn’t comprehend what was happening.

“Get down, as far under the seat as possible.  He may not see you.”

“But mom-“

My words were interrupted by a chorus of gunshots.  The kid’s cries ceased.

Without another word I folded myself into the space under the dashboard.  I got as small as possible.  My mom angled her purse next to me, nearly covering the spot I was in.  She was breathing hard.

A woman’s voice was piercing the alleyway.  “Why?  Why are you doing this?”

I realized  it must be the woman trying to get out of her car door.   She got stuck between her car and the wall.  I shut my eyes, trying not to picture her hanging there, just waiting to be shot down.  Even my mom looked away as the shot rang out.  Blood sprayed.  

My mom braced herself against the steering wheel.  She looked ahead as if entranced.  I sobbed quietly.  I could feel the man jump onto our car hood.  His footsteps were loud right above us.  I glanced towards my mother.  She didn’t dare look at me.

The gorilla mask hung down over the open window of my mom’s side.   The gun was pointed at her temple.  I couldn’t see his real face, but I got the feeling he was smiling.

My mom suddenly reached out and grabbed the gun.  I nearly knocked my head against the dashboard in surprise.  The man must have been surprised too, because the gun came easily out of his grip.  She aimed upward and pulled the trigger.  She shot him as many times as she could before the bullets ran out.  Blood was dripping down the windshield and all over her clothes.  The mask was covered in holes.  She kept pulling the trigger even though nothing came out.

I breathed a huge sigh.  I couldn’t believe she just did that.  My mom, a small town housewife, just killed a murderer.

But before I could crawl out another pop sounded.  It came from my side of the car.  I watched in horror as my mother’s head exploded out of the back of her skull.  She fell forward onto the steering wheel, her nose on the horn.  

I slowly turned my head to my side of the car, where someone wearing a Barbie mask was peering down.  She cocked her head to the side, surveying her work.  She must not have seen me because she disappeared. I felt her step off our car onto someone else’s.  I tried to breath but nothing came out.  

I stayed under my seat for nearly an hour.  The police arrived within twenty minutes of the first shot, but I couldn’t get myself to move.   They only found me after using the jaws of life to open up the top of our car to pull my mom out.  When the officer saw me her face crumpled. She could see the fear still etched onto my face.

I was the only survivor from the drive-thru.  All together thirteen people were shot to death, including three kids under the age of 10.

The man in the gorilla mask was later identified as a radical eco-terrorist.  They planned this “event” to protest Starbuck’s impact on the environment.  Despite their intent, no one who worked at Starbucks was injured.  It was just those of us in line.

They never found the other person.

My mom died bravely and I still cling to that.  Never in my life would I have expected her to grab a gun from a crazed killer.  She did it for me.  To save me.

There is one thing that still eats me up inside.  Because despite their horrible actions, all of the death and destruction those murderers caused, the “event” actually worked.  At least for me.  I know I will never go to a Starbucks again.

[heroinzero-blog]

Aesthetically Pleasing

(Written by GreyOwl / Creppypasta Wiki)

I'm not a fan of altering my appearance, but it's what I have to do to blend in with society. Most males claim they dislike the charade most women allude to. They claim they want a natural beauty, but drool over the over-processed and over-done celebrities that aren't any different from the girls walking around within their own town. Because of this standard, because we are told we must resemble the unrealistic beauty of the women of Hollywood, girls lather on the makeup, blurring out their imperfections daily with various makeup brushes.

I'm no different than those girls.

I love makeup, I really do, but it's a hassle. My boyfriend has to wait in the living room for hours as I get ready for a simple movie date, attempting to perfect some imaginary caliber of aesthetic. Like many women, I refuse to leave the bathroom until I am fully made up, smiling cheerfully within the mirror's false reflection of myself.

Unbeknownst to my boyfriend and the male population in general, natural is no longer in. Anyone within my community that is without the props and the gimmicks are no longer sought after, regardless of the beauty they may display. If you do not display the sultry eyes, the plump, red lips, the radiant skin, or the long, luscious hair, you are a nobody to the world. You are but a monster.

Even though us women have come to this shallow conclusion, we are often pressured by our mates to appreciate our raw beauty, though we, including myself, have undergone severe torment countless times in the past by boyfriends who have witnessed our natural selves. I want to be able to love my appearance, I want to be self confident and shout to the world that I am beautiful, but reality will not allow such blasphemous speech.

Regardless of my fear, regardless of the unknown reaction my mate would have of me, I broke down enough to allow my boyfriend to stay the night.

How silly of me.

As I showered, I heard the bathroom door crack open. To anyone else, that was an invite to more adventurous routes of intimacy, but, to me, it was fear inducing. Just as I expected, the familiar sound of shock filled the air.

"W-what the fuck," he said, shakily.

I turned the water off, slowly pulling the shower curtain open with hesitant hands. Once exposed, my boyfriend's gaze met mine, and though his eyes travelled up and down my nude body, the one he was so in love with previously, the look he displayed when he met my face was heartbreaking.

"Can we talk about this?" I questioned as he began backing away, his eyes wild with horror.

He shook his head, trembling as he stumbled over his own shoes.

"Where the fuck is your nose? W-what the fuck are you?" he questioned, hysterically.

I let out a deep sigh, extending my arms out towards him.

"Please, don't do this," I said, pleading with him.

He continued backing away, turning his head swiftly towards the door, calculating how far a run it would be to make it out.

"You can't leave," I said, shaking my head as tears fell down my cheeks.

Because of my sudden deepened voice, his attention turned back to me, his expression even more horrified with the swift change of tone. As they all have in the past, he sprinted towards the door, hectically rotating the knob, forgetting to unlock the countless locks bolted on the frame.

I watched on for a while, observing his horror, shock, and obvious repulsion of me. The anger began to swell as it had for years. The disappointment I felt as I witnessed him try to abandon me, forgetting the amount of courage it took me to reveal myself without the added hair, the fake tan, the prosthetic nose and ears, the hazel contact lenses, and the collagen filled lips... He didn't appreciate my efforts to please him... He thought I was hideous just as his predecessors had.

So, as he struggled with the last lock, screaming for help, I walked over, helping him unlock the door. Once outside, he began running down the hall, unaware of the growing population of women in the halls. Once he ran up to one of the women, pointing at the monster he pegged me as, the woman reassured him, lowering him to the ground as various others gathered around him. Slowly, realization sunk in of his dire situation. The women all removed their masks, the ones my fellow sisters were confined in because of societal standards, and began ripping him apart.

[heroinzero-blog]

Her Red Right Hand

(Creepypasta Wiki/ By Shadowswimmer77)

“Farewell, happy fields, where Joy forever dwells! Hail, horrors, hail!” —John Milton, Paradise Lost

Standing under the glow of a flickering streetlight, John Avery’s hands shook as he tried and failed to light the cigarette they held. With a mumbled curse the stubborn smoke finally caught and he inhaled deeply, the quick rush of nicotine helping steady nerves and hands alike while driving back the persistent urge to vomit that had, until a moment ago, been so pressing.

  The flashing reds and blues of patrol cars, shattered by the light yet steady drops of falling rain, illuminated the yards of yellow tape that surrounded the building behind him.

The old factory, where once countless animals screamed their last before meeting the butcher’s knife, had long ago fallen into disuse. Until recently.

The man who walked into the station earlier that evening had carried an oddly shaped bag. The desk sergeant was on the phone else he would have sooner noticed the crimson spatters, some still wet, that covered the man’s face and clothes, the slow drip, drip, drip of fluid that leaked from the bag marking a trail behind him.

The sergeant’s attention was only captured when the man poured a fountain of gore upon the desk, assorted limbs and organs intermixed in a disgusting soup of blood and offal, long ropes of intestines curling and twisting around livers, hearts and, here and there, a sightless eye. The only one of the few people milling about the police lobby not moved by his unholy offering, the man had simply stepped back from the desk and lowered himself to his knees, hands interlaced above his head. He’d remained there, grotesque smile never leaving his face, until the pandemonium was sufficiently controlled and the officers on duty were able to make his arrest.

He’d talked then, briefly, handcuffed to a table in the interrogation room. His name was Spencer Darabont. The various body parts belonged to his wife Tracy and their three children, all girls between the ages of five and ten. He’d told the police where to find the rest of them.

John had worked homicide for the last twenty years but even now, rapidly approaching retirement, had never seen anything like this. That was saying something; the Wake was no stranger to odd, even fantastic, murders. Until a couple hours ago John would have said there was nothing that could shock him, nothing that could take him back to the short breath and heaving nausea he’d experienced the first time he’d seen a dead body, that two-bit prostitute gutted and dumped in a back alley. He would have been wrong.

The bodies, horrific as they might be, weren’t what caused John’s gorge to rise, for he’d seen many in far greater states of decay. Neither was it the obvious tools of torture haphazardly spread throughout the factory; here a welding kit, there a jar of industrial strength acid, over there various implements to flay, scoop and pierce. No, what had hit John hardest was the old television connected to an ancient VCR, the yellow paper stuck to its black screen reading “play me.” The scene that unfolded in the first thirty seconds of that video was enough to open John’s perspective to just how shallow his understanding of human perversion had been. That poor little girl. A rat-eaten cardboard box placed next to the television contained more video tapes, many more. John knew before the investigation was over he would have to painstakingly go through each of them for evidence, and the brief exposure he’d just experienced had him already concerned for his mental health. All cases left scars, some far deeper than others.

His phone vibrated and John flicked aside the half burned cigarette before fishing it out of his pocket. Checking the caller id, he sighed before flipping it open; the only reason Lisa would be calling this late was if Paul was stonewalling her again. Leave it to a cop's daughter to marry a cop.

“Yeah, hun?”

“Dad, what's going on? Paul was supposed to be home two hours ago but said something came up and won’t tell me anything.”

“New case, sweetheart, nothing I can fill you in on. Chief’s got him keeping an eye on the perp until we give the scene an initial onceover and hopefully get ahead of the media shitstorm sure to follow. You want more details, you can get it from the talking heads, same as everybody else.”

Her voice got quiet at that.

“Is it really that bad?”

He grimaced.

“Pretty bad.”

“Ok, just … tell him to be careful. And that I love him.”

“Will do. Try not to worry too much. Won’t be good for the baby.”

He could hear the smile in her voice.

“He’ll be fine. He comes from good stock.”

John smiled back.

“Mostly from your mother’s side. Becky still ok with the pregnancy?”

“Sweet as ever. Can’t wait to be a big sister.”

“That’s my girl. Ok, hun, gotta go. I’ll tell Paul to check in when he can.”

“Thanks, dad. Love you.”

“Love you too.”

Closing the phone, John returned it to his pocket. He shook his head to clear it, steeling himself, before turning and reentering the building. He crossed over to what they were considering the center of the crime scene. They’d stationed large portable lights around its perimeter to better illuminate the dingy confines of the area where a small group of people swarmed, placing numbered placards and snapping pictures.

“Tell me what you’ve got, Ramirez.”

The lead CSI turned from where hewas crouched in the process of bagging a piece of evidence. John’s stomach gurgled unhappily when he saw it appeared to be a child’s ear.

“Good news, depending how you look at it, boss. Won’t be able to confirm they belong to Darabont until we get back to the lab, but there’s crystal clear prints all over pretty much every knife, hatchet and assorted pointy object in here. We’ve got fibers, hair samples, the whole gamut. And Charley’s saying based on her initial screening of the remains she should be able to pull blood and semen from, uh … well, pretty much anywhere. Doesn’t look like our boy was particularly concerned about hiding what he was doing.”

John placed his fingers on the bridge of his nose as he felt the beginnings of a migraine start to kick in.

“Anything that might indicate some kind of motive? A journal, anything like that?”

“Not yet, boss. No telling what’s on those video tapes though.”

John grimaced.

“Great. And what about …”

“The message?” Ramirez shook his head. As one, the two men turned to the far end of the crime scene. Amid a litany of other abuses, skin from the torsos of the four victims had been delicately removed and spread across one of the factory walls like horrific canvas. A word was painted in blood on each in turn:

Her Red Right Hand

“Not sure, boss. I took the liberty of googling it. Closest thing looks like a paraphrasing of something out of Milton’s Paradise Lost. My guess is the perp is referring to himself, although I have no idea who the ‘Her’ he’s referring to might be.”

“Neither do I.” John frowned, “Ok. You and your team finish up here. Make sure we process everything by the book; even though there seems to be plenty of evidence you never know what’s gonna be the thing to make it stick. This clown is a real sick puppy and I don’t think any of us would sleep particularly well if he manages to avoid a conviction based on a technicality. I’m gonna head back over to the office, have a sit down with him, see if he feels like taping a confession before he has more time to think about what he’s done.”

“Sounds good, boss. I’ll call you if we find anything especially pertinent, although,” his gaze swept over the scene, “at this point I’m not sure what would qualify.”

John shook his head in agreement and headed for the door. Just as he reached his car, he felt his phone vibrate again.

“Hey, Steve, tell me you boys have something over there.”

“Hey, John. Yeah, we’ve got a little bit for you, don’t know if it’ll shed any light though. Bob and I went over to the Darabont residence. The guy’s an MD, works in the ER at St. Vincent’s in town here. No record, nothing so much as a parking ticket. No sign of struggle at the house. His supervisor at the hospital said Darabont phoned in last week to call off a couple shifts, just saying they were taking an impromptu family vacation. He apparently told the kids’ school the same thing. His wife stayed at home with the youngest girl so there was no one that would have noticed her missing right away. We managed to track Darabont’s mom down. Lady’s in her seventies and got concerned when she hadn’t heard from him, guess he typically visits her on Sundays. She swung by the house and found a note saying the whole family was going to be out of town for a couple weeks.”

“Seems kind of odd.”

“She thought so too. It weirded her out since normally he would have called her, even more when she couldn’t get him on his cell, but the note was in Darabont’s handwriting. She wasn’t quite concerned enough to contact the department.”

John frowned.

“Probably wouldn’t have mattered even if she had. If everything else you’ve got is true, there’d be nothing to flag it, even if she’d reported him as a missing person. Any idea why he would have shown up here in the Wake?”

“Nothing we’ve found so far. Doesn’t seem to have any connection to the place in particular. Far as his mom knew he’s never even visited your part of the state.”

John sighed, the headache now coming on in full force. “All right, thanks, Steve, appreciate the help. Tell Chief McQuaid I said hey.”

“Will do, John. We’ll keep sniffing around over here, see if anybody at the hospital has anything more they can tell us, check if they noticed him acting out of character recently.”

“Sounds good. Although with all the evidence it’s looking like we’ve got, I think finding a motive will just be pure gravy. Talk to you later.”

“Later.”

With much to ponder, John got in his car and started back towards the station. It was past midnight when he parked in the lot, the shadows dark and thrown long by the lamps lining the way up the path to the administrative entrance. John pulled out his lanyard with his staff key and let himself in, handed his pistol and side-piece over to Spirelly who was on night guard as he passed through the metal detector, then reholstered his weapons before making his way towards the squad room, passing the ever overflowing board displaying the many missing children of the Wake. The bullpen was deserted. Small wonder; Arthur’s Wake wasn’t large enough to warrant much of a police force, so all available units were pretty much already at the scene or resting up to start their shift in the morning.

He frowned at the chief’s darkened office. Lazy asshole. The man had been mentally checked out for years now, just biding time to a retirement looming even closer than John’s. If things had gone a little differently it could have been John wearing the pants in the department but … no. That was an old gripe, no sense rehashing it now, not with work to be done. He grabbed a pen, pad of paper, digital tape recorder and rights waiver before heading back to the interrogation room. He was met outside the door by Officer Paul Schuster who, aside from being a solid cop, was also his son-in-law.

“Hey, Paul. Chief Holbrook check out?”

“Yes, sir, a couple hours ago. Said he needed to get some sleep to be able to face the press in the morning.”

“Uh huh. And how’s our guest?”

“He’s still in the interrogation room, sir, right where you asked me to keep him.”

John looked at the perp through the one sided glass. The guy was fucking weird. “No, I mean how is he?”

“He’s … well, he’s odd, sir.”

“Jesus, how many times do I have to tell you it’s John, ‘less we’re in a formal setting. Christ. What do you mean, odd?”

“I mean, he’s just sitting there with that creepy smile on his face. Hasn’t asked for a phone call, a lawyer, cup of coffee, nothing.” Paul’s face curled. “Pretty sure he pissed himself, even though Spirelly and I have given him plenty of opportunities to hit the head.”

John frowned. “Huh. He say anything more?”

“No. Not since the initial intel where we could find the bodies. Sir … John, I mean. The scene? Did you find the wife and kids?”

“What was left of them.”

John chewed his lip thoughtfully. “All right. Let’s go try to talk to the sonuvabitch.”

Paul’s eyes widened. “Sir, do you think that’s such a good idea? The chief said …”

“Yeah, right the chief. Look, Paul, I’m gonna go in with some forms and a tape recorder, see if I can’t get this psycho to give me a confession before he changes his mind and lawyers up. If you aren’t comfortable skirting the chief’s orders a little, how about you go call my daughter so she stops worrying.”

Paul pondered this for a moment.

“Sorry, sir. You go in there, I’m coming with you.”

“The guy’s chained up. And your wife is worried why you haven’t called.”

Paul shook his head. “Can’t do it, sir. It’d be a breach of protocol to allow one officer in the room with a suspect. Besides, Lisa’d kill me if something happened to you.”

John couldn’t help but laugh. “All right, ya friggin boy scout. How you ever managed to bag my little girl with that clean cut attitude I’ll never know. Fine. Let’s go.”

Before Paul could protest further John opened the door to the room and stepped inside. The metal chair squeaked harshly on the floor as he pulled it out and took a seat, carefully arranging the materials he had brought with him to the side. He heard Paul take up position behind him, leaning against the wall.

At last, John turned his attention to the prisoner. The room was well lit to allow for easy observation, but some trick of the light seemed to drape the suspect in shadow. His hair was long and matted with blood, falling forward and hiding his face behind it. A big man, fat with the weight of middle age, his clothes were covered and stained with the many fluids of his victims. As John watched, Darabont looked up at him, his eyes almost seeming to glow with a red sheen through the curtain of his hair, crazed smile never leaving is lips. John repressed an involuntary shiver; ‘odd’ was not how he would have described the man. Terrifying, maybe.

John cleared his throat, forced a tight smile. “So, Dr. Darabont. Doc, is it ok to call you Spencer?”

The prisoner replied with an almost imperceptible nod.

“Great, glad we’re getting off on such a good foot. Now, Spencer, I’m Detective Avery. You, me, and my friend Officer Schuster here are going to have a nice little chat about what happened to your family, ok?”

Again, the slight nod.

“Fantastic. Now, I’m required to ask if you’d like to have a lawyer present.”

This time, a small head shake.

“All righty. Now, since there’s no lawyers present, do I have your permission to record this conversation?”

John frowned slightly when Darabont shook his head in the negative.

“Ok, then.” John slid the recorder from the table and passed it back to Paul, stealthily pressing the ‘record’ button as he did so. Paul slipped the recorder into his pocket where the red light would be concealed. John turned back to Darabont.

“Real quick before we get started, Dr. Darabont, I am gonna need you to sign this form saying you’ve agreed to talk to me and that you don’t want a lawyer.”

John slid the form over to the prisoner, feeling a slight moment of apprehension when Darabont took the pen in his large, meaty hand before scrawling an imperceptible signature on the indicated line and handing it back to him.

“Thank you so much.” He passed the form to Paul.

Throughout these preliminaries, John had slowly become aware that something was off about Darabont. He couldn’t put his finger on just what, but he’d interviewed enough murderers to know that this guy wasn’t right, even so far as crazed killers went. Whatever it was, that indefinable thing scared him, almost beyond reason; it spoke to some ancient reptilian part of John’s brain and told him to put as much distance between him and the thing sitting across the table as humanly possible. Shaking his head to clear it, John pressed on, hoping he projected more confidence than he felt, beginning to think that conducting this interview may have been a mistake.

“Now, Spencer, I’m an old fashioned sort of guy so I’m gonna be direct with you. I don’t really need you to confess, because I already have enough evidence to lock you away for a really, really long time. So, what I’m really curious about,” John peered at the killer across from him, “is why? Why did you kill your family?”

The silence pregnant with anticipation, John’s perception took on a kind of hypersensitivity. The taste of the burger he had for lunch caked the back of his throat and he could smell the faintly sweet aroma of Paul’s aftershave behind him accompanying the stench of the dark ichors staining the prisoner’s clothes to his front. He swallowed uneasily, despite himself.

At last, Darabont spoke, his voice almost a whisper but nevertheless carrying the sound of gravel poured over sheet metal.

“For fun.”

His manic grin widened even farther, as the tiny hairs on the back of John’s neck stood up at full attention and he desperately fought the urge to wet himself.

“You were a family man once, detective, I can tell. Ever wonder how little girl tastes?” Darabont smiled lasciviously. “I know, in every way you could mean,” he chuckled lightly, “Didn’t bother to pack groceries for our family outing. Didn’t need to, just fried up little pieces off ‘em to feed each other. They refused at first, but I found ways to motivate them to choke it down.” He sighed as if remembering.

“Wife was the easiest. You wouldn’t believe the things I got her to do by promising to stop hurting her babies. Well, I guess you’ll know if you see the tapes,” he laughed evilly, “if you live so long. Of course, I lied to her. Saw the hope die a little more in the bitch’s eyes every time. Still didn’t keep her from agreeing the next time. Or the next. Or the next.” He licked his lips.

“That thrill right there, seeing her spirit chipped away bit by bit, was almost as good as the pleasure I got turning her spawn into such willing little whores,” he threw his voice higher, “Daddy, I’ll do anything, just please don’t cut off any more toes!” He chuckled.

“That factory. Got some good memories there. Old, new. Darkness is on the rise, detective, Shadow’s coming. The wolves howl, the serpents hiss. You’re gonna have to make a choice. You all will.”

John stared at the man. “And what choice is that?”

Darabont smiled. “Whether to be a good little meat sack who serves his masters willingly, or one who needs to be … broken. I like the ones who fight,” he ran his tongue across the front of his teeth, “makes the agony that much sweeter. Which will you choose, detective, when the sun goes dark and the moon falls silent, when the Song of Joy echoes across the land? Whichever will you choose?”

John felt frozen where he sat, the pounding of his heart a drum in his ears, Paul equally still behind him as Darabont fell quiet, grinning madly. Finally John managed to stutter out another question.

“What … who is Her Red Right Hand? Who is She?”

From within the dark recesses of his matted hair, John could see Darabont’s eyes glowed bloody scarlet, no question now, impossible as it was.

“Why I’m the Red Right Hand, detective, Her prophet, the one who prepares the path, spreading discord and despair where e’er I roam. And as for Her,” he laughed. It was crazy, but it seemed to John that Darabont’s teeth were lengthening, sharpening.

“She is the All-Mother, the First, the One who leads the way,” he grinned, “into Darkness.”

Abruptly, the lights in the station went out.

There was a brief moment of silence before John heard a sharp metallic snap that his mind dimly registered must be the sound of a handcuff chain being broken. Suddenly he was thrown backwards out of his chair to the ground as an enormous black thing, all glowing red eyes and flashing fangs, flipped the heavy metal table across the room and flew at him with a roar. He yelled and raised his hands defensively, but the attack never came. Instead, he heard a crash and the sound of a desperate struggle.

“Sir! Sir, shoot him I can’t hold him, I can’t AGH dammit!” Paul cried, “Jesus, dammit. No, NOOO!”

At that, the voice of his son-in-law screaming in pain, the crippling fear was driven out of John as sharply as if he’d been dunked in a bucket of ice water. Years of training took over and, regaining his feet, he fumbled briefly to release his pistol from its holster before pulling it free. He used Paul’s cries to orient himself, raising his gun towards the mound of inky blackness that seemed even darker than its surroundings. John pulled the trigger once, twice, each shot accompanied by a white flash and the sound of thunder, again and again until the chambers were empty and the gun only clicked hollowly. As the echo of the last shot faded away, the dark mass fell heavily to the ground at his feet.

John heard the sound of rapid footsteps and turned as the door was thrown open, the soft glow of emergency lights revealing the form of Officer Spirelly who pushed into the room, gun drawn.

“Detective Avery, what’s going on? I heard a crash and then gunshots, is everything all … oh.”

John turned back to the room’s interior. The light leaking in from the hallway provided just enough illumination so he could see Spencer Darabont, limp and lying face down where he’d fallen on top of Paul’s unmoving form. John lowered his gun to his side, a black hole rapidly expanding in his stomach. God. Oh, God. How was he going to tell Lisa?

He tensed when Darabont shifted.

“Fucking hell,” Paul groaned, “John, you think you could get this fat ass off of me?”

John sat at his desk, a cup of lukewarm coffee held in his hand, a lit cigarette between his fingers. Smoking inside was strictly against the chief’s policy, but fuck him. Darabont’s body was still cooling on the floor of the interrogation room where he’d died as John hadn’t quite yet worked up the motivation to call Ramirez to tell Charley to come grab the stiff. Spirelly was back at his guard station; John had practically had to force him back there, only after ensuring him that he and Paul were both fine.

He’d sent Paul home to Lisa. Miraculously, the kid was basically unharmed; a few bumps, bruises, and scratches but nothing too major. When John had asked him why he’d screamed, he said the freak had been trying to bite his neck of all things. John angrily stubbed out the cigarette in the bottom of an empty cup. Fucking psycho. He’d already decided he was going to leave Paul’s involvement out of his official report. John figured he’d be able to spin the whole thing so that there wouldn’t be too much trouble brought down on anyone, he knew Spirelly would back up whatever he said, but the kid didn’t deserve the heat. Neither did Lisa. John sighed. Probably did the world a favor by sanctioning Darabont the way he had. The guy was so nuts he’d even had John seeing things at the end there. Her red right hand; pssh right. Good luck preparing the way for the Darkness now, fucko.

The morning sun was just beginning to peek its face over the horizon when John at last headed to his car to go home. Darabont had been bagged and tagged, his initial report had been filed, and all pertinent parties had been notified. Chief Holbrook had been pissed, although John figured it was as much from being woken up at three in the morning as from learning John had shot their murder suspect. He’d been mollified when John informed him he’d managed to get a taped confession out of Darabont; no matter that he hadn’t agreed to taping, it had been easy enough to forge his signature on the appropriate form. At some point in the night he realized Paul must have ended up taking the tape recorder with him along with the rights waiver he'd handed him; small wonder he’d forgotten them with everything that had gone on. John would just have to swing by his and Lisa’s place and pick them up before going back to the station that afternoon. John took in the morning sun, almost surprised at the lightness in his heart. He’d never killed a man before last night but, maybe, this feeling was because he had served to remove a piece of true darkness from the world. His pocket vibrated and he fished his phone out.

A minute later John had slapped his magnetic flasher to the roof and was pushing the old Chevy to its breaking point as he roared across the Wake, siren wailing.

“Might have something for ya, John,” Steve had said, “just got done talking to an ER nurse that was on shift with Darabont at St. Vincent’s the last day he came to work before disappearing. Said he’d treated some crazy woman, a homeless drifter that had been shot trying to sneak into a residence. EMT’s had to strap the psycho down once they’d reestablished a heartbeat. The nurse said the patient had been raving on and on about ‘darkness’ and something about ‘her right hand’ or somesuch. Anyway, the loony ended up managing to give your perp a solid bite on the forearm before they sedated her and she calmed down, claimed she didn’t remember anything she’d been doing up to that point. The nurse figured Darabont took a few days off to recover from the injury. But I’m wondering if he didn’t catch some kind of virus or something from …”

John had hung up then.

He pulled into Lisa’s driveway and leapt out of the car without bothering to turn off the engine. Running up the walk, the house dark, he drew his pistol as he reached the front door. He paused for just a moment, considering whether it would be better to use his spare key to gain entry or simply kick the damn door down, when he noticed the white piece of paper taped to the inside of the screen.

John removed the note with trembling hands and read it twice before collapsing to his knees in complete and utter despair.

Hey John,

After all the excitement last night, I decided to take a few days off and figured I may as well take the whole family for a little vacation. Don’t worry, I’ll take extra good care of them, and I’ll make sure to take plenty of home movies so you won’t miss a thing. That daughter of yours sure has spirit. See you soon.

He recognized Paul’s handwriting, even though the note was unsigned.

[heroinzero-blog]

My sister never liked me much.

r/NoSleep / merrykatnip My sister Rose was born six years after I was, which created an age gap of exactly the wrong size. We weren’t close enough in age that we could be playmates, but we weren’t far enough apart that she could truly look up to me. I mean, I guess she could have, but she never did. She never liked me much; in fact, I suspect she hated me since before she was even born.When our mother was pregnant with Rose, she used to get all jumpy around me. I know that sounds crazy, but even a six-year-old can tell when their mom’s upset. (No one knows a mother better than her oldest child. No one.) Whenever I would come over and try and rub her belly, my mother would lean way on the couch. “Go play outside, Daisy,” she’d say. “I’m too gassy for you to touch me like that. Little Rosie is kicking up a storm.”Now, I know that doesn’t sound that bad, but it was hard. I had been an only child, and my mother had always loved me best. Now, it seemed like she only cared about her uterus and its unformed contents. But even though I was jealous, I was fully prepared to be a Cool Big Sister as soon as Rosie was born. My uncle Dan told me that was my job, and I was ready to do it.But Rose was a sick kid, and I didn’t get to see her until months after she was born. She was in the hospital with my mom for a long time, and when they finally came home, everything was different.First off, Rose clearly hated me. She would screech like a goddamn banshee every time I walked into the room, no matter how hard I tried to tiptoe. As soon as she gained enough motor control, she started to throw things at me. It was uncanny, how those little pudgy hands could always find something to hit me with, something to throw at me. I began to think that Rose had been put here on earth just to torment me. Like god wanted me to try extra hard to be nice, or something.I don’t believe in god anymore, but I still think Rose was my cross to bear. My punishment for not being better.As Rose grew up, she continued to torment me. When I was a teenager, I would bring boys over to the house, and Rose would drive them away, one by one. She’d monopolize their time with her endless questions—What’s that kind of car? Why is it so loud? How come you are always trying to touch Daisy’s butt? Do you scream at night sometimes, like Daisy does? Where are your parents? Don’t they want to come over, too?She was a real nightmare, that Rose.I tried to like her. I tried to see in her what others saw. She was supposedly cute, with blonde curly hair and a tiny button nose. I just saw a pink piggy face. I had dark brown hair and my dad’s cheekbones. I’m not cute, but I’m prettier than her. Yet somehow, everyone still thought Rose was the sweetest, the cutest little thing.On the upside, Rose was always sick, which meant I didn’t have to play with her often. She spent a lot of time in her bedroom, hooked up to that oxygen machine. It was easy enough to avoid her. Until our mother died.I was in college when it happened. I came home to find my dad devastated by grief and my uncle Dan in the kitchen, tending to Rose as she sobbed. “Daisy, I think maybe you should come home now,” Dan said. “Your family needs you.”So I transferred to a community college near home. I took care of my dad and cooked for him. I did the shopping and managed our house. I even got Rose her medications—not that she was grateful or anything.Without our mother around to tend to her every single need, Rose began to get sicker and sicker. First, her blonde hair started falling out in clumps. Admittedly, it was pretty funny when she came out of the bathroom crying, holding big handfuls of that shiny blonde hair. “Daisy, please help,” she’d cry. “Can you make it stop?” I braided it tightly, so that it would stay put.Then her kidneys started failing and she started to lose weight. In a few months, she had shrunk so small. That’s when she started lashing out at me.It really wasn’t fair.I don’t think what I did was wrong. She started it, after all.But the thing is… after I pushed her down the stairs, after I found her crumpled body at the bottom, all I could thing was, well… I guess I know what I’m good at now. College wasn’t going that well. Nothing was going well, if I’m totally honest.But when I picked up her little body, I felt the most amazing thrill. Her braids hung down like strings, swinging in the air. Her face was bruised from the fall and a little trickle of blood was coming from one of her perfect, pert nostrils. She was so light, like a doll. And for the first time ever, I think I loved her.

[heroinzero-blog]

The Portrait of Noelle Dumont

(By  Mikemacdee/Creepypasta Wiki)

Headline from Aspenvale Post

August 12, 2003

Arts and Entertainment Section

The spirit of Aspenvale’s most controversial expressionist painter lives on in the home of Aubrey Silven, 22-year-old philanthropist and daughter of the late Silven Pharmaceuticals founder and CEO, Donald Silven.

Donald succumbed to lung cancer in mid-March this year. The company is now under new management and the young heiress is using her percentage of the profits to pursue a long-coveted dream: buying and selling art.

“I’ve been an artist since childhood,” said Aubrey. “Art embodies the heart and soul of its creators, of the culture they were brought up in. Schools’ve been phasing fine art classes out of their curricula and replacing them with graphic design labs, and it’s wrong. There’s no soul in graphic design, y’know? You can’t express anything with corporate logos or catalog page layouts. And self-expression is important for kids. We'd probably have less violence in schools if only the adults would pull their heads out of their asses and realize it, and if our country would start taking mental health more seriously than profit margins.”

Aubrey has purchased a dozen galleries, some which she donated to schools all over the country. The city has been in an uproar since she excavated the gallery of infamous prodigy Cameron DeVry from the North Hill Art Museum’s storeroom — frightening paintings that haven’t seen the light of day for several years.

“Miss Silven approached us shortly after the tragedy,” said the museum’s chief curator, Tim Jones, “when the governor threatened to close the museum if I didn’t burn DeVry’s paintings. Art should not be punished for the artist’s transgressions. I agreed to sell the DeVry gallery to Miss Silven around that time — we were both desperate to save it — and her father, gracious man that he was, bought it in his daughter’s name. The paintings have been her property ever since and we’ve simply been holding them for her.”

Photo: The young brunette businesswoman’s smile is all teeth — flawless and ivory white like piano keys. She stands next to a tall cubist painting in which jagged blue and gray triangles construct a vague human figure reaching forward in a gesture of terror and desperation — ten papier mache fingertips glued to the painting’s surface complete the illusion that the creature is trying to dig its way through the canvas to the viewer’s side. The eyes are black pits, decagonal and uneven, burrowing into the viewer’s heart; and the long shark-fin nose between them stabs downward at a raw red mouth frozen in a silent, sorrowful wail. Caption reads, “Aubrey Silven poses with her first prize, DeVry’s Portrait of the Artist.”

Museum-goers have described the DeVry gallery’s one hundred thirteen paintings as a convention of demons from the darkest corners of the human soul. Some pieces are rumored to be so horrific that they induce terrible dreams in the viewer for days, as if the ghost of DeVry himself were invading his/her mind. Aubrey Silven says not all art has to be pretty to be valuable.

“You’re not the first to ask me why in God’s name I would buy those paintings,” she said, showing off a garden of self-inflicted knife scars on her left wrist. “I understand him. You don’t know what an important coping mechanism art is for a troubled kid. If they hadn’t tried to take his outlet away — all because they thought his art was 'inappropriate', of course — then he wouldn’t have done what he did. Nobody has to look at anything that upsets them. I’ll probably be shunned for sticking up for him, but it’s the truth: he suffered among people who loathed him for being different, in a country that doesn't make any real effort to treat mental illness. As for whether I believe in ghosts, you bet!”

Though the city has yet to shun Aubrey, many do not share her sentiments for DeVry.

“She’s honoring the memory of a monster,” said Ellen Garrett, ex-administrator of Aspenvale High School whose son was killed by DeVry. “Those paintings should be burned. He should be wiped from this city’s memory. That’s what the little freak deserves.”

Aubrey plans to collect the gallery a few pieces at a time, and estimates she will have them all by the end of the month.

“I just moved into a big house in North Hill,” she said, laughing. “It’s got plenty of storage space.”

Letter to Brian Galloway 1

August 7, 2003

I bet this reaches Boston before you do, and then you’ll think I’m an obsessive freak. Poor boy, you just escaped my teary goodbyes and now first thing when you arrive you’ll have to deal with me again in written form! But you told me to write, so it’s your own fault.

I suppose Aubrey’s already told you that I left the hospital early. Nobody understood sign language there, so nobody had a clue what I was saying unless I wrote little notes, and I hate when people assume I’m deaf and write their own little notes in reply or shout right in my ears. I must be the only one in the entire state with aphonia.

I didn’t want to bore you with my complaints about the hospital on your last visit. I hated it there. After they set my legs, everyone from the orderlies to the doctors deliberately ignored me. They knew damn well I couldn’t shout for a nurse, much less get out of bed with my legs locked in plastic casts. Nurses almost never came to check on me and I didn’t even get one of those buzzers for calling the orderly!

Thank God for Aubrey. I told her everything and she raised absolute hell with the doctor. She didn’t break anything, fortunately — remember that time in high school when she put a brick through the vice principal’s office window? The hospital agreed to release me in her care. I get to roll around in a wheelchair for the rest of the week, and I get to take lots and lots of pills, which I’m not too crazy about. My last experience with pills was a doozy, if you remember.

Have you been to her new house? It’s a villa! Three bathrooms and three bedrooms, though she’s using one bedroom on the first floor as a studio. Absolutely everything matches: the floorboards, furniture, and lamps are of the same kind of wood, stained a dark reddish-bronze (the same shade as your hair, so I’ve been thinking about you all week); the walls, chair cushions, bedsheets, and lampshades are either custard yellow or a brilliant marble white. Here and there she’s added a potted tropical plant for a tad of contrast. Her study is incredible! A large brick fireplace at the center of the wall opposite the door, and the oak bookshelves lining the walls are as high as the ceiling, each shelf packed end to end with books! The whole building is a giant gorgeous L, and its two wings lovingly hug an exotic garden Aubrey calls her backyard, where she does much of her writing. I realize now how appropriate her name is: it means "queen of the elves" and when she sits in the garden her catlike features give her a stunning resemblance to the elves in Tolkien's books.

I adore the garden. There’s a patio and breakfast table out there, and a pond full of colorful fish surrounded by a lush jungle of tropical flowers I’ve never seen before. I don’t remember any of their names; I just know they’re gorgeous and probably toxic. The foliage is so wild and thick I expect to see monkeys or tigers run past the windows any moment. The guest room I’m staying in is the size of my apartment and has a queen size bed and two large glass doors leading out to the pond.

It’s so beautiful here. She calls it Silven Manor (and giggles every time she does). She has no domestic servants except a cleaning crew that comes by early Sunday mornings to dust and vacuum and polish. She does everything else herself, including waiting on my immobile person.

As you would expect, half the rooms in Silven Manor are cluttered with paintings: leaning against the wall, stacked in closets, crammed behind bookshelves — she buys them before she knows where to put them. When she wheeled me into the guest room, guess who was there to greet me? None other than the self-portrait of Cameron DeVry!

Aubrey forgot she’d stored it there. Apparently her latest art collecting venture is the DeVry gallery: the self-portrait is the only one she has so far, but she says she’s always been a fan of his work and she’ll have the rest moved in by the end of the month. She seemed surprised that the painting startled me. Does she not know about me and Cam? It sure seems everyone else in the city knows. Especially those neglectful orderlies at the hospital.

I feel like I’ve gone back in time. I first met Cam in that very hospital just after I had my appendix removed, and now surgery has united me with him once again. I just wish this acrylic incarnation was as chatty or as capable of pity as the fleshy one.

Aubrey has been so sweet to me since the accident: she cooks all my meals, keeps track of what pills I need to take and when I need to take them, and helps me with my rehabilitation exercises every day like clockwork. She's even covering my hospital bills! I hope I get the chance to repay her somehow, even though she insists I don’t need to because I’m so close to you. Be sure to call her sometime this week, by the way. I can tell she’s still shaken up about her own father and she’d be happy to hear from you. In fact, it’s like she’s been going through withdrawals ever since you left for Boston. Have you two got some sort of kinky history you haven’t told me about? Please respond with vivid details!

I miss you already. I hope Charlie is doing okay. Give my love to that poor old sailor, and write to me often.

Hugs and Kisses,

Noelle

Enclosed photograph: Two Caucasian women in their early twenties — one blonde, one brunette — sitting at a round glass table. The blonde wears bright blue pajamas and the uncomfortable smile of one asked to pose for a photo only minutes after crawling out of bed. The brunette, smiling a pearly white smile, wears a white silk shirt and wraps her right arm tightly around her friend. White amazon lilies, yellow angel’s trumpets, and purple orchids peer out from the thick foliage behind them like watchful animal eyes.

TalkySue222’s Sent Mail 1

To: LordsWill37

Subject: RE: resting up?

I’ll pass. We weak, soft heretics need gentler “help” than savage Bible-beatings and threats of family exile. Not giving you and Mums a third chance. Kiss her for me.

N

original message

Mums and I concerned for your health. Just heard staying at the Silven girl’s house. Bless Aubrey’s soul for her kindness but thought you would come to us first if hospital so bad. Will keep your old room vacant if you decide to open up to us. Available to help any way we can as always. Love you tons.

Pops

Starry2xNite's Sent Mail

To: HalvinCobbs99

Subject: RE: housewarming party?

Went abso-fucking-lutely fabulous, thanks very much! Way more people showed up than I expected, most of them parents of the children from my after-school art workshops (and a few of the little goats, themselves). Tim was there, of course, and Chris Burgess too! He's still teaching art at Aspenvale High, and he looks like he hasn't aged a day! Freaky shit.

Hells no, I didn't wear a dress. You know better than to ask me that. Closest thing I ever wore to a dress was those cute li'l plaid skirts from my high school days. Y'know, back when my hair changed color twice a week. Picked my fave sleeveless and slacks and greeted people at the door all businesswoman-like. I felt so pretentious I was glad to get a little tipsy and forget to act proper. The life of a princess (har-dee-har). Having Tim and Mr. Burgess there helped me loosen up. I'm sorry Noelle wasn't there for it so she could get some badly needed social interaction and have all the boys ogle her and make you all jealous. She's put on a few pounds but she'd still be bodacious in a party dress. She probably would've just hid in her room, anyway. Oh yeah, swallow Talky Sue's flowery praise of my house with a few pounds of salt, btw. It's not that amazing. It's the blandest rich lady house ever. Cam's paintings are the first trace of personality this dump has had since I bought it.

Guess who else showed for the party, and pre-smashed, I might add? That's right, our very own Ms. Garrett, another fond high school memory. Mind you, I didn't invite the bitch, or at any point subtly hint in a roundabout way that I ever wanted to see her in my neighborhood. She shows up anyway. Comes to the door, drunk, scowling like a brittle stone frog sculpture. She hasn't aged like wine, Doll, let me tell you. From the back you could easily mistake her for a used mop in a blouse. Yes, I got a mile-wide grin just from typing that.

"Where are they?" she slurs like it took every last ounce of concentration to string the words together.

"They who?" I say. "Also, I don't recall mailing you an invitation."

She shouts so everyone can hear, "The paintinns. I wan' shee th' paintins. I wan' shee the abommminations you think ssso highly of. Paintins you put mmmore value on than m'son's life."

Abridged version: never argue with a drunk. Especially if you're gonna tell her pleasant things like how her son was a worthless date-rapist that got what was coming to him. Buster was there to show her out before she broke anything. Alas, I had to change suits after her visit because she saw fit to spit a nice thick one on my vest. Must be how you say "goodbye" in the Land of the Cunts.

And you know what? It was worth it. It was worth it just to see how far that self-righteous cow has fallen, and you'd have appreciated it if you'd been there. Ahh, high school. I look back fondly on the day you and I were late for Photo and we ganged up on Ms. Garrett in the hall with every lewd word and phrase we knew. Didn't she look EXACTLY like the pitiful wriggly fuck from Munch's "The Scream"? Not that SHE would get the reference, the art-burning cow.

Well after reading this much of my raw hand I bet you're whimpering for Talky Sue's flowery prose again. Keep a correspondence going with her so she won't mope like an old dog so much, will ya?

Miss you.

XOXOX

Aubrey

Noelle’s Diary 1

August 8.

I’ve already broken a vase and nearly killed Aubrey half a dozen times. I can’t wait ‘til I can ditch this clumsy wheelchair and start walking on clumsy crutches instead. At least I’m mobile enough now that I no longer need help getting in and out of it. In reflection, Aubrey’s strength is surprising! I’ve gained at least ten pounds from all the laying around, and yet she can pick me up like a duffel bag full of socks!

Aubrey brought in six more of Cam’s paintings today, including the large untitled one with all the dismal rag dolls having a tea party. It’s always been my favorite, I think. She put it against the wall in my room and promised she’ll let me have it if I ever want it. I don’t know where she put the others.

She’s surprised that I don’t want the self-portrait. I never really liked it that much. Its composition and color balance are perfect, as with all Cam’s work, but he always painted himself as a fractured monster beyond redemption and looking at the portrait makes my heart sink. He never painted the beautiful parts of himself, like his ability to nurture or his kindness to children and animals. He wouldn’t do it, not even for me.

Here I am getting all sentimental. I guess that’s what a diary’s for.

I watched Aubrey work in her studio most of the afternoon. She’s making an unusual series of expressionist pieces by mixing acrylic paints with mud from her backyard and slapping it onto large wooden panels. When she retired for the day she looked like she’d been digging holes in the garden with her face. I’ve been calling her “Dirt Lady” and she seems to think it’s the funniest thing in the world.

I didn’t know we shared a taste for fine tea! She buys exotic teas and bags them herself, and we enjoy them together in her study every evening while talking about art and politics and high school memories. It’s funny watching Aubrey talk because she uses such lively hand gestures, especially when discussing something she’s passionate about. I keep wondering what would happen if I duct taped her hands to her seat — would she be unable to talk at all or start gesturing wildly with her feet instead?

She’s easily distracted, too, which I’m grateful for sometimes. She tends to bring up stressful subjects and vent about people’s stupidity regarding them. She mentioned a story from today’s paper condemning a young couple’s visit to an abortion clinic, and she hates “self-righteous pro-life hypocrites” more than anything (she seems to hate a lot of things “more than anything” though).

“They call it murder if I abort a zygote,” she said. “What do they call all those unfertilized eggs my period wastes? Manslaughter?”

I agree with her views most of the time, but my pills make me drowsy, depressed, and a little nauseous and I’d rather talk about cheery things to distract me from the curdling sensation in my stomach. She tells lots of stories about her internship at the hospital, too. They’re always fascinating, but if I so much as think of hospitals during the day, come bedtime I inevitably have awful dreams about maniacal doctors pulling my squirming appendix out of my gut while I watch. Ugh, my scar is aching as I write.

My darling Brian called her today (that’s what cut our discussion short). Her face lit right up when she answered the phone, and she seemed pleasantly surprised that he had called just to chat with her (as I hoped he would). After a while she became solemn and her voice began to tremble — I could tell they were talking about their fathers. When she finally hung up she sat at the dining room table and cried, and politely asked that I leave her in peace for a while. Since then she’s been in high spirits, as though a parasite had been torn from her heart and thrown away.

I should have turned in an hour ago. The familiar presence of the tea party painting helps me drift off to sleep like a lullaby (and knowing Cam’s portrait is here to guard me helps, too). So until tomorrow!

TalkySue222’s Inbox

From: HalvinCobbs99

Subject: got your letter

Dad sends his love to both of you, His condition improved and looks like he’s going to make it, I might stay longer just in case he has a relapse.

What time was that photo taken? You don’t look halfway awake!

I can’t believe the people at the hospital were neglecting you! I will have a long chat with that doctor when I get back.

Living with Lady Aubrey must have its moments, I always thought she resembled a pissed off Siamese myself (ha-ha). We don’t have any kinky history although she did love to torment and humiliate me in junior high, She was sort of the local bully and actually she's the one gave me my limp, She was a nightmare and I’m glad she grew into such a saint, She stuck by me through mom’s death and I love her to pieces but there’s nothing between us so try not to lose sleep over it (ha-ha).

I was thinking about Cameron on the trip up here and it’s funny that you mentioned him, I interviewed him for the school paper our junior year, He was a fascinating guy and I liked him a lot, I was as shocked as anyone by what he did although from what Aubrey says about him I guess I understand even if I don’t condone it. I remember she went ape-shit over his gallery when they talked about burning it, She was in absolute hysterics, I remember her screaming "How many times do they have to kill him before they're satisfied?"

How can you sleep with that portrait staring at you all night? First time I saw it I couldn’t sleep for two days!

I’m sure Aubrey knows about you and Cameron and just doesn’t want to make a big deal about it like everybody does, Actually she was obsessed with him in high school (don’t tell her I told you that). I miss both of you already, Hope your legs get better soon, Hope this letter arrives before your next letter gets here (ha-ha).

Hugs and Kisses,

Brian

P.S.: If you’re really worried about pills tell Aubrey to store them someplace safe until you need to take them, Stay on the bright side of things and we won’t have to worry.

TalkySue222’s Sent Mail 2

To: HalvinCobbs99

Subject: kinky history

Aubrey gave you the limp? Tell me whatever you did that set her off, so I make sure I never do it. :D

N

Noelle’s Diary 2

August 12.

I had a strange dream about the tea party painting. I’m sure it was a dream because I stood and walked right up to it as if my legs weren’t mangled. But the room depicted was much more dismal than I remembered: the shadows clung to the walls in thick black sheets and the table, the chairs, even the walls all sagged like melting wax. The piece’s ironic marriage of the endearing and the macabre rotted into an atmosphere of decrepitude and hopelessness. Three members of the rag doll family had vanished, leaving only Mother Doll drinking haughtily at the table.

The shadows in the painting were so real that as my eyes adjusted I began to pick out new details. In the furthest corner a shape that I had assumed was a table or chair turned out to be another rag doll, sitting with his chin on his knees, staring at the wall. He suddenly looked over his shoulder and his blue button eyes locked with mine.

The dolls’ positions abruptly changed. Mother Doll was screaming homosexual slurs at the boy doll, beating him savagely with one hand and waving a crumpled pastel drawing in the other. More drawings were scattered all over the floor, wadded and torn. Girls and faggots and useless fathers drew pretty pictures, she hissed. The boy doll shrank before Mother Doll, shielding his head with his arms. Only once he tried to speak and got a haymaker to the face. He fell to the floor, crying. As the scene played out the movements of the two dolls grew more and more sluggish until they finally froze in place.

I told Aubrey about the dream at breakfast and she heeded me so intently her food got cold. Out of morbid curiosity she wants to know about any further dreams I have.

She brought home more paintings, some of them Cam’s most unsettling. Vortex of Despair was counted among them: a typhoon of putrid flesh-tones swirling into a vanishing point near the canvas’s center. I’m never sure if the shapes in the spiral are flailing human forms or just oddly-textured splashes. Cam used lots of spirals in his work.

The other noteworthy painting is Father Figure. It portrays a filthy padded cell stained yellow and black. A dim beam of sunlight pierces the darkness from a tiny window near the ceiling, illuminating a gnarled figure sitting on the floor, its arms crossed over its chest, hands grafted to its back with painful-looking iron sutures. The thing is a shriveled caricature of humanity, wrinkled and stony-faced like a mummy with Cam’s low brow and aquiline nose. Its eyes glow in the darkness like distant torches, bulging and red, staring through the viewer to the edge of the universe. Posted on one wall is a child’s drawing of a smiling young boy and an older man holding hands on a sunny day.

I think Cam told me his father was committed when he was six. He used to visit him at the hospital every other week. He had to walk because his mother refused to drive him.

Brian’s email was a great comfort. I wish he were here now. I’ve been reminiscing about our three-day weekend in Santa Monica and I miss him badly. I miss his little one-two kisses he gives me when he’s in a good mood: kiss-kiss, one for now and one for the road. I’ve been hugging my pillow as a stand-in, but pillows don’t nibble my ears or sing me to sleep.

You’re pathetic, Noelle.

Letter to Noelle Dumont

August 14, 2003

Dear Noelle,

We want to thank you personally for the generous donation you sent us on the 12th. Your previous donation on the 5th was generous enough, and yet you keep giving to us! Your kindness touches everyone here, especially the children. God bless you and that wonderful friend who took you in. Thank you so much, and get well soon!

Sincerely,

Everyone at the Sanctuary for Abused Children

TalkySue222’s Sent Mail 3

To: HalvinCobbs99

Subject: RE: limpy limperton

That's awful! But sweet, in a demented way. It seems we all became friends on account of trips to the hospital. When I had my appendix removed Cameron was there, visiting his dad, and saw I was being neglected. He ran all over the hospital trying to find someone to take care of me. And you were sweet enough to be my chauffeur the day I had my stomach pumped. I think you and he would have got along quite well: you both have hearts as big as the moon. And you're both huge nerds.

Aubrey was reading over my shoulder. She says to tell you that you cried more than she did, you big pansy-ass.

N

original message

Okay well I don't remember the exact details anymore of how it happened, She would remember what we were arguing about better than me, I think she was mean to a friend of mine or a girl I liked, And I was telling her not to be such a bitch all the time, Said some mean stuff about her mom not wanting her, I was pretty mad. Long story short we were arguing by the concrete steps by the bus stop and she shoved me down them and I busted my leg, Not a long flight by any means but a nasty fall for a sixth grader.

Mom and dad were really upset, We were tight for money as it was at the time, But Mr. Silven paid for everything and gave Dad his number and said to call him if I needed anything, He covered the bill for the surgery and pain meds and therapy and everything, I heard he really laid into Aubrey for it. All my friends came to visit me in the hospital and we played games and stuff, It wasn't so bad.

So Aubrey came one day when I was in therapy and she watched me do the exercises and even helped out a little, And when we were done she said she heard I wouldn't play soccer anymore and she was really really sorry, I knew her as a mean little bitch that liked to slap kids around and throw bricks and stuff at them and I hadn't ever seen her cry before, She was a real water show and could barely get the words out to apologize. I should've been mad but I guess I got all my anger out of the way while I was bedridden and now I just wanted to forget about it, So I said it was okay, And she just cried harder and told me I was a moron and stomped out. We've been friends ever since.

Anyway Aubrey wouldn't be taking care of you if she didn't love you to pieces, You two always got along like sisters, Wish you were both here now, Give her a hug and kiss for me and save a few dozen for yourself. I'll call again later.

Love,

Brian

Noelle’s Diary 3

August 14

So long, you miserable wheelchair! The fracture in my left leg has healed and I’ve upgraded to crutches. I can move around much better now, although I can’t sign to Aubrey while standing up and I still can’t use the stairs. I’m dying to see the second floor of Silven Manor.

Made a fool of myself over tea today, crying like a little baby. I told Aubrey I’d seen the article in the ‘Post about her art collecting ventures and how much her words had moved me. She confessed she used to watch Cam paint in the school art studio without his knowledge, but admired him so much that she never had the nerve to approach him. She hated the other kids for laughing when he lost his temper and destroyed a project for not being perfect.

I tried to lighten the air in the room and playfully asked if she was more in love with Cam or Brian. She frowned at me, then stared into the fire and said,

“I can’t compete with you.”

She was short with me for a while, even when I apologized for being so tactless; fortunately once I got her on the subject of elementary schools and art she seemed to forget all about the remark. She’s been wonderful to me and the last thing I want to do is offend her. Besides which she’s bigger than me and not a cripple.

Aubrey makes magnificent sorbet. I have to get the recipe from her.

August 16

I dreamt of the rag dolls again last night. I told Aubrey about it and she thinks the paintings have had a subliminal effect on me.

The boy doll toiled in a dungeon with brick walls the color and texture of dirty spit. Flickering next to his workplace was a lantern perpetually on the edge of burning out, which helped me to see him more clearly than before. His torso was a crude metal cage containing a veiny, throbbing thing that roared and hissed and raked with bony talons at the doll’s face and hands. It seemed to want out badly.

The doll’s eyes weren’t buttons this time, but real eyes, red and watery with bags underneath from tears soaking into the cloth of his face. He stuck his paintbrush between his ribs and dipped it into the horrid creature like a knife into jam, and the monster abruptly relaxed into a quivering blob. The doll carefully removed the brush, its bristles dripping with a pulpy serving of the creature which he calmly applied to the canvas. Cage Boy’s painting featured only a single color: the scab-red of the shapeless beast living inside him. As I realized this, the little artist froze in mid-stroke and the scene ended.

Aubrey is encouraging me to write these dreams down so she can turn them into an art project. She’s terribly inspired by the epic of Cage Boy (that’s her name for the little artist). I’m glad I didn’t tell her about the shape.

It sat in the corner of my room just to the right of the garden door. I spotted it immediately after I awoke because there has never been anything there since I moved in. My first impression was a human form — it sat facing the corner with its chin on its knees as though it were pouting or being punished — but the angle of the shoulders was distorted and the head protruded from them like the crooked steeple of a collapsing church.

Like Cam’s portrait, I thought. But when my eyes darted to the painting its twisted subject was still there, as miserable as ever.

The corner was deserted when I looked again. It was roughly 4 A.M. and I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I lay there staring at my bedside clock. I’m worried if I tell Aubrey about it she’ll laugh at me…or worse, she may prod me about my dreams all the time, no matter how personal they get. She finds amusement in the most demented things.

August 17

Last night was the second time I’ve heard scratching inside the walls. Just like before it was very faint, and I only heard it a couple times, and never in the same place twice — the last I heard it was in the ceiling right above my bed. Aubrey tells me she’s found the occasional mouse or garter snake on her property, and she knows of at least three sparrow families living in her eaves. She promised me her “tenants” are perfectly harmless (and always pay their rent on time, she laughed). The source sounds much bigger than a bird or snake — something big as a bear cub or maybe even a human child. I’m going to take Aubrey at her word or else I won’t get any sleep tonight.

Aubrey has an art show to attend today at the North Hill Museum. I wish I could’ve gone with, but I’m too tired to “walk” anywhere and I want to get some reading done. I’ve got plenty of art to look at here, anyway, and I’m excited to have a whole mansion to myself for an evening. Fixed myself a cup of tea and crashed in her study on this wonderful marshmallowy couch. The fresh air in the garden did me some good, but my mouth is a little dry and I’m starting to think the restlessness in my limbs is a sign that I’m coming down with something. If I must have a cold, at least it’ll be in a warm, comfortable environment and not a crypt-like hospital.

Later

My panic attack is over and Aubrey’s here now, so everything’s okay. Took me an hour to get my breathing down to a reasonable rate. I still don’t understand what’s happened.

I dozed off in the study while reading Chaucer. No idea how long I was out, but it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes. I heard footsteps on the second floor when I awoke and thought Aubrey had come back early — she said she’d be at the museum until after seven, and it was only a quarter to six — so I went right back to reading and didn’t give it another thought.

After maybe ten minutes a loud thump directly over my head startled me so badly that I dropped my book. I heard the footsteps again, moving toward the other end of the house. I took up one of my crutches, hobbled over to the stairs and rapped the railing three times nice and loud, hoping to get Aubrey’s attention. I did it again when no one came.

Something ducked out of sight at the end of the hall — I saw it out of the corner of my eye. When I stumbled after the shape, turned the corner into the drawing room and found no one there, it occurred to me that Aubrey had found me asleep when she came home and decided to mess with me. My temper boiled as I followed the elusive shape's trail deep into the east wing of the house, to Aubrey’s studio door. On the other side I heard shoes rustling on a newspaper floor, heavy wooden objects clattering, thick cloth tearing slowly in sadistic hands. There was something terribly strange in the background: a dull hum almost inaudible to my ears, like a television or radio turned on but receiving no signal. I reached for the door handle, but those damned painkillers messed up my depth perception and I missed it on the first try.

When my fingertips touched the handle the room went quiet. I jerked my hand back and nearly stumbled. Several minutes later I convinced myself not to turn tail and pushed the door in.

The floor was covered with newspaper, and soiled from Aubrey’s latest project. But there was no one in the room except a red-and-white-spattered wooden easel standing at the center. Aubrey’s paints and utensils were all locked up for the day in the metal cabinet across the room. When I saw the canvas lying face-down on the dirty floor, my heart jumped as if I’d just found a baby bird fallen from its nest, and without thinking I knelt to set it upright. The frame felt lead-heavy in my hands, like my arms were begging me to leave the image on the canvas hidden, and when it finally stood upright my breath abandoned me.

Cam’s self-portrait stared back at me, and I watched its lips curl into a smile.

I dropped the painting and dragged myself out of the vacuum of the studio, back into the hall where I found my breath again. My eyes wouldn’t turn away from the canvas. It lay waiting like a trapdoor to some horrible other world beneath the house. At any moment I expected the creature to crawl out from under it and come after me.

Something moved. I’m still not sure what. It may just have been the newspaper sheets settling beneath the canvas. But I slammed the door and crawled back down that hall like a panicked rat and sat on the study couch with my hands over my ears and my eyes clamped shut to block out any other ghosts the house had in store for me. Aubrey found me like that when she finally came home hours later. I told her what I saw and at first she laughed; then she saw my tears and sat next to me with her arm around my shoulder, telling me I was all right.

She still thinks I was dreaming because the portrait is in my room right where I left it and it’s not smiling. There’s no painting in the studio. I’m sure I was awake. I don’t know what to think.

The next time she goes to an art show she’s taking me with her so I don’t get possessed by Cam again (as she coarsely put it, which I didn’t find terribly funny). Some of the people at the museum were asking about me and would like me to come, she says. Maybe visiting a few cheerful galleries would be good for me. It would be a nice change of pace at any rate.

August 18

That weird incident from the other day is still fresh in my nerves and I just had to get out of the house, so after my exercises and daily dose of pills Aubrey took me to town. We left around 11:30 this morning and had lunch at a deli she’s been telling me about all week. I’ve got to go there again! Their tuna sandwich mix is perfect: not too dry, but not gooey as paste, either!

After lunch we took a stroll through the park to the Kensington Plaza and looked in all the weird little shops there. I love the plaza’s atmosphere: I love that it’s just a city street paved over with stone tiles, elm trees, bronze statues, and water fountains. I love how beautifully it marries “city park” and “town market”. And I love how there’s no roof, so the air is always fresh and always smells and tastes like the forest.

Then Aubrey hissed, “Shit,” under her breath. She turned to me and said, “Heads up, Doll. I forgot these assholes were here today. Don’t make eye contact and maybe they won’t bite.”

I saw what she meant soon enough: the activists were out in full force. Apparently naïve young people go to Kensington Plaza all the time to advertise their social justice movements to the populace. Everywhere we went, small groups of students pestered shoppers with fliers and bumper stickers and petitions. They mixed right in with the jugglers and puppeteers and other street performers. A trio of them accosted us with fliers advertising a pro-life seminar — one of those “preaching to the choir” sorts of events. They shoved one into my hands and urged me to attend, but when they tried to do the same to Aubrey she spat something at them that I don’t dare repeat even to a little journal, then cheerfully led me away while the activists shouted obscenities after us.

In one spot there’s a three-tiered fountain with spouts that make their crystal showers dance like ballerinas, and outdoor cafes on either side so people can watch while having lunch. We rested here and ordered two hot cocoas, and Aubrey told me funny stories about fishing at the lake with her father as a child. Talking about it seemed to transport her to another time, as if she could re-live it all just by describing it: her beaming face seemed only ten years old. She said she rarely got to see him when she was young because of his job, so she treasured every trip — didn’t need to take photographs because she remembered them all so vividly.

“Those moments’re worth too much to a kid,” she said. “Photo would only cheapen it, y’know?”

She’d been talking for fifteen minutes before I realized I still held the activists’ flier absent-mindedly in my hand. Big, bold-face letters shouted Don’t Deny Your Children the Right to Live! before I wadded it up and made a three-point shot into the trashcan.

We were out later than we intended because there was a poetry slam going on in the coffee shop across the street that we decided to attend. It was all pretty bad, but at least some of the poets didn’t take themselves too seriously. One guy recited all his poems like Burt Lancaster and had our sides splitting. Once it ended my head sloshed with drowsiness and my vision blurred a little bit. Aubrey said I looked tired, and it was almost time for more pills anyway. By the time we got back it was almost four.

I had planned to take a nap once we got back, but something cold as ice washed over me the moment I stepped through the front door. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s as if the house welcomed me back with a mean-spirited smile. I try to act casual and not let it bother me, and I swear I can feel the walls chuckling. I think I actually heard someone stifle a laugh as I passed one of Cam’s paintings. Can’t remember which one.

Teatime. I’ve had enough of writing about this anyway.

August 20

Found myself scrutinizing Cam’s portrait this morning as if it were a mischievous little kid. I feel completely silly. Aubrey has been more sensitive about my dreams. She hasn’t prodded me for any details since my panic attack the other day.

I've had three separate mini-dreams in Doll Land the last few nights, and now I suppose it would be a waste not to record them. Anyway, they won't leave my thoughts otherwise. Three new dolls starred in these revues.

At first I couldn't guess the gender of the first dream's star, but I finally decided it was female and called it Angst: she wore a beanie and a black t-shirt adorned with a little frowning skull, and her angry red button eyes reflected light more brightly than the other dolls' could. She had a small beast of her own perched on her shoulder like a pet, which occasionally licked her ears or nipped at her face, and like Cage Boy she used it as ammunition for painting violent landscapes on canvas. Those who mocked her creations were subject to the wrath of her pet (or her fists if she was feeling generous), and her rage did not discriminate between classmates and teachers. The Schoolmistress doll seemed determined to stop Angst from producing such offensive art: she would incinerate every finished painting with fiery breath, often battling Angst's pet to do so.

Angst's anger disappeared around Cage Boy. In fact, his mere presence would drive her to hide around corners and behind furniture. She watched his struggles with the beast in timid silence, her eyes changing into tearful mirrors whenever they looked upon him. Only Angst's pet had the courage to call out to him, but with a sob she always strangled the words in its throat before he could hear, turning and retreating further into the shadows.

The second dream starred the doll I call Blue-Eye: he's a sweet little thing with a single great eye of blue glass in the middle of his forehead. No matter what he gazed at, the object of Blue-Eye's interest always had a beautiful reflection in that eye. While walking along a sidewalk that twisted in unnatural angles, he passed an old decrepit single-story house, and to him it was a great German castle from ancient times. No neighborhood surrounded the castle: it stood in its own dark corner of the cosmos where everyone could shun it. Shouts and sobs and awful insults came from within, and Blue-Eye stopped to watch Cage Boy slip out a tower window, climb down the wall like a spider, and escape into the darkness.

Blue-Eye pitied Cage Boy for having such a rotten home. Every day Blue-Eye came home from school to a great big hug and kiss from his mother, a sweet but badly worn doll who seemed to fall apart more and more each time she appeared. She sometimes left a trail of red hair wherever she went. Her left button eye had a habit of popping off when she smiled, and everyone would have to look under the furniture for it, sometimes not finding it until later in the week. Occasionally another stitch would pop, which she repaired herself with increasing incompetence. One day she finally unraveled and Blue-Eye came home to a soulless shell of a house. Father doll sat on the living room couch, inconsolable. That day Blue-Eye's friend, Angst, supplied his hug and kiss, and didn't let him go for a long time — that big eye cried an awful lot of tears.

The third dream ended abruptly as I noticed a little blonde doll watching Cage Boy's struggles from afar with pity in her eyes. I vaguely remember that everywhere she went, the other dolls didn't notice her when she said hello. This was because she had no mouth to speak with.

Later

Aubrey and I played cards all through the afternoon. Had our usual tea date in the study. Aubrey promised to take me fishing as soon as Brian gets back. Just hearing his name broke something inside me. He hasn’t written in a long time. I’m afraid to pester him with mundane things like broken legs and eerie paintings while his dad’s life is hanging by a thread. I hope everything’s okay.

Maybe I should have said yes to his proposal. He’s sworn so many times that he’s happy to have me any way he can, but somet—[remaining text is scratched out]

No, that’s ridiculous. He even agreed it wasn’t necessary. He knows what he means to me. He doesn’t have to write me letters every single day. Why do you worry about every stupid little thing, Noelle?

Aubrey had to go back to the museum for a little while. This time the house was quiet in her absence. Almost.

Whenever I walked past the guest room I heard something moving inside the wall. The sound followed me from one end of the hallway to the other and back again, clicking and scratching its nails as it went to make sure I knew it was there. It never went further than the east wing bathroom or the entrance to the living room, as if it couldn’t leave the boundary of the guest room. It sounded much bigger than a damn mouse. It had to be a family of rats or even raccoons. I swear it sounded like a person but that’s impossible! The space between the walls is too narrow! Naturally when I tried to show Aubrey it stopped and I haven’t heard it since.

She brought eleven more paintings home. I didn’t care to look at them.

August

Three nights, I think. I can’t sleep anymore. Don’t know the date. All but given up on sleep.

She’s still there, watching. Waiting for her chance. Misery, I think. Consort of…who was she, Cam? Consort of Guilt? or Penance? She steals the victim’s heart and feeds it to the gnawing, yellow-toothed hole in her chest. Nails like razors. Quick as a viper.

She’s been there for three nights, hiding in the ceiling above my bed. Peeks out through a little slit like a trapdoor spider. She stares with her mouth. Lips pulled back into a lovely smile, red and shiny and inviting. No eyes. Not even sockets. Just a lump of pale flesh with voluptuous lips. Don’t remember what the rest of her looks like except the empty ribcage.

Can’t sleep knowing she’s there. I wish she’d go away. I lie here at night with my arms crossed over my chest to keep her back. She sits and waits for me to drop them. Twitching in anticipation. Starved, antsy shuddering like a junky needing a fix. She’s waiting for me to drop them. I wish she’d go away.

August 24

If I tell her I want to stay in the other guestroom I’ll have to say why and she’ll think I’m crazy. She won’t believe me. I can’t keep it to myself for much longer because she can tell I haven’t been sleeping well and she says I’m skittish like a mouse during the day. I think I saw Cam’s portrait wandering the house. Several times she’s seen me peering around corners and poking my head through doors. She asks if I’m looking for someone and I never have an answer for her. I tell her I’ve just been restless. What kind of answer is that? What is it supposed to mean?

They want her to think I’m crazy! She never sees or hears them: the things sneaking about the halls, the things crawling inside the walls, the thing in my bedroom. They hide whenever she’s around like cockroaches from the kitchen light. Misery hung down from the ceiling this evening while I was reading in bed. Dangled there, staring, like a hideous chandelier. Zipped back up into her hole when Aubrey came in with my pills.

They keep taking Cage Boy’s tools away. A boy and girl came and beat him up, then they took his brush and broke it. Then the Schoolmistress pushed him down and chastised him for his ugly pictures. She grabbed his easel and marched arrogantly off with it. Then Mother Doll forced him to sit in the corner of the room while she tore his canvas to pieces. She brought in one doctor doll after another and helped them clamp atrocious machines onto his body that bit with rusty fangs and injected chemicals the color of abscess that only agitated the beast. Why are they so mean to him? He just wants to paint! Can’t they see the monster growing inside him? Can’t they see he’s in pain?

August 25

Not sleeping in that room tonight. Wanted go to the study and sleep on the couch instead. Thought I’d be safe there. Misery did nothing when I took up my crutches and headed out the door. Certain she can’t access the rest of the house.

But something else can. A shambling thing with skin like old leather. Saw it at the end of the hall, walking awkwardly on rickety wooden legs that could barely support its weight. It wears savage scars like medals on its arms and chest and a poorly stitched sack over its head that obscures its face. Or maybe that is its face, a sagging veil of maimed flesh. I didn’t get close enough to find out. It started toward me. I saw the artist’s knife in its bony hand and I fled.

I stumbled and lost my crutches as I rounded a corner and had to drag myself the rest of the way with that shambling horror looming over me. It didn’t attack. Just followed curiously, watched me pull my legs through the study door. Why didn’t it attack?

Locked myself in. Didn’t hear anything outside for a long time. Tried to sleep. Tried so hard.

Someone talking woke me. Opened my eyes and thought Aubrey was there, but it wasn’t Aubrey. The fireplace had eyes. Wide, staring, desperate eyes behind the mesh curtain. Stared at me and never blinked. I fell off the couch, dragged myself behind and listened to the voice. It knew my name.

Sat in silence for a long time. Eventually gathered the courage to peek under the couch at the hearth. Three faces behind the mesh curtain, all staring at me. I recognized them. Tony Garrett and Casey Jacoby from high school. They hovered on either side of the third face. Dorothy. Her name was Dorothy.

Cameron’s mother.

They whispered again. Sounded like they were crying. But the faces weren’t sad. They weren’t anything. Blank like zombies.

“Please let us go,” Dorothy said. It’s all she said.

I don’t know what it means. She won’t explain. She just cries.

“Please let us go. Please, Noelle.”

That’s all they’ll say to me. They won’t shut up. I cover my ears and I still hear them crying.

I don’t know how to help dead people.

The wooden-legged thing is in the room! It’s sitting Indian-style in front of the door, blocking me in, with a hammer and a pile of fat nails as long as chopsticks. Takes one, digs the point into its shoulder or breast and taps it in, straight to the bone. It doesn’t bleed. Taps the nails in like it’s made of wood. I don’t think it knows I’m here. I’m too scared to make a noise.

Tap tap tap. Please let us go, Noelle. Tap tap tap tap. Please Noelle.

brian please please come back

August 26

aubrey found my crutches in the hall this morning. had to kick the study door in to make sure i was all right. gone to sleep with the fire poker in my fist. almost clobbered her. can’t remember much last night. can’t remember why left my room. diary is beginning to frighten me.

hard to write because sleep deprived. disoriented sometimes. felt more relaxed today but aubrey didn’t believe me. thinks i have fever. wants me to stay in bed for couple days.

i’m not sure i believe me.

she’s been talking to brian about me! i heard her on the phone this morning, telling him about how neurotic i’ve been acting! voice trembled a lot like she was scared, told him she was worried and didn’t know what to do. she wants to bring a shrink over. are she and brian going to send me away?

she came tonight with my pills, kissed me on the head like a mom would kiss a child with the flu.

“i’m not crazy,” i told her. hands trembled, almost couldn’t form the signs.

“no one said you were crazy, doll,” she said.

“you told brian i was crazy.”

aubrey started, hung her head a little and avoided my eyes. “i told brian i was worried about you,” she said finally. “you been acting all weird like you’re possessed. and you won’t tell me what’s bothering you!”

“i did tell you. i hear things.”

“i told you about the birds and the other critters creepin’ around here.”

“it’s not birds. i saw what they are. they’re inside the house. i’m not crazy. i’m scared.”

“if they’re in the house then how come i haven’t seen or heard them? hm?”

i didn’t know how to answer.

“there’s nothing,” she said, patting my hands, “and i mean nothing to be afraid of in this house. you’re just having bad dreams.”

i snatched my hands away. “i’m not dreaming and i’m not crazy.”

misery peeked down from her hole while we talked. those perfect lips twisted into a grin. i kept staring until aubrey looked up to see what i was looking at so intently. but the hole closed up like an eyeball and she saw nothing but the ceiling. she looked back at me, sighed, patted my hands again.

“get some sleep,” she said.

“don’t talk to brian anymore,” i said. she agreed.

all night i listened to the faceless, wood-legged thing patrolling outside my room. still out there raking its weapon along the walls as it paces up and down up and down the hallway. cam’s portrait was sitting in the corner again for a while, looking over his shoulder at me with those sad black pits, scowling as if he wanted me to confess something. misery finally left me alone. been watching the ceiling for a long time and sh

no, she’s still there. see her lips peeking. trying to trick me. i’m writing on my side so she can’t reach my heart.

Later

how stupid do they think i am?

do they think i can't tell my own friend from a slipshod puppet??

i sat curled up in bed, staring at cam's portrait, asking it for help. it always frowned in reply. i couldn't tell if it wanted to help but wasn't able, or if it resented my asking. i don't know if it's cam himself or just another of his avatars. rotten fruit smell tainted the air.

through the door came this shambling abomination pretending to be aubrey. its wooden make and badly painted features were painfully obvious. they'd built it out of the parts of a wooden easel in ten minutes. i could even see the strings! i could even see the hands that manipulated them sinking down through the ceiling as if it were latex! i'd never seen such a hideous thing in all my life! are they toying with me? do they really think i'm so gullible?

it shambled to the bedside and hovered there. the head cranked lazily downward until its ugly smirk rested on me like a giant weight.

"and how are we feeling?" it asked. the voice was giddy and not aubrey's at all.

it was cameron's.

i didn't answer. the painted-on eyes leered blindly into mine. god the stink! was it coming from the thing? i couldn't stand it. my limbs shuddered and i threw up on the carpet by the bed.

"come see the new paintings!" it said, and shambled back to the door. it hovered there a long time and stared at me. i didn't move. finally it went out into the hall.

i watched the door, waiting for it to come back. it never did. i was grateful to see the real aubrey that evening and gave her a hug.

i hope they don't mean her harm, too.

Date Unknown

WHAT DO YOU WANT?

LEAVE ME ALONE!

please leave me alone

i’m sorry. i’m so sorry.

August 27

It’s strangely quiet at Silven Manor. The calm of a graveyard comes to mind.

I woke up in a soft, warm womb of morning sunlight and thought I’d died. Slept most of the day away and I still feel exhausted. Aubrey says she’s not surprised, given how tightly strung I’ve been.

The paintings are gone. Aubrey says she moved them out of my room early this morning.

August 28

Slept like a newborn baby! Maybe I should ask Aubrey to move the paintings into storage far, far away from here. Maybe in another country altogether. Although, strangely, I miss the self-portrait and its sorry frown.

Aubrey offered to bring a psychologist friend to visit me, but I declined. I haven’t felt so physically revitalized in ages. For the first time in over a week we enjoyed idle chat over tea in the study, and we laughed quite a bit, too! I needed it badly after our visit to the gallery this afternoon.

I really did try to enjoy myself. Everyone was warm and friendly with me, which never failed to surprise me after my experiences at the hospital. And the library. And the university. And pretty much everywhere else. Cam’s name isn’t spoken like a dirty word at the museum. So many people there seemed to love Cam very much.

So why did it make me so uncomfortable? Shouldn’t I have felt at home there? It’s not that their feelings weren’t genuine — anyone could tell they were — but I couldn’t help tasting condescension on their words, subtle hints that I didn’t deserve to be there. I could have been imagining it. I asked Aubrey what she thought and she gave me a cold look and told me to stop being so insecure. Real encouraging.

She’s been going into town quite a bit lately, so I’ve spent a lot of my free time exploring the house and the garden. In the parlor at the house’s rear I stumbled upon a painting of a familiar wooden-legged figure, carving large chunks of flesh out of its bony body with an artist’s knife. I remember seeing it once in Cam’s studio. He called it “Shame”. Its lack of eyes spares it from having to look into the eyes of others. Cam told me the creature was doomed to whittle itself away until nothing was left.

That was Misery’s consort! Cam had hung them beside one-another on the museum wall.

I haven’t seen any other paintings by Cam in the house, so I guess Aubrey put them all away. Shame is probably her favorite: she told me when she was young, not long after her mom walked out on her, she used to cut herself to cope with emotional stress. Cam had done it, too. Not quite as pretty as painting pictures.

Aubrey won’t let me apologize for my behavior. She insists it’s her fault for being so thoughtless. “I could just as well have hung your underwear up all over the house and expected you not to flip out.”

I think life at Silven Manor has finally returned to normal. But I stashed one of Aubrey’s box-cutters under my pillow just in case.

Time for my pills. Haven’t needed them as much lately. The pain’s mostly gone, but I still have trouble sleeping sometimes.

August 29

I'm in mourning. Cage Boy died last night.

His body swelled and ached with the growing beast that bulged between his ribs. It seemed ready to burst him apart, and from the look on his face he knew it. His eyes burned and hot magma oozed down his cheeks. And all the dolls who saw his anguish simply pointed and laughed.

The pain buckled his legs and he teetered and fell into the waiting arms of Mouthless Girl. She cradled him gingerly and kissed his tortured face despite having no lips to kiss with. They found unity in their crippled self-expression, and when the others mocked them, they paid no mind. The beast was silent for as long as she touched him.

Then Mouthless Girl dipped her fingers inside Cage Boy and spread a fingerful of the beast on her chest like butter onto bread, asking him to use her as his canvas. He did, and despite the crude material the result was an artistic marvel (though just as illegible as the rest of his work). The effort exhausted him and he fainted, leaving Mouthless Girl alone with her thoughts. She stood before a mirror, turning this way, that way, admiring the chic grotesqueness of her new look.

The “paint” on Mouthless Girl’s chest squirmed angrily and began to burrow its tendrils into her skin. She tried to scream, but couldn’t. Horror filled her shiny button eyes and she yanked the thing from her flesh and threw it to the floor, where it quickly died. She seemed ashamed to tell Cage Boy what had happened. She hid her face behind her hands and ran away, seeking solace in her parents.

She found the opposite. They cursed her for touching the beast. They cursed her and beat her until she bled. They sent her to a new school where the nuns burnt her flesh with hot metal crosses and bloodied her with wooden canes if she disobeyed the rules.

Mouthless Girl ran away from this terrible place one day, knowing she would be beaten for it. She ran to Cage Boy's school and attacked him in the art studio. She did to him what the nuns had done to her, beating him with everything in reach and calling him the vilest things she could think of. It was his fault, she said. It was all his fault and it never would have happened if he'd been more careful.

Cage Boy ran home and cried. Several of his ribs broke and curled outward as the beast swelled and swelled, but he ignored it. He would let the thing consume him.

Enter Mother Doll and a fearsome toy soldier, carrying a steel breastplate of Cage Boy’s size. She dragged her son to the soldier, telling him he would be sent away to become a man. The soldier began to bolt the breastplate onto Cage Boy and lock the ever-growing beast inside him forever. But he didn’t get the second bolt in: the beast bubbled and boiled and lashed out at everything around it. More ribs broke away until finally the thing exploded out of Cage Boy’s body with a sound like a hundred jungle animals bellowing at once. Its talons bit into Mother Doll’s chest and tore out tuft after tuft of polyester stuffing. It tore and tore until nothing remained of her but tattered rags.

It rampaged, frightening the other dolls, chasing down Cage Boy’s tormentors. The thing was still a part of Cage Boy, so as it stampeded through the dolls Cage Boy was dragged along, twisting and whipping in the air like the leash of a dog that escaped its master on its morning walk. The beast gleefully disemboweled two more dolls — the boy and girl who’d broken Cage Boy’s paintbrush — before Cage Boy found his footing again and seized the thing in his arms, hugging it with all his might, struggling to force it back inside him. This only made it angrier and it turned on its host and devoured him as the Uroboros eats its own tail.

The other dolls gathered around the carnage, sobbing, whimpering, cursing, screaming. The Schoolmistress doll sat wailing on the floor, cradling one victim’s tattered remains. It used to be her son.

The beast, now without its host, began to die. From the back of the crowd came Angst with a brush and canvas in hand: weeping she knelt by the fallen beast and desperately tried to collect its remains on the canvas in a pitiful attempt to preserve any little piece of Cage Boy she could. Her pet brutalized any bystanders that tried to stop her.

Mouthless Girl was devastated: her grief showed in her endless tears and her red, twisted face and the way her legs refused to work. Gathering all her strength she finally stood upright, outstretched her arms and went to offer the creature one last meal — to share Cage Boy’s fate. As her fingers were inches from touching the starving blob Blue-Eye grabbed her. He pulled her back. He held her tight. He told her it wasn't her fault. The beast wilted like a flower, and Mouthless Girl cried and cried until the scene froze at last, then faded to black.

Should I be grateful to the revenant from Cam's portrait, real or not? Did it reopen this old wound to drain the abscess for me?

Bottling up our grief only makes it rot inside us. Everyone has told me so many times that I did nothing wrong, even though I know better; but I'm beginning to realize Cam's fate may have been preordained. His tenderness and hatred fought for the reigns and the former lost its grip. I want to believe that it wasn’t inevitable — that Cam’s death could have been prevented if not for a faulty variable, like a cowardly girl that should’ve been a brave one. Maybe he would’ve done it anyway. Maybe his final piece was destined to be a work of violence.

September 1

Still not very mobile, but at least I can be somewhat useful when cleaning house. Aubrey is cleaning her closet and wants to hit the plaza again for more attractive replacements. She's actually entertaining the thought of buying some dresses! I don't think she's worn one her entire life! She may need me there to keep her confidence up.

Choking from all the dust in the library. Aubrey says she'll beat me up if she catches me trying to do the cleaning crew's job for them again. And that I sneeze like a guinea pig.

Date Unknown

After dinner I went into the kitchen to offer help with cleaning dishes. Aubrey stood at the sink washing them with her back to me. I went to touch her shoulder and stopped when I almost gagged at the stench of rotten fruit. Thought myself paranoid at first, but crept back out without a sound and went and sat in the study, listening to her move around the house. She called me a few times. I'm afraid to go to her.

The sounds in the wall are back.

Date Unknown

shit shit shit shit shit shit

I think they took Aubrey.

They took her and left something in her place.

It's much more convincing than the other one. Except the glass eyes.

Or did she go away somewhere and forget to tell me?

The hand gestures are stiff, too.

tap tap tapping in the study.

I can't kill her. What if I'm just paranoid? What if I really [rest is scratched out]

I can't leave. They're waiting outside. I catch them sneaking around out there, watching the windows. Will they drag me back in if I try? Or will they do other things?

They don't come into the bedroom. They watch, but that's all. What are they waiting for?

Date Unknown

[illegible scribbling] —my bed! In my bed! Vortex people slithering all over! Kicked and struggled but god the stink of rot and those horrible dripping faces like rotten liquid flesh! Held me down so she could ooze down from her hole and take my heart, but the box-cutter was there and it saved me. I think I hurt one of them. Fell out of bed and can’t reach the door or the garden. She’s hiding behind the bed, waiting for me to make a move. I think she cut me. I think I’m bleeding. I have to get out of here.

Think you idiot! Focus!

My stomach hurts like it’s got razors squirming inside! Did she poison m

[two lines blotted out by large blood spots; right half of next three pages is wrinkled and stained red, some words barely legible]

please don’t. please don’t do this to me. how can you be so cruel?

pain too much, had to get it out. cut appendix scar raw and open like a hungry mouth. something wormlike slithered out, slithered up my chest, licked and bit my neck with barbwire jaws. fought it, grabbed it, pulled it out like a tapeworm foot by foot. other end of the worm-thing finally came, first head, then shoulders, then little feet. fetus. whole fetus popped out, slick and bruise-red, dead black eyes staring into mine, dangling from the umbilical cord tangled around its neck. threw it away and sat and stared at it and sobbed. the face! the brow and nose like a Cameron doll!

your portrait saw it all, stood over me, watching me cry with your face melting into a horrible sagging grimace. is it because you feel responsible? because i blamed you like the fucking child that i was? we were both to blame. i was too young. i wasn’t ready to be a mommy. neither of us were ready for a baby. i’m sorry i said those terrible things. it wasn't your fault. we both made a mistake. i know it's too fucking late to say it now. too fucking little too fucking late. i don't hate you and i’m not leaving you and i love you more than anyone in the world and i treated you like fucking shit and i'm sorry. i tried to tell you but you wouldn’t look at me to hear me. you just went to the corner and sat staring at the wall and wouldn’t look at me. i tried to pull you into my arms and you crumbled and dissolved like wet sand until nothing left. you wouldn’t look because you were dead. i killed you. too fucking late.

can’t sit up anymore. too exhausted. damn smile peeking around the bed at me. tonight. she’s coming for me tonight, to take what’s hers. moving slowly, low to the ground, spider on the prowl, slobbering chest-hole licking teeth, flecking strings of black sputum on the carpet s-l-o-w-l-y around foot of bed lips baring perfect white teeth like she’s going to laugh never makes a sound don’t wan to be scared i cant writ troug th teas im scard cameron pleas mak her go awy plea [rest of the page is too scrawled and too blood-stained to read]

Letter to Charles Galloway

September 5, 2003

Dad,

Don’t ever tell me how unimportant you think you are again, It is not your fault I wasn’t there to help her, Coming to Boston was my choice.

Sorry to start off so bluntly, I needed to get that out.

She didn’t leave a note, Nobody can prove why she did it but that doesn’t stop people from cooking up theories, You should see the disgusting headlines here, I want to start torching newsstands.

I don’t want you to come out here yet, I would rather you stay in Boston till the funeral, You wouldn’t survive seeing Aubrey right now.

I got to her place and she was in Noelle’s room scrubbing an invisible stain on the floor on the far side of the bed, She wouldn’t look me in the eye till I took the washcloth away from her and then she just covered her face and started crying.

She blames herself for absolutely everything, She says she should’ve known better and she should’ve seen the signs and she should’ve called a psychiatrist and she shouldn’t have had all those paintings hanging around the house, She is positive Noelle killed herself over Cam.

She has gone back to cutting herself, Cut her left wrist to ribbons and I had to take her to the hospital for stitches, I’m afraid to leave her by herself so I’m staying with her for a few days. She talked to the police for hours and since they finished with her she won’t utter a word about anything unless I’m holding her tight in my arms, She’s so quiet it breaks my heart.

She muttered something about Cameron DeVry’s angry ghost and I thought she was making a sick joke but her eyes were cold like marbles when she said it.

Noelle’s parents are in pieces, they think it’s their fault, Everyone is blaming their goddamn selves for not preventing this and I can’t stand it.

I still don’t know what to think, The doctors say schizophrenia, They say the anxiety she suffered as a kid is supposedly an early sign but she ate loads of shit from other kids for being a mute so of course she’d have had anxiety then.

Everyone from the doctors to the press keeps bringing up her failed suicide attempt after Cam’s death and they say a second attempt was inevitable, They talk about her like she was some kind of nutcase and it makes me want to tear their eyes out, How can I argue though? No sane person goddamn disembowels herself with a box-cutter, I was lucky I saw her at the morgue where she was clean and peaceful and beautiful and not the mess Aubrey found in her guest room.

Never a moment goes by when I don’t think about Noelle, I see her pale face whenever I close my eyes, I just don’t have time to mourn right now, The Dumonts need me now and Aubrey needs me, My time will come later.

I will see you in a week, Uncle Gary has a room set up for you at his place, Don’t forget to take your pills.

Love,

Brian

Note from Brian, circa 2005

Aubrey,

Go ahead and burn the letters and emails, I don't need them anymore.

You were right, She can't come back, The same shouldn't be said for me.

Letter to Arthur Seacrest, Phoenix Art Museum Curator

February 12, 2006

Dear Mr. Seacrest,

I recently learned of your correspondence with my husband, Brian, regarding the purchase of the DeVry gallery. I regret there has been a misunderstanding: the gallery is my personal property and therefore not Brian’s to sell. I’m afraid the paintings carry many unhappy memories for him and he’s asked me many times to get rid of them. I’m flattered by your handsome offer, but DeVry’s work is special to me and I can’t part with it for any price.

I’m very sorry about all this. He tells me you were so excited about the purchase. I’ll be in Phoenix later this year. If you’d like to discuss the purchase of my other collections, don’t hesitate to write.

Regards,

Aubrey S.

Headline from Aspenvale Post

Sept 3, 2015

Arts and Entertainment Section

North Hill residents gather at the museum today for the opening of a new exhibit honoring the life of Noelle Dumont, who committed suicide ten years ago.

The exhibit features eight paintings and a dozen photographs produced by Silven Pharmaceuticals owner Aubrey Silven and her husband, Brian Galloway, both who were close friends of Noelle. Richard and Laura Dumont commissioned the couple to produce the gallery.

All profits will be donated to the Aspenvale Sanctuary for Abused Children, a charity to which Noelle donated regularly.

“She donated several hundred dollars to it every year,” said Brian, Noelle’s would-be fiancé. “Sometimes she’d mine her pockets, her sock drawer, her couch cushions for nickels and pennies to give them.”

The reason for Noelle’s suicide has been the subject of much debate — a debate that has rekindled since the exhibit’s conception. Many still believe the cause to be Noelle’s abortion at age seventeen. The Dumonts refused to comment.

“The pro-lifers and the politicians wouldn’t shut up about her when it happened,” said Aubrey. “[expletive] pigs. They did the same thing to Cam DeVry when he died. People like to make examples of anyone who’s unusual. If you’re unusual, nobody cares about you unless you do something bad. We wanted people to remember Noelle for the sweet, wonderful, caring person that she was, not the suicidal baby killer everyone’s made her out to be. The self-righteous fundamentalist hicks in this town make me want to [expletive] puke.”

The exhibit opens at 10 A.M. and closes at 2 P.M. It will be available to the public from August 29th through September 12th. Admission is $10 for adults and $5 for children.

Aubrey's Memorandum

Third dream this month. I didn’t wake Brian this time at least. I have to get it out somehow before it drives me insane. And there's nobody else to tell it to but myself, that's the hell of it all.

It’s always the same! Cameron DeVry — he’s an amorphous pillar of disjointed blue triangles, but I know it’s him — strips me, throws me in chains, hangs me on the wall in the museum. He takes that horrible knife, slits me to the bone along my sides, stretches the flesh of my chest with metal hooks on chains suspended from the floor and ceiling. He stretches it into a bloody canvas, smiling as he does it. Somehow I don’t feel any pain. His entire gallery of demented creatures attends like it’s all part of a ceremony.

Cameron assembles his utensils, attacks me with his brush, slashing the paint across my body in Jack the Ripper strokes. The creatures look on with awestruck expressions (the ones with faces anyway). All the while I’m too scared to protest or even twitch. I pray that he’ll be satisfied with the result: that he won’t tear me down, rend me to little pieces like he does all his failures. At the end of the day he and his congregation leave me there, dangling in a silent, black, frigid void. When he’s gone I release all my terror in bursts of weeping and whimpering. Eventually he comes back, picks up his tools again, resumes painting. It goes on like that for days and days.

He finishes, steps back. The creatures marvel at the image on my chest. Some of them look me in the eye, lean to their neighbors, whisper and titter evilly. Then Cameron acknowledges me, gestures to his canvas as if asking my opinion as a critic. I don’t want to look. I always do.

He’s painted Noelle Dumont on my chest, in the distraught-and-clawing style of his "Portrait of the Artist". She’s a yawning abomination of white and yellow triangles, frozen in her final moment of terror. As I take in all the details she springs to life and starts screaming. She screams and sobs and claws at her side of the canvas surface.

Then I feel pain: a thousand razor blades carving through my insides. Hot blood fills my chest, my throat, my mouth and my nose until I can't breathe. I see the impression of Noelle’s fingernails rake down my chest again and again; blood forms on the surface, trickles down to my navel. She’s digging her way out of me. Cameron locks hands with her and he begins to pull her out, smiling ecstatically. Just before he succeeds I wake up, clutching my chest and crying.

Why has this damn dream assaulted me so many times? I don’t feel the slightest bit of guilt. Noelle and Cam were destined to be together, even after Cam’s death. Fate hit her with that car and put her in my care. Fate acted through me: it dropped the ball with Cam and couldn't reach it to pick it up without my help.

And I did help because she owed Cam, the fucking whore. That blubbering put-upon little vagina murdered him. She got herself knocked up, rolled all the responsibility into a lead weight, dropped it square on his head and crushed him. All to make her feel better about herself. Fucking whore. I can't begin to imagine what selfish cuntery she would've subjected Brian to if I'd let them marry. Brian's lucky I saved his ass from that eternal torment.

And hadn’t I enjoyed it? That miserable diary was a barrel of laughs! A dash of guilt and a few angel’s trumpet roofies and she's a one-way nonstop flight straight into suicidal mania! I knew she'd have a worse datura trip than I did when I tried it, especially with all the subliminal imagery, but holy hell!

I enjoyed it all right to the end! So why is my sleep haunted so many nights?

I've bottled it up too long, I guess. Can’t express it through art or people will know. Talking to someone is out of the question because who would I talk to? Brian? He’d leave me in a second. I’m lucky he didn’t know she kept a diary. The exhibit must have a hand in it, too. Cam didn’t haunt my dreams until we started that project for the Dumonts. Fuck me, this must be what Cam felt like every day of his life, with this poison rotting his insides and no way to let it out.

I can't talk about it to anyone because only two people in the whole world know what an evil, soulless cunt Noelle Dumont really was. Only two of us, and one of us is dead. Nobody else would believe. They think she was a fucking angel.

Here’s one more item to add to my little box of mementos. I’d like to keep them all. In hindsight, I probably shouldn’t.

That’s it! It’s the knowledge that that box exists — that big box of evidence! There’s no way around it. I’ve got to get rid of everything: letters, diary, everything. Then the bitch will be truly dead. Then I can sleep.

Do it this Friday when Brian’s at the game with Dad. Give them one last read before I light them up.

[heroinzero-blog]

Hey, I just discovered your blog and was wondering if you plan on posting narrated pastas from youtube too? I just started a channel and since I'm an absolute beginner I need feedback to improve my readings. If you're not interested, that's totally fine :) Thanks and I hope you have a nice day! :)

Hey there Jim! sorry for the late response, I’ve been quite busy with studying for the last months so my blogging time was really limited, but anyway, I’m planning on expanding upon the blogs subjects, I haven’t thought about narrated pastas, but I might consider it, care to share your youtube channel?-HZ

[heroinzero-blog]

Three Friends Diner

NOTE: Dear friends, I’ve been under quite a lot of pressure from school this past few months, my blogging and reading time was been drastically reduced because of this, however, in the following weeks school is going to end and I will be finally able to dedicate more time on the blog, I plan on writing a few of my own originals and also expanding upon the blog subjects, not limited to real and researched unexplainable phenomena, exploration of the dark side of the deep web, horror in history, horror entertainment/culture and gaming, the blog is going to be aiming more towards the coverage of real events rather than fictional oriented content in hopes to achieve an more lingering and terrifying experience for you readers, aside from that the blog is also going to be completely redesigned.

Thank you for your time! -G. Farias(HZ) (By NickyXX/Creepypasta Wiki) To:  Jeremy Fuentes, Ph.D

Professor of Cultural Anthropology

University of California, Berkeley

Jeremy –

I assume you have heard about the strange discovery made at 918 E. 3rd Street, a converted warehouse located on the corner of 3rd and Weller Avenue, in the middle of the Arts District in Downtown Los Angeles.

The building is currently undergoing renovations.  Three weeks ago, construction workers noted a foul odor wafting through the property, seemingly coming from behind what they thought was a solid brick wall.  Upon further investigation, however, it was discovered that the inside measurements of the property did not match up with the outside.  There was, in fact, a 25x30 space completely unaccounted for.  A secret room, so to speak; one inaccessible from any point inside the building or out.  It was located at the far end of the property, along the wall forming the west side of Weller.

With permission, the workers broke through the wall to access the otherwise-inaccessible area.  Immediately, they were floored by the overpowering stench of rotting meat.  Bandannas over their noses, they entered the enclosure.  They had expected to find an empty space – after all, the area had been walled off and un-penetrated for twenty years, at least.

Instead, they found a nice 16mm camera, smashed to bits.  They found film equipment, all destroyed – cracked lights, torn screens, c-stands folded like paperclips.  Cheap-looking framed paintings and kitschy prop menus scattered like confetti.  And three bodies.

Three decomposing bodies, in a state too disturbing for description.  Though the term “half-eaten” has been thrown around.

How the equipment, or the corpses, ended up there has yet to be determined.  The walls and roof were not disturbed at any point, nor was there any sign of tunneling under the four-foot concrete floor.

This bizarre discovery shocked the entire county.  As of now, no one can explain how three dead people and a bunch of film paraphernalia just appeared within a completely walled-off space.

But it was all the more shocking for me, personally, due to the contents of a handwritten account left for me by a former patient of mine.

Her name is Kathryn Soo.  She voluntarily checked herself into the Marsdale Psychiatric Hospital, where I am an on-call physician, several months ago, and was discharged shortly before the horrific discovery at 918 E. 3rd Street.  I am no longer in contact with the young woman.  However, I believe you will find her testimony – a transcript of which I have enclosed – very intriguing.

Sincerely,

Larry Schurr, M.D.

*****

Testimony of Katy Soo

1/5/2015, Marsdale Psychiatric Hospital

Just for the record, shooting Bella Cardone’s movie at the Three Friends Diner wasn’t my idea.  I told her it was probably a scam; that no restaurateur in Los Angeles with two brain cells to rub together would have possibly charged us so little for a location so photogenic.  Again and again, I insisted it just felt wrong.

I was right.  I used to like being right.

A little back story.

I’m Katy.  I’m 21 years old.  I used to be a junior at Cal State Northridge, studying business administration and film production.  I enjoyed the phone calls and the organizing and the paperwork-filling that most film students hate, and had built up a modest reputation as a pre-production guru amongst my classmates, as well as friends and acquaintances who attended other schools.

Bella Cardone was one of such acquaintances; a 29-year-old international student from Italy I’d met at a third-rate horror film festival.  She’d been employed at a television station in Rome doing… something, but dreamed of writing and directing Hollywood movies.  She was one of a dozen or so, mostly foreign, enrollees a year and a half into the two-year Master’s program at New York Film Academy; she was writing her thesis script at the time, and asked me for help organizing the production of the film.

Her script was about a starving artist working as a waitress, who gets dumped by her boyfriend and has an existential breakdown in which she imagines herself poisoning her customers and getting tortured, culminating with a series of flash cuts of her simultaneously slashing her wrists and drowning in the ocean.

Typical pretentious grad student fare.

We needed to lock down five locations: an apartment, a beach, a park, something that could function as a dungeon, and a restaurant.  The beach and the park were relatively easy, and a classmate of Bella’s agreed to let us use her North Hollywood apartment for two days.  Another classmate, a quiet little guy named Sandeep, discreetly told me about an S&M store with a basement dungeon they infrequently rented out for movie shoots.  I don’t know how he came to be so familiar with such an establishment, and I’m not sure I want to know, but it proved ideal for our purposes.  Which left the restaurant – a notoriously difficult one for student and independent filmmakers.

So when I found a little French place in Encino on Craigslist, got in touch with the manager, and played the “broke student” card so well he granted us use of his restaurant for a night for a little over $400, I was ready to sign the papers, get the permit, and move on.  It was two weeks before Bella’s scheduled first day of shooting, and I had a million other things to worry about – from liability insurance to catering to talking Northridge underclassmen into helping out as G&E crew and PA’s.

Bella, however, thought $400 for a night was too expensive, and remained convinced she could find a better deal.  So she went on Craigslist herself and placed a “restaurant wanted for student film” ad.  I’d put up a similar posting three weeks earlier (that’s how I found the French place in Encino), and Bella received the exact same responses from the exact same people as I had.

With one exception: an e-mail from gsjegjpdg@me.com, which she forwarded to me.  It read like this:

CLEAP LOCTN for filmn studnts!  Restarant in downtown Losangeles.  35 weller ave.  100 fr day. Rsp nd to this email, will send you key, pay on dt of filming.  MST b decmbr 3rd aftr noon.

I was suspicious immediately.  $100 for a day of filming seemed a little too good to be true.  Then there was the poor spelling and lack of contact information, and the fact that when I tried to respond to the e-mail, all I got was an error message.

And then there was the key.

The key turned up in Bella’s on-campus mailbox two days after the e-mail, enclosed in a stained brown envelope with no return address.  And if that wasn’t creepy enough, it came with a scrawled note – “key to 3 frends dinr.”

I was ready to call it a scam and be done with it.  But Bella thought we should at least go to the address given and talk to someone there.  If it was real, she argued, it was too good a deal to pass up.  Movies are expensive, and we were already pushing her budget.  So I agreed to go with her and Hamed Shirazi, the cinematographer, to 35 Weller Avenue.  Which, it turned out, was in the middle of the Arts District.

I have a love-hate relationship with the Arts District.

It’s a cool place to go and meet a friend at her new loft.  There’s some nice restaurants and amusing wall art, and the dissonance created by graffiti-coated trashcans, barbed wire, and long smelly lines outside the social services building sharing a block with yoga studios, BMWs, and boutique gift shops hawking 80-buck vintage baby sweaters is ironically poetic.  But the streets are one-way and parking is nonexistent.  I ended up driving in a triangle for fifteen minutes before finally giving up and pulling into a $10-flat-rate lot.

“Weller Avenue” wasn’t a street so much as it was a glorified driveway – a short, narrow alley that branched off of 3rd street and dead-ended.  A large, L-shaped building occupied the east and north sides of Weller.  It appeared to be a closed night-club in the process of being converted into an art gallery. The blacked-out windows were covered with torn, dirty stickers advertising shows long since played and bands long since broken up, and graffiti artists (the gang-affiliated kind, not the Arts Foundation kind) had had their way with both the seafoam-green walls and the ratty trash dumpster abandoned in the corner.

The dingy grey warehouse which functioned as the west side of Weller, 918 E. 3rd Street, looked completely unoccupied.  A sign hung in a window; the building had apparently been bought by East River Development.  I recognized the name – my realtor father knew some people who worked for that company.  They bought old commercial properties and converted them into trendy, pricey apartments.

The most prominent visual, however, was the mural painted on the north wall.  It depicted the head and chest of a woman, face tilted eastward.  The woman had tan skin, ruby-red lips, and flowing hair in varying shades of blue; periwinkle at the tips, darkening to deep lavender at her scalp.  Her eyes were closed.  In the background, some distance behind her, was what appeared to be an orange grove.  It was a beautiful painting, and strangely mesmerizing.  If you looked at the woman one way, she seemed young and innocent, sporting a demure grin.  Then, if you cocked your head or blinked, lines appeared on her cheeks and her lips rearranged themselves into a pouty sneer.

I saw only one door, leading into the grey building.

It was a very shabby door of splintery, untreated wood, with a brass doorknob and keyhole.  No business name.  No street number.  This couldn’t possibly be the restaurant from Craigslist – Three Friends Diner, I guess it was called.  How did anyone ever find the place?  I was still puzzling when Bella and Hamed found me.

“Bloody hell!” Hamed barked, in lieu of a greeting.  “Where’s the restaurant?”

“Here, according to my phone,” I said.  “I’m willing to bet money someone is fucking with us.”

Bella didn’t seem too concerned; her eyes were fixed on the mural.

“So pretty!” she exclaimed.  “Can we film?”

I shrugged.  “I’m not sure.  We might run into some copyright issues.  And it doesn’t look like we’re going to be filming here at all, since we’re not looking at a restaurant.”

Bella frowned at me, and took the key out of her purse.  She walked to the wooden door.

“Here?” she asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said.  “There’s no sign or anything.  I mean, you can try it, but I’m really doubting that key is going to fit into that…”

Bella turned the key and pulled at the knob.  With a creak, the door opened.  Hamed and I rushed to her and, together, we stepped inside.  I heard Hamed running his hand across the wall, and then the room was illuminated by a warm, golden light.

We found ourselves staring at Three Friends Diner.  It was perfect.

It was a larger space than I’d assumed it would be; rectangular-shaped, the kitchen jutting out from the north wall.  Behind the kitchen was a small corridor leading to the bathroom and a little room that could function as dry storage.  The walls were painted that particular shade of deep red that looks beautiful on film, and the tables and chairs and diner-style booths were a nice contrast in black and grey.  And each table was adorned with a salt and pepper shaker, an empty bottle of ketchup, and a vase of plastic lilies.

“Don’t get too excited yet,” I said to Hamed, who was examining one of the series of stained-glass lamps from which light was emanating.  “We don’t know how much juice you’ve got to work with.”

“That’s the beauty of it,” he said gleefully.  “I don’t even need that much juice.  If we come a bit early and switch out all these bulbs, I can use the lamps as practicals.  Plus, this place obviously isn’t open yet, which means I’m not sharing power with anything.”

He was right about that.  The freezers and refrigerators were empty and unplugged, the storage room was empty, and there wasn’t a plate or a cup or a scrap of food to be found.  It was definitely a new restaurant, the latest in the avalanche of trendy urban eateries that had sprung up in the last three years as the Arts District gentrified.  Of course it was hard to find.  That would lend an air of mystery to the diner; the impression of exclusivity, attract a Twitter following.

“I love it!” Bella announced.  “Can you get permit?”

I tried to talk her out of it.  Something about Three Friends Diner made me nervous, made the little hairs on the back of my neck stand up.  But it was exactly what Bella had been looking for, and Hamed had already started planning out shots, and the little hairs on the back of my neck didn’t stand a chance against cheap, gorgeous, and logistically ideal.  The restaurant wasn’t open yet, which meant we could shoot during the day, decorate how we wanted, and place the camera anywhere without worrying about being in anyone’s way.  And December 3rd – the date the mysterious proprietors had insisted on – was our scheduled 6th day of shooting.

“Don’t look under the horse you get,” Bella told me.

I think she meant “don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”

That saying is a reference to the Trojan Horse, given as a token of surrender by the Greeks during the Trojan War.  I don’t know why people keep repeating it.  Because if the Trojans had looked into that horse’s wooden mouth, the Illiad might have ended a little differently.

As I said before, I’d been forced to park in a ten-dollar lot.  And, as luck would have it, the attendant’s iPhone was malfunctioning, so I couldn’t pay with my card.  I had no cash; the attendant directed me to a convenience store on Alameda that apparently had an ATM.  It was getting dark, and I was not thrilled about having to run around downtown all alone.  A trendy neighborhood six blocks from Skid Row is still a trendy neighborhood, six blocks from Skid Row.

The convenience store stuck out like a gold tooth; a little scrap of what the neighborhood used to be, wedged between a café and a construction site.  A cracked neon sign branded it “Alameda Mart,” the ice cream fridge was stuffed with La Michoacana popsicles, and the cash register sat behind a pane of bulletproof glass.  I engaged in battle what must have been the slowest ATM known to man, and was so preoccupied with mentally cursing the “loading” screen that I failed to notice the sole other customer in the shop.

“Need to pay for parking?” he asked.

I turned.  The man standing behind me was obviously homeless – he wore grime-caked jeans and a stained military service jacket, and his leathery face demonstrated the dullness of days with no soap.

I nodded and smiled.

“You a tourist?”

I shook my head.  “Student filmmaker, actually.  My friend’s going to shoot at this restaurant on Weller.”

Immediately, I doubted the wisdom of sharing this piece of information.  I didn’t want him to show up and beg for change.  But his unshaven face fell, and his tone became one of alarm rather than anticipation.

“There’s no restaurant on Weller,” he murmured.  “There’s just Bessie.”

I giggled.  “Bessie?”

He nodded.  “That’s what folks ‘round here call her.  The old folks say she can change things.  Make things appear and dis’pear.”

He leaned in, narrowed his eyes, and dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper.

“If I was you, I’d stay away.  They say each twenty years, for one day, Bessie ‘comes corp’real and feeds.”

I was about to ask him to elaborate; to explain exactly who “Bessie” was and why I should be afraid.  But right then the shop proprietor noticed the homeless man, and yelled at him what I deduced were not nice words in Spanish.  He booked it and, by the time the ATM coughed up my cash and I was back on Alameda, he’d disappeared.

On the way to the car lot, I passed Weller.  The blue-haired girl was right where I’d left her.  Standing in front of a two-dimensional grove of trees in three-quarters profile, facing westward towards the door of the Three Friends Diner, eyes closed.  Was she “Bessie?”

Then, fear washed over me like a cold shower, and I ran.  I threw a twenty at the parking attendant and got out of there as fast as I could.  Something about that mural had scared the shit out of my subconscious.  Halfway to the 405 freeway, I figured it out.

She – Bessie – was facing the wrong way.

******

Bella’s first five days of filming went surprisingly well.  So well that, when I arrived at Three Friends Diner for the sixth and final day, December 3rd, I forgot I was scared of the place.

Crew call was one.  Hamed had already been there for an hour, switching out light bulbs and unloading equipment with Esteban the gaffer and two grips, Miguel and a new girl who said her name was Andrea.  Our grip truck was parked out front, partially obstructing my view of the mural.  But I could tell that Bessie was facing north-eastwards, towards the club-turned-gallery.  As she had been the first time I saw her.  Of course.  It had been dark that night, and I’d been scared and alone.  I’d seen things that weren’t really there.

I made my way through the obstacle course of lights and c-stands, set up my iPad at an unused table, and worked on the equipment drop-off schedule as crew members filtered in.  I heard Katia’s voice at least a minute before she and Bella walked through the door.  God, that chick was loud.  Bossy, too; no wonder she was such a good assistant director.  Then came Venna, the production designer, carrying a large box of prop-house framed pictures and the menus she’d designed.  Nairi, the 1st camera assistant, set up the Arri while her lackey du jour loaded film.  Then two more grips, Pete and Ryan.  Kaylee and Michelle, the freshman PAs.  Lisa, the script supervisor.  Dante, the sound guy.  And finally Ming, the make-up artist.

Then the actors came, and then Hamed and the guys were setting up lights for the master shot, and then Katia was calling for last looks, and then we were pushing in for close-ups.  The first four hours went as smoothly and productively as we had any right to expect and, for a short time, we entertained the possibility of finishing early.  We were an hour ahead of schedule when we broke for lunch, everyone talking and laughing and enjoying themselves.

That’s when things started getting weird.

Right after lunch, as we were picking ourselves up and resuming our work, one of the freshman PAs – Michelle – went to use the restroom.

A minute later, there was a bloodcurdling scream.

Ryan dropped a c-stand.  Nairi nearly dropped a lens.  Hamed and Esteban took frantic steps towards the bathrooms as Michelle sprinted down the hall back towards us.

“Who the fuck was in the storage cabinet?” she cried.

We all looked at each other.

“Seriously,” Michelle demanded.  “This isn’t funny.  You fucking knocked me over.”

“Michelle,” Katia asked, “what are you talking about?”

Michelle was trembling.  She looked ready to cry.

“I went to the bathroom,” she said.  “And I heard this… thumping coming from the storage cabinet that’s back there.   Someone was pounding on the door.”

“We didn’t hear anything,” Hamed said.

“Someone was, like, ramming against the door,” Michelle repeated.  “And so I opened it.  And someone ran right into me, then ran towards you guys.”

She sobbed.  Hamed narrowed his eyes.

“You sure, Michelle?” Hamed asked.  “Because we were all out here, and no one came running from the bathrooms.”

“He was wearing a black hoodie,” Michelle insisted.

I looked over the room to see if anyone was missing.  Nope.  Seventeen crew members, four actors.  None of whom were wearing a black hoodie.  All inside a restaurant with only one entrance.

“You didn’t see who it was?” I asked Michelle, rather stupidly.

“Obviously not!” she shouted.  “It happened really fast.  I just saw the black hoodie and really pale, really white skin.”

We couldn’t solve the mystery.  Michelle was really shaken up.  One of the grips, Miguel, offered to drive her back to Northridge.  He said he had to go, too, because he had afternoon classes.  But it was hard to miss the tremble in his voice or the dampness of his palms.  And suddenly Kaylee, the other PA, also had “classes” she’d forgotten to mention, and tagged along with them back to campus.

Three hours after that incident, we set up for our last shot in the dining area before moving to the kitchen.  Though we’d come to the unspoken agreement that Michelle was either looking for attention or smoking pot in the bathroom, everyone was a little bit on edge, and it had slowed us down.

To speed things up, I offered to help Venna dress the kitchen.  She’d brought cutting boards, utensils, bread, lunch meat, and enough restaurant necessities to make the empty kitchen look like a busy back-of-house.  At one point, she ran to her car to fetch some plates she’d bought from the 99 Cents Store.  I was arranging knives on a knife block.  I accidentally dropped one; it skidded across the floor and got stuck under one of the large industrial refrigerators.  I knelt down and reached under the refrigerator to grab it.  As I did, I heard a creak behind me – a door opening on stubborn hinges.

I straightened up and turned around, still on my knees.  A blast of cold air hit me in the face.  I was staring at an open freezer, ice caked against the back of the door and the walls.

There were bodies in the freezer.

Old, decomposing bodies.   Wrinkled, leathery skin peeling off yellowed bones.  Bones that were oddly compromised, shattered, pulverized.  Greenish mold clinging to the remains of brain matter cradled in cracked skulls.  The putrescent smell of rotting flesh.

I closed my eyes and screamed.  And screamed and screamed and screamed.

“Katy!  What the fuck, Katy!”  I heard Hamed’s voice, felt his hand on my arm, shaking me.

I opened my eyes.

The freezer was empty.  Empty and turned off.

I looked up to see Bella and Venna standing above me.  The rest of the crew was crowded around the kitchen entrance or staring through the window that separated the area from the dining room.

“Sorry guys,” I stammered, heart still racing.  “I… I thought I saw a rat.  Did I ruin the shot?”

Hamed shook his head.  “We’re done.  You sure you’re okay?”

I nodded.  “Um, can I talk to you and Bella and Katia outside?”

The three muttered in agreement, and we started across the dining area to the door as the rest of the crew set up the lights and camera in the kitchen.  I had to tell them.  We had to leave.  Now.  Someone… something… was trying to impress on us we weren’t welcome.

“I thought I saw… dead things in that freezer,” I started, quite pathetically.  “It was on, and it was cold, and there was this smell.”

Bella's eyes widened. Hamed cocked his head, frowning. Katia crossed her arms.

“I mean,” I continued, “I know it was just a hallucination.  But it felt so real, and I’m not schizophrenic, and the thing with Michelle and… I think we should leave.  There’s something really wrong going on here.”

I'd expected them to laugh at me, or treat me like a patient in a psych ward.  They did neither.

“Yeah, this place is starting to creep me out, too,” Hamed said.  “For starters, where are the bloody owners?  Who hands a stranger the key to their business?  Either they’re mental, or they’ve got some ulterior motive.”

He lowered his voice.  “And I’m getting these sensations.  Like, somebody’s watching us.”

Bella and Katia nodded. They’d felt it, too.

“We can find another restaurant,” I told Bella.  “All we need is the kitchen – we can easily cheat that, make it look like it’s the same place.”

“I’ll do whatever you want me to do,” Hamed said to her, “but I think we should consider packing up early.”

Bella looked at Katia, then Hamed, then me.  Her expression softened for a second, then she set her jaw.

“We wait one hour,” she said.  “No problems, we film.”

We decided not to tell the crew and the one remaining actress about the agreement we’d come to, out of fear that they’d panic, make a big deal out of what could have been nothing more than the effect of darkness on a big city.  But several of them were undeniably scared and looking for an excuse to leave.

As soon as the four of us walked back through the door, Nairi and the nameless 2nd AC walked out.  We were “too immature” for them, Nairi told Katia.  Dante, the sound guy, asked Bella if he could head out early, since we didn’t need any sync sound for the kitchen scene.  Two hours earlier, he’d been insisting on staying to get various kitchen sounds.  And when the lights were set and the blocking was rehearsed and last looks were called for, we found that Ming the makeup artist had quietly packed up her kit and left.

No big loss.  The actress was perfectly capable of applying the simple make-up design herself.  Pete, one of the grips, was fairly adept at pulling focus, and Hamed conscripted me to hold the slate.  And our agreed-upon hour had passed and nothing scary had happened.

Finally, Hamed flipped the camera on, and Bella called “action.”  The actress unenthusiastically smeared mayo onto bread, stacked lunch meat and lettuce, then smiled evilly.  She turned to grab the poisonous cleaning solution from under the sink…

And then the lights all went off.

Somewhere in the pitch-blackness, someone shrieked.  There was a bump, and a thud, and then the dining room lamps all came on.  Esteban had found the light switch.

“Someone ran by me!” Lisa cried.  “Who brushed against me?”

“It couldn’t be an outage,” Hamed said to one of the grips.  “The house lights work fine.”

“Seriously!” Lisa sobbed.  “Who the fuck pushed me?”

“Hey!”  Esteban yelled.  “Guys!”

We all pushed our way into the dining area.  The grip crew had plugged the five lights we were using for the kitchen scenes into five different electrical outlets amongst the tables.  The power cables were spread out, lying across the carpet like a spider web, so as not to draw too much electricity from any one spot.

Every cable had been severed.  Sliced down the middle; perfect, clean cuts, as though accomplished with a sharp knife.

“Who the fuck did that?” Katia snapped, trying and failing to disguise her distress.

Because she knew that all ten crew members had been in the kitchen.  And that no one person could have cut all five cables at exactly the same time.

“Everybody out!” Hamed demanded.  “Now!”

Nobody needed to be told twice.  We pushed through the wooden door and convened on the sidewalk, under the closed eyes of the blue-haired mural girl.  The Northridge students huddled together, Katia paced, Venna glared with her arms crossed, and Bella attempted to regain some control over her compromised film set.

“We cannot leave equipment,” she told anyone who bothered to listen.

“Forget this shit,” Venna sneered.  “I’m leaving.”

She stormed off.  The actress threw Bella a helpless look, mumbled “call me,” and started after Venna.  I looked to the four remaining Northridge underclassmen – Andrea, Lisa, Pete, and Ryan.

“Miguel was going to give us a ride,” Ryan said.

“I took the bus,” Lisa stammered.

“Take them home,” Hamed said to me.  “I’ll stay and help Bella pack up.”

“I can stay, too,” Katia said.

Esteban nodded at them.

“Okay, cool,” I said.  “I’ll come back and help you guys finish up after I drop them off.  Give me an hour or so.”

No one spoke the entire way back to campus.  The silence was punctuated only by Lisa’s occasional sob.  The two guys stared out their respective windows.  I left them outside the dorms, then turned my car around and headed back towards the 405.

I couldn’t wrap my head around what I had just experienced.  Some esoteric party had lured us to the Three Friends Diner, left a key with a group of complete strangers, demanded we film today – the third – then hadn’t even bothered to show up to collect the suspiciously unsubstantial amount they’d asked as payment.  Why?

To mess with us?  Were we on some kind of hidden camera show?  Was there a trapdoor or a second entrance we didn’t know about?  Maybe there’d been a projector hidden in the kitchen, creating the disturbing image of dead, decomposing corpses in the freezer.

But how to explain the smell?  Or the cold?  Or the hooded specter that had produced loud knocks on the storage room door that only Michelle could hear?

On to Explanation B – we’d become victims of the specter the homeless man had called “Bessie.”  She was a ghost, or a demon, and we were trespassers on her property.

Then why not start with the big stunt – the severed cables?  Why the systematic approach, scaring one person at a time?  And this poltergeist theory didn’t explain who’d led us to the Three Friends Diner, or why.

Led us there, to scare us away.

Three Friends Diner.

As I merged onto the 101, four minutes after midnight, I figured it out.

One hand on the wheel, I called Bella three times, then Hamed twice, then Katia, then Esteban.  Every single time, I was sent directly to voicemail.  I left messages for them – pleading, screaming messages, begging them to forget the equipment and run as far away from Three Friends Diner as their legs could carry them.  Then I called 911, and sobbed to the dispatcher that my friends were in grave danger, at 35 Weller Avenue.  She calmly assured me that help would be there in 10 minutes.

I got there first.

The streetlights up and down the block had, at some point, gone out, so I found my way to 35 Weller Avenue with only my phone and the moonlight to guide me.  The dim, bluish beam cast by my cell phone fell on the seafoam-green east wall, then the open and half-loaded grip truck, and finally on Hamed.  He lay crumpled on the asphalt, a pool of dark liquid expanding around him.

I ran to him, screaming his name over and over.  He didn’t respond.  I saw his chest rise and fall feebly as I knelt beside him, and felt a faint carotid pulse.  I rolled him onto his back.  There was a large cut on the side of his head; his hair was matted with blood.  His left arm hung at an odd angle.  But the most distressing injury he’d acquired, and the one responsible for most of the blood, was a series of five deep lacerations into his right bicep.  The muscle was torn, and shattered bone was visible through the mess of ribboned skin and ground-meat fatty tissue.

The positioning of the lacerations was consistent with the placement of five fingers, latched onto his upper arm.  Five fingers with very long, very sharp claws…

I tore off my jacket and tied it around his arm like a tourniquet.  My consciousness had kicked into overdrive; I operated on quick flashes of disconnected logic.  Something had attacked Hamed.  It was gone.  It was gone?  Bella.  Katia.  Esteban.  Where the fuck were they?

I stood up.  Help was on the way, and there wasn’t a whole lot I could do for Hamed until the paramedics got there.  But the rest of them were still in the Three Friends Diner, and if my suspicions were justified…

I ran to the door.

But the door wasn’t there.  I was staring at a grey, unbroken wall.

I dashed to the corner of the dead end, and then to the sidewalk, scouring the length of the wall with my phone.  I ran back and forth again and again, feeling the hard concrete with my fingers.  Nothing.  The one entrance to the Three Friends Diner was just… gone.

Then, the street lights came back on.  I took a step back, and my terrifying impression was confirmed.  I was on Weller, I was facing the right way, but there was no door.  In the distance, I thought I heard sirens.  I looked up at the mural - the pretty blue-haired girl with closed eyes, standing in front of a citrus grove.

She was gone, too.

In her place was a shriveled old woman, skin dotted with sickeningly-detailed moles and age spots.  Her hair was the filthy, stringy, disheveled mane of a homeless woman.  Her open mouth took up the entire length of her cheeks, showing off black, rotten, knifelike teeth, dripping blood.  A lot of blood.  Blood that ran down the seafoam-green wall like rainwater, pooling on the asphalt below.

Her eyes were open.

Her bloodshot, yellow eyes.  Her dilated pupils, flashing maniacally.  Those bulging, staring, impossibly-detailed eyes.  This was no spray paint.  Her eyes were real.  Then her foot-long pupils shifted, and I swore her fanged smile grew even wider.  She was looking at me.

This was Bessie.

I don’t remember the cops showing up, or the fire truck, or the paramedics.  I didn’t notice them lifting Hamed onto a gurney or loading him into an ambulance.  And I have no recollection of the back of the second ambulance, or the psych ER, or the questions I answered for the doctors, or the drugs.

They tell me I was crying and laughing at the same time.  And that I kept on repeating “she only wanted three.”

All I know is that I woke up twenty-three hours later, in the tiny detox room of the private mental hospital my parents had me transferred to.  I stayed there for the remaining 49 hours I was under 5150 hold, then went home to La Crescenta with my family.

The last I heard, Hamed had regained consciousness and could speak short words like “hi” or “yes.”  This is a good sign; the brain damage may be less severe than the doctors initially thought.  His memory’s shot, of course.  He can’t remember traveling to America, much less what transpired the night he sustained his injuries.  He was lucky, if such a word can possibly apply to his situation, that his left shoulder had taken the brunt of the impact when he hit the wall.  He’d cracked his head on the asphalt at a lower velocity.  The doctors aren’t quite sure what to make of him.  His wounds suggest something threw him, like a discarded Barbie doll, against the east wall of the club-turned-gallery.

I told the police everything – from the strange email and the key to the mural’s horrifying transformation.  Except the email had disappeared from both my computer and Bella’s, which had been confiscated by the police as evidence.  The key, too, had been misplaced and never found.  And the mural in the crime scene photos was the same mural it had been before that inexplicable night – the lovely profile of a blue-haired girl with closed eyes.

They were also confused when I referred to 35 Weller Street as a “diner.”  For no diner existed there, nor had ever at any time in the past.  35 Weller Street wasn’t even a real address – there had never been a side door to the building at 918 E. 3rd Street, and the building had been completely unoccupied for six months.  I insisted.  I described, in minute detail, the deep red walls and the untouched kitchen and the little vases of flowers on every table.  I begged the cops to look at the footage we’d shot.  But that would be impossible, I learned.

Our camera was missing.  As was half of our equipment, everything that hadn’t been loaded into the grip truck.  As was Bella Cardone.  And Esteban Serra, and Katia Milicevic.  The three had not been seen since the night I’d been found raving and Hamed, half-dead.  Their credit cards had not been used, their cars were still parked on the street in the Arts District, and their phones were all off.

The cops spoke to the other crew members – I hope they corroborated my story.  They designated Hamed’s assault an “animal attack,” and the disappearance of Bella, Esteban, and Katia as a “likely attempt at visa overstaying.”  They kept a lot of the details from the public.  I’m sure they didn’t want to explain how a mountain lion managed to grow an opposable thumb and pick up and throw a man, at 60 miles per hour, against a wall.

As for me, I’m now a voluntary inpatient at the Marsdale Psychiatric Hospital, undergoing treatment for PTSD and an unspecified mood disorder.  It’s okay here.  They let me smoke, and no one freaks out when I wake up screaming in the middle of the night.

Too late I understood the significance of the name – Three Friends Diner.  Three friends.  The homeless man was right.  “Bessie” is real.  She can make things appear and disappear – the key, the door, the diner.   She’s something inhuman and evil, something that demands sacrifice.  She lured us there.  She played her little games, chasing away a few crew members at a time, until she had a manageable number.  Then she tossed Hamed aside like a chicken bone and took her prize.

She only wanted three.  Three friends.  Bella, Katia, Esteban.

******

To:  Jeremy Fuentes, Ph.D

Professor of Cultural Anthropology

University of California, Berkeley

Jeremy –

As a postscript to my last letter, I should add that the three bodies found in the secret room of 918 3rd Street have been identified as the three missing foreign students – Bella Cardone, Katia Milicevic, and Esteban Serra.  The police are still at a loss as to how the unfortunate young people met their end, though evidence suggests they were mauled by an extremely large, extremely violent animal.

We have also learned that the building at 918 E. 3rd Street, which supposedly housed “Three Friends Diner,” was previously renovated in the early 1990’s.  According to building plans, the “secret room,” in which the bodies were found, was originally designed as a storage closet.  But the company later decided to seal the area off completely, likely after three overnight workers were found dead there.  Their deaths were attributed to an “explosion.”  An explosion that no one saw or heard, and one that did no structural damage.

The three workers were found dead on December 4th, 1994.  Which is intriguing, because the three students – Katy’s crew mates – were reported missing as of the early hours of December 4th, 2014.  According to Katy, the e-mail she received stated that the crew must film at “Three Friends Diner” on December 3rd, after noon.  A typical film day is 12 hours, putting their end time at shortly after midnight, December 4th.

I believe Katy’s homeless man said something about one day, every twenty years.

I looked through pictures in books, old copies of the LA Times, slides, news footage, etc.  I have included several of these for your perusal.  In every single one, since the warehouse at 918 E. 3rd Street first opened in 1920, the mural of the woman with blue hair is present.  No artist has ever taken credit for this mural.  And it’s always the same, never dulled by the rain or the sun or time.

Well, not exactly the same.

Sometimes the girl faces the west, and sometimes she faces east.

Sincerely,

Larry Schurr, MD

[heroinzero-blog]

The Harbinger Experiment

(Creepypasta.com/Zyon J)

The world we live in is full of things we don’t understand. Being the curious humans that we are, we naturally try and seek these things out. Doing so has led us to remarkable discoveries and inventions that we never could have imagined a hundred years ago. We have defeated disease, built to the sky itself and even created machines that could take us beyond the clouds and into the stars. If our ancestors could see us and what we have created, I’m sure many of them would see us as gods.

Our innate curiosity and lust for knowledge has not always led us to greatness, however. True evil and darkness have also been uncovered in humanity's conquest of knowledge. And in the end, I fear this evil will be our doom.

I do not say this from the standpoint of a great philosopher who has sat and simply pondered things either, no, I say this because I have seen it; experienced it. I was a part of it.

The event I am about to relay to you is true in its entirety, this I swear. I feel certain that this will fall on deaf ears and many of you will believe this to be just another spooky story meant to give you cheap thrills, but I promise you that this is neither my intent nor my purpose. The purpose of this story is to simply warn you of what lurks beyond the veil of what we can see and understand; to show you what awaits us in the darkness. Even if I myself don’t understand it.

What I am about to tell you has happened, and I feel certain it will happen again.

In 1971 a not-so-well-known scientist began preparations for an extremely secretive project known simply as “The Harbinger Experiment”. I would like to keep the identity of the scientist a secret for personal reasons, so throughout this recounting I will refer to him as “Zimmerman”. Zimmerman’s background is unclear at best beyond 1971. All that is known about him before that time is that he had grown up somewhere in Maryland with a strange fascination of the occult and supernatural. This later made him an outcast among his fellow scientists due to how scoffed upon the metaphysical was (and still is) at the time. Zimmerman’s opinions concerning the “other worldly” were not the sole cause for him being an outcast though; it was his methods that made him widely unaccepted among his peers. Zimmerman was well known during his time for being ruthless and cold beyond measure. He never cared about the means; all that mattered to him was results, and if he predicted the results to be valuable enough, anything would be worth obtaining them. It was this insatiable and brutal lust for the truth that made him feared among those that knew of him. And the few that knew of him and did not fear him believed in him and followed him and his work closely.

The word harbinger itself has such a mysterious and intimidating taste to it. Maybe it’s the way it rolls from our tongues or maybe it’s simply due to its association with the project, but the word always seems to carry a certain amount of doom with it. Which would make sense, the word itself means to warn or forebode. I can’t imagine Zimmerman’s reason for giving the experiment this title, but in retrospect, it fits perfectly.

Zimmerman came to a select few (me being one of them), he told us he was working on “something big” and that he needed people who could keep confidentiality and not spread idle gossip of his work. While he did not fully trust some of us, he did know that we were professionals and that for some reason or another, we were all in dire need of employment. I had worked at the local clinic as a doctor, but I was caught stealing medication and was promptly fired. This left a very dark mark on my resume, so work was hard to find. I was also a native to Alaska and lived near where the experiment would take place, so I guess you could say I was a convenient choice. As you can imagine, I jumped at the opportunity. It was hard not to when I saw the payout.

Fifteen of us were hired in total. Some were colleagues of his that has been working with him for a while, some were maintenance workers and a few were hired as “private security”. I was the only medical professional to be hired. It is still a wonder to me how he even attained the funds necessary for the experiment, I would not be wholly surprised if his financing was not entirely legal. But legal or not, I needed the money and he was paying. Looking back, it’s a decision I have come to regret.

After Zimmerman obtained his money, he used it to buy a relatively large plot of land deep in the frozen wilderness of Alaska. And upon that piece of land Zimmerman built a concrete structure, not dissimilar to a bunker in fact. The sole difference being that its goal was to keep any potential damage contained within the structure rather than keeping it out, as he put it. Most of the structure dug underneath the earth which had the effect of making the underground complex seem so much smaller than it really was from the outside, as would be expected. There was only one way of entering and leaving the underground structure, and it was via a ladder that led from a small unassuming concrete building on the surface (which I will refer to from now on as the entrance building for convenience) to the network below. After everyone had gone to bed at night, the hatch that contained the ladder would be sealed off with a very large and thick metal lid. Zimmerman was very strict about this. Located not too far away from the entrance building was a series of wooden cabins that would serve as the sleeping quarters for the staff Zimmerman had hired.

Compared to the entrance building standing on the surface, the underground system was massive. At the center of the complex was the control room. This is where all the facility's electronics and such were linked to, this included security cameras, lights and door controls. Consoles, monitors and computers lined the walls of this large central chamber. This is also where the ladder in the entrance building connected to in the underground complex.

Connected to the control room were three doors; one led to a smaller room that served as the infirmary, another door led to a break room and the last door led into the hallways. The hallways are where the complex began to feel extremely eerie. They were for some reason laid out in an extremely confusing scheme that led in circles and to complete dead ends. These hallways made up a vast majority of the complex and it would be very easy to get lost in the maze if you were unfamiliar with the complex.

But if you knew where you were going you would find yourself standing before one of three eight by eight foot rooms before long. Each room had a camera hooked up to one of the corners of the room and all three of those cameras were connected to a corresponding monitor in the control room. Cameras were also scattered throughout the hallways so that whoever was watching their corresponding monitor could see anywhere they wanted to when they wanted to.

Thick metal doors stood at the entrance to each of the three eight by eight foot rooms and in order to open them you would have to enter a four digit code into a panel located near the door.

I remember when I first arrived at the complex how badly the hallways frightened me. I have always been claustrophobic you see, and those hallways were so very narrow. The noise (or, more accurately, the lack of noise) was also a tremendous source of fear for me in those bleak, narrow hallways. It was always so unnaturally silent, as if the entire world had stopped moving. It really made you feel like you were trapped down there. Thankfully though, I only rarely ventured into those hallways for I was the only medical professional in the facility and I had virtually no reason to go into them.

In the beginning I found it so peculiar that Zimmerman would ask for a medical professional like me on a project like this but by the time it was all over, I understood why.

The official purpose of the Harbinger experiment was to test and observe the effects of extended isolation on the human mind. This is what was listed on reports being sent out at least. But unbeknownst to all those who were not participating in the project, excluding the subjects, the true purpose was much darker.

Like I said before, Zimmerman had always had an obsession with the occult and supernatural. He sought to prove himself to those who did not believe in him. He wanted physical proof that the supernatural was a real phenomenon, and he wanted to be the first one to attain said proof.

The true purpose of the Harbinger experiment was to find proof of the metaphysical; a world we could not see. The thought of doing this was naturally a tad bit daunting and even scary, but it was Zimmerman’s method of doing so that was truly terrifying. Zimmerman believed that he would be able to open a portal between worlds momentarily, allowing three random "entities" to cross over to our world, and each one these beings would be trapped within one of the three rooms.

Zimmerman had the theory that any “entity” would try and latch onto the nearest living thing that had the capacity for it. He wanted to use this “technique” to trap a spirit in a physical form by allowing it to enter a living being that had been injected with compound mixture of Zimmerman’s creation.

In theory, this compound would keep the entity from simply leaving whatever it was attached to; the only way it would be able to leave a host who had been injected with the compound was through death. According to Zimmerman, the host would have to be something living, with a will strong enough to survive the possession. And there is only one known species that possess the amount of will required for this; humans.

Zimmerman had also done something to ensure that the entities would only enter the three rooms and that there would only be one entity in each room, though I cannot say I know what exactly he did. In fact, I know next to nothing when it comes to how Zimmerman managed to do what he did. He liked to keep his methodology a secret to his most trusted colleagues, most likely due to his paranoia that someone would steal his ideas and take credit for the success of said ideas.

If I had known that this was the true purpose before I signed up, I may have reconsidered. But Zimmerman decided not to tell us until we were all gathered at his “fortress”. Even if any of us wanted to leave, I doubt we would have been allowed to do so. The security team Zimmerman had hired was loyal to him and the payout; it is not likely that Zimmerman had given them the order to now allow anyone to leave.

There were three different subjects included in the experiment, all were native to Alaska and each one was lured into the project under the belief that they would be participating in a harmless study of the effect of isolation on the human mind, as I mentioned before. Which is why none of the subjects objected when they realized that they would be confined to one of the three rooms that I mentioned earlier. The first subject was a young man; he was apparently out of work and desperately needed the money that had been offered for participating in the study. The second was a woman; by looking at her, I could tell she was an addict of some sort. The third and final subject was an older man, a drifter if I had to guess. One thing that they all had in common was that none of them had any family or friends left. In short, no one would miss them, which is why they were chosen for the project.

I am sorry, I wish I could supply more information about the subjects, but all of this has been drawn from memory and I was given little information on the three to begin with.

The experiment did not officially begin until 1987, 16 years after its original announcement. I was eager to begin, so I packed up and headed out to the complex as soon as I could. I arrived at the compound a week before the subjects had even signed up, and a whole month before the project even began.

I was not the first to arrive by any means. When I got there, Zimmerman, his colleagues and the security team had already arrived. I suppose you could say I was among the people Zimmerman did not trust to arrive first.

Everyone had arrived about a week before the experiment began. There was a noticeable rift between those who were there simply for the money (like me) and those who were followers of Zimmerman.

On October 15th, 1987, all the preparations were in place. The subjects had been sealed in their rooms, the cameras, lights and speakers were fully operational and all the staff members had settled in; the time had come for the experiment to officially begin.

Zimmerman asked everyone to report to the control room around 9 PM to witness the beginning of the experiment, he wanted everyone to be present when he proved that all his theories had been correct and that he was not just a madman; he wanted us all to see the fruits of his labor. When everyone had finally gathered in the large control room, Zimmerman turned to us and simply said, “Observe.” He then turned his back to us, leaned into the microphone that would project his voice through the three rooms and then he began chanting in a strange language that I feel certain no one but Zimmerman could understand.

We all observed the three large monitors on the wall, silently waiting for something to happen. The subjects all stood in their room, dumbstruck by Zimmerman’s chanting, staring at the monitors with confused expressions on their faces. After about five minutes, I felt something… Awful. I cannot explain what exactly it was, but a horrible feeling of dread washed over me, riddling me with fear. It was then that the ground actually began to shake subtly and the lights began to flicker. Zimmerman continued chanting into the microphone as if nothing was off or wrong while the subjects began dashing around their rooms, screaming for help. Then suddenly the ground stopped shaking and the monitor’s image turned into static.

The air began to become very heavy as we all stared at the monitors, waiting for them to regain their image and show us what was happening or had happened in those three rooms.

For a while all was silent, but then there was screaming. The screams of a woman going through unbearable pain and terror began to echo through the compound. The similar screams of men began to coincide with the woman’s terrified screams and together they mixed into an awful symphony of pain and fear that beat mercilessly into our ears.

Those of us who were here for the money began to give each other scared looks while those loyal to Zimmerman seemed completely unfazed. We wanted to leave and never come back to this awful place but we all knew deep down that Zimmerman would never allow that to happen. We were here for the long haul, there was no escape.

It was 10:13 PM when the screaming finally stopped; the monitors had yet to reveal to us what had occurred in those three rooms. As soon as the screaming ended, Zimmerman stood and dismissed us all for the night, adding that we were all forbidden to come back into the compound until 10:00 AM tomorrow morning, not like any of us wanted to. We all solemnly made our way out of the compound and towards the cabins and settled in for the night. I feel it is safe to say that not all of us slept well that night, and I was not one of them.

The following morning all of the staff had arrived at the entrance building. We all stood inside exchanging tired or nervous looks as we waited for Zimmerman to arrive and open the hatch that concealed the ladder. I could see palpable fear in the eyes of some of us, while others did not seem to have been even remotely affected by what happened last night. Zimmerman showed up five minutes after 10:00, apologizing for his tardiness as he came through the door of the entrance building. He opened the hatch and, without any hesitation, began descending the ladder downwards into the black abyss. He almost seemed enthusiastic.

I was the first to follow behind Zimmerman’s dark descent into the facility. It seemed that the farther I climbed down, the more the darkness closed in on me, as if it was trying to swallow me whole. And as I climbed deeper I couldn’t help but feel that this place was… different somehow. While before there was only the unsettling concrete hallways and rooms, now there was something else… Something made the eeriness feel so real and personified. I felt like a horrible and gruesome scene awaited us down there, but I continued climbing downward, despite my fear and my hesitation. This was no longer just a spooky bunker, there was darkness and malevolence in the air, a true evil now lived here, and I could feel it. We all could.

I finally felt my foot touch ground and let out a silent sigh of relief to be on solid ground. Almost as if on cue, the light bulbs came alive, dousing the room in their warm and welcome light. Zimmerman must have turned on the power, I thought. I allowed myself to take a couple seconds to examine the control room. It was exactly as we had left it last night, for which I gave a silent and thankful prayer. It was almost as if nothing unusual had ever happened. I shook myself from my thoughts as I remembered the static filled monitors from the night before. I let my eyes slowly make their way towards the monitors on the wall, anticipating the grim and fearful scenes that would be on them.

My attention was first grabbed by monitor one and three, which were still pure static. It would have been a small relief, but then the motionless image on monitor two caught my eye. Room two was entirely still and everything seemed entirely untouched. I couldn’t help but gasp as I noticed the only thing that was different; the woman lay in the center of the small concrete room, an expression of fear and terror was frozen into her gaunt face as she lay silent and lifeless on her back.

Zimmerman's expression turned angry when he saw this, he ordered that second monitor be turned off, and it was. We didn’t ask why, it’s not like any of us wanted to see the dreadful scene any longer. He also ordered that if the images in monitors one and three did not return within the next two hours, the security team would be sent to investigate the rooms. The security team nodded at hearing this. They made it seem as if they had no fear, but I could see it in their eyes.

The subtly loud tick tock of the clock was the only sound that echoed through the control room while I stared at the monitors. An hour and fifty minutes had gone by, and static was still all that occupied monitor one and three. All of the other staff members were working except me, this was due to the fact that the project had been completely injury free thus far, so I essentially had nothing to do but wait for someone to hurt themselves.

Zimmerman, a couple of his colleagues and I were the only ones that occupied the room. They quietly chatted amongst each other on the other side of the room while I spent my time reading and pondering the situation I currently found myself in. I had clearly made a mistake coming here, the corpse lying in room two was evidence enough of this. And God only knew what awaited us in rooms one and three.

My thoughts were soon interrupted as monitor three’s image returned.

The clear image now displayed on the screen made everyone’s eyes noticeably widen. What was displayed on the monitor was… horrifying. A humanoid… thing stood in the center of the room staring directly at the camera, unmoving. It was wearing the jumpsuit that subject three had been issued, but this clearly was not the same man that had entered the room. What caught my attention first was its eyes. They were solid black and twice the size of normal human eyes; they seemed so… so endless and so cold. Its head had also grown with the eyes in such a symmetrical and unsettling manner. The being had also shed all of the hair it once had and even from the monitor I could see how unnaturally smooth and clear its skin was. It had also seemingly grown in height and stature, which could be seen in the fact that the jumpsuit was now obviously far too small for its wearer. Its limbs had grown especially long; its arms hung almost as low as the creature’s knees.

What we were looking at was in no way the same man we had sent inside.

Fear; fear was all I felt as I continued to stare into the monitor at the thing in the room. And my fear seemed to be shared by those around me, which made me feel kind of good. It may sound awful, but it was a bit satisfying to see that Zimmerman and his colleagues could feel fear too. But at the same time it was worrying because this showed that this was not part of Zimmerman’s “plan”. Something had gone wrong.

We all stared into the monitor at the thing despite our fear; it was almost as if we were in a trance. My already present fear began to grow and spread rapidly through my body as I became lost in the creature's eyes, trapped in its terrifyingly hypnotic gaze.

After what felt like forever, I managed to break eye contact with the creature and divert my attention from the monitor, and when I did so, I felt my fear levels drop considerably.

After a short while, Zimmerman ordered his security team to make their way to subject one's door just as he said he would do. The security team left without question, armed only with batons and pistols.

I focused my attention on watching the men progress through the hallways towards subject one's room via the cameras. Even through the not-so-high-quality cameras, it wasn’t hard to tell that these men were afraid of what awaited them. Their heads were downcast as they walked; they did not possess the same confidence within them that they did when this project began. They looked like scared boys being sent off to a terrible war.

Eventually, they made it to the door. We had perfect vision of them and the door via the hallway camera. One of them said something through one of their walkie-talkies and made a motion towards the camera, in response one of Zimmerman’s colleagues buzzed the door open. The men already had their pistols out by the time the button was pushed.

Slowly, the door began to open. We all watched eagerly as the men began to approach the door, guns aimed inside. Suddenly and without warning, there was a loud shriek. And as something bounded out of the room at the men, the monitor turned into static. Immediately, we could hear screaming echoing down the hallways followed shortly after by the distinct sound of gunshots.

We could do nothing but wait. After a couple minutes, the screaming and gunshots stopped. We all waited and prayed, hoping that whatever bounded at them from the room would not be the one to return to the control room.

After a couple more minutes, three of the men came back, carrying with them the corpse of the fourth. He had massive cuts covering his chest, and his face was shredded; you couldn’t even tell who he was anymore or even that he was human. I was used to gore, being a doctor and all, so I felt somewhat unfazed by the mass of shredded flesh and bloodied meat they carried with them. But many of the others went pale and vomited. The security team all wore emotionless expressions and eyes filled with terror. One of the men finally looked up at us; he stared at us for a while with those wide eyes of his. “It’s dead,” he finally managed to mutter in a shaken and scared voice.

A couple hours went by. The dead man’s name was Frank; he was buried outside in the cold, Alaskan ground. Two of the men were unharmed, physically at least. The third was alive, but only barely. His body was covered in bloody slashes and one of his eyes had been gouged out. I managed to stabilize him, but only just. The other two men vaguely explained what happened. Apparently, subject one leaped out at Frank after the door had opened; only it wasn’t really subject one anymore. According to them, it had a hideously contorted face and long sharp claws.

They claim to have shot it over a dozen times before it fell dead, and then they emptied another dozen bullets into it just to be sure it was really dead.

Only once it was dead did they come back.

After tending to the wounded man, I went to investigate the monitors. As afraid as I was of seeing what those monitors may have held, I needed to see. Subject three was the only one left now and I needed to see it and make sure the creature was still in his room. It seemed to be more like a jail cell than an ordinary room at this point though, which was probably a good thing.

The cameras displaying subject one's room and the hallway outside it still displayed a static filled screen. No one was sent to repair them or investigate; we just had to hope that subject one was well and truly dead.

Monitor three’s image was exactly the same as I had left it; subject three was still staring directly into the camera at us. He was still in the exact same position and if it were not for the small fan in the corner of the room, I would think I was looking at a still image. In a way, I felt relief at seeing this; relief that he was still in his room and had not escaped while no one was looking.

After everything quieted down, I noticed something especially unusual. There was a… strange sound emanating from somewhere. At first, it was barely noticeable. The only reason I heard it was because of how extremely quiet it was in the infirmary. But as time went by, it slowly began to increase in volume. After about an hour, it was loud enough that everyone else could hear it too. And after a couple more hours its volume had increased so much that we could determine what the noise was. It was a song; one of the staff members identified it as “Living in the Sunlight” by Tiny Tim. Apparently, his father loved the song and listened to it frequently. The song seemed to be on a loop and kept replaying itself. Although we were able to identify the noise, we remained unable to identify its source. We knew that it wasn’t coming from the speakers because we had turned them off, it seemed to be emitting from the walls themselves.

More time ticked by as we all began to become increasingly agitated by the song; I spent most of my time in the infirmary attending to Frank or in the control room. Fear hung in the air and the presence of unmistakable darkness and evil was no doubt its source. Subject three still had not moved; he had kept his unblinking gaze fixed on the camera the entire time. It always felt like he was staring directly at me, no matter where I was in the room. I think this effect was also felt by others due to the fact that they seemed to move around the room a lot and for seemingly no reason.

After a few hours, the song was so loud that people almost had to shout in order to communicate. We had been trying to find its source so that we could turn the song off, but it was to no avail; the source was completely unidentifiable. This added a level of extreme irritation to our already very present fear.

It was around 8:30 that the ground itself began to shake once again; just as it had done the previous night. Panic began to spread among my fellow employees and me as the shaking grew in intensity.

During this, I had the sudden instinctual feeling to look over at subject three’s monitor. It was gone. Almost as if on cue, the power went out. And thankfully, the song did as well.

Ever since the security team came back, panic had been slowly building up among the staff, and Zimmerman was powerless to stop it. When those lights went out, the calm projections that everyone had been trying to maintain left us and the fear in all our hearts took over.

The emergency backup lights kicked on shortly after the power went out, which I gave a silent thankful prayer for. The lights were dim, but they still allowed me to see a lot.

Total panic seized us as many of my fellow staff members began screaming and rushing to the ladder in an attempt to escape. But too many were trying to use it at once and no one was able to get very far on the ladder without someone else pulling them to the floor and taking their place. Zimmerman was shouting for everyone to calm down, but his dominating and intimidating personality had no effect here, and his demands fell upon deaf ears. It was total chaos. It wasn’t long until people actually started hurting each other in their desperate attempts to get up that ladder and out of this place; I could only stand against the wall and wait for my opportunity to escape up the ladder.

All the screams were soon silenced as the familiar hum of that unsettling song began to rise in volume again, only much quicker this time. And this time, it was clear that the noise was coming directly from the maze-like corridors. People stopped fighting and shouting as all our attention shifted to the door that led into the hallways.

The song quickly got louder than it had ever been before which forced many of us to cup our ears with our hands in an attempt to silence the noise. Then, suddenly, the song just completely stopped.

Silence. That was all that filled the room as we all stared at the thick metal door in anticipation for what was coming. It felt like ages had gone by, but in reality it was probably only seconds before the silence was broken.

The door suddenly and violently burst open and the music started again, louder than it had ever been before. The suddenness and the volume of this caused many of us to recoil by falling to the ground and grabbing our ears in an attempt to block out the noise. I glanced up for just a second and in the doorway stood a tall, smooth skinned figure with long limbs and eyes so dark and malevolent that you could clearly see them in the dim lighting.

After I got my bearings, I looked upwards at the creature once again just in time to see the thing pick up and rip Zimmerman in half in one fluid movement, dousing the room and everyone in it with his blood, intestines and organs. I was no stranger to gore, but the sight of that was too much for me to bear: I hunched over immediately after seeing this and vomited all over the cold cement floor.

That ladder is my only hope of survival… I thought to myself as I forced myself to a standing position. And as my eyes rose along with the rest of me, I could see the thing ripping and tearing through the people as they scattered in attempt to escape it. It was distracted, and as awful as it sounds, this was my only chance to get up that ladder. I forced my legs to move towards the ladder, trying to block out the terrified screams of my fellow staff members and the unbearably loud music. I could hear gunshots coinciding with the screams and terrible sounds of flesh being ripped apart somewhere in the mess of noise. I reached my hands outwards and felt a wave of relief wash over me as my fingers came into contact with the hard metal rungs of the ladder. I gripped them and began to climb upwards as quickly as I could in my disoriented state, all the while praying that the monster would not see me and pull me off the ladder and back into the slaughter.

It felt like at any moment I would feel one of its smooth hands wrap around my ankles and pull me to my death, but I eventually made it to the top. There was no question in my mind, I had to close the hatch and seal that thing down there; even if it meant certain death for my colleagues. I could not allow that thing to escape. I gripped the thick metal lid and began to push with all my might in an attempt to seal the underground complex off.

Despite how dense and sturdy it was, the lid was surprisingly easy to move and did not take very much effort to push it over the hatch, even in my weakened state. In seconds, the hatch was completely covered by the dense metal lid.

I collapsed on my side and began to vomit some more as exhaustion overtook me. And as I lay there, I realized something; aside from my labored breaths, the only thing I could hear was the faint echo of that song from down below.

I felt as though I would lose more of my sanity if I continued to lay there and listen to that song, so I once again forced myself to my feet and began to make my way to the wooden lodge I had stayed in the previous night. It was where I had left my baggage and also where I had left the keys to my truck.

Of the fifteen staff members that took part in that forsaken experiment, I am the only one who survived. I have never returned to the awful place where all of this happened, and I don’t intend to. The project was very secretive and Zimmerman was the only one who knew all the details of it. And, as far as I know, no one is aware of my involvement aside from me. In fact, I am probably the only one who knows what the Harbinger experiment truly was, let alone what actually happened.

By now, you are probably wondering why I have told all of you about something none of you should be aware of. Maybe you’re expecting me to give you a speech about not messing with things you don’t understand or something along those lines. I hope not, for I have no speech to give or lesson to impart.

I began hearing a noise earlier today. Almost immediately I recognized the noise as a very haunting and familiar song. I didn’t even try to trace it to its source; I knew it would be pointless. And as the day has progressed, the song has increased in volume. It’s loud enough now that I can very clearly make out the lyrics. I am completely unable to escape Tiny Tim’s voice; it has followed me everywhere I have gone.

Subject three is coming for me, and I know my time left in this world is extremely limited now.

I guess you could say that I just wanted to tell the tale of the Harbinger experiment before it was lost forever. I hope that you will take some lesson from what I have recounted to you, but I think we both know you won’t.

Let’s be honest, you don’t believe a word of what I’ve just told you. And I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t believe me if I were you.

To you, this is nothing more than something to get your cheap thrills from. You were probably mindlessly surfing the internet when you clicked a link and found yourself here, wherever here may be, reading this story.

And to be honest, I don’t care if you believe me or not.

Even if you do, it probably won’t stop you from trying to uncover the truth of a darkness that few of us have ever seen. It certainly never stopped Zimmerman. If you want a lesson, look at what happened to him when he went seeking the truth.

I pray that none of you will ever discover this truth; I pray that none of you ever have to see the evil I have seen. I hope you all get to live in ignorance of what lies beyond the veil of what we can understand.

It’s here now. I can feel its black eyes burning into me just as I could all those years ago.

I am as much to blame as Zimmerman is for the monstrosity that is now free to roam the world, even if I was not the one to create it.

I’m sorry.

Please forgive me.

[heroinzero-blog]

The Long List

(By HumboldtLycanthrope/Creepypasta Wiki)

When Melissa was fourteen years old, her father sold her to a crank cook named Diesel for two pounds of crystal meth and a broke-down Trans Am. Diesel kept her chained to a rusty woodstove during the day with a mason jar of water and a box of Cheerios, while he worked in the lab back behind the trailer, breaking Sudafed and Ephedrine tablets down into glass-like shards of amphetamine. In the evening, Diesel would swing open the door, the cat-piss stench of burning chemicals wafting into the tiny trailer, and unchain her so she could make him meals, wash dishes and mop. At night, as the bullfrogs began to bark and the crickets chirped, she would press her fist into her mouth, trying to stifle her cries of pain as he lay upon her, his rank smell of sweat and chemicals overwhelming her.

Two months later a couple of Boy Scouts found her naked corpse in a drainage ditch in a patch of woods outside of Eureka, California: a pale tangle of limbs sticking out of the trash and sewage of the dirty culvert. Though the case officially went to Homicide Detective MacClenny, Detective Standler had been at the crime scene assisting. Standler had helped take her by the arms and pull her remains from the rank sewer water and debris. As her body rose up from the muck, her head had lolled to the side and her wide, staring eyes had looked straight at him. For a moment, Standler thought he saw a flicker of life register in them, though her gray, bloated face clearly revealed she was long, long dead.

Detective Standler (now ex-detective Standler, suspended, out on bail, and awaiting trial for manslaughter) settled deeper into the seat of his car. He was parked in front of the police chief’s suburban home, waiting for the fat fuck to arrive home from work. He sipped from a pint of Wild Turkey, washed it down with a warm Budweiser, and thought to himself, someone who could do something like that to a fourteen year old girl, how can you let someone like that live? Who would possibly miss them? Who could possibly care?

And no one had. Nobody missed that piece of shit Diesel. Two weeks paid administrative leave was what Standler had gotten after he emptied his service revolver into the sick degenerate’s face.

It had been a big bust: the lab, kilos of meth, and an arsenal of weapons. Everyone in the department was happy, and all he had gotten was two weeks paid leave and a wild party at The Alibi, thrown by the other detectives and a gaggle of uniformed officers.

When the inquest asked him why he had gone out there, outside his jurisdiction, to that backwoods no-man’s land, he had simply replied he was following up on a lead from an informant.

What was he going to say? That a ghost had told him where to look? That the little dead girl had come back from the grave and told him? That in the dark, predawn hours, that twilight time between sick drunk and excruciatingly hung-over, he would awake, lacquered in sweat, his wife snoring loudly beside him, the room spinning, his heart threatening to break free from his chest, and there she would be: a frail, little girl, at the foot of his bed, her stick figure limbs draped in a white nightie, its hemline stained in dark, crimson streaks?

The first time he had seen her he had screamed, horrified, the raspy noise of his own startled voice burning his dry mouth and throat. His wife awoke and shot straight up in bed.

“What is it? What is it?”

Standler blinked his alcohol swollen eyes. Only darkness. The girl was gone. There was nothing.

“Nothing, honey. It was nothing. Just go back to sleep. I just had a nightmare.”

“Kay, honey.” His wife had rolled back over and immediately began snoring again. He lay there till the room grew pale in the morning light, his flesh tingling, wondering what he had seen, if he was going insane.

The next time the little girl had appeared he was calmer.

He blinked twice quickly, expecting her ghostly form to disappear like last time. But she didn’t disappear. She remained there, looking down at him with her cold eyes, sunken deep in their dark sockets. He stared in disbelief. Was it real? Could this pale figure possibly be real? That’s when she had stepped up to him, quickly, and her blue lips parted and she began to speak, to tell him things in a whisper. He thought he could smell the grave on her breath as she murmured in his ear about the night her father had sold her to Diesel.

It had been a dark night, deep in the backwoods of Southern Humboldt. Past the mountains of Alder Point and Blocksburgh, in a place that didn’t even have a name, near Zinnia, on the Trinity border, where it snowed in the winter and the cold mornings found the hills hardened in ice. The sky was black and it was pouring rain. Her father had been drunk and handled her roughly, pulling her by the arm through the muddy front yard. She was terrified, and devastated that her daddy’s big Danner logging boots were splashing mud up all over her dress. Her mother had been dead less than three weeks.

Her father had shoved her roughly through the front door of Diesel’s trailer.

“She’s all fucking yours,” her father had spat at the old, bearded man in greasy overalls.

Diesel had shuffled forward and took her cheeks into his grizzled, calloused hand, squeezing her face tightly, moving her head back and forth for inspection.

“Oh, she’s a pretty one.”

“If you say so,” her father said. “She’s got that weird eye and those fucked-up teeth. But she can cook real good, and clean. She’s damn handy with a broom.”

“Oh, yes,” the old man chuckled, handing over the sealed bundles of meth-amphetamine. “She’ll do. She’ll do nicely.”

And two months later she was dead and abandoned like so much trash.

The sick fucks. How could he have let them live? And no one missed Diesel. No one mourned him. They had thrown Standler a party. He had been a hero.

That time.

The second time was different. That one had gotten him suspended, most likely fired. No pension. No 401K. He might even see some time for that one.

Standler sipped his whiskey, reached down between his legs and lifted up the Beretta. An old pistol, his father had given it to him, long ago. He cradled the heavy, cold weight of the gun, waiting for his old boss, that fat fuck, to arrive back at his nice suburban home. Maybe his wife would find him dead on their well-manicured front lawn, maybe one of his teenage kids. Oh well, to have a sick fuck like that for a father: just desserts.

It was a warm night and he had the window down, the whine of passing trucks on 101 softly humming in his ears.

He thought of Hamlet.

He had taken a Shakespeare class back in college when he was studying criminal law, still entertaining the idea of going on to law school and becoming an attorney, before Charlotte got pregnant and he quit school and joined the force so he could start making money for his new family, only to have her give birth to a stillborn boy seven months later, never to conceive again.

Hamlet. That tale of the haunted Danish prince had always stuck with him. Standing atop the castle parapet, the ghost of his father crying out for him to avenge his savage murder.

Ghost: My hour is almost come when I to sulph’rous and tormenting flames must render up myself.

Standler always wondered: was Hamlet insane? But no, that would mean they were all insane. Horatio, Marcellus, Barnardo, they had all seen it. They couldn’t all be insane. It had to be true. The ghost had to be real.

The second time the little girl told Standler to kill, things hadn’t worked out like they had with Diesel.

My father, she had whispered. Kill him.

And how couldn’t he? Anyone who would do something as sick as sell their own daughter surely deserved to die. She described his car, where he would be, the pound of meth Standler would find in the trunk, the Glock he always kept under his seat.

Standler had waited at the Red Lion Hotel on Broadway, right where the little girl had told him to, and just like clockwork the car had rolled right into the parking lot. Standler had been amused at the look of surprise on the man’s face when he strolled up with his .38 leveled right at eye level, squeezing a round off before the jerk even had a chance to utter a word.

But there was no meth in the trunk, no gun under the seat, and it ended up it wasn’t her father at all. At least that’s what the investigators said. They claimed it was just some business man from Santa Rosa.

But when Melissa appeared before him the next night, shimmering and ghastly in the moonlight, she told him, no, it had been her father. They were lying. All of them. Lying liars, the little girl had whispered to him with her pale, blue lips and graveyard breath. They had tried to hide it. It was a conspiracy and they had fired him because the police chief was in on it.

That’s why the police chief was next. He had to go. That’s why Standler sat in his car outside his house, a pistol cradled in his hands. He had to kill his old boss. Off that meth dealing, slave keeping, degenerate son of a bitch.

And there were more.

There are many of them, the frail ghost had murmured.

His wife was one of them. She had made the list. She was a cheating meth-whore, fucking the whole department for crank. The little girl had told him all about it, late at night, moments before the morning, when the earth swelled silent and cold and his heart beat so it threatened to leave his chest.

Yes, there were many of them. A whole list. And it was a long list.

[heroinzero-blog]

Journal Entries (Found on a blog)

(Creepypasta Wiki/Posted by EmpyrealInvective/Original Blog)

My brother was a whopping eleven years older than me, so I don't remember much of when he was still living with us during his college years. I was only thirteen when he moved out. But he was always weird. His self-professed hobby was to watch people. I remember there were times when he would pick me up from school, and, as we drove home in the afternoon sunlight, we would see something like a group of children walking home in their uniforms, and those little mundane scenes--old ladies feeding birds, shops closing down for the day--were heartbreaking to him. He took pictures of seemingly innocuous things. He was very nostalgic about things that had never happened to him.

I distinctly remember that on a weekly basis he would sit in a corner of his cramped room and scribble into an old notebook that he used for school. Sometimes I would ask him what he was drawing or writing. He would of course tell me to leave. He kept it well-hidden when he wasn't writing, because several times during my childhood I looked for it while he wasn't home, and never found it.

I don't remember a whole lot else about my brother. He mostly kept to himself, but was willing to oblige when I asked him to play video games or something with me. He wasn't very much for sports, and he had a small but recurring circle of friends. They were generally as weird as him and Mom didn't like them around the house. But he didn't seem lonely or hurt, he got good marks and generally he appeared satisfied with his life. He was the opposite of my sister (seven years older than me), who has always been socially adaptable, self-confident and outgoing.

Whenever my brother went out, it was either to take pictures of the seedier parts of the city, or heading straight to a friend's house, probably to listen to music. He was big on music, especially anything that used "found sound", i.e. recordings picked up from somewhere else.

My brother died in a car crash last year. We have made our peace with it by now. My parents decided to keep his room as it was when he left. But I haven't been able to contain myself. For years the mystery of the notebook had settled in the far back of my mind, but months after his death it resurfaced. I needed to find it.

I scoured his room again. I checked under and inside everything, with meticulous care to make sure my parents didn't notice I had been moving things around. And finally, by sheer luck, I came across a loose floorboard under where his bed used to be.

It was a clever hiding spot, and I never would have found it as a child. I pried the board loose with anxious expectation, hoping that this was, at last, where I would find the notebook. And I was right.

My brother kept loose documentation of his feverish scribblings. By now, time, humidity and insects had taken their toll on his writings, but most of it was entirely legible. It was kept in a pile of unassuming school notebooks, lined paper, ring-bound, bland black covers. There are marks on the cover that indicate that they were once covered with something, possibly labeled, but those aren't there anymore.

For the past four or so hours I have been poring over my brother's lost oeuvre with unbroken interest. What he wrote (and occasionally drew) there is of extremely varied nature. It includes lists of people he "loves", but these are populated with people like "7:30am cleaning lady, ____ Av. ____ Hotel, wears pink ribbon" or "kindly old doorman from childhood house". These are people who, I assume, he only knew via his personal brand of nostalgic voyeurism.

There are also interviews with people from the city about varied subjects. My brother would sometimes do this; he would pretend to be a Communications or Journalism major of some sort and interview strangers on the street about various things. Many of the interviews are recorded here.

And then there are also personal (or sometimes impersonal, stated as if they were fact) accounts of strange things that go on in the city, written as if they were the most mundane things in the world. Yet they are anything but. Sometimes his friends pop up in these writings.

I am transcribing these as I go, so you'll have to forgive me if I go slowly. I don't have a scanner at hand to show you the writings directly; and my brother's handwriting is undecipherable chicken-scratch to anyone not familiar with it, anyway.

Just to be on the safe side, I will replace all street names, locales, and people's name, etc. with pseudonyms or blanks.

A few other notes: I have not gotten in contact with any of my brother's friends ever since his passing, though all of them came to his funeral and were very supportive throughout. Naturally they are all much older than me and we don't have many shared interests.

Given the close nature of my brother and his friends, it's entirely possible that some of what was written here is not his own, but his friends', and that this was their collective project of sorts. This is substantiated by two facts: first, the writing style changes considerably between documents. Sometimes it's like my brother's (clinical, distant), and other times it's unlike him (flowery prose, or liberal use of slang).

And also, there is no guarantee that everything--or anything--documented here actually transpired. It may have been an elaborate exercise in fiction. My brother read a lot of it. He was especially fond of authors like Borges, who have an almost mathematical grasp on fiction, and others like Cortázar, who are fond of letting it intermingle with reality.

Finally, I should mention that both my brother and my native language is not English, and these notebooks are not written in English, either. So I have the double task of transcribing and translating here. If any of the following prose seems awkward, that may not necessarily be my brother's fault.

Some of what is here is not written, but was typed out and printed, then pasted into the notebooks with tape or glue (and most of it is falling apart), lending credibility to the theory that my brother's friends participated in this project, or whatever it was supposed to be.

I suppose that's more than enough preamble. I will now post excerpts from my brother's notebooks. There are five of them in total, of varying size. The third is by far the largest; the other four seem like additions or further explorations on ideas first explored in the third notebook.

But I'm probably reading too much into all this anyway.

Exc. from Notebook 3: Untitled List #4

PEOPLE WHO KILL ANIMALS & OTHER THINGS

1. [___] St., corner store, mom & pop shop, Chinese sweets. Rat infestation.

F. told me that what they really do is take them to the back and cut them up and this is why the radio in that store is really loud.

2. DRAMATIC shortage in dove population thanks to the "DOVE STRANGLER", anonymous assassin of winged pests.

3. Group of children in [____] Park, use carbines. They used to gut fish at the lake in [District] but we all know what happened in '98.

Although A. doesn't know. Most agree that the fish all turned up dead one morning because of a poisonous leak but I disagree.

4. Doors fan in [Record store] enjoys making films of this, K. is a friend of hers.

5. Do you remember those commercials that started airing past 3am back when pet dogs were turning up dead, strangled or poisoned? And it was like a bunch of grainy footage of this dead animal asking people to report whoever was doing it? Good job guys.

6. Nobody ever figured out where it was buried, not even us.

7. Ask A. about that guy from Architecture who is into torture porn. [this entry is crossed out.] CONFIRMED FALSE

Exc. from Notebook 1: "A Memory"

Back then we lived in [District] which has always been very boring. You know the tagline. "The Greenest District in [City]". They're very proud of it. In truth, it just got boring. Adults moved there to get away from the hubbub of city life but I prefer gritty urban chaos to some kind of lame attempt at bohemian country life.

And anyway it was bullshit because soon enough everyone else moved there and it was just another part of this awful city. Engulfed. Assimilated. The Borg of urban planning.

Anyway, back then I was like nine and I didn't have a lot of friends (HA HA), but I had this one friend whose name was I., he was a kid who lived across the street from me and sometimes we would play house (all you boys played house when you were little, don't pretend you didn't) and sometimes we would go exploring the neighborhood, which was almost the same thing.

But there was one place we didn't go to, which we blatantly referred to as the Haunted House. I'm still not sure what it really was, I think once I asked Dad and he said it was an old terrain used to keep horses for the [Country Club], but people lived there, too, and there were cars parked inside and you could hear a TV and sometimes see its glow inside the little cabin. But we never dared to go past the barbed wire.

I guess I should describe the infamous Haunted House. I have told this story over drinks countless times and I always describe different details. But anyway, it was in the really remote part of the neighborhood, right at the edge of where all the wealthy houses gave way to the shantytown, and that's where there was all the burglary going on. There was a main entrance, which was this huge old rickety steel gate, which you arrived to by following a dirt path (back then [District] really did feel like the country a bit), and it was this HUGE terrain, you could tell just from looking at it from outside, and the whole perimeter was surrounded with barbed wire and warnings about trespassing, which I don't think is the sort of thing you could get away with in a neighborhood like that nowadays. And the whole place looked and felt old and sinister. There was a little cabin in the front and then in the back there was sprawling gardens and in the far back was the "main" house, where I assumed the residents lived, and there was a pool but it was always empty, and I never saw any guard dogs despite the warnings.

Anyway I. was really crazy about this place, he was into ghost stories and those stupid Goosebumps books and such so this was right up his alley (back then *I* wasn't as much of a freak as I am now), and he wanted to explore this house. And I said no but he kept insisting, and he was my only friend so I saw him everyday after school. So we ended up going to explore it in three separate occasions, and it got progressively worse. Did I mention that it had the most twisted, evil-looking trees ever? They never flowered and barely had any leaves they were just gnarly towers of twisted wood, and sometimes these HUGE black birds, like buzzards, would roost on them, it was awful.

So the first time we went exploring, not much happened. We didn't actually get into the house like later. First we spent a lot of time daring each other to slip inside and we both pussied out of it. Then we walked around it and tried to spot something creepy. In the distance we saw someone walking around with a stick in his hand, probably a watchman, and we also saw some figures in the far back, it was a really foggy winter morning, and we couldn't make anything out beyond a certain distance.

So I mentioned that there is a fairly long and winding dirt path that leads to the entrance to this house, which is straight out of a villain's mansion from a children's movie. And we would always look around while we were walking there because we were always afraid of stray dogs or something. We would bike there. So after spending about an hour walking around the perimeter of the Haunted House, trying to find something worth or while, we walked back to the entrance, with the intention of going back down the dirt path and to our homes. We had left our bikes right outside the gate.

So when we got back there, first thing, our bikes were gone. I. cursed for like the first time, I'd never heard him curse. It's pretty shocking when you're a proper nine-year old lady like I was! But that wasn't WEIRD, we were just stupid for leaving them tossed out there and walking away. Some kids stole them, we figured.

But then we saw the footprints.

Now I am not kidding you when I say this. I am not fucking kidding you. These were dogs' footprints but they were fucking. Huge. HUGE. They were like bigger than a human hand print. Or about as big. [There is a line drawn next to this paragraph roughly 21 cm long.] And they went in a straight line, not in the normal path that a dog goes. And you know what else? They stopped right there at the fucking entrance.

We ran back home.

So when I got back home my parents chewed me out for losing my bike. I was wholly uninterested in my bike and tried to tell them that there was some sort of monster living in the Haunted House, which they dismissed as hyperbole, as parents always do. They told me that I should go back there and politely ask if they had seen my bike, maybe they had taken them into the house for safekeeping until the owners showed up.

I never mustered up the courage to do that. But I.'s mom apparently went there herself a couple days later to ask whoever was living there about the bikes. I never heard it from the lady herself but I. told me that his mom had no luck and that when she came back from the house, she looked "sad and angry", and told him that he should never go near that place again, and told him to tell me the same.

Of course we were kids, and while we were scared of the footprints, we hadn't actually SEEN anything, and we wanted to go back there so bad. It was incredibly stupid even for a nine-year old but what can I say? I'm an adventurer.

So one Saturday morning we snuck out of our respective houses and walked back down that dirt path; without our bikes it was a half-hour of walking or so. It gave us a lot of time to speculate on the nature of the hellish beast that had left those tracks. Dog? Demon? Dog-demon? Our imaginations were not very agile. We decided we'd see for ourselves. Somehow.

That morning was a little clearer, almost sunny, a crisp winter morning. It subtracted some of the House's innately sinister qualities but we were still deathly afraid of it. As per usual, there was nobody around, but there was an old Volkswagen we hadn't seen before parked outside. The tracks were gone, by the way. And we decided we would find a way in.

The second time we went exploring, it was as though we had fallen into a nightmare. Neither of us wanted to go inside; but no one would believe us about the dog-like footprints, and we were under pressure to get our bikes back.

So we went inside.

This mansion was full of 18th century artifacts. Almost as though it hadn't been touched since the American revolution. There were gold coins still in small jewelry chests, paintings and portraits of people in powdered wigs all over the wall, and even a musket hanging on the rack. We almost expected to find a skeleton in the closet.

We had no idea where to start looking for our bikes. Until we caught sight of the footprints again.

So this time we were focused on finding, maybe an unguarded back entrance or a child-sized hole in the barbed wire. For the most part we were unsuccessful. The sun was starting to beat down on us as it got closer to noon and we were hot and tired and urging each other to go back home; at this point we were more tired and bothered than scared. But then I heard something and I'm still not sure of what the fuck it was.

Honestly it could have been a super-heated martial dispute, if there was indeed a couple living there. It came from the "main" house, the big and pretty one in the far back of the terrain, which we were some, I don't know, 20m away from. But we could still hear it. It was this really weird screaming, it was like scream therapy or karate or maybe even a drill sergeant yelling out orders. The same interval of time (just a few seconds) passed between each scream. And there was a male and a female voice, alternating. And it got louder and louder and then it stopped when it sounded like something made of glass had broken.

They weren't yelling AT each other, though, they were yelling WITH each other maybe? It was weird and controlled, but at the same time really disturbing. We were paying close attention to these screams, trying to see something through one of the house's distant windows, but then somebody started to walk out of the house through the back door and we got out of there.

Our parents never found out about this second visit. We were now intrigued and decided we would get in there no matter what. That night for some reason I remember having really bad nightmares and having to go sleep with my parents, even though the footprint episode hadn't phased me. Something about those screams.

We decided that we would gear up for our third (and as it would be, final) expedition to the Haunted House. We stocked up on snacks, I.'s pair of shitty binoculars (they were the kind that came as an accessory along with a G.I. Joe or as a cereal box prize), water, sweaters, and flashlights. Because we decided that we were going to do this at around 5pm, when our parents weren't around, to make sure they didn't catch us. It was winter and it got dark fairly early. This was unbelievably stupid in retrospect.

I was still having recurring nightmares after hearing those screams. I was much more shaken up than after the stuff with bikes and the would-be demon dog. On that fateful day we took to the dirt path early and got there in the late afternoon, in the twilight actually, and the house was the creepiest I had ever seen. There were no cars parked outside, that was a first. But there were lots of those big black birds on the trees I mentioned. And there were dogs. They weren't devil-dogs, just a couple of emaciated stray dogs fighting over a dead rat, near the entrance. They left normal tracks and they ignored us, thankfully.

But the most important detail is that, for some reason, the gate had been left open. Just a crack. But enough for me and I. and our backpacks to slip through. And we were in. It was getting dark by then and we heard the dogs outside howling.

For the first few minutes of exploring we were accompanied by nothing but settling darkness and silence. We passed by the little cabin at the entrance without anyone noticing us. The TV was on and there was some afternoon soap opera re-run playing, but I couldn't tell if there was someone watching. I remember I.'s face bathed in the glow of the distant TV set pouring out through the cabin window, as we tried to sneak a peak into it. He looked pretty scared.

But since he was the boy he had to put on a brave face and pretend he wasn't afraid, so he got his backpack and took the flashlight out of it, and gave it a couple shakes and turned it on. It was the weakest little stream of light ever, but at least like that we wouldn't trip over anything. We were in the middle of the open terrain now. In the far back was the house where we heard the screaming during our second visit. We heard birds and dogs barking in the distance.

The next part is where it gets awful, and is the reason why I. ended up with all those stitches. First we heard the screaming again. This time it was anything BUT controlled. It was wild careening agony coming from the house. Then we heard the heaviest footsteps in the distance.

I'm not going to lie. I was ready to drop everything, grab I. and run out of there and straight back home without stopping.

I. was taken aback by the sudden sounds. He jumped back a little. The light bounced off something that was reflecting it. I first I thought it was a dog but it was a bird.

It was like... a peacock. But it was all black, like an overgrown chicken-crow hybrid. It walked on the ground and it seemed incapable of sustained flight because its body was big and heavy like a squatting ostrich. It had these HUGE reflective golden eyes and the light was shining off of them. It stared at us and made this shrill squawking sound, but the screaming coming from the house drowned it out.

I yelled at I. that we had to go. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed that there were TONS of these birds. A terrestrial flock of herd wandering about the terrain. I hadn't seem them until now. They were all around. Then one of these birds brushed past my leg and its feathers were prickly like thorned stems. I. wasn't reacting to me yelling it him. He was transfixed.

He was shaken back into reality by the sudden distant barking, which was rapidly getting closer. I started hearing these horribly heavy footsteps, like if the ground itself were pounding. And then I jumped back and turned around and saw that, bigger than these creatures, there was something attacking one of them, just some 20m from where we were.

Then the screaming got louder and then suddenly I saw that the flashlight was extinguished because I. had been knocked down by something.

The rest is a horrible blur. I tried to help I. but whatever was pinning him down was huge, like pony-sized. I heard these horrible guttural sounds coming from it that completely drowned out I.'s panicked screaming. And throughout this entire scene the screaming coming from the house didn't stop. It was like a ritual cry that had summoned these creatures which as far as I knew weren't supposed to exist.

The guardsman came to help us. He was the one who was watching TV in the little cabin and by now we had made enough of a racket to get his attention. He took me sternly by the arm and with the other he beat... whatever was attacking I. and after a LONG series of SEVERE beatings with the stick the beast back off. I.'s legs were covered in blood. At this point I don't remember anything else consistently. The screaming had stopped, everywhere, I. was no longer screaming, the House was no longer screaming, only the guardsman was yelling at me, "why are you here?! What are you doing?!" I sobbed and couldn't articulate words.

He took both of us back in the cabin and started applying oxygenated water to I.'s wounds. They were awful, deep, chunks of flesh gone. He was bawling horribly. I managed to choke out my name and address and he called my parents. They picked us up and took I. to the hospital. I don't remember how many stitches it was but it was tons, on both legs, and the doctors said he was lucky, even though he needed therapy for the coming months to walk again. Even today I. is kind of weak and he has a really skinny right leg, have you noticed? It's because it has a chunk of flesh missing. He can't develop muscle there. He's probably going to end up needing a cane.

I don't understand where the birds came from or what they were, or that thing that attacked I. I did do my own investigations some years later.

I asked my parents several times about this incident; I've never mustered the courage to ask I.'s. Either way all I get most of the time are stares of disapproval and sometimes Mom starts sobbing because she was so scared that night that I had been hurt, and she was scared that I. might die. My father told me that he had a stern talk with the owner of the terrain two days later, along with I.'s dad.

The owner was apparently a short old man, European, terrible grasp on our language, but the doorman served as translator. Apparently his dog had attacked I. after the two of us had trespassed. Dad tried to get him to at least apologize but apparently things escalated and they almost got to a fistfight. Our parents never associated with those people again. I've told him about the birds and the screaming and he just gives me blank stares. "There is no bird that looks like that", he says.

When I was fourteen I had mostly forgotten all about that incident. I. had gone to a different middle school and we wouldn't start talking again until we ended up going to the same university. But one day I headed down that dirt path once more, against that better judgment, and as if it were a conclusion taken out of a movie, the house was now abandoned. Apparently it had been sold but the new owner never showed up and it was in real estate limbo.

I have talked to some of the neighbors and they agree in that the people who lived there were strange and almost never left the house. They had also heard the weird screaming and such. But they had never seen any birds or dogs. They did add that that Volkswagen I saw parked outside once was a frequent sight; apparently four men, impeccably dressed, visited that house every weekend.

Those birds... appeared and disappeared like fog. I never got a good look at what attacked I. He didn't, either; he's practically suppressed the whole thing. My parents didn't. Whatever roamed those terrains left with the owners.

This is mostly personal speculation, but I'm pretty sure those fuckers were keeping those birds are livestock for the horrible thing that attacked I. It wasn't the only one, there were more in the distance. I heard them. I don't get how anyone could deal with those things. Or what they were. Not a single creature living in that house seemed real.

I tried to get in contact with the guardsman who saved I.'s life (and probably mine). My parents thanked him plenty after the incident but I didn't hear from him again, because after that I stayed the fuck away from the Haunted House for obvious reasons. I looked into it. I learned that long after working there he became a policeman. And that some years ago he killed himself.

Don't ask I. about this story, he doesn't like hearing about it.

---END---

Now, a few of my considerations on this story.

This story is not autobiographical. For one thing, the protagonist is indeed a female, and her friend, I., doesn't fit the description (or name) of any of my brother's friends as far as I know. My brother DID have a friend, let's call her T., who is female and her manner of speaking very closely matches this account from what I can remember of her. It's possible that this is her testimony.

Alternately it's entirely possible as well that this is all a work of fiction, either by my brother or one of his friends. We never lived in the district mentioned here, and my parents have never mentioned an incident like this.

Now, the next story that I will transcribe seems to have indeed been written by my brother. It is more consistent with his writing style and attitude from what I can gather, and definitely sounds like something he would do.

Exc. from Notebook 2: "Xochipilli"

It seems that in every group of childhood friends there is one requisite expert in tall tales. The kind of boy who will tell you that there is a fourth flute in Mario 3 or a super-secret character in Street Fighter. Or that his Dad killed a lion in his trip to Africa. Or that his Mom is a movie actress. You know the type.

A. was our resident tall tale specialist, and one of my best friends—he is still both of these things. We mock him and enjoy his alleged exploits, which he can never back up. When we were still in grade school and [Sister] was a baby, we had been learning about the Aztecs in school, for some reason, and A. and I were obsessed with the concept of ritual sacrifice, especially if it allowed for communion with the gods.

So what we would do is, we would head out to [___] Lake [note: this is the same lake mentioned in the "List of People who Kill Animals & Other Things"]. We would roll up our pant legs and stand around on the shore with glass jars, looking to swipe up some fish. Some relatively large ones got close to the surface and sometimes we got lucky. The other kids feeding bread crumbs to the geese would look at us weird, something I would quickly get used to.

Now, prior to this we had dug a small hole in the ground behind some bushes, near the rusted swing set that you can still find there. The hole was originally dug out so we could safely bury T.'s doll, which was also an interesting story, but a different one.

At that point we weren't using the hole for anything. We would take the fish there and gut them with our school utensils (pens and pencils), while they were still alive, and then we would toss their smelly remains into the hole. With our hands covered in fish-blood, we would kneel before our makeshift sacrificial altar, and recite this solemn prayer: "We make this sacrifice to you, O, Xochipilli, and hope for guidance in return."

Xochipilli was one of the Aztecs' gods, appropriated from another culture, if I recall correctly. He was one of the few gods whose name we could recall correctly (albeit we usually couldn't spell it correctly), so he was our god of choice.

Sometimes after our daily sacrifice we would sit there and wait, taking turns putting our ears close to the hole, waiting for some voice to emanate out and reveal, I don't know, our fates, or the existence of a God, or the answers for tomorrow's Math test. Eventually we would get bored and go do something else, but continued to do this for approximately one month.

Looking back on it, I find it felicitously odd that nobody called us out on our strange and recurrent behavior. The other kids that regularly went to the lake simply kept their distance. The altar of Xochipilli was tucked away in a faraway part of the park, and nobody used the swing sets anyway, so the pungent smell, which gradually became more notorious as the hole got full of rotting, gutted fish, was hardly ever noticed by others.

Xochipilli would not respond to us, but our efforts went undeterred. As I mentioned, our daily sacrifices went on for at least a month. Then something rather momentous happened.

We weren't the only kids in the neighborhood with a penchant for animal cruelty. There was another gang of kids, one or two years older than us, who would hang out near the lake and throw stones at the geese. I figure they mostly had the intent of simply scaring them away, but on one occasion, one of the kids hit a goose squarely in the head. Very good aim or luck, really.

The adults at the scene were mock-horrified for the violent tendencies of children these days, and how THEIR generation wasn't like that, and how video games were to blame, and so on. The goose was violently trying to swim, suspended upside-down, drowning while trying to make it to shore. A concerned father waded a few meters into the water, grabbed the animal by the leg, and put it down softly on the shore as a crowd of onlookers gathered.

Its head had been smashed and it was bleeding profusely. Some silly old lady suggested that they take it to a veterinarian, which was immediately dismissed by everyone with a modicum of common sense. It was understood that the bird was dying, and nobody was brave enough to put out its misery, so they just left it there. The goose convulsed and flapped its wings in vain every minute or so. The adults had left the scene, taking their children with them, and in a matter of minutes that section of the shore was left deserted. The animal struggled through its final throes.

Of course, A. and myself had other plans for him. In our minds, it went like this: the bigger the sacrifice, the better the response. And this was a BIG sacrifice.

Once the area had been abandoned, we sneaked close to the animal and confirmed that it was still barely clinging on to life, as demonstrated by its infrequent spasms. We dragged the animal back to the altar of Xochipilli. I told A. that he should have the honors for this one, mostly because he felt queasy about it.

He was initially drunk on blood-lust, and without thinking about it twice, he took out his pen and stabbed the animal in the breast. Warm, red blood jetted forth. That's when we realize that we couldn't mutilate it. The goose seemed to alive, not alien like fish, too similar to our own pets. So we just stood there, feeling a little bad about ourselves, waiting for it to finally die. It struggled for only another minute or so.

We quickly got to work. By this point the hole was almost entirely full of fish guts—rotting ones, at that. It's a marvel that we could stand to be near that horrid smell, but I suppose you have a greater resistance to these things as an intrepid and somewhat disturbed child. We grabbed the goose and pushed it into the altar of Xochipilli. Our hands were once again covered in blood.

With its new sacrifice, the altar looked rather sinister. The goose's smashed-in head poked its way out of the hole, its neck, sustained by rigor mortis I guess, propping it up, with one broken wing sticking out, and feathers strewn about. We looked at each other uneasily, decided to say our prayers and quickly go home, and unspokenly agreed that our worship days were over.

"We make this sacrifice to you, O, Xochipilli, and hope for guidance in return." I still remember that prayer perfectly. This time we didn't bother to try and listen for a response, partly because we feared we would actually get one. We got on our bikes and furiously pedaled home.

This incident took place, to the best of my memory, in August of '98. And you know what happened in August of '98 to the lake. It showed up in the papers. All the fish turned up dead overnight, floating belly-up on the surface. And that lake has not been kind to life ever since. Like the kid who drowned.

I suppose that Xochipilli rewards the patient. I didn't go down to the lake for years after that. Neither did A. We never checked to see if someone had bothered to clean up the whole and the mess we'd made. When I finally went there, there was not the slightest trace of the altar. And I don't like going there. There are still some geese left; they have nothing to eat but what others feed them. And the way they look at me—I know this sounds like I'm trying to make things spookier, but it's true—the way they look at me, it makes me feel evil. ---END---

This story was almost certainly written by my brother, as it matches his style, and A. was indeed, as far I know, his best friend. According to my parents there was a time when he, as a child, spent a lot of time at Echo Lake, so it fits. As he mentioned here, the lake's fish mysteriously turned up dead overnight during August of 1990; it is generally believed that a toxic leak from a nearby processing plant caused the disaster. Nowadays only a handful of geese remain.

Exc. from Notebook 1: "Monica"

T. named her new doll Monica, I think after Monica's Gang. T.'s mom is Brazilian and she brings her children's comics from there and Monica's Gang is like the Brazilian equivalent of Peanuts or something.

I told T. that that doll was bad news, though. She had gotten it at one of those big flea market fairs. The doll looked really old and the facial proportions were off, it's like they consciously tried to NOT model it like a real baby. It hadn't come with any clothes so T. put a doll-sized one-piece white summer dress on her. Oh god, why am I referring to "her" as if it were a person?

Anyway, back then we were all in grade three or so and even then K. was already very sensitive to what we have come to refer to as "Weird Shit"; for example she knew about the thing in D.'s garden way before anyone else. She said Monica was bad news, and I agreed. I always agreed with K., she's a lifesaver. We tried to convince T. to throw Monica away, but she's always been stubborn when it's worst for her, and instead she started taking Monica everywhere just to spite us. We threatened to stop being friends with her and such.

But in the end we all loved T., we still do, and we didn't stop being friends with her, but we hated Monica and its vacant, vaguely deformed stare, like a child born from generations of incest, gave us nightmares at night. So one day we hatched a plan to rid ourselves of Monica forever.

We went to the park. It was T., K., D., and me. A. and I had come up with the plan. In preparation, we had dug a hole near [____] Lake, behind some bushes, where we would bury Monica. First, we left our backpacks and things behind a tree in the park, and T. did the same, leaving her bag with Monica in it and nothing else.

Then, while we were playing at the monkey bars far from there, A. sneaked behind the tree and took ALL of our stuff in secret. We were all in on this except for T. When we got back and noticed they were gone, we all acted shocked and assumed that our stuff had been stolen. T. really must have loved Monica because she was bawling the rest of the day.

Later that afternoon, I met up with A. He gave me everyone else's stuff and I gave it to everyone else. But we kept T.'s bag, and the doll inside of it. We pedaled to the lake. We went behind the bushes and took Monica out, handling it as carefully as possible.

We threw her into the hole and then we piled dirt on top of it as quickly as possible. We covered it with soil until it was no longer a hole. And then we breathed a sigh of relief. Until we heard the crying.

Apparently Monica was one of those baby dolls that emitted a crying sound periodically, like many such toys do. But we had never heard it before. T. had never told us about it. Given how much she loved Monica, that was odd. I don't think she knew.

But if she didn't know, then she wouldn't have put batteries in, so how was the doll making that sound? It was a high-pitched analogue squeal, it sounded as old and sinister as everything else about that abomination of a child's toy, and we didn't stick around long enough to find out how we could still hear it through all the dirt we had piled on top of it. We got out of there.

T. never found out about what really happened that day until many years later, when we started university. A. accidentally told her while drunk. She wasn't upset. She agreed that it was the best thing to do. Apparently that doll had also given her nightmares, and the only reason why she hadn't personally disposed of it was to spite us. Stubborn, as always.

A. and I wouldn't dig out that hole until one or two years later, when we used it as a makeshift altar to a sacrificial god. (That's another fun story with a somewhat odd ending.) Once we did dig it out, Monica was nowhere to be found. Plastic doesn't just decompose into nothingness. Our favorite (and most dreaded theory) is that, after we left, some girl passed by and heard the doll's crying, dug her out, and, charmed by it, took it home. Monica is probably still out there. It doesn't feel like she was something a bunch of kids could've gotten rid of so easily.

---END---

As for my considerations on "Monica", I don't have much to say. I don't have any way of confirming any of this, except by talking to any of the people involved, but T. in particular is currently living in America and I'm ambivalent about getting in contact with her. She was the most shaken by my brother's death.

There are no details on the doll that could help me find the model that Monica was, or what company manufactured it, so I'm in the dark in that respect. I'll just take it for what it is.

Exc. from Notebook 4: "Lists of Our Lost Friends"

We write these words with solemn hearts. But not really.

THE LIST of E., LOST IN THE SUMMER OF 1999:

"The List of Adoration"

1. The man with the golden watch transports large fish tanks in shopping carts. He buys them at [____] Gallery, the one in front of the [Supermarket franchise] on [____] Ave. He does not keep fish in these tanks, but he does not keep anything else in them either, except for his feelings.

2. The young man who jogs around the old military training facility in [District] is his partner (in crime).

3. There is a small kiosk on the corner of [____] and [____] St. that sells both children's sticker albums and pornography, side-by-side. The lady vendor has a deal with these two men.

4. The eye doctor that A.'s dad has been going to is also an acquaintance of my mother. He was part of this group in the sixties.

5. The rat population living under aforementioned kiosk did not form naturally. [See: rat king]

6. Did you know about the hospital black market? Certain bodily fluids are at a premium. The one A.'s dad used to go to is in a discreet little place near [____] park.

7. "The Clan of Adoration" has not been active since the eighties, but never leave it. Members refer to you as "dormant" when you're not active.

8. The former chairman is now homeless and frequents a specific bench of the same park.

Find out for yourself. To our dear E., lost to a job offer in Europe and wretched away from us far too soon.

THE LIST of N., LOST IN THE FIRE OF 2006 :

"List of In-the-Know Record Stores in [City]"

1. [Store], [___] Ave., [#], close to dumpster. Classic rock, newspaper, st(n)uff. *

2. [Store], [___] St., [#], ask K. for details. Monster, punk, viewpoint. **

3. [Name]'s place, [___] St., he runs a store out of his apartment. Nice collection of rarities. SAFE!

4. ESSENTIAL: In the Name of the [____], the [____] and the [____], located in you-know-who's basement. */**

* Not safe during the night.

** Not safe at any time.

To our dear N., lost to the fire of [Marketplace], September [#], 2006.

LIST of X, OUR NEIGHBORHOOD ADDICT, OUR SAVIOR and OUR FRIEND, LOST FAR TOO EARLY IN OUR LIVES:

"List of Places we do Not Mess With"

1. The Office of a Thousand Identical Faces with the Doorman who Looks Impossibly Old where A.'s Dad Used to Work, but Doesn't Anymore (for Obvious Reasons)

2. The Field of Mars, Located on the Seaside Hotel near [___] Park, which Is Not a Hotel at All, and Will Not Take No for an Answer

3. The Baby Stroller Abandoned in [District] Dumpster, which for Good Reason Has Not Been Moved Since the Fateful Day of Feb [#], 1991, Coincidentally the Birth Date of Our Fearless Leader

4. The Hospital, You Know the One I'm Talking About

5. The End of the Road that Leads to the Haunted House, as Retold in T.'s Riveting Tale of Beasts and Children, as Recorded, Verbatim, In a Previous Tome

6. The Hole Twice Cursed

7. The Bottom of the Lake Where We Freed Things That We Will Probably Never Understand

8. The Playground where Everyone Lost

9. Our Dear School, Left Behind Us Forever, for the Better

10. K.'s House for At Least the Next 12 Days, After Which We Should Be Okay Again, but You Should Always Exercise Caution!!!

To our dear X, who we never fully understood.

Take these lessons to heart!

These are the three articles that make up the "Lists of Our Lost Friends": the lists of E., N., and X. This is by far one of the weirdest things I've come across in my brother's notebook so far.

I cannot offer much insight into who these people are or were. I don't know of any friend by the name of E. who my brother ever had, or if she left to work abroad in Europe. As for N., there was indeed a fire that broke out in the marketplace named on the date specified, and dozens of people died, but I didn't know that my brother was acquainted with anyone who perished there.

As for X, I think I might have a clue to who THAT was. My brother was friends with a guy who got really into drugs in high school and ended up having to be taken by his parents to a rehabilitation center. Even before his addiction truly spiraled out of control he was very eccentric and paranoid, and was noted for writing with arbitrary capitalization, as demonstrated in his list. However, "X" is not a pseudonym I made up; he is literally referred to as "X" in the notebook. So I cannot verify that.

Okay, "Record Store" is coming up next. This is a somewhat long story an it is written in incredibly cramped handwriting, very frantic. This one was definitely not written by my brother, because he appears as a character in it. I will refer to my brother as B. when this happens.

Exc. from Notebook 3: "Record Store"

Let us go down a trip to memory lane, specifically to the summer of 2002, when A. was finally kicked out of school. His dad has always been negligent, as you know, so every day was partytimes in his house, as you also know. Truly this was a glorious time. This was the summer of Sister Zero, of the Convent, of the Arcade Incident. This was the summer when K. got caught and suspended for the mess she made in the boiler room. This was the summer when B. tried to stop smoking like twelve times and failed consistently.

Coincidentally, this was also the summer when B. got very dark in terms of music tastes and we all had to put up with it. Remember all that shit he played in the car when we all drove down to the coast? I mostly remember Swans, he was huge on Swans. This is how we started going to [Name]'s apartment, you know he runs a little record store out of that place. Guy is the textbook definition of an audiophile, reminds me of the guy from Ghost World (the movie).

B. was looking back then for a vinyl of Swans' live album, the title had "Castration" in it, I don't remember too well. I was never into things like that, I don't find music of that type cathartic, even if I have professed my love for Suicide (the band, not the act) several times with great enthusiasm.

Anyway, the first time we went there it was fairly innocuous. It was just me and B., one Friday after school. I think we also asked K. to come with us because we wanted her to fucking explain what she had been doing in the boiler room, but back then she had holed herself up in her home, poring over her books, you know how she is, she needs her space, she's weirder than all of us put together, which is saying a lot.

A lot.

Anyway, the guy's apartment was tiny, and it was made to seem tinier by the fact that it was lined with shelves which were themselves lined with records, and other than that there were piles of cassettes, mostly bootlegs and mixtapes, and there were also at least five different record players and musical paraphernalia that I'm not enough of an expert to comment confidently on. And there was practically no furniture. And for some reason there were porcelain bowls strewn about. Guy was big on cereal I guess.

He opened the door and he was stubby and unkempt and wearing a Captain Beefheart t-shirt. He didn't have much in the way of social graces and quietly invited us in. He offered us coffee, I said no, B. said yes, you know how he is, he never refuses a cup of coffee, even if it's laced with hemlock.

B. and the guy started talking about music and I felt like I should be a part of the conversation as well. They started off on points that we all had in common: Joy Division! Monster Magnet! We got into an argument over whether NYC Ghosts & Flowers was really really bad or just bad. Then I started to zone out when the two of them started talking about bands and movements that I didn't even know existed. I remember the names Syzygy, Baroque Hell and Spiritual Masters of Shangri-La. I zoned out. I remember that at some point they mentioned a record called "Baby Sex" (the name stuck to me for obvious reasons), which I'm pretty sure is by the Residents.

Anyway.

I ended up falling asleep in the couch where I had settled. Afternoon sunlight, the time when all the kids are coming home and you're being lazy, listening to crackly AM radio and procrastinating over homework, that kind of stuff gets me woozy. I woke up abruptly when one of the guy's ferrets jumped onto my lap. Did I mention the guy had a bunch of pet ferrets? They all had names like Patsy Cline and Howlin' Wolf. It was cute.

I noticed that B. and the guy had moved to the kitchen, which was tiny and adjacent to the living room, and were talking in hushed tones about something.

At this point I realized that it was already dark outside, I glanced at my watch and it was like half past seven. So I called out to them and their conversation stopped abruptly. The guy almost dropped the beer he was holding. They both stared at me as if they had heard a disembodied voice or one of the ferrets talk. I guess they had forgotten I was there. B. could really get into music when he wanted to, to say nothing of the other guy.

So we said our goodbyes (I hurried the whole thing along) and B. left with the record he wanted, I remember it now, it's called "Public Castration is a Good Idea". Quaint title. He put it in the backseat and we drove back, he dropped me off at my place. He was playing something really soft and tender on the way back, I think it was Joni Mitchell, she's a favorite of mine. First time I heard something like that playing in his car all summer.

On the way back I asked him what had he been talking about with the guy all that time, all in all we had been there like three hours, and he said nothing, just music and trivial shit, he's an interesting guy, but a little weird. And I agreed and didn't pursue things further. He dropped me off and I went to sleep because for some reason I was unholy tired, despite having done nothing but sleep for the last few hours.

The next day B. didn't show up at the regular place, which was weird because it was a Saturday. I called his cellphone but it apparently had no batteries. I called his phone number and his mom answered, she said that B. was in his room, I could hear little [My Name] crying in the background, back then he was just a baby. Apparently B. had been "studying". Ha.

That day I was with A. and T. and we both called bullshit on that, because it's B., he doesn't study for tests, he just wings it. We decided we would march over to his house and see what was up.

His mom opened the door for us, she looked a bit distressed, but then again B.'s mom has never been a big fan of B.'s friends. She is nice and polite though, and she offers us cookies, and that's good enough for us. B.'s sister was playing Mario or something in the living room and the door to B.'s room was closed. We knocked and knocked and he finally opened.

B. looked like he hadn't slept, there was an unlit cigarette dangling from the corner of his lips, he had that hilarious spotty attempt-at-a-beard he got when he forgot to shave, and bags under his eyes. He looked at us as if it made no difference who we were and let us in.

This is when I realized that B.'s record player was playing the new Swans record, but it wasn't making a sound. B. had a nice used record player he got at a really good price, it worked really well for what it was. A. tried to play around with it and B. told him to be careful. T. just grabbed a magazine and sat down to read, she was out of it that day, I think she was still mad at B. for what she did to I.

So we just sat there in silence for a minute or so, A. and I were mostly waiting for B. to offer up an explanation, T. was in her own world. B. raised up his head, he was practically falling asleep in his chair, he was about to talk when we heard this UNEARTHLY SCREECH FROM HELL coming from the record. The speakers sprang to life and out came this hellish sonic torture that blasted the room at full volume for all of four seconds, and then it stopped and everything was silent again.

B.'s mom stormed into the room, incredibly angry, wanting to know what that was. B. sheepishly apologized, said it was a malfunction of the system, wouldn't happen again. She gave us all a disapproving look and shut the door. Really, we don't LOOK weird, so parents usually like us, but when you spend as much time around us as B.'s mom did you learn to roll your eyes at everything we do. I guess.

B. started to spill the beans at this point, but not before hooking a pair of headphones to the record player and disconnecting the speakers to spare us of any further torture. He said that he had talked to the guy who sold him the record and he had told him that this was some sort of special first-issue version of the record. Apparently it was recorded live at a different venue than the one on the official version of the record or something, it was a pretty nerdy distinction but apparently B. was so excited about the notion that he played it the second he got home last night.

The problem is that the record has been playing all night and it doesn't make a sound except for periodic outbursts every hour or so, apparently like the one we had just witnessed. At this point I felt a horribly headache coming on.

Well, fuck that, I said. It's probably scratched beyond recognition, or the guy conned you. Take it out and we'll go bitch at him right now and get your money back, I said.

But B. shook his head. He explained further. Apparently he had been listening to the record all night on headphones so as to not disturb his family, and the record is not damaged at all, it's just... different. He nervously lifted the headphones up and offered them to me. I gave him a blank stare. Then I put them on.

First I only heard the usual vinyl crackle and pop. But then I realized that there WAS music playing, but it was playing incredibly softly, like it had been recorded from miles away. From what I understood this was Swans alright. I listened for about thirty seconds, there were other sounds, like I think I could hear something like a wood-chipper in the background, but B. took the headphones back and put them on the floor.

He explained to me that the outbursts, the extremely high-volume screams coming from the record, were unpredictable, and that's why he couldn't listen to it continuously. You had to crank to the volume all the way up to hear the music at all, and if one of those high-volume sonic blasts came at you through headphones at full volume. That was it. You'd go fucking deaf or damage your eardrums beyond repair.

Listening to the record for any long stretch of time involved putting yourself at risk of that.

A. and myself listened to the story with moderate interest; T. was still out of it and would continue to be out of it for the rest of the day. In fact it won't even make a difference to the story if I stop mentioning her. You know her. She's stubborn, when she's mad at someone she doesn't acknowledge their existence. She and B. wouldn't really make up until months later.

B. looked at our reactions as if he expected them, but then he looked at us and leaned closer, as if to tell us the punchline.

"The thing is", he started, I remember this word-by-word, "That this isn't a Swans record. This is a list of places being recited repeatedly."

I didn't really react. So aside from being a dangerous piece of shit, it wasn't even a Swans record. It was some random bootleg probably by some random band that never got anywhere. I said fuck it and put the headphones on again. I strained my hearing to make out the lyrics. The singer, who was definitely not Michael Gira or whatever his name is, was indeed screaming out locations of places. Places in our city.

Record stores.

When I confirmed this—the street names, the locations—everyone looked at me weird. Suddenly this became interesting. This had either been recorded by a native of our city or this was simply inexplicable. But my hearing isn't so great. I couldn't make out most of what was being recited. Back then we were bored and there was nothing else interesting going on. K. was still cooped up in her house and with T. and B. not addressing each other directly the whole group was tense. So we decided we were gonna find out what that guy was saying. So we decided to call up the guy with the best ears, and that would be N.

Remember back then? We weren't really friends with N. We had conversations every once in a while but I guess he was a bit too cool for us or something. He wouldn't be a part of the group until a year later or so. It was kind of funny how much he got into the whole thing, and how fast.

So the next day we called up N., asked him to hang out and get a couple drinks, he agreed. When we were in the store where we always did our requisite non-I.D. drinking, we casually and briefly summarized the story for N. He was fascinated by the whole thing, but, as he told me later, he didn't really believe us at the time. He was mostly humoring us because, remember, they had sort of kicked him out of the cool group at school for being gay, so he kind of turned to us for a new group of friends. It's true, he told me all this!

Anyway, we went back to B.'s house. The record was still playing. Now we warned N. about the thing with the sudden blasts of super-loud music. He seemed unimpressed by our somber warning. Again, because at the time he didn't believe us. He put the headphones on we gave him paper and a pencil. The rest, of course, is well-recorded history.

That episode with the record is how N.'s List of In-the-Know Record Stores in [City] was composed. Of course, back then we only had the names and locations. N. wrote them all down on the paper, scribbled them, really, and then when the thing started looping he put them down, with a half-bewildered and half-amused look, he said "that's all".

And I am not shitting you when I say that not more than one second passed after "that's all" that the record emitted the must brutalized, awful scream, it was like a wave of metal crashing into a sea of metal, with tortured people screaming over it, it was like a tower or Church organs stacked on top of each other, it fucking BLEW out B.'s headphones. We all stood there in shocked silence. N. was slack-jawed, it's a funny image now but back then I felt bad for him, because we had used him and put him in danger (he's forgiven us for it now). We just stood there in silence with the list in hand.

And well, the record never stopped making that horrible sound as far as I could tell, except B.'s headphones were shot. He lifted the cartridge and took out the record, it was scratched all over, A. grabbed it and broke it in two in a moment of righteous fury.

Of course that list would lead to tons of other stuff—the expeditions, the midnight chases, the run-in with the doctor, as we discovered which stores were Safe and Not Safe and Never Safe. But that came later. Right after this happened we—B., N., T., A. and myself—drove right the fuck back to this audiophile fuck's apartment, wanting a series of explanations.

During the drive there we got N. up to speed on the whole thing—that this is where we had bought the record, that B. originally thought it was a Swans live record, that we tended to get into Weird Shit (the official term wouldn't appear until later) like this unnervingly often. He was still amused, but I think he was also a little scared.

By the time we got to the guy's place it was nighttime. We stormed up the steps to the third floor where the guy's apartment was. This was a somewhat abandoned building by the way, in a somewhat shitty part of town, and the whole scene was a little perturbing. But anyway A., who always takes the lead when shit is expected to go down, knocked on the door impetuously, and nobody answered. He kept knocking for like a whole minute. T. started complaining that it was cold and in this part of town they might try to jack the car and that we should go. Then suddenly the door budged, and it opened, abruptly and unexpectedly. And we entered the apartment.

There was only one light one, a naked light bulb hanging from the center of the living room ceiling, barely illuminating anything, and out of the corner of my eye I saw the ferrets scurrying about in the darkness. But the guy, the bastard, was nowhere to be found. But all his stuff was still there. This is when T. noticed that something that been spray painted on the far wall, in big, fat letters.

"WELCOME"

"FOREVER OPEN FOR BUSINESS, JUST FOR PRE-ADMITTED CLIENTS"

"PLEASE PAY EXACT AMOUNT IN CASH, LEAVE IN SINK, THANK YOU, HAVE A NICE DAY"

These three lines had been sprayed onto the far wall; we had to combine the illuminating power of all our cellphones to read it. This is when it hit us, and we realized that the guy was gone for good. For some reason we were certain of it. Mostly everyone was just weirded out, but B. looked knowing. And then he spilled the rest of the story.

Apparently The Guy was a part of a sort of underground circle of really obsessive record collectors in the city. Apparently that day when B. and I originally went to the apartment B. had sort of taken an "entrance exam" with the guy, where he asked him about music and if he answered enough obscured shit correctly he gained entrance into this circle, which presumably implied access to lots of rarities and oldies. But B. also mentioned that the guy was moving soon and he'd let him know about his new address.

The guy has never gotten into contact with B., by the way, nor has he ever come back to his apartment. We still use it sometimes. We go there, surprised that nobody else has robbed it clean by now, we browse the shelves, we find a record we like, and we pay the exact amount in cash, on the kitchen sink. We feel a little silly because there's a rather big pile of money building up there—it's not like the money disappears overnight or anything cheesy—but we feel like we should pay. T. wants to take one of the ferrets home, but that doesn't feel right to us either. I guess they're like cats, they find their own food wherever.

And to this day, this is the only store we consider Safe.

Well, that last story took a long time. Although N. apparently became a part of my brother's circle of friends, I don't remember anything about him, nor did I know that my brother knew anyone who perished in the 2006 fire mentioned in his list.

Excerpt from Notebook 5: "The Hissing of Summer Lawns"

[1]

[Note: The title of this entry was originally written in English in the notebook; I did not translate it. This happens with a few other entries, all of which seem to be musical references.] THE GROUP, F.'s APARTMENT, EARLY POST-INSOMNIA MORNING, FEB. 3, 2002

B: Okay, go.

A: What are we doing again?

F: No, not you. K. is doing this.

A: Why is K. suddenly our fearless leader?

K: Because I am the one going through with this endeavor. Please be quiet.

T: Oh my god, 'endeavor'. I'd forgotten how weird you talk.

F: Yes, yes, K. is weirder than the rest of us put together--

N: Okay I seriously doubt that--

B: Okay, guys! Come on. This is for posterity. For the ages. Someday this will be important, probably. Okay, go.

K: [pause] Well. As we all know [laughter], this began in '99, when we realized that we were not going to be together forever after E. suddenly up and left. Back then our records of our travails in this cesspool we like to call our city consisted of little more than a few cassettes of recording and even fewer transcripts. Back then, X was our... uh, treasurer?

T: Well you really shouldn't speak of the dead so lightly.

A: Shut up.

K: Okay. After 2001 all of that material was lost for reasons that are painful to recall. We don't have to make a record of that. Do we have to make a record of that?

B: No. Just keep going. K: Okay. It is now 2002 and we have decided that we are going to compile our findings in a series of books which will be kept by B., our new... uh, treasurer? Are you okay with that?

B: Whatever.

F: He's okay with it.

K: So... Starting on this day, we will record everything that we have and will continue to refer to as "Weird Shit". Let me leave for the record that I did not come up with this term and happen to have extremely vulgar friends.

A: That's funny.

N: Come on, stop.

K: [Loud sigh] I wanted to name this project "The Sand Notebooks", because it is a much more elegant reference, not to mention extremely fitting.

B: What is that? Borges?

F: Yes, it's a Borges story.

T: I only ever read him in school. I liked the one about the library.

K: Well. Whatever it ends up being. On this day we have decided to continue exploring these avenues and record them, if somewhat haphazardly, and B. will keep them. And that's all.

B: We should probably keep a record of who is here and participating in all this. F: Well, I guess the official group is B., T., A., K., our lovely new member N...

N: Nice one--

F: And myself. F. [Pause] Where's D.?

T: At the wake.

F: Oh.

K: So yes. That's it. Wait, what about J.?

T: Guys, J. is scared of most of you. I can talk to him if you want but no way he's gonna hang out with the whole group.

B: It doesn't really matter. Honorary member.

A: That's so stupid.

K: Okay, I have to go. Keep the notebooks at your place where your family won't find them or anything because I would be deathly embarrassed. We would all be.

F: But B.'s mom is so nice. [Laughter]

B: Okay! That's all we needed. Since cassettes are no longer a safe medium I'm gonna type this up later and--[End]

[end]

This excerpt is important, as it all but confirms my brother's friends' involvement in this, and is also where the name for this blog comes from. It also sheds light on the alleged purpose of keeping these notebooks, and reveals why my brother had them in his room.

Excerpt from Notebook 2: "Mom & Pop"

[2]

This is the first time I get to tell a story for this so let's hope I don't fuck it up.

All of this went on before I hung out with you guys. It was during winter vacations and days went by slowly. Back then I guess I was a pretty private kid, I mostly stuck to my video games. Or that's another way of saying that I didn't have a lot of friends. You know what I mean.

My favorite place in the world back then was probably the Chinatown, right near Yuga park, you know, it's not REALLY a Chinatown, but close enough. And there's tons of little mom & pop stores ran by couples of second-generation Chinese, probably descendants of immigrant workers back during the early boom, you've learned about this in History class, hopefully.

There was this one little dingy store where they sold the best candy and stuff straight from the Far East, in its cutesy packaging with Chinese characters—at least I'm guessing they were Chinese, I couldn't read them obviously--, and the girl at the counter was very nice, this slightly plump university-aged girl who was probably the daughter of the couple who ran the place. I only saw the father like twice. The mother sometimes came out to sweep the floors and shoo away the cats, you know how Yuga park is infested with cats and it spills over to its surroundings. Now, you've definitely heard the rumors and jokes about Chinatown. You're only supposed to eat in the well-known places because everywhere else they will give you a back-alley rat on a platter and tell you it's spicy chicken. I've never really bought into that too much, I mostly think it's people being mean for no reason.

However, this little shop was full of them. Rats. Sometimes you would see one scurry over from one hole in the wall to another. The girl at the counter would look really embarrassed and the mom would get angry as hell and start sweeping everywhere. You know what was really creepy? Once, she was really frustrated I think, she hit one of the far back walls with the other end of the broomstick, she was looking for rats I guess, and I'm pretty sure she got more than she bargained for. We all heard this horrifying rattle and scurrying behind the wall, like there were a million of the little animals moving around behind that paper-thin wall. She never did that again. It was kind of sickening. I guess they were thankful I kept coming back—I was just a kid, after all—because most people steered clear of that place for reasons that are now pretty obvious. The shop had a second floor, a staircase tucked away behind a wall that cut off at the back lead up to it. I think the whole family lived there. You could tell they were going through tough times because sometimes I would start to hear screaming in Chinese coming from upstairs, so the girl would give me this sad stare and turn the volume of the radio up, so I would hear the loud FM crackle and some old tune instead of the yelling. As a child I was very forgiving, I think.

So anyway, I kept coming back to that shop for a decent time, like maybe three months, long after school started again, and one day I come in and I find the father at the counter. I asked him what had happened to his daughter and he said he was taking care of her brother. I didn't know there was a brother; I mostly thought she was an only child. The father informed me that he had many, many sons. He had a VERY loose grasp on our language so I'm guessing he didn't exactly mean that. A lot of what he said didn't make sense. For example, he said that he also sold "milk" if I ever wanted some, which they didn't, and then he started rambling, half in Chinese, half in chewed-up local vernacular, that the women in his family always pampered the men.

I think I'm getting a bit too long-winded. I'll get to the point. What happened was that I once mentioned this store to a boy from school I liked, let's call him Giovanni, because he had a fancy foreign name. You don't know him, he transferred to another school a couple years later. He was very mischievous, and taller than me. He said, I know that place, and then he asked if I wanted to see what they REALLY did there. So we went to the store one day later than usual, when it was already getting dark, but then again it gets dark early in the winter. Giovanni was wearing the funniest scarf, I remember, but that's not the point. He said, a kid who lives here told me that they cook rats in the back. I rolled my eyes at him and told him that that's what they ALL said about EVERYWHERE here and that that wasn't cool or interesting, but he put on this really serious face and said no, really, I'll show you.

That day the father was also watching the counter, and the rest of the alleged family was nowhere to be seen. We went around the store and to the back. The store had a little back room, I always assumed it was for storage, nobody ever went in or out of there as far as I could tell. There was a little window in the back that peered into that room, but it was protected by iron bars to keep burglars out. You could still see through it, but barely.

Giovanni put out his hands to let me climb up on them and look. So I did. I grabbed on to the bars and peered into the room. It was dimly lit. I couldn't see much other than a dingy old bed and a small desk with a lamp on it. Then the door opened. It was the mother. What I'm going to tell you now is why we don't go to that one kiosk. Again, it was dark in there and it was dark outside. I strained my eyes to see. Also I was freezing and Giovanni down there was complaining about his arms. But I was only focused on what was going on in that room, the mother came down and then she stood in front of the bed. She just looked down on the mattress, which was covered with a really thin sheet, and I could just barely make out that it was covered in stains, plus the whole thing was really lumpy and uneven, like it was a really old mattress that a lot of people had slept in over the years. I figured this all made sense because after all this family didn't seem to be very affluent. And then she ripped off the sheets.

I realized that the bumps under those sheets weren't from a lousy mattress, the whole thing was just covered in rats. Like a gray carpeting of these animals, each varying from the size of a hamster to a full-grown rabbit, just sitting there, inert, as if they were paralyzed. At this very same moment, peripherally, I noticed that whoever was working the clerk at that moment—I'm guessing the father—turned the radio up loudly again. The animals didn't move at all. The mother just stared at them, I don't really know what kind of look she was giving them, if it was tenderness or fear or hate or something. Then she spun around and yelled out a name I knew. The daughter came into the room. She hung her head low, as if she were about to be reprehended for something. They talked really quickly, like, chattering, in Chinese. First the mother, these long sentences, and sometimes the daughter would try to interrupt but she would overpower her with her own voice and continue. The daughter didn't attempt to make eye contact. The mother raised her arm and first pointed at her, as if blaming her for something, then she waved her arms around, gesticulating wildly about who knows what, and then the daughter tried to speak up again and she slapped her. When that slap reverberated throughout the tiny, cramped, rat-infested room, that coat of vermin lying on the bed suddenly sprang to life, quivering and shaking like an animal waking up abruptly, and making those high-pitched hissing squeals that rats make when they're excited, like you're going to give them food or something, we've all had to deal with rats at some point. I can play this whole scene back in my head like it happened yesterday, by the way. Giovanni was still complaining but I tuned him out. The radio was still on pretty loud.

It's lucky that at that time of day Chinatown is practically abandoned because otherwise we would've looked pretty silly to passerby, peering into the back room of some family's private business, and some old lady with nothing better to do would have probably stopped by to admonish us.

That unified hiss of the rats kept rattling the back room. The mother and the daughter stood there, silent as graves. Then the mother, without saying a word or making any sort of gesture, walked out, shut the door behind her, and left the girl alone with the animals in the room. Giovanni asked me what was going on and I told him to shut up. We were lucky they hadn't heard us. I looked into the room with full concentration. I was enraptured by the inexplicable scene developing before me. What now? Was she going to take out some big pot from under the bed and start cooking? Was that really all it came down to?

In the room, there was this silence that touched me, went beyond the fear and fascination of that moment, and suddenly I remembered that this girl was my friend and I liked her, and whatever she was doing in that room she was clearly doing it against her will, and that made me sad. It also made me feel wrong, because I was poking my nose into her private life, and additionally my leg was getting sore and I was losing my footing.

The girl just stood there, staring at the animals, and it was almost like they stared back because they quieted down suddenly. I've mentioned that this room was dimly lit, there was only one old lamp in the corner turned on, that's why I couldn't even really see what was going on on the bed. Anyway, like twenty seconds of ambivalent silence passed. Then—I remember this in slow motion—first, the girl, she unbuttoned her blouse, really quickly, practically tore it off, she had a bra underneath, I think it was the first time I'd seen one, and she had a lot of marks and purple bruises and scars on her shoulders, and over her collarbones and some on her belly, but most importantly on her breasts, they were all scratched, petite as they were, and then she spun around and switched off the lamp. At this point I lost my footing, partially because I was sore, partially because I was scare, partially because I didn't want to continue looking at whatever was going on there, and fell on my butt. Giovanni made fun of me in silence but then immediately he asked me what I saw. I said, I don't know. I really don't know. But there were rats, I said. You were right. And then he did the little song-and-dance all self-righteous kids do when they're proven right and he started telling me about other strange things he'd heard about Chinatown, but he was cut off by screams.

Do you remember how I told you that sometimes I would hear this screaming coming from the second floor and then the girl would turn up the volume of the radio so nobody would hear? Well this was the same thing, except it was the girl screaming, but then the father joined in, I heard the door open and slam shut once more, and I heard the mattress give in to pressure, the rusted springs squealing, and I heard something get knocked over, and I heard that awful, sinister hiss of all the rats, and I heard them crawling up and down the insulation in the walls, in the sewers, under my feet, and for a moment I FELT hundreds of tiny little claws crawling all over me, it was freezing, I was terrified by the screaming, I nearly pissed myself all over right there. Giovanni pulled me up. For a split second I considered peering back into the room, but with the light off I couldn't see anything, I didn't want to, either, so Giovanni and I ran away. On the way back I passed by the front of the store. There was nobody at the counter. I never came back to that place again, but it's still around, they tell me, although the daughter doesn't work there anymore, and you never see the father doing anything because he's senile and in permanent bed rest, so it's all the mother's work now. I've never seen the son they once mentioned; apparently nobody has. I told this story to F. once, you know he's my cousin, right? Way before I knew the rest of you I told the story to him, but I chickened out of telling the truth, I went with the conventional answer and said "Yeah, they cook rats there." As a matter of fact I hadn't told anyone the whole thing until now. I haven't seen Giovanni in ages, either.

I could still come back to that store someday if I felt like it—as far as I know they didn't see me that night--, but honestly I don't want to. There's a bit of an epilogue to this story, though, one you can go check out yourself if you want to. You know that little kiosk in the corner of [____] and [____] St. where D. used to buy her cigarettes? They sold all kinds of stuff without regards for regulations, cigarettes, porn, kids' sticker albums, all on the stands. You know how most days there's this plump lady, lots of creases and dark spots on her face, of Asian descent? She's well known. Well, I stopped by there one time. I saw her from afar, she didn't recognize me. But that's her. That's the daughter. I guess she's working there now. Maybe she's keeping the business alive, opening a new locale. I don't know.

[end]

I'm not sure of who narrated this story, as I'm not familiar with F.'s relatives. I had never heard of such a store in Chinatown, but then again there are hundreds of such stores in Chinatown. A kiosk does exist in the location specified. I haven't stopped to look at who runs it, nor have I heard any strange stories about it, but then again I don't go looking for those, either.

Excerpt from Notebook 3: "Yuga Park under Watch"

[3]

THE IGNOMINIOUS X, CAFÉ "HAITI", [___] ST., 1995

Do you remember all the stories your parents told us about Yuga park when THEY were our age? It was like the nicest most tranquil beautiful genteel bubblegum place in the world, it was cardigans and schoolgirls in mini-skirts and kids playing soccer until five in the afternoon at which point they went home and fought over control of the TV remote because they wanted to watch cartoons but their older brothers wanted to watch re-runs of old action movies and then mothers would come in and say, "Fuck you both, we're watching my afternoon soaps", and that would be that, and... Oh man, weren't those nice and fun and clean times? Now what does Yuga park look like? I'll tell you what it looks like, it looks like cats and whores. Cats and whores. Did you know about the whores? Yeah you knew about them alright, you're a lot more, oh let's say WORLDLY then you let on, I know that perfectly. Anyway what were we talking about?

Oh yeah Yuga park, right? Yeah, well, I met up with the guy—you know, The Guy, the one I've told you you should talk to, I've told you this before, he runs the record store deal out of his apartment, he's in on this shit too--, anyway, I was meeting up with him, I think I was sitting on the bench that's next to the kids' see-saw or maybe it was in front of the bust of that general commander sergeant, the park was established in his honor or something. Actually I think I was sitting on the bench in front of that sign they just put up the other day, something like "Please clean up your pets' waste" or whatever, anyway, it's all bullshit. It was like nighttime but not really nighttime, it was twilight actually, it was around six. It was that time of day we all love because it feels lazy and old and the sunlight is coming from just the right angle to illuminate everything like an old picture, you know? You know about this. [Laughter] Shut up. Shut up! Okay so Yuga park. I'm at Yuga park. This is like just five days ago, this is completely recent shit, I hope you're paying attention because you and I, we can't go to that place anymore. As a matter of fact I suggest you advice all your little friends on the dangers of Yuga park, and I'm not just talking about getting mugged or drugged or raped or kidnapped at night or all that other fun teenage shit, I'm talking about REAL danger, I'm talking about the guys, you know the guys.

So I met up with The Guy—you know, The Guy, don't make me repeat myself—and he was selling me this really good weed for a really good price, I'm not always this adventurous, you know, it's like my dad said before he died, way before he died, he said, you know, the hard stuff is fun sometimes, but, sometimes you just want some good, old, sticky weed, my dad was a hippie, have I told you that? He was a hippie motherfucker, and so was my mom, but she's not anymore.

The sunlight was really nice and I was just sitting there watching people like B. does, you know, he likes doing that, he's weird, I was just letting go and enjoying the moment, and this asshole, at first I thought he was a fag, and he was like, coming on to me. That happens a lot in Yuga park, too, you know, it happens too much. At first I thought he was a fag and he was coming on to me. Have you noticed that everyone is looking at us weird? Get the check. Let's go to the back. THE IGNOMINIOUS X CONTINUES HIS STORY IN THE BACK ALLEY BEHIND CAFÉ "HAITI", AFTER BEING UNCEREMONIOUSLY INVITED TO LEAVE THE LOCALE

Where were we? It's cold. Oh yeah, this asshole. This asshole sits next to me and starts killing my buzz. I think he was trying to provoke me, probably, he was whispering this shit at me, trying to look totally normal and natural, he had a snake tattoo, by the way, it was this stupid fucking snake tattoo wrapped around his arm, it was the stupidest shit I've ever seen, and I've seen lots of stupid shit, mostly coming from old people.

So this guy says something like, "Do you know who the Brutalists are?" And I'm like, fuck, now I'm screwed. But really, really screwed. Because well, he's talking about the Brutalists, and—what do you mean? The Brutalists, they're all part of the group, it's a thing they do. It's the Brutalists, the Nobles, the Legion, and... one more but I don't remember what it's called. Write this shit down later. This is exactly what they do. I said something like, fuck you, man, I don't know what you're saying, leave me alone, and suddenly I realize it's nighttime and everyone has left and there are like five more of these assholes, they were all dressed really nicely, though. But they were all surrounding me. And they just look at me, and they're grinning. Really wide grins, they have really clean teeth and really white eyes, like, around the eyes. But they're pure evil. I just know that. I can tell. So the one sitting next to me stands up and says, come with us.

I'm not fucking A. or whatever, okay? I can't just activate my super strength or whatever it is he has and pounce on five guys. Plus I was still tripping, when I told you that The Guy's shit was good I wasn't kidding, by the way. So I just keep quiet and keep my head down, I look to see if there's any police or decent people that might help a poor boy being assaulted by a bunch of evil men, but there's nobody around, Yuga park is fucking deserted all of a sudden. It's like people disappear on those few moments when you would actually like them to be around.

So I went, reluctantly with them, I thought they were going to take me behind some place and beat me up or mug me or worse, but no, these weren't muggers, of course, they weren't a gang, either. These were upstanding members of society. I picked it up the second he started talking about the Brutalists. These were the assholes who were kicked out of the Clan of Adoration—I think that's what it's called—and wanted to get back in. So they started asking me, where does E. live? Does she live with her parents? How does she rank? How long have they been in the clan? And I just shake my head. I'm not a loser or a coward or a traitor, I wasn't going to say anything, my plan was just to pretend that I didn't know E. at all, and didn't know what they were talking about either. Actually I don't know how they even knew that I was associated with any of that, and I'm not, anyway, so it doesn't make sense. But back to the story, I was in this fucking seedy back alley, there was no moon in the sky, just a really desolate streetlight in the far left, and I have these five guys ganging up on me, and I think at this point I started to make peace with the fact that I was going to die here, because the guy with the snake tattoo takes out a knife.

But I think I got really brave all of a sudden, I was like, fuck, I don't care, you're going to carve up some kid because of something so stupid, are you retards, I started to really make a racket, I think someone could have heard me in the distance, I figured that if they didn't stab me first someone would come to my rescue, but no one did. Plus it got really foggy that night, which was weird because it's still summer, but whatever.

And they kept pushing and pushing. And I don't really have much else to say because I kept denying everything. So the guy got really mad, he picks me up by the collar, the other ones start inching closer, I can feel their combined breath on my face, it was caustic, they had the worst breath in the world, like they had rotten from the inside. They tossed me onto some garbage bags in a back alley and left me there, I was still in a daze, and I didn't see where or how they left, but I think they got in a car after turning a corner. And well, fuck, you can see what kind of reminder they left me with. [Points to sutured cut on left cheek] It was pretty deep, by the way. The doctor said I was lucky or whatever. I told mom that I got mugged, what else was I gonna say anyway.

Don't tell E. about this, I don't want her getting paranoid. They're not gonna touch anyone unless you get in their range of action. Just don't go near Yuga park. I'm pretty sure they're keeping tabs on all of you, on your whole little group, so I'm going to try and keep anything bad from happening. But I can't promise anything. As you can see. So just be careful out there. They're losers anyway, this isn't like the New World Order or anything, just a bunch of angry old men. You know. Old people. They're the worst.

[--End of interview--] B.,

Sorry for stopping by your house while you were out, but I thought I should leave this in the Books as soon as possible. I forgot to tell you that I was still holding on to a transcript of this back from '95. It's a good idea that everyone re-read this sometime. You know, because it's X.

- F.]

[end]

This appears to be the only testimony by X from what I've found in the notebooks until now. As for the "Clan of Adoration", I have no idea of what it's supposed to be. Frankly, it sounds a little silly and very novelesque. It's true, by the way, that Yuga park has deteriorated over time, and today it is frequented by prostitutes and, as you can see, young people looking to buy drugs.

Excerpt from Notebook 2: "Miranda Cassette Exchange"

[4]

One morning, E. and I decided that we were going to skip class. For the most part we didn't do things like that. E. was pretty serious about her marks, which was a change from her usual apathetic response to everything. We spent most of the morning at my house (my parents were away on their second honeymoon at the time, so I guess this was in '97), watching really stupid infomercials and re-runs of game shows, and talking about all sorts of things. I didn't really hang out with E. much, she was more of D.'s friend, I guess. But I wanted to ask her about her parents. In the end I didn't. I felt a little embarrassed.

It was already noon or so when we decided to leave the house and find somewhere to get lunch, first E. changed out of her uniform at my place, I gave her some clothes, they weren't exactly her style, as you can imagine, but she was okay with them. We drove down to the little Chinese place at [____] St., the one behind the Miranda there. [Note: Miranda is a widespread supermarket chain here.] The food sucked, by the way, and after that E. had to go to the bathroom so we went into the Miranda and I waited outside, looking at some magazines.

So I was waiting for her outside of the ladies' room (I'm not the kind of girl who does the "oh let's all go to the bathroom together" thing) and suddenly I heard this sound like she was trying to pry something off the wall. I started to wonder what the hell she was doing in there but kept quiet, you know, because E. was a pretty private person. And suddenly she comes out of there, she's practically hyperventilating and can hardly manage to form words. She says something like, oh my God, you won't believe what I found in there, come in, come in right now, take a look for yourself, and from the look on her face it was like she had found fucking Santa Claus in the ladies' room, so I obliged.

First thing I noticed was this plastic thing lying on the floor. It was this big roll of toilet paper, you know, they put them in these plastic casings and you push a lever and pull out some of the paper to dry your hands with, you know what I'm talking about, right? It was hanging on the back wall of the bathroom. Anyway, where it used to be hanging there was a hole. Apparently E. had heard some sort of scratching or shuffling behind it, and, in a moment of poor judgment decided, to pry it off the wall. Behind it was a hole in the wall through which you could see the insulation and other crap, I figured that they had made it accidentally or found it there and decided to cover it up as conveniently as possible. There was something else in there, of course. It was a cassette tape labeled "EXCHANGE".

Back then everyone here was still using and buying cassettes for everything, which was very convenient for us because, as we would find out later, they were one of our safe mediums. Not anymore, of course. Now we're reduced to vinyl and handwriting. Pretty pathetic.

Anyway it was your pretty standard cassette which you can buy in bulk, it had a label on it saying "EXCHANGE", written crudely in marker. E. was like, what is that? Who do you think left it there? I didn't really know what to tell her. Needless to say it was pretty weird. I think that at some point some other girl came into the bathroom, saw us peering at the hole in the wall, turned on her heel and walked right back out. We're pretty lucky none of the staff caught us tearing their bathroom down.

We couldn't play the tape there, as we had no way of doing so. I was ambivalent about taking it, this wasn't my first experience with "Weird Shit", and, although this wasn't particularly weird, I had a very potent feeling that it could become so. But E. was determined to take it and find out what was in it, for some reason. The cassette was unmarked other than the label. So we took it, tried to get the paper roll back on the wall, sort-of succeeded (it was hanging, lopsided), and drove back to my house.

Back at my place, which was empty those days, I didn't have a radio or anything with a cassette player for some reason. I dug out my Walkman but I didn't have batteries and I doubt it would have worked either way. So we ended up having to climb into my Dad's car to use the built-in cassette player. It was a pretty funny scene, the two of us sitting there in anxious expectation.

So we sat there and listened to most of it. It was really bad quality, you might not remember that tape hiss was already pretty annoying but on top of that it sounded like it had been recorded from a distance or something, like it was a recording of a recording of a recording. Anyway, there isn't anything particularly weird about that tape. It's just a mixtape of sixties psychedelia. There some stuff from Kaleidoscope on there, mainlyTangerine Dream, and there's some Beatles, obviously, and there's other stuff, but E. and I weren't really into that genre so we didn't listen to it all the way. Later on, on my own, I would listen through the whole thing out of curiosity, but as I said, beyond the quality of the recording, there's nothing special about it.

But this is when we realized that, since the tape was labeled "EXCHANGE", maybe we were supposed to leave something in return. You know, leave something in the hole in the bathroom, for whoever it was that left this there. The idea struck us as silly. But by that time school wasn't over yet, and we didn't have anything better to do, so, armed with one of my many mixtapes, which are sort of a hobby of mine, we drove back to Miranda.

We talked to each other on the way back there and speculated on what kind of person might be leaving these tapes, and whether she (we assumed it was a she, since it was the ladies' room after all) really expected someone to find them in that hiding spot. We wondered if it was some college student's social experiment; actually, that's what I thought for the most part. E. had her own theory. She thought it was some desperate woman, living a lonely life imposed upon her by her family, who had no form of expressing herself, and, in this desperation, reached out to strangers by leaving cassettes tapes hidden in public places throughout the city, checking back every week, hoping that some equally lonely soul had found one of them and given something back in return. I'm pretty sure she was projecting.

We got back to the supermarket and, happily, none of the people working there seemed to recognize us, Miranda is usually pretty busy at that time of day. We both walked into the ladies' room again. Luckily, the canister or toilet paper holder or whatever you wanna call it was still hanging on, albeit only slightly. We picked it up with care and put my mixtape, which, now that I think about it, was mostly grunge (God, that's embarrassing), in the hole. We figured that maybe we should leave a message. So we ripped off a piece of toilet paper and scribbled onto it, "THANK YOU", quite crudely, and we left it in there along with the tape. We put the canister back in its place—we had sort of gotten the hang of getting it to stay there—and left, mostly laughing about the whole thing. Later that day we met up with the rest, but didn't tell them anything, figuring it would be more fun for now if it was our secret.

The next day E. and I debated over whether we should go back to Miranda and check if there was a new tape. I mostly wanted to forget about the whole thing, because frankly I didn't think anyone was actually checking that hole to see if someone had responded. I figured it was a fluke, or something that had been left there years ago, and whoever had done it had forgotten it about it. E. didn't buy it, though. She was certain that whoever had left that tape was actively checking back. I managed to convince her that we should go back next weekend, because even if her theory was true, I doubted that our hypothetical swap partner was checking the Miranda bathrooms every day. Then again what do I know. Maybe he was some pervert looking to get in touch with schoolgirls via public bathrooms.

The rest of the week went by rather slowly, A. was fully into whatever he was doing back then, I think it was Muay Thai or Valetudo or whatever it's called, it was some kind of martial arts thing, so we didn't see much of him. B. and F. were off doing their own thing, and anyway we didn't want to tell anyone about it. So we just hung out at home (I think we ended up skipping three out of those five days of school, it was terrible), watching movies and talking.

I actually ended up learning a lot of stuff about E. back then (much to F.'s pleasure, who was totally crazy for her at the time), but she kept her mouth shut about her parents for the most part. On Friday we drove back to Miranda upon E.'s bequest and went in there again. Sure enough, our mysterious correspondent had been very busy.

The mixtape we left had been taken alright. In its stead a new cassette had been left, exactly the same model as the previous one. This one had a label that was really long and badly-written, and inside that dingy bathroom we couldn't read it for shit, so we went back to the car. This time around we had taken my Dad's car in anticipation, since that way we could play it immediately on the way back home. We got in the car and rolled down the windows, E. took the opportunity to light a cigarette. She put the tape in and read the label out loud, not without some effort:

"Soundtrack to a Manic Night of Preparation Before an Important Challenge"

She looked at me, shrugged, and I pushed play. This time the tape was a combination of New Wave stuff, I especially remember "Bizarre Love Triangle" because, although I probably wouldn't admit it to anyone, I love that song, and then there was also really quiet folk. It went something like this: Bombastic New Wave --> Folk --> Silence --> Folk --> New Wave again, and so on. All in all it lasted about 25 minutes per side. We finished listening to it at my place and were mostly unimpressed.

As with the previous tape, this one had a terrible recording quality. Again, it was like a recording of a recording of a recording. We could recognize most of the songs, and for the ones we couldn't, we usually knew the artist. Later I asked B. about some of them, without directly telling him about the whole cassette exchange thing, and he confirmed most, I think. The most interesting parts were the silent ones.

In between folk songs there were these tracks which were mostly silence and tape hiss, but you could hear some shuffling and moving things around as well, and in one of them you can hear a voice. It's really faint, but I'm pretty sure it's female. And there are these hints of musicality to them, like very softly you'll hear a sax in the distance play for just like ten seconds and then it's gone. I'm not sure if those were live recordings or more recordings-of-recordings. And then in another "silent track", if you listen really closely, you can hear someone talking steadily in the background, I'd say it's an older man, he sounds like he's answering questions, but the quality is too bad for me to make out a word.

E. was really excited about the whole thing regardless; just the fact that the person had actually responded was great to her. Admittedly I was surprised by that as well. E. said that the exchange was still going, and we should leave something else for the person the next time we went there. We decided that "next time" would be tomorrow.

This time we put a lot of thought into what kind of tape we were going to leave in return. We speculated about whether leaving different kinds of music resulted in getting different things in exchange. Whoever was doing this was putting so much effort into it, we figured, that surely she(?) must be listening to our stuff as well. I found a bootleg of a band I used to like, they never got big, so it's not like the tape was worth anything, and its sentimental value to me was gone after a certain incident. So I decided we would do that. We weren't very creative, and we didn't consider the tape to be a "Soundtrack" to anything, so we just wrote "Here's another one" on the label. Nice, I know.

We drove back there, it was a Saturday morning and again we went in Dad's car, though I'm not sure why. We went into the bathroom, took the canister out, and in the middle of doing this, some girl walked out of one of the bathroom stalls. We were incredibly embarrassed. She gave us a weird look, washed her hands and walked out. She looked a bit older than us, probably a college student, wearing jeans and a black shirt. She gave us kind of a dirty look, really. But as soon as she left we got right back to business. We left the tape, drove back, and talked some more.

I guess I should leave for the record—although I don't really want to—that by this point E. sort of opened up to me and told me some stuff about her parents. Apparently her Dad owed a lot (a lot) of money to some group. According to her, her Dad had done nothing illegal, he had simply parted with what rightfully belonged to him, but the other members were angry and his entire family had been sucked into a slow-moving legal mess that had been going on for years. E. was really shocked about what had happened to X before, though, because she never thought things would come down to violence. F.'s theory at the time was that E.'s dad was with the mob, which I don't think is true. Whatever it was, her dad was in deep shit, and I guess that's at least part of why she left so suddenly only a couple years later.

E. and I went back like three days later and we found another tape. This one was labeled "Soundtrack to a Night of Peaceful Dreams". It had a lot of Sinatra in it, which I thought was nice, but not really a guy you fall asleep to. The recording quality was the same, though, which gave the songs a distant quality, kind of nostalgic, and that felt different. Again there were also "silent tracks", and again you heard moving and shuffling, and in one you could hear a dog barking. By now we were getting a little bored of the whole thing an decided we'd leave one more tape.

We kind of wondered what would happen if we left something of our own creation for our correspondent to enjoy. Not that E. or I knew how to play instruments. We just imagined we would leave a small greeting or something. But we had nothing to record stuff with, it was still all at F.'s place at the time, he had needed it once he started hearing that shit in D.'s garden, but that's another thing, anyway. So I looked and finally came across an old tape which is a combination of songs my Dad liked in the eighties and recorded on tape, and, on side two, me, as a young kid, reading out some story. I guess he thought it would be cute and then forgot all about it and taped over it or something. We decided we would leave this, with the label "Something different", and we drove there.

It was nighttime on this occasion, in fact Miranda was almost closing down for the day, and we sneaked into the bathroom. The lights were off, E. tried them several times but apparently they weren't working, so we had to grope around in the dark to find the canister. E. removed it carefully and I felt my way around, left the tape, and we got out of there quickly.

Now that I think about it, I think I saw that girl, the one who caught us in the act last time, the one with glasses, browsing one of the aisles close to the bathroom as we walked out. I looked at her but I don't think she saw us, or pretended not to. We just left. The next morning we would return to find the final message from our mysterious correspondent.

The last time we visited Miranda for our cassette exchange was on a school day, which we also decided to skip. This had become an alarming habit of ours at the time and our friends had started to wonder about what we were doing. I guess we got a little obsessed with the whole thing, even though we didn't realize it.

We walked in, Miranda had only been open for an hour or so, the cashiers looked at us expectantly. We just went right past them and into the ladies' room, which must have looked weird. We opened the door and went right for the canister, but not before checking the stalls to make sure there was no one else in there, just in case.

E. wanted to do the honors for this one—we had already decided that we wouldn't continue with the exchange anymore—, and so she grabbed the canister by both sides and lifted it up, and out came this wave of insects.

The hole in the wall was just crawling with spiders and bugs and a few cockroaches. A bunch of them fell onto the floor, along with a cassette, and there were dozens more of them squirming around inside. E. and I both had to grab on to each other to avoid screaming. We took three giant steps back, E. still holding on to the canister. I whisper-yelled at her that we should just get the fuck out. She stared at the cassette, and, after arming herself with courage for a few seconds, grabbed it and we ran out, not even bothering to put the canister back in its place.

On our way out the other people looked at us weird, probably because they had heard sounds coming from the bathroom, we didn't even bother to act like we cared and speed-walked straight out of that place, into my dad's car, and back home. E. was grabbing the cassette by its edges, covering her hands with her sweater sleeves. I started to wondering how the hell had that hole filled up with vermin practically overnight, although now that I think about it there are several possible explanations for that. She struggled to read the label on the tape. Frankly it is practically illegible, so to this day, we're not sure of what it says, but our best guess is:

"Soundtrack for a Cancer Cell as it is Born in the Center of Your Brain"

For a few moments we were silent. Then I joked that she must not have liked our last tape. E. asked if she should play it. I said no, it had been covered in bugs, after all, although in reality I didn't want to hear it anyway, the label had given me a bit of a chill.

That was the end of the Miranda cassette exchange. We never went back in that bathroom to check if someone was still leaving new tapes in the hole. According to A.'s brother, who stopped by that supermarket for entirely unrelated reasons some days later, both bathrooms had been closed for sanitary reasons, and apparently the whole place was due for fumigation soon. So I'm not sure of what became of that.

If you're wondering about the three tapes we got out of the exchange, well, sometimes I play the first one, the one about preparing for a challenge. I kind of figured I would play it while studying for exams, I tried it out during midterms a couple years later. It's kinda nice! Or at least I think so. Helps you get in the zone. I ended up giving the second tape to a friend who had trouble sleeping, without telling her about its origins. She said it helped a lot, weird as it was.

I personally never listened to the third and final tape. E. took it home on that day. Many weeks later, after we had put the whole thing behind us, I happened to ask her if she ever worked up the courage to listen to it. She said yes. She said it was just "thirty minutes of noise", and that it "kind of sounded like being inside a sewer".

She took the tape with her when she left.

[end]

There is certainly a Miranda supermarket located where this incident took place. I don't know if it was ever scheduled for fumigation, and I've never heard any rumors or stories about the bathrooms, other than that they are used for casual sexual encounters. That kind of goes for every public bathroom in certain districts of the city, though.

Excerpt from Notebook 5: "The Children of District 11"

[5]

This is just a small incident that occurred to me a few days ago. I'm not sure if it merits being written into the notebooks, but I figure some of you will get a kick out of it.

Now, you've all been wondering what the hell I've been doing since I dropped out. The answer is not very exciting: I've just been doing odd jobs for my parents. Ever since I left university they've been on my back about making money in some way or another. Since mom has the whole catering business getting off the ground, I help her with that. But the other day Dad asked me to run an errand for him; he wanted me to leave a parcel at [#], [____] St., in District 11.

I don't know if you've ever been there, it's in the far north part of town, where everything is more quiet. It's mostly just suburbia, kind of a nice and tranquil place. During winter like now it gets covered in fog, and I mean that, you can't see three feet ahead of you. I got on a bus and rode it all the way to [____] Av., from there it was like thirty minutes of walking to the house. The parcel that Dad gave me was a small box wrapped in newspaper and tied with a string. I didn't see what it was, it didn't seem interesting at the time. It wasn't heavy and something inside it moved around when I shifted its weight, I think it might have been a toy or something. Maybe a present.

The house where I had to leave this package was your typical suburban home in an affluent neighborhood; nice, clean, a bit boring. It was in front of a park, though I couldn't see much else because of the fog. I was also pretty cold and wanted to get back home as soon as possible. I rang the doorbell like three times before someone answered.

That someone was a child, he couldn't have been older than ten, he was this skinny, blonde kid who rubbed his eyes periodically, like he hadn't slept. I didn't get a good look into the house because he only opened the door enough for his face to peer out, but I heard the TV on inside, I think he was playing some video game. It was a school day, mind you, so it was weird that he was home.

I asked him if his parents were home. He vehemently shook his head. He said, "This isn't my house, I'm just using it". That admittedly struck me as weird. I figured maybe he was a friend of the kid who lived here. I asked him if anyone who did live here was home. He looked at me as if I had asked him something nonsensical. We stared at each other for like a minute. Then he shut the door and I heard him calling someone's name inside. I stood there like an idiot for what must have been five minutes. I heard dogs barking in the distance and what must have been children playing in the park, but again, it was hard to tell with the fog. Eventually the door opened again. It was another child, this one had dark hair, he looked a bit like A., actually, though that's not important. He also kept rubbing his eyes like he hadn't gotten any sleep.

He asked me what I was here for. I asked him if he lived here. He looked like he was considering lying to me, but finally nodded. I said that I was sent here by my Mr. [____], my Dad, to deliver a package, and if his parents were in. To this he shook his head emphatically. He looked interested in what was in the box, which I was holding behind me.

I was getting a little exasperated with the whole thing, I just wanted to go back home. The district, with its fog and lack of people and apparently sleepless children, was starting to annoy me a bit. So I asked him when his parents would be home, and he said he didn't know, but "probably not today". I gave him a quizzical look. He just kept staring as if everything were normal. So I said, fine, look, I'm supposed to deliver this package here (I double-checked the address at this point to make sure I hadn't gotten the wrong house), so just take it and give it to your parents when they get home. He nodded, as if finally understanding what I was doing here, and reached out his arms. I considered withholding the parcel and coming back tomorrow, or later, but the notion didn't appeal to me much. So I reached closer to the door (the kid kept the door only half-open, staying inside the house) in order to hand it over to him. At this point I got a look inside the house.

I was looking into what appeared to be the living room. It was full of kids, there were about a dozen of them. They were all sitting around, watching television, but the second I stuck my head in they all turned around to look at me. It kind of felt like when you look at a pack of stray dogs as they're in the middle of eating some dead cat, and they stop to look at you, to make sure you're not going to interfere, and then as soon as you divert your eyes they get right back to business. That's what it felt like. All these kids were fixated on me, including the one who had opened the door the first time. And the TV? It wasn't playing anything. Just static. The jingles and music I had heard was coming from somewhere else in the house. I stared at the children and they stared back at me for what felt like whole minutes but was probably just a few seconds. I felt a chill run down my spine for some reason. I handed the kid the package. He shut the door. I started walking, half-jogging away from the house. Inside I heard the indistinct yelling and cheering of different kids.

During the bus ride back I replayed the whole incident in my head, and kind of regretted not looking to see what was inside the package, or withholding it and coming back later, when there were adults, if there are ever adults living that house. When I came home Dad asked me if everything went well and I nodded. He gave me a look, like he was expecting me to say something else, but I just went back into my room and listened to music. I couldn't get the image of the children out of my mind, it was like something out of a storybook.

And well, that's all. I did ask Dad yesterday about what the package was, and about who lived there, and he said it was just "a present for a friend". I didn't inquire further. You have the address of the house, so you can go there if you want, but, I don't know. I wouldn't advise it. At least not when there's all that fog.

[end]

I don't have much to say about this story. However, I do know that F. dropped out of university around 2004, as it was a matter of discussion among my brother and his friends at the time, so I think he wrote this story. District 11 is indeed known for its dense fog, which rolls in on winter mornings.

Excerpt from Notebook 1: "Origin / Multiple Births"

[6]

I think that the determining moments in your life are not seen as such until much later. You can only weigh their importance once they are in the past, and maybe that’s the great tragedy of time.

The children’s section of our school library housed a very small video compendium, mostly consisting of documentaries and bad films. When I was a boy, at the end of every semester the class would hold a pizza party where we would watch movies and relish in the knowledge that we were at the doorstep of summer vacation. Our teacher would ask for a certain kids’ movie—usually a Charlie Brown special or one of the Clifford the Big Red Dog tapes—and before long, the video lady, as she was called, would arrive.

The video lady was slight and always looked tired. She had big hair and spent all her time in the video room. I don’t know why I was fascinated with that place, maybe it was because something was always playing. They always had the news on, playing on one TV, with multiple other movies, recorded news from the past, or documentaries playing at the same time. The place was littered with cameras, costumes used by the Drama club, and shelves stacked with tapes. It had come to serve as storage for the entire school. The concept of spending your days working away in that room, surrounded by the past and the present in video form, connected with this fictionalized account of reality, vastly appealed to me. That I was already so nostalgic and taken by such things at that age is a little preoccupying.

The video lady was cordial and patient, and often I made up excuses to spend time in that room. Usually I was running errands from teachers that I had invented. In one of those many excursions I came upon a couple of cardboard boxes tucked away under a bottom shelf, crammed with old tapes. Pulling the box out released the pungent smell of dust. All of these tapes had cryptic labels. I distinctly remember “DOME”, “FUSE BOX” and “TWELFTH FLOOR”. I took one that was labeled “MULTIPLE BIRTHS”. Not sure why.

I hid it under my jacket and then stuffed it in my backpack when no one was looking. Seeing as the tapes were apparently forgotten, I figured that nobody would miss it.

Back then my parents had a big old Betamax sitting in their room, which they seldom used. My grandfather had brought it for them from America, I think. Back then everyone brought everything from America because our country, in its current state of disarray, could barely supply necessities, much less tapes of romantic comedies. So all we had were a handful of bootlegs, most of them badly-recorded from foreign signals intercepted by local pirates.

Handling the old thing was a hassle. My parents were at some wedding or cocktail party and wouldn’t be back until past midnight. So I put the tape in and sat down to watch.

It was grainy and the image had decayed, but it wasn’t hard to make everything out. It was filmed on a camera standing on a tripod, facing the shore. By the color of the gray skies and septic hue of the sea, not to mention the various empty bottles strewn about the sand, I could tell that this was a nearby beach. At the very beginning you can see the shadow of a person adjusting the lens, then they move out of the frame and are never seen again. The footage is simply a long recording of the thunderous back-and-forth of the waves, with cold wind howling in the background. In fact, just watching the tape made me feel chilly; even though I’m pretty sure it was summer at the time.

I sat at the foot of my parents’ bed and watched. I was prepared to see something disturbing—at the time I wasn’t sure of how childbirth worked, after all—but all I saw was the sea. About ten minutes in, an emaciated, stray dog walks across the sand, sniffs a discarded bottle and walks back out of the frame.

All in all the footage lasted about twenty-five minutes. I remember almost nodding off but forcing myself to stay awake. Then there’s that final minute.

After almost a half-hour of recording the eternal motions of the sea, you notice something different. At first they seem like three black spots some ten meters away from the shore. Like three buoys in the water. Then they begin to move forward, closer to the sand. As they do, they begin to emerge. I realized that they weren’t buoys. They were heads, sitting on necks, giving way to shoulders. Three full-grown men emerging from the cold water. The distance, the quality of the video and the lighting make them look simply like black silhouettes. I think they were naked. They begin to walk out of the water. They move in unison, almost taking steps at the same time. They are very tall. The water is only up to their knees and they’re walking towards the camera in this arrhythmic gait when the footage ends. Whoever was filming cut it off right there.

It’s hard to trust my young and impressionable mind on this, but I’m quite sure that the footage was one continuous shot with no cuts.

At the time I didn’t know what any of it could mean. I guess I still don’t. I removed the tape—almost forcefully—and put it back in my backpack. The next morning I tossed the tape into the basket where students leave books that they’re returning to the library. Obviously the video lady must have known that somebody retrieved that tape from the room.

Apparently she never suspected me, though. The next time I saw her she gave me her usual tired-but-polite stare and asked me what I was here for, a cup of steaming coffee between her arthritic fingers. I’m fairly sure that the cardboard box with the other tapes disappeared.

It seems funny to say now, but I think that was the beginning of my obsession.

Excerpt from Notebook 1: "Origin / Crawl Space"

[7] Many things have bothered me in the past, like “haunted houses” and “creepy” dolls, but when you’re a child it’s easier to forgive (and forget). There was a particular time when I realized that the things chasing me and reaching out for me in the night would never give it up.

I must have been twelve or thirteen. School was out and it was the hottest summer the city had seen in decades. Some of my friends were jumping rope in the plaza, trying to crank open a fire hydrant or something. Back then the streets were safer and I was allowed to wander about within the constraints of my neighborhood, wearing a nice summer dress and sandals. I was a cute kid.

Do you remember Alex? He left our grade somewhere between middle and high school, he wasn’t a very stand-out kid. I remember the others teased him because he was poor and apparently his parents had to borrow money from extended family to pay for his tuition or whatever. His father actually ran a clinic out of his house, you know. The first story was the clinic and the second story was their home, it was this little apartment complex they owned. On this particular summer day I went to visit that particular boy, because we had established a previous appointment to do so.

Alex had something to show me. I always told him my stories, the ones about big dogs that roam about in the nighttime and about Monic, and about the ghosts I see shuffling about my home while I’m trying to sleep. I was making a conscious effort to creep him out, because at that age that was my favorite pastime with boys, but he was remarkably interested. He said that similar things happened in his house. Apparently I had found a kindred spirit.

So I walked some eight blocks over to his place, the run-down little clinic where a tired secretary fanned herself behind a counter, and sure enough he soon came skipping down the stairs to greet me at the entrance. He was wearing an old Thundercats t-shirt, I think, with worn-out jeans and white sneakers. I offered him a chocolate I had stolen from my mom’s jar. He invited me in.

As I have it understood Alex’s family was in deeper financial troubles than any of us knew or cared to assume, and his grandparents lived with him. They came from the countryside and were appropriately superstitious; one of his grandma’s favorite pastimes was interpreting dreams (apparently they were always ill omens), and on one occasion she told me a thing or two about mine, but that’s a story of its own.

Alex took me to the basement of the two-story complex, which was really a cramped hallway. Apparently it was leftover space originally used for insulation or perhaps as part of a larger design; according to my dad that building was part of a larger complex or something along those lines. It was accessible via a rotting wooden door about the height of a cupboard in the back room which also doubled as the storage for various medical supplies. We had to sneak around his dad and the disgruntled secretary, as the adults didn’t like him going in there.

Had I been even mildly claustrophobic I don’t think I would’ve made it. Even for a kid my age I had to wiggle along on all fours, groping around a damp, winding concrete path with the rickety sounds of the house over my head. I feared that everything would come down collapsing on us. Alex had stolen a lighter from his father before entering, but he was in front of me and the meek light it produced did little to reassure me. After insecurely moving along the path for a minute or so, we arrived at a dead end, at which point he said that we could stand up. He was right; we now had to shimmy along a far wall, I assumed we were right on the edge of the house, between the outer and inner walls. I could hear the sound of a television somewhere, although it was playing something that sounded really old.

Finally, Alex said, “Look.” He pointed the lighter at some point in space in front of him. I had to squint to look, and even then I didn’t really see anything in the dense darkness, so I swiped the lighter from him and used it myself. That’s when I managed to make it out.

It was… well, sort of a hole in the wall, I guess. Opposite to where we were standing was this big indentation in the far wall, roughly egg-shaped, with cut-off wiring and steel frames sticking out of the edges, as if a little meteorite had crashed in there. I could only make out the vaguest contours in the dark, but I could see markings on the inside, which were murky brown in color, amorphous in shape.

Alex told me that, according to his neighbor, the man who owned this house in the distant past left his son to die in that hole when he discovered that he was the product of his wife’s affair. The baby eventually starved and nobody ever found out. He related this tale with mild fascination, with the same tone as a tour guide describes a slaughter that took place hundreds of years ago so it no longer carries emotional weight.

I kind of nodded and stood there for a while. Eventually we crawled back out, played some cards for a while and then I left (his mom offered me lemonade, she was very nice, but looked very tired). I remember telling A. and B. about the adventure and they said that Alex had probably made the story up on the spot just to impress me. Then there was the requisite teasing and taunting about how the two of us would get married and have babies but Alex would be too poor to support them. I swear that year when my teacher said that girls mature faster than boys I felt like life in its entirety had been explained to me.

In all honesty I think that Alex just wanted to be friends with me, because his family, his clothes and his country bumpkin appearance repelled most of the kids at our school. I only went back to his house once, like a week later. It was an equally hot day and I walked there once again. I remember back then there was the whole scare about the Dog Killer and how children were advised to stay at home, but I didn’t pay it much mind. This time Alex came running down the stairs to tell me, with bated breath, that I REALLY had to see something.

We went back in that crawl space. A minute of groping around blind, some thirty seconds of sidling along some insulation, and we were there. This time Alex said, “Look,” with an almost diabolical expression, and took out a flashlight, which was quite an improvement over a measly lighter.

Now I could see things more clearly. The hole looked about what I imagined it did on my first visit, but now I could make out those smudges inside. They were amorphous brown stains that could have very well been made with feces or something equally unpleasant. Together they created some vague shape. Alex told me to take a step back. He said that the figure looked like a baby—he started pointing out the facial features and body as he saw them—but I didn’t really see anything. Just a bunch of smudges and marks. I rolled my eyes and said that we should get back out.

And as soon as I said that there was this sound, like all the air was being sucked out of the house, it was kind of like the sound a river would have made if it were flowing under our feet. The sound intensified, began to shake the planks and loosen bits of paint and dust from the roof. And suddenly we heard this crash, like a refrigerator had been dropped from the top story, and we thought the whole thing was coming down on us, collapsing, so we screamed and ran blindly back where we came from, back into the crawl space, frantically wiggling out towards freedom.

When we got out we found Alex’s mother standing there, arms akimbo, looking at us disapprovingly. We were coated in white paint flakes and dust. She had probably heard us screaming like idiots, and was particularly mad at Alex, who she had warned not to enter that place again. She said she would have the entrance boarded up by tomorrow.

I didn’t get the chance to go back to Alex’s house after that. He was grounded for the rest of the summer, apparently, and once school started it became evident that we weren’t in the same crowds and quickly drifted apart. As I said, he moved to some other part of town a few years later. I’m pretty sure the guys remember that. Oh, and according to his mom the big crashing sound we had heard had been a garbage truck outside, though at the time I didn’t buy it.

What is really weird and makes this entry deserving of being in the notebooks is that, well, I’ve passed that apartment complex where Alex lived several times while coming back from university. His father closed down the clinic when they moved and now it’s a private residence; it’s been remodeled substantially. But I have passed that place and I have looked at it from every conceivable angle, and I have gone over the memories in my head with great care, but it still doesn’t fit. The crawl space, I mean. There is no place in that house—no space—for that passage, and the wall with the insulation space, and the hole. It simply doesn’t make sense. And I’ve asked a friend in Architecture what purpose would a structure like that serve and she said that it would be completely out of place in a building like that, and for that matter it would probably be out of place in any building.

Has anyone gotten in touch with Alex?

[end]

Not much to say, honestly. I think it's fairly clear that this was written by T., but this Alex person is a mystery to me. I asked my parents if there were any clinics around T.'s neighborhood in past years, but they couldn't answer.

Excerpt from Notebook 4: "Interview with J."

A few days ago I went up to J. and interviewed him about the incident with the haunted house, when he was a kid. The one that T. was also involved in. I said it was for a scrapbook project or something like that. He was really reluctant; he doesn’t like talking about it and he doesn’t like me very much, either. But I’ll transcribe what little I got out of him. T. is probably going to be mad.

So what do you think it was?

J: What do you mean? It was a dog, it was the guy’s dog.

Did you ever see it after that?

J: No, obviously I never wanted to go back to that house. T. didn’t, either. My dad went there to talk to the owner after it happened and they almost got into a fight, T.’s dad was involved, too. Dad was really, really angry about the whole thing at the time. He said he was going to poison the animal. But I don’t think he ever actually saw it, either.

He said he was going to poison it?

J: Yeah… You know, he was just really angry because my mom was really shaken up about it. But eventually the guy moved and we all forgot about it.

What about all the other strange things, though? T. said that these people did some kind of screaming therapy, and that they kept these strange birds around.

J: Those were peacocks. I think the couple wanted to turn their property into a sort of expensive countryside inn for foreign tourists, and they wanted to have a sort of petting zoo area, with exotic animals like peacocks.

How do you know that?

J: Well, years after the whole thing I asked around the neighborhood about the couple. They were just a regular European couple with no children, but they got a lot of visits. Apparently the husband was a member of one of those Mason-type groups. You know, like the Lions Society, but not the Lions Society. I think they mostly did charity work but they are also kind of New Age.

Maybe the Clan of Adoration?

J: Maybe. That sounds of kind of weird. I honestly don’t remember the name, it was a long time ago. Is that it?

Do you think your dad actually did anything to get back at the man?

J: What? No, of course not. What are you even saying? You know he’s in a wheelchair now, right?

[end]

I know next to nothing about J., but I do remember learning that his father suffered an accident which left him a paraplegic some years ago. Apparently it was a fall from a second-story window or something.

Excerpt from Notebook 4: "Faith Healing, Part 1"

Our university outlawed smoking in campus only recently, which comes as a surprise to most people. I guess it hasn’t fully seeped into our culture that second-hand smoke kills or whatever, but until very recently, most universities allowed in-campus smoking. Now, at certain times during the morning and early noon, the same mass of students gathers outside the campus entrances to puff away. B. is part of this group, of course; he has tried to quit innumerable times and failed. F. and A. accompany him out of solidarity, or sometimes simply to bum cigarettes from him.

This massive and timely movement of students in and out of the university did not go unnoticed and soon enough there were people passing out fliers for all sorts of things: supplementary classes, night school, plans for working abroad during summer break, the occasional free condom hand-out, and, of course, New Patricians.

To say that New Patricians is a cult would be exaggerated, but nobody is really sure of what it is. The locale itself is only a twenty-minute drive away from our school and its stylish brochures advertise vague concepts related to self-discovery and philosophical exploration. To us, the most interesting part was that these fliers were handed out by an assortment of wiry, heavily caffeinated, middle-aged women, regurgitating slogans and asking rhetorical questions out loud (“Don’t you want to know what life is really all about?”), and the boys had come to assume that New Patricians was some sort of New Age analogue to a book club; a mostly vacuous endeavor started by bored housewives.

However, we don’t have a lot going on as a group at the time. Ever since the whole fiasco with the record store girl, Weird Shit hadn’t crossed our path. So B., F. and A. decided to go and investigate this thing, if only for kicks. The following is their account of what happened, as recounted to me by A., who, as you know, is a man of few words.

On their way to Kenny’s (a small burger-and-fries place two blocks down from the university) on a Thursday afternoon, F. swiped a bunch of pamphlets about New Patricians from a bunch of different women handing them out. The recurring theme among their propaganda seemed to be “Philosophizing,” an awkward term that refers to both self-discovery and socialization more than any actual discussion about philosophy. It also advertised a meeting for newcomers on Saturday at 3:00. Apparently B. and A. groaned at the notion, assuming that it would be a boring seminar about the importance of purpose in life with some phony spirituality and hand-holding thrown in, so they were ambivalent about wasting a precious Saturday afternoon. But F. was impossible to dissuade and they eventually yielded.

I have been doing paperwork and menial tasks in a law firm of considerable prestige, and they pay me a pittance for it. I’m mostly doing it to have experience once I graduate, of course. The point is that on my way to work I’ve passed by the New Patricians building several times. It’s pretty easy to miss: an eggshell white, three-story building flanked by smaller structures on both sides, with little movement and no more than five or six cars parked outside at any given time. Then again if this really was some sort of kooky cult I wouldn’t have expected anything more flamboyant. Apparently the three guys arrived there fifteen minutes in advance; F. parked his dad’s car a block away. The place was particularly lively on that afternoon; on their way in they were greeted by mostly middle-aged, middle-to-high class people wearing “loud sweaters, white button-up shirts or sports team t-shirts, invariably.” That’s exactly how A. described it to me. I remember because I found it pretty hilarious, since A. isn’t usually the one to be passing judgment on fashion.

The guys were lead into the central building along with thirty more people or so, most of them older. Apparently they got the occasional odd stare for being students. To their surprise, the back door of the building opened to a spacious patio surrounded by tall brick walls. The place seems to be quite a bit bigger than it looks from the outside, and A. says he heard some talk about a “basement” as well. They were herded as a group to the center of the patio, standing before a platform with a podium on top. There were small tents set up on both sides of the area with members waiting behind counters; one of them had a coffee machine and the other gave out yet more information in the form of pamphlets and fliers. There was also merch; F. apparently bought a shirt, which seems very much like him.

The ensuing wait was very much like sitting around, waiting for a concert to start, and the three took cover from the sun by sitting against a far wall. There was a lot of indistinguishable chatter among older members of New Patricians; all in all A. says that there must have been some three hundred people managing the event, which is a pretty surprising turnout, I guess.

By the time someone stepped up to the podium, the afternoon was starting to cool off and the guys rejoined the crowd. Many of them were now wearing New Patricians shirts; F. was delighted and put his on as well. A. noticed that something weird happened as soon as he did. The other members seemed to suddenly and abruptly recognize his existence, as if before he had been a ghost drifting among them. An elderly woman placed a hand on his shoulder for support. He exchanged amicable glances with many of the younger members, who must have been in their late twenties, according to A.’s recollection. The two remained at the fringe, observing with morbid curiosity.

The man who took the podium had an air of regality about him, apparently, a silvery but full head of hair and a well-trimmed moustache. He wore a brown blazer and exhibited perfect poise. B. says that he had seen this man before in the paper; apparently he’s the Minister of Agriculture, or something. For university students I have to admit that we are not the most politically aware.

The next part of the story was not elaborated on by A. because he said it was “boring.” Basically, the man proceeded to give a rousing, elegant and ultimately meaningless speech on the value of the human soul and the mission statement of New Patricians which lasted for about forty-five minutes. There was periodic clapping in between statements, which turned into wild cheering towards the end. People were grabbing F. by the shoulder and using him to prop themselves up and cheer; apparently. F., always the one to humor people like that, cheered right along with them, and so progressed the afternoon. B. and A. considered ditching F. for fun while they could still make it out the front door without the stampede of followers rushing out at the same time. But ultimately they stayed, and according to A., they managed to pick up some interesting bits in the man’s speech. Mostly they were peculiar because they didn’t make much sense. Apparently the man spoke of “a precise dimensional measurement of human potential,” “the ignoble spirit of charity,” “the spiritual value of inanimate objects in our daily life,” and “a new age of adoration for the human spirit and holistic creativity.” If you’ve ever gone to one of these New Age meetings for whatever reason such baseless phrasing probably doesn’t seem strange to you, as it’s a pretty common tactic for charismatic leaders. But A. says that as the speech went on there was this weird feeling in their air, not the typical blind devotion of a fanatical cult, but a sort of intensity in the looks of everyone there. A. and B. started to feel like they didn’t belong and were being made aware of the fact, so they retreated into the building and decided to wander around for a while until the whole thing was over and F. could give them a ride home.

They snooped around for a while without anyone interfering, although the secretary at the front desk gave them a strange look a few times. Mostly they browsed the bulletin board, which had a schedule for upcoming events, all of which seemed to be seminars of a similar nature. They had strange names, though, such as “Conference on the Latest Developments in the Study of Homeopathic Interlinking with Our Animal Friends,” that’s the only one that A. managed to recite from memory. By this point I think that the two had concluded that New Patricians was just another silly pseudo-cult for people lacking direction in their lives.

The seminar finally ended amid cheering and clapping and the mass of followers stormed back into the building and towards the front exit; B. and A. waited for F. to appear. He emerged, still wearing his New Patricians t-shirt, with a mischievous glint in his eye, A. said. He told them to go back to the car because he had to show them something.

Now a block away from the building and in the safety of the car, which apparently still stunk of weed from the last hot-boxing session in the park, F. revealed the fruits of his labor: a small, black matte box padded with foam on the inside, housing an egg. According to A. it was a little bigger than a chicken egg but had the same shape and hue. F. explained that at the end of the seminar all of the newcomers had lined up in a queue in front of one of the lady assistants, who took out a large Chinese box and started handing out these eggs, one per person. There was no confusion or inquiry regarding the eggs; apparently everyone understood that this was a thing that would happen at the end of the conference. F. wasn’t the one to give up an opportunity for something as strange as that and received an egg of his own.

According to A., F. is keeping the egg in a cardboard box in his room, making sure that it is warm. I don’t think that F. knows how to properly care for an egg, or anything else that is or will become a living being. It’s been four days since their little adventure at New Patricians and it hasn’t hatched or changed in any perceptible way. This afternoon I’m going to stop by his house and see it for myself. B. says that it looks like a snake egg, and that he saw a mural in the far back depicting a vivid green serpent. I don’t think they plan on returning. Before leaving, the secretary asked them for names, phone numbers and e-mail addresses so that they could contact them with details about the next seminar, but they gave out fake info. I’m not sure of what to make of all this at the moment. I’m going to ask around to see if anyone knows anything about this whole New Patricians business.

Excerpt from Notebook 4: "Faith Healing, Part Two"

F.’s house is a disaster. His father collects things obsessively. Sensible things, like records, encyclopedias, nostalgic trinkets from decades we weren’t alive in, and also useless things, Halloween masks, kitschy holiday decorations, burnt-out remains of fireworks of New Years past, pop culture detritus. He cannot let go of anything.

Fortunately he is rich (as far as we can tell) and lives in a stately, old house with statues on the garden that look like creatures out of a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, a pool that is never filled, iron bars covering windows overgrown with brittle vines. It’s spacious and empty; it’s located next to that one terrain that used to be a school until the late eighties. The first time I went there I had to ask a nearby watchman for directions. I gave him the address; he said there was no such house. Half an hour of walking later, I found it.

I was two years into my university studies at this point; I was bored and resentful at my parents for having encouraged me to choose this career path, so every week I skipped class more often. It reminded me of high school as so many other things do. There were policemen making lazy morning rounds around the neighborhood and housewives in sweatpants walking their dogs. Everyone else was working, studying or doing something allegedly useful with their time. The weather was grey and crisp.

Pushing the gate open and letting loose some dust in the process, I had to wander around the house and yell out for F. I had figured I might as well stop by and see the much-discussed egg for myself. I walked into the living room to find him, surprisingly, with X.

They were playing an old record that I didn’t recognize and sitting across from each other, cross-legged, staring intently at a cardboard box in between them with a lamp hanging over them. I took a guess at what was inside. When I said hello X didn’t respond; he probably hadn’t noticed my presence yet, which I was accustomed to, while F. was cordial as ever. He said that X had another disagreement with his brother and headed over here for the time being. I wondered what that last part exactly meant.

I crouched and peered into the box, feeling a bit silly between the two. We were alone in the house. His father was gone pretending to work. (He was one of those people who, due to the nature of his position, could easily never stop by the office again and keep getting checks in the mail for the rest of his life.) Only a few strident birds interrupted us. I reached out to hold the egg, but X brusquely stopped me. The hue was a bit off for a chicken, it was a little bigger and leaner, more elliptical. I lightly placed a fingertip on it; it was terribly warm.

After a minute or so of just sitting there, F. explained that the egg had remained the same ever since he received it three days ago at the New Patricians rally. He didn’t really know about incubation, but figured he was doing a good enough job. F. has a high opinion of himself. X interrupted to add, in his charmingly unique way, that the egg was important and crucial to “something,” and he had mostly come over here to check on it and made sure it was developing well. I didn’t know whether to believe him.

“We can prove a connection,” He rambled on. “We can show the rest that they are linked to the group. The group that took E.’s father’s house.”

He had touched upon a subject that not everyone was comfortable with.

“Wasn’t her dad in a sort of charity society?” F. asked. X denied this. He assured us that the Clan is not only a charity association, or a club of rich old men, and much less an inoffensive New Age deal like the Patricians are supposed to be. It was infinitely more than that.

“I think it’s going to be one of the nobles,” He muttered.

There was a silence then. For the first time that day I noticed that he reeked of alcohol. “Nobles?” F. arched an eyebrow.

X stared at us like we had just asked him what one plus one was. He stared at us long and deep, as if he were going to reveal a particularly difficult secret. Sometimes it was hard to see his eyes underneath the unruly hair. He suddenly sprung up and started asking for a piece of paper.

We couldn’t find anything that hadn’t been written on, so F. ripped a page from one of his father’s documents and let X go to town with it. He madly scribbled with a pencil sharpened and re-sharpened to the point that it was only a few centimeters long, which he produced from his back pocket. He kept erasing parts of the drawing for no reason and it only made things more muddled.

Then he handed us the drawing. He pointed at each of the drawings and stammered to say something about them.

“Nobles. Reptiles like snakes. Crawlers.”

“Virgins. Pretty birds. Waterfowl.” “Guardians. Rats. But really, all rodents.”

“Legion. Bugs. Spiders.”

Then he pointed at the last drawing on the bottom.

“Null, bad, dogs, they hate them. The Clan hates them. I don’t know.” I studied the picture for a moment. Five animals with exotic names.

“So you’re saying this is what the Clan is about?” “I don’t know what the Clan is about,” he snapped back. This was after he was assaulted at the Park. He said he just knew it had something to do with them. He suggested that perhaps it was all just a joke.

F. arched an eyebrow and asked him where he got that from.

“The fucks at the park,” he replied nonchalantly. Apparently he had pieced it together from that encounter and a number of other incidents, like the hotel, the bath house and the dumpster. Everything in the notebooks. It was his pet theory, I guess. He said he wasn’t sure about the names but he was sure about the pictures.

He them crumpled up the paper and handed it to me, practically pushed it into my hand as if he wanted nothing to do with it. I said nothing, quietly unfolded it and put it in one of my school books. I made a mental note to tell B. about this and maybe store it in the notebooks.

X grew silent after that. We tried to coax him into revealing more, assuming that he knew something else, but he just stared intently at the egg and ignored us. My legs grew numb and I asked F. if I could go out for a cigarette. He accompanied me.

We sat on the lawn chairs by the empty pool, dirty and covered in webs. I stared off into space, something very easy to do when the sky is painfully monochrome, as if it were a screen draped over the neighborhood. F. smoked in silence. I asked him if X was staying at his house now.

He figured as much, he replied after a few moments of apparently mulling it over. He added that he didn’t want X to go back home at the moment because he needed someone to take care of the egg while he was off carrying out errands or working part-time jobs.

I asked him if that was what he was doing now that he wasn’t in university anymore. He nodded slowly. He said his father had more or less given up on interacting with him beyond the common courtesies of hello, goodbye and please pass the salt. He just sent him off on errands that he was too lazy to do. He was set to deliver a package in District 11 tomorrow. I looked at him with a tinge of sadness. F.’s ambition had deflated. He used to do so many things back in school, and excelled at most of them. But back then we all had a future. The future then arrives and is completely foreign to your expectations, so you retreat into past lives.

I was about to say something like that, but then we heard yelling from inside the house. It was X.

When we got back in we saw him holding the cardboard box above his head as F.’s dog leapt up and tried to swipe it off his hands, barking and growling. It was a beautiful Weimaraner that F. has had since childhood. His name is Drogo, I think. He appears and disappears from the house. Sometimes I never see him at all.

F. grabbed him by the collar and dragged him into the kitchen, then locked the door. It looked remarkably difficult as the dog struggled and yelped to break free, but eventually yielded to him.

We could still hear scratching from the other side of the door. F. asked X if the egg was okay. He nodded profusely.

X said that it was time to move the egg into a safer place. F. motioned to me, inviting me to his bedroom, but I declined. Somehow two hours had passed since I had come to the house and it was time for my next class. I wasn’t really thinking of assisting, but I didn’t want to stay there, either. I felt like I was intruding.

So I said my goodbyes, picked up my bag and walked out the front gate smoking a cigarette. I’ve picked up the habit from B., by the way. I really wish I hadn’t, but it’s comforting when you’re standing in the middle of the street and have absolutely nothing to do. I had to walk down the winding streets and pass by many joggers and dog-walkers, looking at me with mild curiosity and disapproval, until I got to the bus stop. I felt a little numb and strange as if everything had ceased to move for a moment. It might have been the cigarettes, I’m not very used to them yet. It felt like a resigned calm, not necessarily good. Like a kind of fatalism in the face of death.

I sat waiting for the bus and strangely felt like crying. I didn’t go to class that day.

Notes

I've been looking for the drawing referenced in this entry. It doesn't seem to be in the notebooks, at least not anymore.

I found it

After reading "Faith Healing, Part Two," I started to wonder if the picture mentioned could be anywhere. I looked again in the hole under the floorboard in my brother's room, where I originally found the notebooks. It was tucked away in a corner. I found something else, too, that I had missed the first time. I apologize for the bad quality, but it's been clearly crumpled up and folded over many times and I had to wipe a lot of dust out so it would scan properly.

I have been re-reading some entries after looking at this picture.

Excerpt from Notebook 4: "Warning, Goodbye"

1. The killings were misguided. The intention was good. He is out of control. F.'s house stinks of it. That. It stinks of death.

2. The day store is not safe. Don't associate yourself with the girl. If you do, don't go at it alone.

3. NP has your numbers. I thought you gave out fake information. Why didn't you? They've been calling my house all day. Why did you give them my number? What else did you give them?

4. I dreamed of a man locked in a second floor room, with a family living below, locked inside his body, stuck in a bathtub covered in ice. I've been dreaming a lot of N. ever since he left us. I know that it's difficult to hear.

5. E. has been talking to me online. She wants me to listen to some music she made.

6. N.'s funeral is in [____], [____] St., the 21st of this month, 7:00 am sharp. You will be there.

7. I didn't know about D.'s statues at the time. I deduced it because of what happened with F.

I won't be adding entries to the notebooks anymore. Sorry.

- K.

Notes

This is one of the few signed entries in the notebooks. There aren't any other signed entries by K., before or after this one.

Excerpt from Notebook 1: "Origin / To Remember"

A. told me a story the other day. I'm not sure if he was kidding or not.

When A. was twelve or so and his parents would take him to see a psychologist after soccer practice, he recalled seeing a lady every day. The psychologist worked out of his apartment in the third floor of a complex. After the session was over, he would take the elevator back down and wait outside the building for his parents to pick him up. They would ask him how it went and he would reply with a half-hearted "Well."

Next to the apartment building was a small retail store, summer dresses and ladies' shoes and the like. At the time that A. was waiting for his parents to arrive, the owner was returning from her lunch break to re-open the store. She was a lady in her mid-forties, from the looks of it; she wore colorful, loud dresses with odd prints. Before coming back into the store she would stand outside and smoke, looking exasperated. Sometimes she would shoot a furtive glance in A.'s direction. He figured that maybe she knew that he was going to see the psychologist in the third floor. She had probably seen many boys like him waiting in that precise spot for their parents to pick him up.

The store windows exhibited gaudy mannequins sometimes lacking arms or facial features, draped in clothing that couldn't have been fashionable, even back then. A. would stare at them out of having nothing else to do, and also because the lady made him nervous. Sometimes she would stand directly next to him and smoke. But she would always retreat into the store before his parents arrived. She was wrinkled and covered in makeup, always staring off beyond the streets and buildings, expecting trouble to arrive.

This was when A. began to realize, after so many awkward meetings in silence, that the lady's clothes seemed to be the very same ones that were sold at the store. That seemed sensible enough, as a form of self-advertisement, or something. But what made A. curious is that whenever she was wearing one particular dress, that dress was no longer on display at the store. It was like every night she took one of the mannequins' outfits and wore it herself, then moved on to another one. A. came to assume that nobody else worked at the tiny store. He never saw anyone walk in or out. He regarded her with mild confusion and never told his parents anything.

Months after this had begun, A.'s appointment was switched to the late afternoon one day, he took the elevator up and waited outside his door. He grew impatient and knocked, even though he could hear talking, and then presumably sobbing, coming from inside. He recognized the psychologist's voice telling him to please wait a moment. So he sat on the floor, leaning against the wall. Several minutes passed with intervals of silence and sobbing. Then he finally heard steps in his direction and the door swung open. Out came the lady from the store.

She wiped her eyes with an embroidered handkerchief and stared, dumbfounded, for a moment at him, evidently surprised to see him there, as if he had caught her in the middle of doing something bad or sinful. Her face morphed into the same desperate, anxious look she always carried. Then she walked away and the psychologist ushered him into his apartment.

On the last day of these, when A.'s parents figured that he no longer needed the sessions (and had complained sufficiently about how expensive they were), A. was saddened to realize, while he waited outside for his parents to arrive, that the store had closed and was now empty.

I asked A. to write this story down himself, but he declined.

Excerpt from Notebook 5: "Dog Killer"

Sensationalist nutjobs are nothing new in the morning news. You probably remember that cab driver who went around picking girls up and stabbing them with a screwdriver. A screwdriver. They called him "The Screwdriver Psycho" because they're not very creative around here. The Dog Killer was something like that. It was in the early nineties. T. probably knows the exact year.

Somewhere around this time, dogs in the city's District 2 started turning up dead. They had usually been strangled; later on the Dog Killer took on more grisly ways like crushing their heads. Some of them were also poisoned, but cruel neighbors poison others' dogs all the time if they're being too loud or obnoxious, so it's unlikely that most of those killings can be attributed to him.

The Dog Killer story initially perked up the media's interest when he started branching out of the neighborhood. Family pets were turning up dead via the same methods all over a certain sector of the city. All breeds and sizes, often multiple victims. The motivation behind these killings was practically non-existent. It's assumed that a lot of stray dogs turning up dead around the time were also his victims, but stray dogs turn up dead all of the time, so it's questionable. What scared people was that a.) Since the killings were seemingly random, he was probably insane (or just really hated dogs), and b.) a lot of these killings involved breaking and entering at least the back yards of homes, which meant that at any point the Dog Killer could move on to people. The fact that he didn't bother to take advantage of the moment to steal something only made everyone more afraid of him, because it wasn't rational. I remember my parents setting up an alarm system at home for the first time back then. They also moved my brother's crib up to their room so he'd sleep with them for the time being. Back then I was still in grade school, so I'm not sure what I was supposed to do if I came face-to-face with a maniac, but with a baby it's different, I suppose. Not that I'm resentful, anyway.

The Dog Killer was at large for something like five months, and never far from the papers, though never quite making the headlines. He was sort of a lurking, puzzling shadow in the back of everyone's minds. A lot of people took their dogs in to sleep inside the house with them. Many more people got rid of their dogs so the Killer would have no reason to enter their house. Walking down the streets meant seeing many stray dogs, some of them with collars, having been let go by their owners, wandering and scavenging for food.

During his spree, many people came forward claiming that they were the Dog Killer. But when the killings continued it became hard to believe. There was a certain young man who appeared in many news reports and talk shows after supposedly providing proof that he was the Killer, but it was then proven false. I'm not sure why so many people wanted everyone to think that they were this person, but that's fame for you.

I say that T. probably knows the exact year when the killings took place because the whole thing started in her neighborhood. In fact, her neighbors' dog was one of the first victims, if I recall correctly. We actually didn't have a dog, so my parents were just being paranoid with the whole alarm thing, as they usually are.

At this time one of the people who owned a dog that turned up headless the morning after claimed that she saw the Dog Killer as he ran out of her garden. She was a very old lady whose pet had been her only companion. It was a popular sob story in the media. She was also very superstitious. She claimed that the Dog Killer was not a man, but a devil. She said that he was a shadow with red eyes who vanished upon being seen. Most people dismissed it as the ramblings of a senile old lady, but a good part of this country is pretty superstitious as well, so others took it more seriously.

Then the late-night ads started.

I only saw it once for myself. They aired very late at night. I had once stayed up until like 2 A.M. watching X-Men reruns, when all of a sudden the TV faded to harsh static, and then came up a grainy image. The whole thing lasted about thirty seconds. It was slow-motion, low-quality footage of dogs simply laying there, presumably dead. I don't know if it was footage taken from the news or filmed by the broadcaster, but the dogs were obviously victims of the Killer. The "ad" was unnerving by itself, but even stranger was the background music. It was some kind of ritual chanting, or at least that's how I remember it. Kind of like something you would hear people singing at Mass, but in a weird tone. Meanwhile you had these panning shots of dead dogs. Then, finally, at the end, superimposed in big white letters, "PLEASE STOP." Then the ad ended and faded to static, which was almost instantly replaced by usual programming. It was chilling.

When the existence of these ads seeped into the cultural consciousness at large, it became clear that they were showing up in all sorts of channels, interrupting cartoons, soap operas and pornography without discrimination, usually between 2 and 5 A.M. And even more interestingly, they were not paid for by the channel companies. They were not official ads; somebody was jamming the signal of these channels late at night to broadcast the ads. Nobody ever found out who it was. The ads stopped after a few weeks.

And then, so did the Dog Killer. At the time people had more or less gotten tired of hearing from him anyway, but eventually the killings seemed to subside. In any big city dogs turn up dead on the streets pretty much every day, but none of it seemed to bear the Killer's mark or align with his modus operandi. So it was assumed that he had gone back to being a regular psycho, or returned to the depths of Hell for those who believed the old lady's account.

The Dog Killer's identity, as well as that of the mysterious broadcaster, are unknown to this day, at least as far as I know. (Some of my friends probably have their pet theories, though.) This guy who used to put up compilations of popular South American ads from the eighties and nineties on YouTube had one of the dog ads up, but according to A. it's been taken down. Just another strange tale from the city.

Notes

It's clear that this was written by my brother. The baby mentioned was me. I scarcely remember the Dog Killer. He isn't discussed much these days. I never knew about the videos, though. I asked my parents about it and they didn't remember anything, either, so maybe it was a piece of fiction tossed in by my brother to spice things up. I looked it up on YouTube but got no results. (There are many videos of people abusing dogs, sadly, but nothing like my brother described in this entry.)

Excerpt from Notebook 4: "Faith Healing, Part III"

I think that I've been dealing with depression for a long time now.

Have you ever taken a long bus ride without a destination? Any city with a public transport system is perfect for that. Empty bus seats at night are the most heartbreaking thing. It had become a bit of a hobby for me to simply sit there and watch neighborhood blocks, projects, skyscrapers go by.

It's becoming progressively easier for me to enter a state of complete disconnect from the world and its troubles. I have a perfect understanding of my pressing responsibilities, upcoming assignments, family expectations and so on. But I survey them with a grey clot in my mind. It's like I'm in a fog. Lately this winter I've been waking up early in the morning to sit on the wet grass outside my room and watch the still world.

I went to F.'s house in this state of mind.

The house is beautiful in its decay. It's so out of the beaten path, along a deserted street with abandoned lots, running down the steepest hill of District 5. The black iron gate at the entrance has ivy wrapped around it, it looks like a European haunted manor. The guard acknowledged my presence quietly and I pushed the gate open.

I had missed class again. Earlier that week I had already informed my boss that I would be quitting at the end of the month. I was just an intern, anyway. I would eventually be able to find work somewhere. He looked at me sternly and said he was disappointed. I don't think I was very good at my job.

As I walked along the winding garden path of F.'s front door I felt a tingling in my legs and an odd sweetness in the back of my mouth. It was a kind of anxiety.

He opened the door just as I was about to knock. He looked like he hadn't slept.

We talked about inconsequential things for a little while and he played with his hair. But the moment we sat in the old living room, with the dusty record player and the spider-covered bookshelves, he broke down. Just sobbing. I had never seen him like that. I actually didn't know to react for the first few minutes. I just sat across from him and quietly sipped the coffee he had brought me. I looked around nervously to see if his father would show up, or maybe X, but the house seemed to be empty except for us. Eventually I asked him to calm down, but it came out muffled.

He stopped crying eventually and explained to me what had happened earlier that morning. He had woken up to find that X had disappeared. Most of his things were gone with him, but some clothes remained scattered on the floor of the guest room. The bed where he slept had been somehow flipped over and was now leaning against the wall, as if thrown by a powerful wind. F. said that he hadn't heard any strange noises the night before.

Then he lead me to patio in the back. I trailed a few steps behind, trying to process everything. As he swung the kitchen door open a powerful odor hit me. It was decomposition.

In the middle of the patio was Drogo, F.'s dog. A pigeon was trying to pluck out its left eye.

I instinctively stepped out and scared the bird away. I had gotten used to the smell remarkably quickly. Drogo hadn't been dead for a very long time. I surveyed the slender, grey body. There were no visible wounds. I turned back to F., who looked mortified.

He said he had discovered the body earlier this morning. He hadn't the heart to move it. I asked him if anything else was missing. He replied that the egg was gone.

I just stared in disbelief at what he was suggesting.

After the initial shock, we took a walk around the yard and surveyed the gate, the walls, the backdoor. No locks had been broken and there were no signs of forced entry. F.'s father has a guard standing outside his house at all times of night and early morning. It doesn't seem possible that someone would be able to sneak in without anyone noticing.

We wandered for about an hour, looking for an explanation. He mentioned that he hadn't told anyone other than me. He knew he would eventually have to tell the rest of the group, but right now he wanted help with something else. He wanted me to help him cremate Drogo.

The proposal seemed a little morbid, and I shuddered at the thought of touching the body. But F. seemed so distraught that I couldn't possibly say no. I knew that I wouldn't go to my next class; I was already failing half my courses, anyway. So I agreed.

We did our best to do everything respectfully. The body was extremely heavy, so we had to use the rusted wheelbarrow left in a corner of the yard. Eventually we managed to stuff the body in the furnace. F. shut the door with resolve and started the fire.

Had F. lived anywhere closer to urbanization than he did, I'm sure we would have gotten a dozen complaints from the smell and the smoke. It was thick and black, impenetrable; I shielded by eyes and covered my nose but still stared up in the sky, a dull grey color, at the smoke column. F. was silent next to me. It burned and burned for an hour. We didn't say much of anything.

After it was over, F. thanked me and asked if I wanted to stay. I was feeling strange about the whole thing, though. I said I had to go to class and showed myself out. He stood on the patio, where Drogo's body had been, and stared. I shut the gate behind me.

My clothes stunk of smoke. Then it suddenly hit me, that X was missing, that someone had almost certainly broken into F.'s house last night, that F. was probably in danger. I considered calling X's parents until I realized that I didn't have their number and I didn't know where he lived. I considered calling F. and telling him to go to a hotel for at least a week. But the moment I got to my house I felt an overwhelming malaise and collapsed in my bed.

I don't recall any dreams.

I woke up at midnight, having slept twelve hours. The only light in my room came from my celphone. I had about twenty missed messages, from B., F., E., A., and N.

They were all recounting the same thing, of course. X's body had washed up on the shore.

Short Exchange with A. at the Harbor

The man referred to as A. in the notebooks is now thirty-one years old. I couldn't find much from investigating him. He went to the same primary and secondary school as my brother, but was expelled in 1997 and graduated in 1999 from a different institution. He passed the entrance exam for a local university and studied Industrial Engineering. Apparently he won three Regional Vale Tudo Championships in a row, on 1998, 1999 and 2000. Currently he works as a supervisor in the cargo company owned by his father. He has not married.

It wasn't hard to find A. at the harbor in the summer morning. He looks very much like he did as a teenager, but his hair is much shorter, and he has that tiredness that comes with adulthood. A black mark that appears to be part of a large tattoo peeks out from under the collar of his shirt.

I introduced myself as B.'s younger brother and he almost immediately recognized me after that. There was some effusive hugging and exclamations and asking me about my family and my studies. Then there was a lull as A. recalled my brother and momentarily stared off into the sea, from where a heavy mist was rolling in. I said that I wanted to ask him some questions for a family project that I was putting together for Art class. It seemed like a flimsy excuse as I said it but A. seemed to buy it.

We sat down at one of the many tiny seaside cafés; A. loosened his tie and crossed his arms, leaning back against the chair. A strident group of seagulls were feasting on a discarded fish only a few feet from us. I remembered that he had been a man of few words in his teens, but the years seemed to have mellowed him out.

The interview was very informative right up until the end.

You knew my brother for most of his life, right?

Yes... we became friends in the first or second grade, and we remained friends through high school and university. We couldn't see each other as often after graduation, but sometimes we managed.

I know this is kind of awkward, but, what do you think made you and my brother so close?

We... We had the same sense of humor, I guess... We were part of a bigger group, which was better.

What bigger group?

Well, you probably remember us visiting your brother as a big group when you were a boy. We were always hanging out with T., F., E...

I remember all of those people.

T. and F. also went to university with us. The four of us would get together sometimes after graduating. We all studied different things, of course, so we graduated at different times.

Do you know anything about T. and F. as of late?

I know that T. is in New York City. After she dropped out of Law, her parents sent her to a design institution abroad, and I think she was immediately hired by a New York design firm after graduation.

I don't know much about F... In 2006 he headed off to Honduras to live there and do social work for a while. I would get monthly letters from him, real letters, in the mail. Then he went to Africa to take some photographs for a magazine, or so I heard from his father. I actually had a business meeting with his father a week ago. He owns half the place, after all.

What about E.?

E. actually moved to Europe on the last year of secondary school... Nobody heard much from her again. I think T. got a couple emails from her and that was it.

E. was the girl that F. had a crush on for a while, right?

[Laughter] Yes... I can't believe you remember that.

I'm trying to remember another person who used to hang out with you... I think his name started with an N?

Oh... Yes, that was N. He was sort of friends with us over the last two years of secondary school, but I didn't see much of him because by then I'd been expelled.

Uh... Why did you get expelled again?

[Laughter] Fighting.

So... What's N. doing these days? Do you know?

[Clears throat] He died, in 2006. In the Nantes marketplace fire.

I see... Was there anyone else in your group?

That was most of it... D. was around sometimes, you probably remember her, with the red hair. I don't think you got to meet K...

I think I did.

Really? K. was a very odd person... She didn't go out that much. I think that was the whole group...

Wait, was K. the girl who almost blew up the school's boiler room? They still talked about that when I was in secondary.

[Laughter] Yes, that was her. I'm pretty sure it was a miscalculation on her part.

What are they doing?

Nothing much... D. went back to live with her family in the U.K. after she finished school, and K. sort of dropped off the radar... I think she might still live here, though.

I also remember another guy, though... He was kind of... Crazy-looking, I guess. I can't remember his name...

Who? [Long pause] What are you really here for?

I wanted to confirm memories I have of my brother and his friends... I've been having some dreams about it lately, sort of half-remembered childhood moments.

[Pause] I think your brother was friends with a guy from school who got into trouble many times... I think he passed away at some point.

Do you remember his name?

Not really.

So... what did you do, as a group, usually?

Well, the usual teenage things...

Any record stores?

[Pause] Not record stores, I don't think so. Why do you ask?

No reason. Well, I guess that's all... [click]

[end of interview]

I don't have very much to say. A. became visibly defensive and clammed up towards the end of the interview. I wonder if he knew that I had found the notebooks.

Maybe the whole thing really was fiction, and A. was simply embarrassed that I'd found their collaborative creative writing project or something...

Or otherwise he didn't want to reveal the identity of X to me, for some reason.

Other than possibly K., it seems that A. is the only member of the group who is still alive and living in this city. Contacting anyone else will be more difficult.

[heroinzero-blog]

Shut That Damned Door

(By WriterJosh/Creepypasta Wiki)

My parents died in a car crash when I was fourteen.

Don't feel bad for me or anything. I've made my peace with that years ago. Life with them was never great, but I do miss them. It's just that if they taught me one thing it's to not sit around wallowing in self-pity.

I just wish they hadn't sent me to live with my Aunt Louise.

Anyone have that one family member that's just a little strange, a little cut off from the rest of the family? Aunt Louise was ours. She was also our closest living relative. Dad's family lived on the other side of the continent. Mom's parents were both dead and she was an only child. Aunt Louise, her mother's sister, actually, so my great-aunt, lived just an hour from where we did.

When my folks were alive, we rarely visited Aunt Louise, and to be perfectly honest, I half expected her to refuse to take me in. I was fully prepared to become a ward of the state, or move across the country, as soon as I heard that Children and Family services had contacted her about taking me in.

But she accepted. I'm not sure how willingly, or graciously, because I wasn't privy to the phone conversation where she agreed to take me. I was surprised, though, at how nice she was to me the first three days I was there.

I want to make something clear; while Aunt Louise was cranky, odd, eccentric, uncouth, and several other less-than-flattering adjectives, she wasn't a complete bitch. She had a rather abrupt, even abrasive, way of speaking, but she wasn't cruel. I had never taken the time to really get to know her during my initial fourteen years, but I could tell that she mostly kept to herself and didn't particularly like people, so naturally I assumed that she was a reclusive, curmudgeonly bitch.

Really, what surprised me most when I first moved in, it was how normal everything seemed. At least at first. Aunt Louise cooked, cleaned, watched TV, talked to neighbors on the phone, etc. just like anyone else would, and she told me right away that she had little in the way of expectations from me, or at least, none that my parents wouldn't have; don't stay out too late, let her know if you're going to be late coming home, finish your homework before you watch TV, clean up after yourself, etc.

There was one rule, however, that was strange. And it stood out from the other rules in how strange it was. At first I tried not to worry about it; old people sometimes have peculiarities. I initially thought that was all this was. I was wrong.

She insisted that any time I entered or left a room, I was to shut the door behind me right away. It didn't matter if I was only going to be in that room for a few seconds. If I entered a room, I was expected to immediately shut the door, and the same was true if I left it.

I often forgot this rule in my first week or so there. She never failed to remind me of it. "Shut that damned door!" she would yell, any time I forgot. It never seemed to matter where she was in the house, she could always tell when I had not shut a door just after opening it.

Her house was old, and my understanding is that she was not its first owner. She had lived in it since Mom was a girl. I had no idea how old it was. It could easily have been over a hundred, judging by its design and layout. It had two floors, a basement and a sub-basement. That last floor threw me for a bit of a loop when I discovered it existed. I was washing a load of my clothes when I noticed a door, closed, naturally, in the far wall of the utility room. The basement was unfinished, with mostly dirt flooring and bits and bobs stacked or piled or shelved everywhere. The only room you could really walk through without fear of stepping on something or knocking over a stack or pile was this laundry room, which was also the only tiled floor down there.

The door I found in the basement had a board laid across it, easily moveable. It was as if Aunt Louise wanted a border there but not one that she couldn't get past, if need be. My curiosity overtook me the second time I saw it, and I slid the board away from the door and tried it. It was locked.

This didn't strike me as all that strange right away. That is, until I realized that this was the only room in the house, other than the doors leading outside, that Aunt Louise kept locked.

I asked her about it one day. She was cooking.

"The door in the basement?" she answered. "That's the sub-basement. Not much down there. I mainly keep my preserves down there. It's cool enough for them to keep."

"Right," I answered. This didn't really explain why she kept it locked. "So if I ever wanted to take a look around down there..."

"For the love of Christ, boy, why would you want to do that?"

I noticed with that response that her face had changed. Aunt Louise mostly wore the same expression; a scowl like someone had just tracked mud onto her freshly-shampooed carpet. Again, she wasn't as nasty as her expression indicated, but it was the expression she was most used to making, apparently.

But when she responded to my desire to see what was behind that door, her eyebrows raised and her mouth quivered for just a second before answering. It was so slight, others might not have noticed it, but by that time, I knew enough about Aunt Louise to equate that with a scream of horror.

I knew then that I had to see what was behind that door.

I've always been a curious type, you see. I've never been able to stay away from something that aroused my curiosity, even if my good sense told me better. I wanted nothing more after that than to see what was in that sub-basement.

But how was I to get around the lock? That was going to be an issue. Aunt Louise kept all her keys on a single ring. There weren't that many of them, but I figured if the door to that sub-basement was anywhere, it was there.

I just had to find a way to take it from her.

This turned out not to be so simple. For one thing, it was not possible to get around the house without being heard. I couldn't sneak from my bedroom to hers in order to sneak the keys without opening and closing all doors in between us; mine, the door in the far part of the hallway, and hers. Believe me, even if I simply left all doors open, she somehow knew. I once had to go to the bathroom in the night, and I forgot to close the hallway door. I had just made it to the bathroom when I heard her yell, even while asleep, "Shut that damned door!" I hurriedly turned back and went to close the hallway door, forgetting to close the bathroom door, and I heard it again: "Shut that damned door!"

For that matter, Aunt Louise's room had a squeaky door that also had a catch to it, so when she opened it, it sounded like a choom-creeeeeeeeeeeeak. There was no opening of her door without her noticing.

So I forgot about the sub-basement door for a while. I placed my curiosity on the back burner and just tried to get along with the taciturn old woman for a while. Life got a bit easier. As long as I remembered to keep all doors shut at all times, the two of us got along famously. She didn't get in my face about things, and I didn't get in hers. It was a pretty silent house, but one that I got used to living in. I didn't even think it strange anymore that every part of the house that one accessed through a door always had its door shut. It would have struck me as more odd if any doorway was ever left open.

Which brings me to the day Aunt Louise fell asleep while watching The Price is Right. It was a summer day, and pretty hot. Louise was slightly less worried about windows being open than doors, but she still tended to only open one at a time, and today she had just one open, one that wasn't doing much at all to cool down a boxed-in house that had zero room for airflow thanks to Aunt Louise's chief eccentricity. So, naturally, she fell asleep. And I saw my chance.

Her purse was at her feet. I was sitting in the chair directly beside hers, reading an Avengers comic book and trying to ignore the repeated calls of "Come oooooooon doooooown!" from the TV. I looked over at her, and saw that she was in a deep doze. Her hearing wasn't the greatest even when she was awake, though she was far from deaf, but I figured in her snooze, there would be little chance she would hear the tiny noise of me rifling through her purse.

I found her keys almost immediately and headed for the stairwell. If she woke up when I opened the door, I would just claim I was doing a load of laundry. But she was unlikely to wake up unless I forgot to close the door, which by now I never did.

I headed down the stairs, for some reason tip-toeing even though I wasn't yet at the place I had been shut out from. I felt absurdly guilty, despite the fact that Aunt Louise had never expressly forbidden me from doing what I was now doing.

The door to the basement was closed, of course, but unlocked, as always. I ducked through and closed it, waiting a few minutes, listening for a shifting of Aunt Louise's frame in her chair, indicating she was getting up, or perhaps her voice calling to ask why I was in the basement.

Quietly, I crept for the laundry room, opened the door and closed it just as quick, slipping inside. I felt for the chain-pull for the light and pulled it. Low, eerie light flickered through the room. I had never thought of the lighting in here as eerie before, but I did now. There was something about this entire endeavor that felt wrong.

But my curiosity overrode my sense of caution. I crept toward the door and slid the board away from it. Aunt Louise had apparently put it back in place after the last time I had done this. The question of why she had done so played in my brain for a moment, but I ignored it and brought out the key ring.

I found the right key on the third try, and heard a loud chuck of the lock sliding away. I froze, heart beating in my chest, waiting to hear a cry from upstairs. Nothing.

The door opened silently as a ghost. There wasn't any light to illuminate the staircase beyond. I didn't even see a chain-pull for a light on the stairs. My brain was screaming at the rest of my body to turn around and forget this little adventure, but I paid it no heed and crept down the stairs, feeling along the wall for guidance.

It turned out there was a tiny amount of light, coming through vents in the ceiling. It wasn't much, but I could see that there was a pull-string light, just a few feet from the foot of the stairs. Stupid place to put it; it should be right at the landing. But I walked down what appeared to be a fairly compact hallway and pulled the string. If possible, the light that flickered on was lower than the light from the laundry room. I could barely tell I'd turned it on.

I looked around and saw that, indeed, Aunt Louise did have rows of preserves down here. I was somewhat disappointed at the mundane answer to the mystery. For a moment, it seemed that the secret sub-basement was exactly what it was supposed to be.

Except...I could feel a puff of a warmish breeze that should not be possible down in the hard-packed earthen walls and cooler, subterranean air. The sense of wrongness was still there, and still strong, and I realized that the long row of shelves holding jars ended in a doorway at the end. A doorway that didn't have a door.

I crept forward, arms in front of me, stepping carefully. The room beyond the door was dark and smelled musty. I couldn't feel a source of the slightly warm air that was brushing against my skin. But I was noticing that the closer I got to that room, the warmer the air became.

By the time I was at the mouth of the tunnel (somehow I had started thinking of this place as a tunnel by this time), the air wasn't just warm, it was humid. Fetid. The smell went from musty to moldy, to something even worse. I was assailed by that sense of wrongness stronger than ever. I had to get out of here. Why was I walking even closer?

There wasn't much light, but I could see the outline of another door on the other side of the room. It was ajar. Seeing a door ajar in Aunt Louise's house was like seeing a shattered window in anyone else's. It was wrong. It was not meant to be. But then...I wasn't precisely in Aunt Louise's house anymore, was I? This tunnel was not built for this house. I knew that in my soul. It was here before. Long before. This was a place that had only become attached to Aunt Louise's house by short-sighted builders, unaware of what they had unearthed. What they should have left buried.

It took me a moment to realize that the room beyond, the very room I was about to step into, was moving. The light was too dim to really see what was happening, but there was motion beyond it. Unceasing, slow, lazy motion. All along the walls, the floor. I could hear a slight squelching noise from its every corner. Things were crawling, expanding their pulpous flesh.

And looking at me. Daring me to cross that floor and shut the door on the far side, forever closing out what might be coming through it. I heard sucking sounds. Some formless, gelatinous presence stretched and flexed in the darkness.

In that moment, a sense of understanding came to me. I was not the first person to stand at this door. This door that could not be closed. Not the first person to see that other door, the one that was not meant to be, standing open on the other side, and knowing that it always would, until someone worked up the courage to cross the threshold and close it.

Aunt Louise had not had the courage, so she had fled, and kept every door in her house closed at all times, hoping against hope that keeping her doors closed at all times would alert her when whatever was beyond that damned door finally came for her.

I didn't have the courage, either. I turned and fled, and never looked back. When I was sixteen I moved out of Aunt Louise's and into a Halfway House. Once I was eighteen I got a job upstate, and moved there. I never went back to Aunt Louise's and never called her, tried hard to not even think about her.

But I haven't been successful. I still think back to the day I stood at that doorway, about the squelching, wriggling things that waited in the dark. And I wonder if Aunt Louise ever found the strength to cross the room and shut that damned door.

[heroinzero-blog]

A Small Piece of Lead

(By EmpyrealInvective/Creepypasta Wiki)

“A million years later, I feel like apologizing for the human race. That’s all I can say.” —Kurt Vonnegut ("Galapagos")

It was such a small thing, insignificant in the grand scheme of things. It was hardly worth any focus or attention. Enough about me though, the bullet was small too, in a different sense I guess. To be honest, I didn't even feel it when it tore through my chest. The first thing I noticed was the damage it had done to my book. I had been walking down the street reading the last few pages of "Deadeye Dick." I was just at the part about Will Fairchild’s parachute (or lack thereof) when it happened.

There was a loud ‘Bang!’, but before I could even register the sound; the pages of the book I had been reading exploded outward and spilled out onto the street. People scattered, but I was too busy reaching for the pages before the wind could steal them away. I sank to my knees and reached for the papers. For some reason, I couldn't breathe. At first, I thought it was a car backfiring, but when I looked up, I saw a teenager around my age speeding away in a black SUV. It wasn't until I looked down and saw the hole in my chest that I connected all the dots.

I had been shot.

The last thought that went through my head was, “The book, how did it end?” As far as last thoughts go, it was a bit lackluster. I haven’t really thought profoundly on what my last thought should have been, but I was hoping for something a little more poignant to come forward in that moment. I collapsed onto my face and was dead within seconds. So it goes.

My story should have ended there, out on the pavement with blood spilling out of me, but it didn't. You could call it unresolved issues binding me to this mortal coil, but I think it was really just interest. I wanted to see what happened next. I died there, but I didn't stop existing.

I watched as police cordoned off the area with tape and tried to discourage rubber-neckers. It didn't work. The sidewalk was soon crowded with people trying to see over the shoulders of the police that were on the scene. The police tried to get witness statements, but nobody had anything noteworthy to say. They saw a black car speeding off and that was it.

The weight of it all slammed down on me like one thousand bricks. I was dead. I lingered there for a few hours, trying to make sense of it all, but I couldn't piece it together. How did this happen? How could this happen? I had so much I wanted to do; so much I needed to do. I had a family! I broke down only a few feet away from my body. It was then while I was crying that I shifted.

One moment, I was lying on the street, curled up in the fetal position, the next moment; I was in my house. I don’t know how much time had passed; I assumed a couple of days judging by the house’s appearance. It looked disheveled. Dust had begun to form and the counters were cluttered. I began to look for my parents, wondering if there was some way I could communicate with them.

I spent a few weeks with them. I kept hoping that they would come to some form of acceptance about my death or at least move on. They didn't. I screamed at them, begged for them to hear me, supplicated to God for some reprieve. Nothing. I could only watch them as they attempted to cope with the loss of their only son.

My dad, who was always such a quiet man, was now belligerent. The smallest things seemed to set him off: a call during dinner, stupid plot twists on a television show, even something as small as stubbing his toe on the coffee table resulted in a violent outburst. He shouted, spat, and cursed. He was so angry, at everything, at the world, at himself. There was nothing left of him except a seething mass of anger at the injustice of the world.

My mom was even worse. It was as if the bullet that tore through my chest had pierced her heart as well. She moved around the house with sunken eyes that were bloodshot, afraid to set off my dad. She tried to keep herself together around him, but it was obvious to both of them that she was nowhere near okay. She cried and spent most of her free time in my room, curled up on my bed and weeping.

My room had become a shrine with my mother being the only supplicant. Nothing in my room was touched; nothing was moved. She spent hours crying into my bedspread when she knew my dad was out. It served as a monument to her all-encompassing sadness. I tried so hard to make my words reach her, but they were as insubstantial as the wind. I wanted to tear apart my room, hurl my Vonnegut books against the wall, anything to ease some of my frustration, but there was nothing I could do. There was nothing I could do. There was nothing.

I left them a few days later. I couldn't stand to be in that mausoleum any longer. I couldn't see my father spend another day consumed by his rage at the injustice of the world or another night of my mother crying herself to sleep curled up with a toy I used to play with. I couldn't bear another second with them as they spiraled into depression. Call me weak if you want, but my only option was to run. I couldn't help them and I had no intention of seeing them self-destruct.

It was then that I made up my mind about what I needed to do. I could visit my friends, but chances were good that it would only make me more depressed. I could visit the girls I had a crush on, and never told, but what would be the point of that? I had to find him. I had to find the man who shot me from that black SUV and left my parents emotionally crippled. At the time, I didn't know what my intentions were, but now I think I knew what I wanted to happen all along. I wanted justice. I wanted retribution.

It didn't take too long to find him. I don’t know if it was some bond we shared, or just dumb luck. I mused to myself that Vonnegut must have been right when he proposed the Bokonist idea of a “karass” in his book “Cat’s Cradle”. This man and I were intrinsically linked. As soon as I saw him, I knew that I would be there until the day he died.

He looked nothing like I imagined. If anything, he was younger than I was. He looked like he wasn't a day over sixteen. He even had acne for God’s sake! He was thin and lived in an apartment complex with his mother. She was a single mom so she spent most of her time at work, giving him free reign of their tiny apartment. He spent most of his time in his room listening to rap. I spent most of the day watching him in confusion.

How could this teenager have killed me? For what reasons did he have to pull the trigger?

I spent my first week there following him everywhere and watching him. Waiting to see some form of remorse or regret for his actions. He gave no indication that my death had impacted him in any way. He hung out with his friends, who looked like a bunch of suburban teenagers playing at being gangsters. There was one interaction that has been burned into my memory.

He had a friend over and they were both in his room crowded around his window, taking turns passing a joint back and forth. With each inhalation, both erupted in a flurry of coughs, betraying their obvious attempts to mask their inexperience. When they were both sufficiently stoned, his friend started in on him about the drive-by.

“How did it feel to pull the trigger?”

“Come on, nigga,” a statement made awkward considering that they were both lily white, “it was just a twitch of the finger. Nothing more.”

“But you could get caught, I mean you killed-”

My murderer interrupted, “Cops ain't gonna do shit, just another drive-by, just another typical Sunday. As for the punk I capped, his dumb-ass was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was all part of initiation, right? Now the others will know we’re serious.”

That was the end of it. They tried the best to air the pot smell out the room, but the words he spoke hung around me like a malicious miasma. His words echoed around in my brain, beating and tearing into me. I made myself a promise as I stood watching them joke and laugh, I would return the favor. I would drill my words into him like a stake through the chest.

Every night, as he lay in his bed, I glided up to his sleeping form. I bent down and whispered in his ear. I whispered of the horrible fate that awaited him. I murmured my murderous machinations to him throughout the night. I intimated my intentions of what I was going to do to him once he died and entered my plane of existence. I was going to tear him apart, limb from limb and piece by piece. I was going to turn his after-life into hell, because I couldn't impact him in this life.

I whispered throughout the night to his sleeping form. Much like my previous attempts at communication, it failed. He gave no indication of having heard me, but that didn't stop me from doing it. It was a cruel compulsion. It gave me a reason to exist. I spent the day haunting him and thinking of wretched words to whisper to him at night.

The change was almost imperceptible at first. I had been whispering his sins into his ears for a week now, and I was just about ready to give up and resign myself to my fate when it happened. On the eighth night, my killer rolled over in his sleep and I heard the faintest sound. It sounded like a whimper, some pained response to my tireless labors. That one action, that small sound caused me to re-double my efforts.

Was I able to reach him somehow?

I had managed to intimate a message to someone. I was ecstatic. Maybe, with time, I could learn to control this gift. I had to keep talking to him. I had to keep tormenting him. The thought never crossed my mind to return to my parents and attempt some form of reconciliation or help them move on. I was too busy with the man who had put me in this position. I think that’s my greatest regret in all of this. I had an opportunity to try and help my parents move on, but instead I chose to torment my killer.

As time went on, he began to sleep more fitfully. He would toss and turn as my words echoed unheard into his ears. He began eating less and less. He would pick at his food, enough to trick his mother into believing he was eating. He began to grow thin. Still I whispered my midnight maledictions to him.

He stopped hanging out with his wannabe gangster friends. He became withdrawn and stopped speaking to people as he grew more and more reserved. Still I whispered my curses and invectives. He would sneak off at times during the day, wiping away tears. At night, he would breakdown, crying into his pillow in an attempt to smother the sound. Still I whispered.

He wasn't the only one that was beginning to crumble away. My metamorphosis began as something almost imperceptible. It started with my skin beginning to crack. Tiny fissures spread along my flesh, revealing decaying tissue underneath. My skin turned mottled and gray. I couldn't see my entire body, but I was certain that if I could, it would be similar to that of a moldering corpse.

I reasoned that it was an effect of my body decomposing. My ghostly form was still linked to my body in someway. As it rotted, so did my current form. I wondered what would happen to me if enough time passed. Would I be reduced to mummified remains or would the worms pick me apart, leaving me a skeleton? Either way didn't matter to me, I was too busy tormenting him. I wouldn't stop, couldn't stop.

I continued my malevolent midnight mantras to him for two more weeks before the end came. I had started whispering to him at all hours of the day by then. He hadn't left his room at all that weekend. He just sat in darkness as I told him of my hatred from him and how it would be better if he died. Upon uttering those words, the floodgates shattered. My words couldn't reach him, but maybe my sentiments did.

He shot up from his bed as if galvanized and began tearing down posters, throwing his stuff around the room, and venting his emotions. His mom heard the commotion and began knocking on his door. He ran across the room and locked the door before she could open it. She asked him what was wrong and that was when he began his confession. The words spilled out of him like blood from a bullet hole.

He wept, “I-I killed him. I did-didn't mean to. They said I had to do something to prove I wanted into the gang, that I would be willing to do anything for them. I thought if I pulled the trigger, but missed him, it would be good enough. It was an accident; I swear I didn't mean to shoot him! I didn't- Oh god, I didn't! I-”

I could almost hear the gears in her brain turning to try and connect the dots. It only took a few seconds before there was a loud thud on the other side of the door as she collapsed under the weight of his revelation, her breath stolen away from her. He began tearing apart his closet, looking for something. He found it and returned to the bed, cradling the object like it was a precious gift.

The gun looked heavy in his grip, almost comically large in his small hands. He sat down and thumbed the safety off. I was surprised he could even manage that through his tears. He turned the gun back-and-forth in his hands as if trying to figure something out. He must have reached a conclusion because he took a deep breath, wiped away his tears, and spoke.

“I’m sorry mom.”

A quote from “Cat’s Cradle” reverberated through my mind upon hearing those words. “Now I will destroy the whole world.”

Was this what I wanted?

He turned the barrel towards himself and raised it to his head. He wrapped his lips around the cold steel and I could hear his teeth chattering and clicking against the barrel. The sound of the hammer being fanned back brought everything into a twisted and sobering light. He was going to kill himself.

I should have felt happy, but all I felt was sickness in my stomach. It felt like there was something lodged in my throat, but no amount of swallowing could dis-lodge it. I didn't want to see this; I didn't want to know how this would end. I turned to leave, but there was something in my way. It stood in front of the door and blocked off my retreat.

The being was hard to describe. The best explanation I can give of it was that it was static-y and blurry. I couldn't make out a definite form, but it seemed vaguely humanoid in appearance. The air around it shimmered like I was looking at hot asphalt on a desert road. I didn't have much time to examine it, as it spoke as soon as it was sure I had seen it.

“It’s too late to turn away now. Watch what happens next, knowing that there is little to no difference between him pulling the trigger and you.”

I felt myself being turned towards the boy on the bed. I didn't see the entity move, but I felt it exerting its influence over me. I couldn't turn away. I watched as he struggled to breathe around the gun in his mouth. His mother’s wailing drowned out his whimpering. He closed his eyes and I knew what was coming next. I couldn't turn away. I couldn't shut my eyes. He squeezed the trigger.

I stood over his body. He was pitched back over his bed. There was a small dribble of blood coming from the wound. He twitched spasmodically as the last little spark of life he had in him was extinguished. I heard his mother ramming the door in an attempt to break through. It was too late for him. He was gone. It was too late for me as well. The static-y figure approached me and I knew that my time here was almost done. I just had one last question I wanted answered.

“H-how did it end?” I meant the book, “Deadeye Dick.” The transparent being shifted and although I couldn't see its face, I knew that it was smiling.

It told me how it ended and I wept bitter tears.

I told the thing that I was ready. His form shifted with what I assumed was a nod. I was ready to leave this world. I felt myself floating up and I let myself be taken. I sank into myself and began to weep again. I thought I wanted revenge, but this all felt wrong. I had taken his life just like he’d taken mine. The only difference between us was intention. He hadn't meant to kill me, I had. The being tried to carry me, but it wasn't long before I felt myself sinking. My soul was far too heavy to be carried.

I wish I could say that the years passed by in the blink of an eye, but that wouldn't be the truth. They dragged by slowly. I suffered under each crawling hour. I filled the first few years watching my parents, unable to do anything as they self-destructed. I thought the news of my killer’s confession would bring some form of solace to them, but it didn't. If anything, it only made matters worse.

My father began drinking himself into oblivion. He would stay out at all hours of the night and wouldn't return home until he could barely walk. Sometimes he would pick a fight in the bar in an attempt to forget about what happened to me. It never worked. His last moments were actually in the alley behind a bar four years after my death. He picked a fight with a kid who he unjustly blamed for his shortcomings. The man laid him out in the alley with a single punch and left him there. As he was face-first on the concrete, he drowned in his own sick.

My mother’s end was no better. The news of my father’s death was too much for her. She survived a few months after his death, but her heart wasn't in it. She swallowed a bottle of pain medication left over from an old surgery. She spent her last moments on my bed waiting to overdose with an old sweater I used to wear across her lap. As the end approached, she reached out as if she could see me standing only a few feet away from her. She couldn't, if she did, she would have cried out in terror.

I had deteriorated so much by that point that I wasn't even recognizable. My stomach had become tumescent and my flesh began weeping a milky substance. My eyes have completely withered in my head, but I can still see. My skin has become leathery and cracked, but I can still feel. The worst part of it all is that I know I am stuck here. The after-life has been barred to me. I am trapped here, left to watch the world that I no longer care about.

It took a few more years for me to figure it out. By this time, all my friends had passed away and I had nothing to occupy my time except my thoughts. I finally figured out why I look this way. It had nothing to do with my corpse. My appearance was directly impacted by my interaction with the boy who killed me. It wasn't due to my body decomposing; it was my soul rotting.

“You want to know something? We are still in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages – They haven’t ended yet.” —Kurt Vonnegut (Last line of "Deadeye Dick")

[heroinzero-blog]

Have You Seen This Painting of A Hallway?

(By Wdalphin / NoSleep)

I got this package in the mail from my dad: brown paper wrapping, large but flat, with the word “FRAGILE” written on it in black ink. When I unwrapped it, it was this big, acrylic painting, framed in some sort of bronze-gilded plaster.

The painting itself was of this long hallway full of doors, kind of like you’d see in a fancy hotel. The walls had edging about halfway up, the upper part was painted sort of an off white while the lower half was a crimson red that blended into the carpeting. Between each door was an up-turned light, as well as on the far wall at the end, where the corridor seemed to connect to another hallway running perpendicular to it, disappearing around a corner.

It was really amazing detail, though I wouldn’t call it life-like by any means. Just the sheer amount of intricate pieces to each aspect of the scene showed that the artist really paid attention to every little thing, like somewhere in the world was this hallway, and you could stand in it and hold the painting up in front of you and if it weren’t for the border and the clearly stylized art, you wouldn’t be able to tell where the canvas ended and the real world began.

I called him up and thanked him immediately.

“But where’d you find this?”

“I got it at an auction.”

I kinda figured as much.

So I hung up the painting in my office, just behind my desk, which I realized later wasn’t the best place for it because in order to actually look at it, I had to swivel completely around, but there wasn’t anywhere better really, and once I’d gotten it hung up, I felt less willing to take it back down, so I just left it there. It kind of hung out over my shoulder and watched me work, and every now and then I’d turn around and stare at it and get entranced by it, feeling like I could get up and put my hands in the frame and climb into the painting as if the frame were a window.

Of course, I wouldn’t be writing this if something weird didn’t happen as a result of the painting.

We had a couple friends over, Marc and Sabina, and Marc and I went into my office when the women-folk started talking about knitting, which has become my wife’s new favorite hobby. I went and sat down at my laptop to find a video I had been telling Marc about, and Marc wandered over and started admiring the painting.

“Where’d you get that?”

“My dad bought it at an auction and gave it to me.”

“It’s creepy.”

“It’s not that creepy. It’s kind of... I don’t know.”

“Hypnotic?”

“Yeah.”

I turned around to look at it with him while the video loaded. He got up close and was running his finger over the canvas, feeling the raised acrylic, and I just let my gaze wander over all the details again.

“Huh, I didn’t notice that before.”

“What?”

“At the end of the hall, there’s some sort of light coming from around the corner, and it’s casting a shadow on the floor.”

I got up and looked closer, because I really hadn’t spent a lot of time studying the far end of the hallway. There was definitely some yellow and some darker colors making what looked like the shadow of a person coming from around the corner. I even reached out and touched it to make sure it wasn’t some trick of the light in the study making it just look like there was this shadow in the painting, but I felt the paint and sure enough it was actually there in the painting.

“See what I mean?” Marc said, “Creepy.”

I genuinely felt weirded out by it. It was one of those moments where you start thinking, Why didn’t I notice this earlier? Was it there to notice?

A couple days later, I was working on a project in my study, and it was like 9:30 at night, and I just couldn’t focus, so I spun around in my chair to look at the painting and I felt this sudden vertigo effect, like the ground wasn’t there and I had to grab my chair to keep from tumbling into emptiness.

You wouldn’t have noticed it if you hadn’t looked at the painting a hundred times like I had. The hallway was long, with exactly six doors. I remember, because I counted them the first day. three on the left, three on the right, each with a little shiny, metal doorknob.

Only now there were seven doors. Three on the left, four on the right. It didn’t make sense. Everything looked proportionally exactly the same, and the far end of the corridor was just as far away, and yet there was a fourth door in the right side of the hallway, with its little metal doorknob. I don’t even know which door was the fourth door, that’s how well it blended in, I just know that there were four doors where once there were three.

“What the hell is going on?”

I turned away in my chair and back to check several times and make sure my eyes weren’t playing tricks on me, but the number of doors remained constant.

I called my dad again and I asked him, “Is this a trick painting you sent me?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean it keeps changing. I can see it changing.”

“Not as far I know. It was just one in a bunch I picked up all at the same auction.”

After I got off the phone I took the painting down and checked the back for some some of mechanical or digital hocus pocus, but it was all soft canvas so I left it on the floor behind my office chair with the painting facing the wall because the thought of it was freaking me out.

The next day I pulled my wife into my office and held the painting up so she could see it because she hadn’t had a chance to before.

“How many doors are there?” I asked.

She looked it over for a moment. “Seven.”

“When I first got this, there were six.”

She just looked at me like I was being a goofball. “Okay, so which one wasn’t there before?”

“I have no idea.”

“You don’t know which door magically appeared?” and she laughed and gave me a kiss and went back into the other room.

It gets worse.

The next time I chatted with Marc, I told him about the extra door in the painting.

“Are you sure there weren’t seven doors to begin with?”

“Well, I would swear I counted six.”

“Well, if another one shows up, at least Melissa counted seven, and can confirm it then. You know what you should do? You should take a photo of the painting so you can prove it if anything else changes.”

What a great idea, so I got my phone and took a photo of the painting.

Two days went by. Nothing.

On the third day, I walked into my office and there was a man staring at me. Well, I mean... it wasn’t... I can’t say that it was a man or a woman. Hell, I can’t say that it was human. There was a shape at the end of the hallway in my painting. It was oddly lacking in the detail that the rest of the painting had, like someone had hurriedly painted it on. I even ran my hand over it to make sure it wasn’t fresh, that someone hadn’t actually come in and painted over my painting to drive me crazy.

It was really there.

And the look of it scared me more than anything else, changing painting included. I wish I could do it justice with words, but the best I can describe it is that it was human-ish, with legs and arms, but it seemed squat, or hunched, and lopsided, like someone had slapped a blurry Quasimodo onto an otherwise beautiful painting. You couldn’t see the details of its face, but you could see shading on it, defining really warped features. I was almost glad that there wasn’t more detail to it, except that it left just enough to the imagination to give one nightmares.

But I had proof! Here was proof that the painting was changing. So I brought up the file on my laptop to show my wife for comparison, only when I did, the figure was in the photo I took too!

At no point did I start questioning my sanity about all this. Something unnatural and terrifying was going on, so I took the painting out of the house and set it on the curb where we put our trash for pickup. I was so done with that painting.

Or so I thought.

The next evening, when I got home from work, it was gone from the curb. I figured someone had seen it and taken it home, and I waved my hands and said, “Good, now it’s someone else’s problem.” I went in, played with daughters, had dinner, put them to bed, and after watching a show with my wife, went into my office to check my email.

No, the painting wasn’t back on the wall. I made sure of that the moment I walked in the door.

But I got a message from Marc, asking if the painting had changed anymore, and I told him about the creepy new addition and also how I had gotten rid of the painting.

“Oh man, that sounds cool. I wish I’d gotten a chance to see it.”

“Well, I can send you the photo I took of it.”

“Cool.”

So I opened the image file.

The thing in the painting had raised its arms.

Before, you could only barely make out the arms hanging at its sides, but now both arms were raised up over its head, and its fingers were spread apart like it was waving hello at me. I think it was waving hello at me.

I zoomed in, as best as I could without pixelating the image, and the shaded contours of the face seemed stretched into a grin.

Oh Jesus, Mary and Joseph.

I sent Marc the file, but the connection kept fucking up, so I put it in a folder on my dropbox account and gave him access to it.

“The file’s corrupted.” He texted me.

I tried to open it as well, but he was right. Every time I copied the image file, somehow it got corrupted.

“It must be the spooky magic.” Marc joked.

“This is no joke. I’m freaking out here.”

“Delete the file if it’s scaring you so bad.”

So I deleted the file.

But it gnawed at me, you know? The painting was still changing, in horrible, terrifying ways, seemingly acknowledging my observation of it, and now it was gone. But if it was gone, why should it matter? If something unholy happens, it’s the problem of whoever has the painting now, right? And they’ll see it changing too, won’t they?

“Oh shit.”

It was two days later, and I was organizing a folder of documents and had accidentally deleted a couple I hadn’t meant to. I went into the Windows recycling bin and --you guessed it-- there was the image file along with the documents.

I had to look. I was trembling with dread at the thought of it, but when something so surreal happens to you, you have to witness it and see it through to the end.

I recovered the file and opened it.

The walls of the hallway seemed to be melting. The partition separating the red from the off-white was lower than it had been before, and drooped in places. The ridge on the lights looked like they were peeling off. The carpet seemed less crimson and more reddish brown.

And the figure had taken several steps down the corridor toward the viewer’s perspective. More details had become defined: hair hanging off its head, long and black like it had been painted with a fine-tipped brush, the eyes were little more than dull black points under the shading of the brow. The grin came with teeth, uneven and fat, like those of a child more than an adult. Its arms were extended out on either side of it, touching both walls. One foot was ahead of the other, as if I had caught it mid-step in a game of red light/green light.

I realized I was panting and shaking as I looked at it. It was really hard to breathe, an anxiety attack. The painting was going to make me pass out, just from looking at a digital photo of it.

Quickly, I closed the image to calm myself down, but that suddenly brought forth the thought, What if it progresses every time I look away? The only way to stop it is to keep looking! and I opened the file again.

No change. Oh-- no, wait, that wasn’t a new change, I had noticed it before, but it hadn’t dawned on me. One of the doors was open. There was a dim blue light coming from the room inside, moonlight I thought. And just outside the threshold of the door, there was an object lying on the floor.

I zoomed in for better detail.

It was a little, yellow, stuffed lion with a scraggly, orange mane. A child’s toy. Of all the details, the melting hallway, the grinning fiend with arms wide open, the blue light from the open doorway, it was the innocent nature of that little toy lion that filled me with the most dread.

My wife came into the office.

“Come kiss the girls goodnight.”

I went into their darkened room, where they were both wrapped up in blankets in their bunks, each hugging a half dozen stuffed animals and looking cute as could be. My little darlings. I love them both so much.

I kissed my oldest goodnight. She kissed me back and hugged her little pillowpet with the built in night light. It glowed through a variety of colors.

The little one in the lower bunk gave me one of her super strong hugs where she presses her cheek against mine and squeezes for all she’s worth.

“I love you, baby.” I told her.

“Can you get my Simba?”

I looked around. “Where’d you leave it?”

“Over there.” She pointed to the closet. The door was open, and her toy lay on the floor just inside.

Simba, her little, yellow, stuffed lion with the scraggly, orange mane.

Seeing it lying there, just past the threshold of the closet door, while the dim glow of my oldest daughter’s night light faded from red to purple to blue, I felt my heart rise up in my chest. The closet was just a closet. I could see it was just a closet. There were clothes on hangers and bags with toys and blocks in them. They were right there. And yet, as I looked at the stuffed lion lying on the floor, waiting for me, I felt as if I could see carpeting on the floor inside the closet, even though there was none. Carpeting, not in my vision, but in my imagination. And maybe if I went in and shut the door, I’d find that the walls beyond those clothes had a wooden partition, red below, off-white above.

And maybe there was something hunched and terrible shambling its way toward us even as I stood there staring at that toy.

I walked, briskly, trying not to look half as frightened as I was, snatched up Simba and shut the closet door. My breathing was heavy, like I’d just run a mile, and I struggled to avoid gasping for breath as I tried to calm myself down.

“Hey, did that poster fall down?” I asked nobody in particular, then pretended I was trying to adjust a cat poster that had been on the floor by their dresser for months, and shoved the heavy dresser over so that it partially blocked the closet door.

“Here’s Simba, sweety.” I handed the lion to my littlest, gave her a quick hug and kiss, and wished them both goodnight before rushing back to my office.

The painting had changed, as I knew it would. The open door was closed, the toy gone from the floor, the hallway was dimly lit with yellow light from the melting lights again. But the thing, that not-quite-human fiend, was standing right outside the now shut door, its body turned to face it with both hands pressed up against the door itself like it was running its hands down it, caressing it, and its head turned toward me, still grinning that awful, frightening grin full of gnashed, crooked teeth.

Oh God how close had it been? No, it’s just a closet! The hallway is not there. It’s not real. None of this is real.

I’ve put up signs around the neighborhood, knocked on doors, asked everyone I know and many I don’t if they know who took the painting. I need to find it and get it back. I want to tear it, shred it in my hands, throw it in a fire and watch it burn to ashes. Jesus God in Heaven, I hope it didn’t end up in some landfill.