#drawing some walking nightmares will be a piece of cake (above took me about ten minutes blank white canvas to finished)

[organised-disaster]

Did a bit of worldbuilding and felt like getting Adne Hardware involved

Yapping under cut

This is Trustworthy Human Manager in his actual form, not the fantastic human disguise he wears to avoid spooking customers

Our friend Trustworthy here is a monster that most folks would call a Walking Nightmare (not to be confused with waking nightmares, a temporary side effect of bumping into one of these shaky fellows)

Essentially, a Walking Nightmare is a spooky concept that decided to grow legs and walk away. Sometimes they're sleep paralysis demons, sometimes they're actual monsters seen in people's nightmares, sometimes they're the creatures pictured crawling out of the dark when the midnight paranoia sets in.

Our guy is fairly standard. Nothing too special or scary, just kind of a weird freak. He's based off of several descriptions of sleep paralysis demons (the staring kind, which is a thing apparently) because I've never actually had sleep paralysis myself and thus am guessing what the hell he looks like

Some of them are pretty scary, based on what they're made of. They can come in all shapes and sizes, depending on the concept they came from. None of them are malicious, though. It's not uncommon for small children to draw pictures of themselves receiving a flower from a figure made entirely with black crayon, or for the monster under the bed to delicately place a stuffed toy back with its owner.

They feed off of fear of any kind. People with generalised anxiety don't tend to be the only presence in their house. High schools and universities have one too many shadows around exam time, and classroom corners are a little darker than they should be. Sometimes they appear at funerals if the person being mourned was dependable enough.

[magic5ball]

Nature Trail to Hell Arc V: Back into Hell (V)

Chapter 5: From Beneath it Lurks

           The basement. Every ten year old’s worst fear outside of Barney the Dinosaur. Or the Underworld. Or Tako Shak. Or your evil corporate shill self. 

You know, after all the crap I’d been through over the summer, the basement was penny beans all considered. Anyway, no one knows why the basement became such a dreaded place among children the world over, though its’ close proximity to the underworld might have something to do with it. And really, who was to say the low moaning from below was the furnace and not, say, Al-biblibop, Vivisector of Souls? Certainly not my parents, that’s for sure.

           Funny thing is, the basement probably wasn’t even that long, though when your only light source is a birthday cake candle clenched in your fist, the darkness seems to go on forever. Not to mention every stray gust from old Jack Frost felt like some sort of monster breathing. But worst had to be the walls. Whoever had dug this tunnel had dug it in a way that made the walls fold in on each other like some sort of giant black intestine, with gross streaks of pink where the Salisbury Steak had cut roots through the place. Once, back in 1st Grade, I’d gotten lost on the way back from the tinkle room and waltzed right into a high school health class right in the middle of watching a colonoscopy video. Walking through that tunnel felt like reliving that nightmare all over again.

Shatner, funny enough, actually seemed amused by this comparison, like I’d just told him a good joke.

           This didn’t exactly calm my nerves, though. We kept our cleaver at the ready, itching to slice a monster at a moment’s notice. But you know what’s worse than a monster lunging out of the darkness at you? When no monster lunges out of the darkness at you. Because that means wherever you are, even child-eaten cretins want nothing to do with it. And why would monsters not want to be around?

Better to not know the answer to that, let me tell ya!

Ten feet we endured this. Ten long, tedious feet before we saw something. Or somethings, to be exact. They were black. They were green. They were orange and blue and every color in between. And they covered the walls like scribbly little snakes!

“Cave paintings!” gasped Shatner.

Indeed they were, the sorts you’d find tacked to the refrigerator door. An dif there’s one thing little me knew about cave paintings, it’s that just like with picture books, illustrations tell 90% of the story! This particular one involved a mysterious race of creatures that looked like men, but with only four fingers (and they most certainly were four fingered creatures; not ‘poorly drawn stick figures’ as a certain partner of mine likes to claim. Anybody with a brain could tell you those pencil thin bodies were a stylistic choice! Stylistic!) Things got right eerie, though, when we realized the stick figures looked a bit too much like us and Hilda (with four fingers, of course. And in my case, too fat). The drawing started out with the three stick figures living as servants to some scribbly black cloud, until one day they summoned what I can only call the most butt-ugly depiction of a poop I had ever seen. Remember that one kid in kindergarten (you know the one) who’d take all the crayons and just go wild all over the walls? Now imagine giving that kid six lattes and free reign over your house. Somehow the thing looked even nastier than that! And for those of you wondering if it’s possible to make a crayon drawing so terrifying it can make a guy wet his pants in five seconds flat, let’s just say Shat’s drawers weren’t exactly the cleanest after he laid eyes on the picture.

“B-b-bob Sardoth!” he sputtered, all over the walls “Bob-Sardoth!”

“Whozat?”

“I envy your ignorance of the dark secrets man was not meant to know.��� Shatner spoke all serious-like.

I rolled my eyes. It was the same thing my Dad told me whenever I asked if the Easter Bunny crapped chocolate eggs.

           As for the painting story, it went on to show that dark cloud, Bob Sardoth or whatever, got into the kid’s mean ol’ master. First things seemed hunky dory in happy funtime land, with them all hopping through a field of white flowers Shatner told me were mountain laurels while a rainbow arched above them. (Relatively hunky dory. In my book, that’s what Hell looks like.) But after that, things really took a dive: lots of violent scribbles everywhere and hundreds of people toiling at… something while the demon-possessed master and the one that looked like Hilda laughed menacingly on a hill, like they were villains who’d just jumped out of one of my Saturday morning cartoons. Things got even more messy when the stick figures rose up and started beating the crap outta the Master. If there was one thing I wished the paintings showed, it was the whole fight, but the artist must have gotten lazy, because what followed were a bunch of swirly dark clouds before cutting to the aftermath.

           The stick figures, triumphant (I think) held hands in a circle around some giant star, looking up at the sky with large round Os in the middle of their heads. At the center of this circle was that Bob-Sardoth guy, getting sucked into this cute little animal with whiskers and a sausage body.

“Freddie!” gasped Shatner.

There was no mistaking it. The stick figures might have looked a tad like us, but that poorly drawn weiner schnitzel was undeniably Fred. And just when I thought the whole thing couldn’t get any wilder, Shatner pointed out something else beneath the whole thing.

“P-primitive writing! I-I think I can decipher it!” he sounded like he was about to faint.

“Really? So those scribbles are in some ancient language or something?”

“Actually, cursive. Very, very poor cursive. Whoever wrote this should be absolutely ashamed of their penmanship.”

The cave shuddered, pieces of rock clipping against the floor.

“A-anyhow, it reads ‘This is the chaunt by which the people sealed Bob Sardoth: Eye-‘“

           Well, it must have been the Jack Frost’s birthday because he chose right that moment to blow our cake candle right out! Only to take back his wish, because five horrifying seconds later, the light came back on. Except now, there were only muddy black walls when art had once been. In their place, at the end of the tunnel, was a ring of light surrounding a little square door that should have rotted away when my Grandma was a kid.

“No,” whispered Shatner “Nonononononono…”

“C’mon.” I told him “we’re here. I think. Let’s get this over with before we freeze to death!”

Together, we opened the door- nice and slow, like two kids sneaking on Santa.

                                                    .   .   .

(Author’s Note: For those reading, the next few chapters are gonna need quite a bit of polishing up, so I’m afraid this story will be going on hiatus for another month so I can clean them up. Thank you for sticking with this story all this time, it means a lot to me, and I promise I’ll do my best to make these next chapters truly great.)