#like it’s crazy boiling It down to some vague obscure Bad Thing happening

[starlooove]

“Nothing is unique about right now” is an insane thing to say tbh

Shame on everyone who has money but chose/is choosing to spend it donating to ao3 or some streaming service instead of saving someone’s life

[razzamatazz13]

Bridges part 3

My town didn’t have anything distinctly bad or strange about it; very rarely any drug addicts or homeless people sitting in the streets, no shady businesses, no suspicious murders, hardly any disappearances. But still it gave off a bad feeling, a feeling that something was wrong. Maybe it was the high amount of abandoned building that the council always talked about demolishing but never did. Maybe it was the fields, moors and forests enveloping the place, cutting it off from the rest of the world. Maybe it was the rumours. There was a legend in our town, I remembered my Grandfather telling it to me when I was nine, and how it kept me up at night for weeks, refusing to turn off the light and too frightened to even look out of the windows at night. But now I could hardly remember anything about it. 

It had been two weeks since the police had taken me home, two weeks since all the strange, crazy stuff had happened, two weeks since I had first met Anne. When I got home, my parents were both furious and dismayed, but my mother and father showed it in different ways. My mother rarely talked to me, while my dad tried harder to bond with me, taking me on ‘bonding father and son activities’, which I hated. If only I could tell him that I wasn’t his son, but neither of them would understand it. My mother would hate me even more, and my father would think I was ‘just confused’ or some bullshit like that. To my surprise, I never got arrested for the robbery of the shop, and upon checking the newspaper, I found out why. The shopkeeper had no memory of what happened, and the camera didn’t show me or Anne,  but something strange. A picture from the camera footage was in the newspaper, showing the silhouette of a figure in a bowler hat looking directly at the camera. I haven’t looked at the newspaper since. Not the recent ones, atleast. I started going to school again, and stopped smoking pot. Strange as it sounds, I felt happier than I had in years. I finally had a friend, someone that I could trust, even if I didn’t know where they were. And I had hope, hope of seeing Anne again, who knew about me, who I trusted. I was determined to find her, before Alice did. I thought Alice could have been behind the rumours surrounding this town, and I wanted to find out more. The best place to look into the rumours, I decided, would be the library. The library in our town was situated in an old brick building, and had an archive for almost all the newspapers from our town from the last hundred years. I had been in there once a few years before, to do some research for a piece of history homework.

I was searching through the newspaper archives when I found, hidden in the corner, a cabinet marked ‘Missing persons/Murders’. I checked it, and found quite a few newspapers, all dated roughly ten years apart. I flicked back to the earliest, dated at 1934. The newspaper was yellowing, sealed in a plastic bag. I pulled it out, and had a look at it.

The headline read, ‘FAMILY FOUND MURDERED: DAUGHTER MISSING’. Under that was a blurry picture of a family, a mother and father with three children: a son, a baby, and a daughter. Looking at the daughter, my blood ran cold. It was Alice. I skim read the newspaper, discovering that the wealthy family’s corpses had been found in various places, the parent’s in the house; the son’s in the forest, alongside the daughter of the neighbouring family. The baby, Mary, had survived, and had been put in the care of the mother’s sister. Of the daughter, however, there had been no trace, simply vanished. The police believed it had been committed by a lunatic, or a robbery gone wrong, but I knew better. Alice did it, I knew. But how was she still alive, I wondered, was she a ghost? Or something else entirely? I remembered seeing Carrie, after we saw the remnants of her corpse, the huddle of transparent kids waiting outside the house when we tried to leave. So she was a ghost, and those kids outside the door… I flicked through the newspapers, finding the pictures where they had them. Sure enough, I recognised them all. Then I reached a newspaper from 1976. Pictured on the front, in black and white, was the girl that had fought off Alice; Carrie. And there, beside her, Anne. 

I checked through the newspaper, convinced it had the wrong date. It didn’t, the date was right, and deep down, I knew it. I started to read the story; two girls missing, presumed to have ran away. But one had been found a week later, hanging from a noose in the forest, believed to have committed suicide. My mind raced back to when I first met Anne, standing behind the noose. But I stopped her from killing herself, I saved her. Except, I wasn’t there in 1976, three years before I was even born. I hadn’t saved Anne from dying, she was already dead. I closed the cabinet and walked out of the library, my mind was whirling with confusion. I didn’t want to believe it, but I had no choice. 

I got home to a coldly distant mother and an overly-friendly father, who greeted me with a “How was the library, champ? Hey, how say we go on a hike tomorrow, just us lads?”

I told him I had a lot of work to catch up on, and went to my room.

I couldn’t sleep that night. The hope that I’d had was dying, and I felt myself sinking back into depression. My only friend, the only person I had trusted, was dead. But she had been dead for as long as I’d known them, so, I told myself, if I could trust her then, consider her my friend, then I still could. Anne had saved my life from Alice, we had run from her together. She hadn’t changed, all that had changed was what I knew. 

I was searching through a box of cassettes when I found it, where I buried it when I got home; the cassette I had found in my cassette player after I’d been given it by the arm of who I assumed to be the pale, grinning figure in the bowler hat. Even if they might have been helping me, in a strange way, they were the one that filled my nightmares, the one I imagined looming outside my house, the one that truly frightened me. Maybe it was because Alice, despite being some kind of murderous ghost, had some semblance of humanity in her eyes, she still looked human. But the creature in the bowler hat didn’t- I never saw its eyes, only the void-dark circular sunglasses, but I knew that under them, if it had eyes at all, they would be completely empty, or filled with madness. I picked up the cassette and turned it over in my hands, the ‘listen to this’ smudged. I decided to finally follow the instructions. I put the cassette into my walkman, and, hands shaking, pressed play. The cassette started to play, producing a buzzing sound, voices speaking over the top, The first was Alice’s.

“Do you want to see them again? Or do you want to spend another twenty years alone, hmm?”

The second voice was Anne’s.

“No! But I can’t do that, not again!”

“You don’t know this person, and yet you’re choosing them over your own brother and girlfriend?.” Alice responded.

“How do I even know that you’re telling the truth?”

“What other choice do you have?”

“I… I can’t.”

“You won’t even know you’re doin-”

The voices were drowned in a buzzing sound, obscuring all that was said after that. I opened the cassette player, took out the cassette and put it back in. The buzzing faded and increased continuously, partly obscuring what was being said. All I heard was;

“Ju.. t.k.  th.. ..e .ou.. “ The sound distorted and slowed down, before stopping completely. I took out the cassette again, to see that the tape had snapped. I threw it against the wall, and it broke. I sat down on my bed, hands on my head. I needed to know what was happening, what Alice was trying to get Anne to do, when it was from.

It was one thing knowing she was a ghost, it didn’t change who she was as a person, but quite another hearing this. I wondered if she could have tricked me, acting as a lure to Alice, and the house. But if that was so, why had she saved me? I convinced myself I was making it up, being paranoid, there had to be some kind of reasonable explanation. But then, nothing about this was reasonable. 

That night I couldn’t sleep, the shadows filled with leering grins and wide staring eyes. Eventually, I got out of bed and went to my window, climbing out into the garden. I sat on the grass and stared up at the sky, mesmerised by the stars and moon, trying to not think about anything, trying to lose myself in the infinite sky stretching above me. But I couldn’t get away from my problems, and instead of floating away, I felt like I was being dragged down. I could feel the misery and confused anger boiling up inside me, and I felt like I had to somehow release it, get rid of it, because I was too afraid to face it head on. I carefully climbed back through my window, and looked through my messy drawers, eventually finding it; the ‘solution’ to all my problems. I went back outside, and brought the blade to my arm, a messy crisscross of faint red lines. I started to press the blade against my skin, dismayed that the only good friend I’d ever had, that I could trust, was dead. Even the friendship itself was a facade. I didn’t want to ever do this again, but I didn’t feel like I had a choice, I felt like it was the only way to release the bitterness building up inside of me, before I exploded in misery or anger, and did something far worse.  I heard rustling at the edge of my garden, and looked up, desperately hoping to see someone, Anne, and for her to tell me that she wasn’t dead, she hadn’t just been pretending, that it all was just a sick joke. I was starting to wonder if any if it even happened, or if I had just been running around the outskirts of my village, lost in some kind of drugged-up hallucination. It would make sense, it would explain all the weirdness that happened, even if it wasn’t the truth I wanted to face.

I looked back down to the blade, glinting in the moonlight, and pressed it back against my arm, dreaming vaguely of bringing it to my wrists and just ending all of this shitshow, maybe going to Anne, if she existed. Maybe as a ghost I could be my true self, if it was the soul then it could only make sense, unless I was confused like everyone told me I was, if my true self as I thought of it was no more real than Anne or Alice or the person in the- 

My arm blazed with pain as the blood pooled out, releasing all the anger and misery built up inside me. I lay back on the grass, watching the stars spiral above me, and I spiralled away into them, like a penny rolling down a drain, around and around and around, down and down and down.

I was standing on a bridge, illuminated by only the moon, either end obscured in darkness. I stood up on the side, and looked down to the red water below, watching all the people I knew get washed away; my parents, teachers, the people that bullied me at school, my uncles and aunts and grandparents, the shop keeper. Anne. I jumped in after her, fighting the red water that was holding me down, fighting through it. I surfaced, only to discover myself completely alone, no longer under the bridge. I could faintly see land in the distance, and walked towards it. As I got closer, I saw a figure standing at the shore, eyes glowing red from under their bowler hat. They opened their mouth in a wide grin, and red light shone out. They started to sing, in a flat, high voice.

We’ll meet again

Don’t know where

Don’t know when

But I know  we’ll meet again

Some Sunny day.

I saw a huddle of people standing behind the figure, and for a moment I could hear faint screams.

Keep smiling through

Just like you always do

Till the blue skies drive the dark clouds far away

 Washed away by the oncoming wave, I was pushed back under the water, and fought to the surface.

I surfaced from sleep on to the wet grass, looking up to the night sky. I sat up, looking at my arm. It was still bleeding, a small red pool on the grass below. I pressed my hand to it and climbed back in through my window, into the bathroom. I cleaned off the blood and wrapped some tissue around it, using a hair band to keep the tissue in place. Then, I went back to my bedroom, and tried getting to sleep. For a while I was unable to, the red glowing eyes keeping me awake. But when I did eventually fall asleep, my troubles followed me. 

I was wandering through the forest, following Alice through the trees, running after her until she disappeared, and I was back in the clearing. But this time I was too late, and Anne was hanging from the trees, her eyes bulging, her body swinging in the wind. Before my eyes, she rotted away to the bones, then the bones to dust, leaving no proof that she was ever there. I knelt down on the ground, and started trying to form the dust into a person, shape it, but no matter how hard I tried all I could make was a hand with a smiley face carved into the wrist. It grabbed me and pulled me down into the puddle of dust with it, and I was sinking. 

That morning I tried searching for the broken pieces of the cassette I had been given, but couldn’t find anything, not even a shard of plastic. Maybe none of it was real, maybe I had just suffered some kind of psychotic episode. I refused to believe it, Anne had to be real. There was only one way for me to find out.

I said goodbye to my father -for what I hoped to be forever- and left for school, but headed in the opposite direction; to the outskirts of my town. I had packed my bag with everything I thought I would need to run away. This time I would be prepared, this time would be different. By the afternoon I had reached the bridge where I had sat with Anne to have lunch, close to where I was given the cassette. I approached the pool of water, and threw in a handful of rocks, hoping for some kind of reaction. Nothing happened. I threw in a few more rocks, and again, nothing happened. I stuck my arm into the pool of water, and found nothing. I lifted my arm out and stared into the dark water. “Where are you?” I asked, not receiving any kind of reply. 

I was suddenly overtaken by a deep anger, hitting the water again and again, soaking myself, shouting, “Where are you? Where the fuck have you gone?” I cut my finger on a sharp piece of metal, and stopped hitting the water, instead, bursting into tears. I curled into a ball as I cried, this one escape I had found, the light at the end of the tunnel, it was gone, if it had ever even been there.

I wiped off my tears and started towards the abandoned house, reasoning that if there was evidence anywhere, it had to be there. I set off on the path I had walked with Anne only a few weeks earlier, following it until I reached a dead end, the path blocked off by a bramble bush. I walked off into the trees in hope of finding a way around it, but soon got lost. By the time the sun had set, I was completely and utterly lost. I continued through the trees, until I reached a section of forest I faintly recognized. I soon realised that I was near the bridge, close to where I first met Anne. Sure enough, I soon heard the crashing of the river. I stumbled towards it, struggling to see in the dark. I climbed up onto the bridge. Thinking maybe I would head home, but as I looked out on the river, I was struck by a wave of sadness. I had lost my only friend, and now I felt more empty than ever, when I was with her it was like a hole in my life had been filled, but now she’d gone I felt even more empty than before, now I knew what I’d been missing, in a friend. I stared into the river as it swirled and danced and rippled, and I was being carried away, taken towards it. I climbed up onto the side of the bridge. I thought maybe I could see someone in the water, a silhouette of a person. I reached out towards them, Maybe it was Anne, maybe she would save me from drowning again, and we could run away again, away from my school and family, away from this shitty town, away from Alice, away from everything. We could be free, I thought, as I fell into the water.

We could be free, I thought, as the water filled my mouth.

We could be free, I thought, as everything faded, we could be free.