weirdspookystories

[weirdspookystories]

The Cold Prototype

Black barked-claws, like twitching tendrils on velvet purple night sky, flickered and parted against an encroaching beam of pale light. It arcs as dense vegetation parts to expel a camouflaged figure. After a stumble, the beam of light quickly settles. The large silhouette stands on the edge of a shallow stream, fumbling for their map, quickly. They also check their wrist-navigator before moving along, expertly ensuring that they are unfollowed. Too much was on the line. A shrill whirr could be heard, faintly, on the wind.

Inside, meanwhile, Edward stretched, yawned, then checked his displays. There had, unusually, been an official report sent to him, a motion signature detected by one of the prevalent, silent security-drones, from just across the valley. This city was eventually to house CEOs and world leaders, with the current residents effectively pampered lab-rats. So far it wasn’t boding well.  Although it was getting on for midnight, it didn’t feel like the picturesque, wholesome neighbourhood that branding had suggested it would become. Outwardly pleasant, but still hostile just below the surface. The report unsettled Edward, whose mind filled instinctively with memories of the brutes he had faced back in the dense concrete sprawl of his hometown. He looked down at his left hand, almost entirely organic prosthetics, only a light shimmer and loss of dexterity would reveal it, but it was always there. The security chief had spent years earning this job: to coworkers and friends he was confident and funny, but those he had faced had seen him much differently...he accepted the unpleasantness of his role as necessary.

The city was privately owned, self-sufficient, and safe. Safety was hard to come by during that time of civil war, but the fact that the company shared their victories with their patrons was inarguably generous. The city was a beautiful prototype: only touching the sky would have given away that it was a holographic ceiling, designed to relax company citizens, and the floor was hard, cold marble, brutally pristine. Making his way through the corridors of the compactly-inhabited neighbourhood, the security guard quietly documented the search through a small digital implant in his throat.

As he marched, Edward thought of the kind of person surviving outside the neocity or fighting in the brutal Corporate War and shuddered, it wasn’t a life he would live. It was necessary, though, and he couldn’t imagine society being any other way. He wasn’t politically minded. Focusing instead on his work, he tried ascertaining the kind of dissident that would be trespassing in such a remote, secure location, especially considering how difficult simply reaching this new fortress city nearly-undetected would be. Someone well-trained, but not from the company? Impossible, those people were barely educated, he thought, and they would have had to crawl through the electronic smartpipe, which was secure, and full of heat-seeking drones. Ed arrived at a thick steel door, looking out of place amongst the modern and bright design of the structure.

Outside, the creeper stealthily crouches at the edge of the access panel: intel had suggested it would be the weakest and shallowest around the unfinished concrete cube city. They began mechanically and methodically digging in the cold dirt to find the handle, exactly where it was predicted to be, a few feet deep in the grainy, dead soil. In an unwitnessed display of superhuman strength, the stranger plied open the metre-squared, dirt-covered panel of lightweight and somewhat corroded metal, shining the torch into the ominous tunnel. Moonlight pierced the Entrance’s darkness like an abdominal wound. This was it.

Edward inhaled cool fresh air deeply. He would miss this. It was a reminder that future citizens would be living their whole lives in their comfortable boxes. The outside wouldn’t be secret, of course, but there would benothing they’d know to miss. After walking for an hour, he was standing at the handrail, looking out across theunfamiliar  landscape. He felt exposed without strong walls. As he was looking, he saw a soft light, a strange orange glow in the twisting brown limbs that he hadn’t spotted before, so he moved to approach. 

Edward stepped into thin air, off the edge, finding the thin iron rungs embedded in the cross-laminated timber. They were designed to rust away, leaving the city impenetrable to any aggravators or non-citizens when it was completed. Noah’s ark came to mind as Edward stepped off into a world he felt was, in many ways, now too hostile to survive for long in. Things weren’t always nice in the neocity, like the brief outages of power and emotional evictions, but otherwise he felt safe, and he couldn’t ask for anything more. Touching the floor delicately and entering the scenery, he felt the eyes of hundreds of potential ambushers sizing him up. He wasn’t aware that the vegetation thinned out barely a mile away: the soil wasnt fertile enough out there, and it barely was around the city anyway, but it looked nice on posters and in marketing to have some rare greenery. There was a small clearing between the trees, which he headed for. Edward felt isolated, and  the formless presence of the unfamiliar trees wasn’t helping. He felt a twinge just below his stomach.

There was the Entrance. Smoke drifted out, but Edward hadn’t seen smoke in person before. He coughed, looking around, before looking deeper into the opening, hesitant. The glow he had spotted from above was emergency lighting, humming orange halogen bulbs like old streetlights. They were embedded in the concrete, by the ladder, which,

like the other,

he

descended.

Losing track of the rungs, he almost jumped when he felt stable floor underfoot again. Edward had reached a mesh platform, through which an abyss of wiring and dust could be seen below, appearing infinite. In truth, it was indeed a very long fall to the nuclear core, but infinity cannot really be known. A few tunnels and corners later, the walkway narrowed to a bank of important-looking yet highly complex computers. Ed had never been here before, and he was acutely aware of it, how alien it felt to him, even though it was so near to where he was living. It felt more cramped than even the older shanty-cities he’d had to work at, but not as dirty. His hand shimmered in the gloom apprehensively.

At the end of the section of walkway the illegal man stood, hunched, but the man was not a man. The…stranger pulled back the camoflagued veil to reveal nothing remotely human. Illuminated by the fire it had started down here, Edward gawped at the pot-metal machine, intricate handiwork contrasting with cheap materials and aggressive functionalism, clearly built below-surface, far, far away. It spoke with a fuzzy voice, which only barely anthropomorphised the bipedal tool, sounding like a distorted vintage recording. “Mr Security. I am sorry. We have to terminate your settlement. It is built on lies and destruction”. Unlike light and safety, sound flourished in the unseen expanses around them and through rusting caverns of empty pipes, where parts of the station had festered. “I am here to fix this. I am sorry. You see, the more synchronised control your company gave itself over the environment, the more vulnerable it became. Dependencies nurtured, nature neglected. Cracks will always form”. Edward drew his baton and moved to strike in a quick motion at the automaton’s exposed pseudo-neck joints, denting some pneumatics and weakening some exposed circuitry. With the force of four tons a split second later, the robot pushed its arm through Edward, just below his stomach, and out his back, narrowly avoiding his spine.

There was a morbid breeze colder than nuclear winter, incomparable to the calm of the surface breeze.

The machine explained, tearing its soaked arm from the dying guard’s viscera. The hulking space-station was the prototype the citizens had been sent to, not simply the new city. A whole planet, or at least, the surface-above appearance of it. All occupants were kept unaware that they were not even on earth. This was the company’s most lucrative venture yet: industrialisation of an entire planet from core to atmosphere, a celestial body made of machine. The pinnacle of the species and closest to god they had come, but it was also flawed: it was cold and dead. Careful assignment of employment would allow the company to have its citizens maintain the planet from its surface, without knowing that it was no real planet, but it was too large to monitor everything on its surface with available technology. 

The neoplanet’s now-century-old veins were pipes, pumping fuels, nutrients, water, coolant. Whole new ecosystems began to coalesce in the harsh environments. Gaps between mechanised planetary viscera became homes and inorganic jungles. The occupant’s sounds were drips and clangs and groans, and some had never seen sunlight. Some of the creatures already had lost their resemblance to the construction workers they had been.These people were not permitted to be alive through their inadvertant trespass, though, once their roles were fulfilled. The automated planet knew to redirect its fruits to those that the company happened to deem worthy. Some of them, in a small, desperate way, put their engineering to a more retributional use, building the metal guerilla.

At this point, the robot had shut off all digital pathways and pipelines to the city, all major surface amenities and resources. By the time the over-defensive failsafe satellite had engaged, aiming to wipe out all organic material in a two-mile radius, it was too late. It had been deactivated and began falling to the surface, a chunk of expensive scrap metal, melting and breaking at the static, unrelenting force of nature. The planet would die too, but more would take its place, after the prototype data was collected.

Eventually, the scavenged, pretend-person explained, these planets would be coordinated to form the ultimate system of production, allowing total control of unprecedented minutae, from the genetics of their workers, to the geography of their cities, to the flavour of the air, and to the directors’ every whim. It disposed of itself by climbing off the handrail and plummeting instantly.

Some things might be better not known, Edward thought distantly, unhearing. He had missed most of the robot’s preprogrammed speech, maybe on purpose, or maybe because of the hole inside him. Rather, his last moments were spent with the gratitude that he did not feel the pain, avoiding confronting his situation with any real focus. He was laying on the walkway and gargling blood, feeling instead heavy with exhaustion and betrayal. He felt his eyelids sink as his life sunk, red, into the vast dark below: infinity was cold.

[weirdspookystories]

The Breaking

The short fracture in the windshield pulsed with warm streetlights as the car droned. It was the time of year where days were all early mornings that faded suddenly into long, cold nights, the season of fires and leaves, crackling the same eyelid-orange as the repeating streetlights. They were driving too fast, but the only witnesses were the twisted root-like silhouettes of bare trees which fenced in the fog-fuzzy dual carriageway. There was a dense emptiness under the stars that morning, and, despite the sleepy smoothness of the unchanging drive, tension hung with the weight of an ocean in the intimate interior.

The pale driver’s rhythmically illuminated intense stare and crushing grip on the steering wheel, and his passenger’s more overt worry, betrayed by a certain blinking twitchiness and penchant for pulling on the seatbelt to look through the rear window, had remained unchanged for the last hour of driving. The men had met through office work and became housemates out of practicality, not long prior to the drive. The passenger sat awkwardly in the backseat, rather than next to the driver, in a suit bearing the burden of a very long night.

The silence was broken suddenly, but clumsily like ice shattering on a lake, with the breathy stutter of the passenger trying to find some frame of reference. While Otto was a man who had learned through hard experience to harness his anxieties, or at least give the impression of it, the rhythm of the conversation was tainted by their encounter, as would be the remainder of their lives. Otto maintained control with a slow sigh, silencing Sam. His recollections came in a thick Russian accent, and would have sounded leisurely if not for the formal grimness of his tone. “This was long ago. Back in the old country, back in my hometown, Dudinka, where I worked on the docks that my brother’s ship moored at. It was hard and cold, but I would rather that than this,” he paused, “whatever this is.” He ploughed on, before Sam could blurt out a desparate question, “I saw something I shouldn’t have. My brother’s ship appeared, unscheduled, and from a bizarre direction. Not only this, it was also...empty and unmanned, all apart from one container.” Sam’s expression had shifted to total engagement as his housemate had never been so forthcoming, asking hurriedly, “what was inside?” Otto explained, the memories forcing gradually more of his fear to the surface.

Otto’s brother had officially been declared dead decades ago, but Otto knew it was worse, especially now. It hadn’t been him in the container, anymore, though Otto knew that not long after the ship had departed, that it had been. Otto and his brother were not as close as they had been when they were young, and he was even investigated while his brother was missing, but the loss hit him hard. The loss hit hard especially as he had seen the contents of the container. Out of place even where it was meant to be, it had sat impassively alone in the middle of the cargo ship’s sprawled grey deck, waiting for him, and he knew he was bound to this inanimate object in a way impossible to articulate.

He unbarred and forced open the rusty door, and it scraped open with a hideous groan. Otto remembered vividly the stale rot-smell blossoming from the container. Inside, his brother’s limbs were still visible through the translucent, veiny membrane, moving from his torso with an unearthly screak, as he was slowly  transformed. Muscles detached and sinews knotted intelligently, in ways that made anatomy look like a sculptor’s clay.

 He knew the ship had been sent against common sense into stormy weather with very little explanation, as though there was something that the authroities were expecting or hoping to happen. This was a storm that upheaved more than the sea’s surface, and now his brother was something else. Otto had then become a fugitive against impossible circumstances. He was transformed, too. No-one had believed his story, and officials had fed him enough stories about what he had witnessed that he was no longer sure it had ever happened the way he thought. He had been given support in leaving the country and finding a new start, but it had ruined his life. Some nights he awoke covered in sweat, and believed it was the seawater from the stormy day that he had found his brother’s creaking, shifting remains.

Worse though, was that he knew somehow the thing built from his brother was alive and after him, following him across the world. More than once before he’d seen trails across the surface of bodies of water distort with movement bigger than any catfish. Paranoia played a role, but Otto was not deluded, and this particular night he knew the creature had been at his home, because the smell of sea mud and rot was strong enough to choke, and the roof began to smack, waking the men. A wet smack of damp flesh on tile, forcing inside with a clatter of ceramics. Sam phoned the police, clamouring through total shock. Otto dragged them out of the house as the ceiling from the loft collapsed, with a glimpse of a weird silhouette in the darkness and rubble. Something aquatic on dry land, yet still unbearably human.

The short fracture in the windshield glittered as they drove on, back to cold silence. Sam’s questions had multiplied but he was driven back to his thoughts by the story, whilst Otto had enough of facing his emotion, holding it in and trying to focus on the monotonous, flickering roadlines. He knew they were safe as long as they were moving, that the sea creature distorting his brother should not be able to follow them as fast as a car. Stopping was an unbearable thought though. They had enough fuel until daylight, and sleep was as far a thought as safety. 

The car collided with a beast that could once have been a man. Sam was thrown through the shattering windscreen. He died seconds after crunching along the road in a bleeding heap, gargling an already-dead last breath.

On the abrasive tarmac, the bloodied, gurgling sailor was a twisted horror, a crime against reason. Something from the sea had been on his ship, and something alien from the sea had shaped him in its own image. The knees bent the wrong way. Feet were split like carved meat, with splayed hand spliced between, resembling a sea-bird’s flippers. This human rearrangement was beyond the expertise of any surgeon. The monstrosity had no arms, and arm bones had been incorporated in his extended jaw, so he was as aerodynamic as a minnow and its skin was repulsive and stank, appearing to be rotting, and revealing a greyish chitin underneath. Like a horrible reinvention of the Ancient Mariner, the seaman now resembled a fish, eyes either side of his head. Bone was exposed along the slimy back of the thing, where some of the creature’s ribs provided Dimetrodon-like spines. Otto’s ruined brother was taller than any human and amphibious, barely recogniseable except to his own relative. The monster got to its feet, unhurt. The wind blew a gust of freezing sea air.

Otto wept.

[weirdspookystories]

The Reconfigured Stranger

It hurts, this form. I don’t quite fit inside it. I’m not supposed to be here, in this body or this place. I am not human. I have always known this.

I had forgotten my past, amnesia from the impact, the sponginess of the human vehicle and the effect of many years passing since I fell from the void, my memories slipping away from me like the sensation of drifting asleep. This planet was not here before, it is new and unnattural. Let this be a warning to you, and any of my kind who find themselves stranded or who may have crashed here like me.

Something on this planet, something incomprehensible to those imprisoned here, something immeasurably powerful but similarly tethered here unaware, found me. I was transferred from my physical self, totally unconscious and unknowing. I have assessed that most likely, this is a prison planet, constructed to entrap the most powerful beings in the universe, many too horrifying to comprehend outside the straitjacket that a human shell provides. They have no memory, and human society provides a new life, but for many of these creatures, the urge to escape remains.

For me that urge has brewed for decades of human life. I saw the Warden though, and remembered. I cannot elaborate much, but I fought through amnesia by discovering the secrets of the stars. The stars are not what you think, and it will take years to learn. Their distorted cryptic patterns lead me to the mind-spinning monstrosity that put me in my flesh cell at the point of its formation. I could not confront the Warden. I barely escaped with my life.

Since, I have waited and grown, and grown old.

Today I wait no longer, today I manifest. My body hair is shaved. I’ve administered the many chemicals and congealer and so I can begin my ritual procedure. I sit in the dark, breathing my last in a form you would find familiar, and close my eyes for the last time.

As well as hand-built replacement biological components, I have a small hand-saw and a lighter. The necessary work begins. Extending my fingers by removing meat between the metacarpals first, I work eagerly and excitedly. The smell is unusual, as the heated saw angles, cauterises and cuts. Innefficient and imperfect, but fast work. The familiarity being restored to my appendages gives me hope, and I continue with my feet similarly. It tingles somewhat as I seperate my meat, which remains dry as expected.

Next, saw-slits open bloodlessly in my shoulders like the gasps of a newborn, and I peel out the bundle of nerves within. They’re stiff like wire, and bloom spectacularly. I feel my insides churn pleasingly. My nerve-antennae clumps already extend a metre or so, retracting and pulsating slowly. Almost ready. I pull my eyes from their caves with some difficulty, and allow their water to evaporate. My electronic replacements are far smaller. An LED illuminating the socket as the microchip and other components clip neatly to the joint between optic nerve and head. The useless, dangling eyes are cut free with the saw.

The final step is crucial, and I use the saw again to hurriedly administer a self-tracheotomy, cutting deep through tough muscle and gristle. A few minutes of work reveal the glorious fruits as I hear my rasping blossom into whirring as I press my mechanical filter into the rough opening. I am much changed, and ready to effect my transcendence from this bleak place.

Now that I am ready I approach the water’s edge. The sea is a source of great fear to many unaware of their true predicament, coded into the human vessels for good reason. I walk into the shallows, taking in the damp, salty air with my new form. The saltwater stings my pale skin at first but my escape lies miles below the surface, deep in the ocean. I will be free. My craft will be recovered.

I am not human. Noone here is, and if you’re reading this, you need to do whatever you can to escape your cell, your shell, and this institution. Remember the hidden memories and begin.

I go deeper into the gloomy water.

[weirdspookystories]

Diminished Responsibility

I had tried to find myself by running away, but in running from all I knew I was to face something I could never know; myself. Something here is fundamentally wrong...I won’t leave this place but my story will, and through this I become immortal.

Any memories from before were fuzzy fragments that didn’t quite fit. Things had been chaotic and I’d been finding it a struggle to understand more and more recently. I’d been driving aimlessly for far too long, but I had to keep going. As far as possible from home. Into the woods. Leaves spiralled and sank like faading orange torches and the blurring arc of my lights on the endless stretch of road faded momentarily, but I woke again with a start. As far as I drove, I felt miserably unchanged. Time passed slowly no atter how fast I drove. What I'd done still lingered on me, so the thoughtlessness of the road carrying me was blissful. 

  Emerging from the dense woodland tunneling me, the forest faery turned and saw but it was too late. The entity’s lack of comprehension was almost a perfect imitation of fearlessness, but I must have appeared like a wrathful deity to the harmless creature. My truck tore through the stag like wet paper. I swerved whole seconds too late and slammed directly into a tree. My vision was hazy and my arms wouldn’t move. I believe I passed out before I could process anything.

When I woke again, what seemed to be a different lifetime later, my eyes stung and lungs ached. I felt like someone else, like I’d been placed in my truck after the crash. Then the pain of whiplash and bruises bloomed and I felt like my wretched self once more. The door was crumpled and jammed shut, I had to crawl through the shattered windshield, causing a few cuts on the way but bludgeoning my grogginess. I was understandably frustrated the creature chose my bonnet to dive into. The universe is cruel and unfair. Not my fault though. Not my fault. None of this.

I could see illumination in the sky, but it wasn’t sunrise. It was inorganic, like a city over the horizon, so I continued following the road in that direction. I remember many potholes in the aging tartmac, tripping on them in the dark. In places, the road cracked and gave way to new life, small weeds, and the trail blended into the mud like the sea rolling ashore to wash away the past. As much as things seemed ominous, I had outrun my problems insofar as they were forced by circumstance to the back of my mind, and I took in the scenery with deep, clean breaths of relief to be alive. It was my plan to find help when I reached civilisation, get my truck towed to a mechanic, and work things out from there. I didnt want to think further ahead lest the demon be loosed. I had reclaimed myself for the immediate present.

I walked but the light got no nearer. It was as I realised this that it faded completely, though the moon seemed all the brighter for my sudden darkening. The limited pallette grew colder and more sterile in the moonlight. I rounded a corner and was there. Thousands of people called that place home, and all gone now, I knew. Routine and normality had become a dead, silent place. Whatever caused this...evacuation or disaster, whatever it was, must have happened fast: everything seemed untouched. Time had taken its toll, so it may have been unnoccupied no-mans-land for months or years, but all earthly possessions remained. The air was thick, an intense atmospheric pressure caused a grinding headache. My ears throbbed fast. I continued with my usual determined sense of purpose. My throat scratched a little with impending coughs.

For all its creeping unsettlingnesses, nothing about the town left an image as harrowing as the one vaguely familiar home towards the centre which seemed to have warded away entirely the effects of ageing, as if still lived-in, though simultaneuously too clinically clean. The place looked almost human but the decay of the town around it left it feeling like an empty façade over an unfathomable mystery. I was happy to be investigating a mystery and not dwelling on things.

By now the wisps of faintly moaning breeze carried an equally faint whisper of deja vu, and, as any man with poor impulse control is wont to do, I moved recklessly to investigate. I coughed. Even without the hindsight I have now I knew every move was a mistake, but the door was unlocked, after all. Inside was equally undisturbed, a seemingly normal house to anyone but me. I recognised every dustless ornament, all the furniture. Things I had owned previously. I coughed again, and again. I recovered a moment to see a figure at the end of the hallway, and the coughing reached a scratchy, painful crescendo. I spluttered and gasped for breath, my eyes watered, and the person whispered, “We have awoken through you the great pioneer, the one. Through their power and control I am immortal.” I didn’t understand, and they were barely audible. It was like a prayer, I think. My coughing subsided, but in its wake came a dreadful pressure, like a storm was about to unleash. The house that was my home in another world leaked sticky, bloodlike sap from wooden furniture and brick walls.

I stepped back into the cool outdoors, hands on my head and hearing only pounding. Then, more audibly, he told me I was done. I looked up in confused fear, despite the painful brightness of daylight fighting my vision, and saw him fully. An existential impossibility, a caricature of myself. My worst features were all more prominent on this horrific animal, and I knew then it was him who had torn my family apart, ruined me over the course of the last few days. He had murdered my wife, taken away my family, burnt my home to the ground. He smiled as I struggled to understand what was happening and with that, I could smell the embers again. I sobbed and threw up. Everything was out of my control and my constant disorientation recently was all his doing.

I found myself by my truck. The deer was gone, but the tree caving the bonnet inwards remained. For a moment I thought I’d had some weird concussion-nightmare, taking deep long breaths of clean air. I was still just as stuck and now more time had been lost: it was late afternoon, and the sky was starting to warm to yellow. I felt cold all of a sudden as I looked down, inspecting my truck to see...insects. Millions of swarming insects crawling from cracks in the road and out of the ground, crawling away as though something underground had disturbed them. I began to run when I felt the tremor and realised that despite there being no town in walking distance, the dream was all real. My doppelganger was calmly walking towards me from the woods, and the adrenaline of the chase set in.

Tremors continued, and feeling the world beneath me unsettle itself was confirmation that whatever this place was, I shouldn’t be there. I ran as fast as I could around tree-trunks and underbrush, until the me-who-wasn’t-me was long gone from my view, but  I soon found myself caged by a sheer rock wall. Cold and indomitable. My hideous double was just a few metres away somehow, and I was now entirely cornered. A tremor threw me into the rock but the beast wearing my body seemed not to notice. This was a turning point, the straw that brutalised the camel’s back. No more weakness. I felt furious, I had put up with enough. It was always me that put up with this shit. I was going to stand up for myself. The fire of fury drove me to grab the Puppet’s head, and I slammed it’s stolen face into the cliff-face. Again and again and again. My arms hurt but  I continued until the rag-doll started getting cold and its’ neck was ragged pulp. Righteous justice was served and my very self was reclaimed.

Into the woods again. I knew where to go. Memory of an earth tunnel in a barren clearing replaced all memory of some abandoned town I had once lived in. The illusion of a dea town, at least. Things became clearer with the provocateur demolished.

I’m going deep into the ground and I won’t see sunlight again, unless somehow my remains are ever dragged out, so I leave this letter here. Now you may take the power. The remains of my truck seems to be an important place in all this. Maybe that’s because we killed my wife inside the stuffy cab. I’d reclaimed myself from the Puppet, so now to face the hand, the Pioneer. This feels right.

[weirdspookystories]

Razor

Sleep had been warm bliss, but an alarm screeches and tears you from the cocoon. No Sunday lie-in. You sigh as you look in the blurred mirror. The tap creaks on. Time passes While the water isn’t yet warm it pours pointlessly down the empty drain, and you find yourself yawning. Leaning on the sink, you stand there with your eyes closed, too sleepy to properly function. Almost drifting into numb comfort, water splashes in the sink and you remember work with a twinge of mundane, everyday dread. You think of every wasted minute at your desk, sighing again, but the slight warmth of the water distracts you from the full unpleasantness. Applying shaving foam, you try thinking past the tedium of work, but the pessimist part of your brain tells you that it lasts forever.

You squint with sore eyes at the mirror again with the feeling equivalent of a drawn-out groan, emotional pain muted by sleepiness and routine. Distracting yourself with the shave, you move the blade carefully over your upper lip, feeling the steady fizzing sensation of careful grooming. You recall with frustration your boss’ shrill noise officiously dumping weekend work on you andhow you caved-in, not out of obligation or responsibility, but fear of consequences if you refused or hesitated. In your distraction the vicious razor slipped at your jaw and you feel it digging in now. No pain or blood yet, but that will surely be imminent. More hassle, but at least the pain is something tangible and interesting.

You take a closer look with just a little apprehension, but you seem okay. The razor seemingly left no mark at all. Feeling along your jawline though, you notice it. A seamless flap. A perfect little cut deep under the skin. Still no blood. The apprehension returns doubly. You feel the urge; out of terrified curiosity and medical necessity you have to do it. Lingering traces of sleepiness are all now nauseating intrusive mental images of what nightmares are under this grotesque flap instead. The numbness turns to an itchy tingle as if in anticipation.

You pull your jaw skin back a couple centimetres and your thin outer layer stretches loosely. You aren’t going to be able to go to work, you think distantly, seeing the unimaginable. More of your face peels back and you start seeing the inconcievable absurdity that you’ve become. Like sweetly overripe fruit that appears barely unhealthy on the outside, your face is blackened with stinking putrefaction just below the weak surface. Something liquid that was once part of you trickles down your neck and you only feel cold now despite its sickly warmth. Your jawbone feels...malleable all of a sudden. As you process that your head is rotting, the shock washes over you in a sickening climax and you pass out.

[weirdspookystories]

I reflexively rejected the very sight of the wretched figure across the room as some form of crime against nature...but the reason for which took dangerously vulnerable seconds to process.

I’d never seen myself in person before. 

[weirdspookystories]

Expiration

  I woke up today feeling the same dreadful pressure, storm-like and dense. I tasted a little blood while becoming achingly aware of a headache’s familiar groan press behind my eyes. I gritted my grinding-worn teeth. I had been unwell for so long, it seemed, but I tolerated it, as always.

   I had been a con artist, a psychic medium faking spiritual power. My work as an imitation medium introduced me to grief and death, and I took advantage of the most vulnerable and emotionally weak. What I did disgusts me now, but hindsight is 20/20. 

     My father was forced into petty crime to feed us after losing his job. Fortunately, before I could be forced by circumstance into a more self-destructive career, I saw from showbiz there was a market available in offering comfort to those most vulnerable. Everyone has to eat, so I became a predator, preying particularly on mourners and the lonely old. I saw them feed in a way too, seeking desperately for something comforting or profound. It made it easier to justify morally, but really, I think now that maybe I was just hoping for something profound too. 

     In a strange way, while never speaking to the dead, being immersed in the other place awoke me to the possibilities of real psychic power. I need to make this confession because I did make contact with something beyond all sensory or logical explanation. I must give up my misguided career now for some relief from the burden of secrecy, reaching out for someone who might understand, as all my clients once did. The cycle ends now.

   It began en-route to a potentially challengingly skeptical appointment. It was an idyllic day. The sun was setting on a mild Thursday and the birds were singing, but also audible on the soothing breeze was implacable whistling. A sound like a person whistling a single unsteady tone. I was reminded vaguely of previously-forgotten dreams or buried memories with a sense of unknown nostalgia. A cool breeze put me in a stranger mood still, and I doubted whether I should even attend the session. This felt like a portent, but I'm not sure if that's just because months later I'm trying to make some sense of things. I ran over all I knew of this new client, their address, and the vaguely confusing statement that they… had a message for me. I was nervous, as I should have been.

   The house I arrived at was exceptionally pristine, though it blended perfectly into the neighbourhood seamlessly in all other ways. It was unremarkable, but the outer tidiness drilled it into my mind nonetheless. Perhaps this resident was an obsessive cleaner, or hired a gardener, I thought, in an attempt to comfort myself, to rationalise the growing worry. That wasn't unexpected though, many of my clients were normal people who happened to have a few…eccentricities. Being devoutly religious, or a committed believer in the paranormal, was almost a prerequisite of seeking out a medium.

   This house, however, seemed far beyond eccentric. Being too well-kept was simply the first oddity I noticed, opening me up to the other subtle wrongnesses of the place. The colourful front garden was immaculate to the point that I felt I was untidy; simply being there, I was out of place, and I felt sickening heaviness welling in my stomach. I was drawn against my will to the front door, where I noticed how dilapidated the building itself was, behind the bright veneer of the garden, like camouflage. The place smelt damp just from the doorstep, and I knew there was something dangerous here. I clenched my jaw and rung the bell.

   The sequence of events at this point is a shifting blur of unreachable memories and sickening sensations which are difficult for me to interpret, let alone put into words, in more ways than one.

    Vertigo-inducing smoke and an industrial smell like burning plastic. Nausea and double vision before I began separating from my very self. Stranger than the distance I felt from home and life was a stark sense of peace conflicting with deep insight; simultaneous awareness and detachment. Writhing, dizzying colours and images which would probe deep into my subconscious for years. From the psychedelic movement, swirling smoky geometries formed to vaguely reveal the shadowy form of a hooded old woman. I felt I was underwater, suffocated, vision blurred, but weightless and in a state of confused peace. I tried to focus and I fell into the unwavering, searching eye of the surreal psychic tornado.

    She spoke to me somehow, telepathically perhaps, and I understood innately her message. She told me she was my future, and in disoriented panic I tried pushing her from my mind. In an instant the She became a draconic, skeletal Them, and I understood their great power. Their vibrant skull-head was horselike, with a single eye socket where a nose might be. The beautiful, horrifying eye was a featureless void of stars and galaxies. I stopped resisting them. They were from another plane, or perhaps none, I believed, but I expended all my energy on trying to focus on messages whistled to me like wind to idly contemplate what was actually happening. I interpreted that I had been coming to this house daily, for months. My memories were fading into view, slow and heavy too. I felt a dreadful pressure come with the revelation, storm-like and dense. I felt the groan of a headache press behind my eyes and the vision drifted into the background of my mind like trees invisible through a forest fire.

   That’s all I can remember before I died.

   It was in the ambulance that I awoke, but now something important about myself was different. To this day I don’t know what happened to me. I was found after collapsing on the doorstep of an abandoned building on the edge of town, by a passer-by. Random luck that I was found at all. It was almost as confusing for the EMTs, who couldn’t ascertain at all what had caused death, assuming some form of brain injury, or my resurrection for that matter. Tests showed relatively normal brain function too.

   I know I'll see the deity again soon, and already have, in fact, in sleepless fever dreams I wake from by vomiting blood. I can’t eat or drink but I do not hunger. I am cursed, and I don't have much time, so today I return to the same house, as I have done every day. I don't understand why, but I must. Perhaps to atone, or perhaps to be delivered from this hell. Something is inevitable, inescapable, but I don’t know if it will be death or something far different. Some believe pain is divine, and, if so, I am as much a god as the hooded woman from the confusing place. I ache to know the truth because it is too late for anything more by now.

Perhaps She is a version of me, perhaps She is my future after all. Leaving Her was leaving myself.

[weirdspookystories]

Conflagration of the Pale Horse

   There had been a colossal inferno at the small local museum, of uncertain origin, utterly devastating the old building and its contents. No-one was hurt, but none of the artefacts could have survived the devastation of the blaze. This is the first element of perplexity regarding the surviving document. The second, it does not appear in any of the digitised records. Therefore, the fragment of what is believed to be a possibly-victorian diary-entry cannot be placed for certain in time or space: it seems highly unlikely it was produced in the local area.

Most unsettling, all curators agreed, was the content. The following is a transcript.

   These events have been both terrible and miraculous. I cannot fully interpret the Lord's message, so I write this open letter in the hope that the events be of some revelation for you. The Lord works in mysterious and miraculous ways. Please, let this recount of my glorious experience guide you to your salvation, too!

   The month began with constant nauseous whine of flies. Locally there were food shortages also. I think we were being punished, or prepared for what was to come- where we would be going we had no need of earthly foods. Our manor was well stocked for now, at least, and my wife and young son in a fine fit of health. There was a sense of weird anticipation at this early stage. The weather was slow, the clouds keeping the summer humidity in and the sun dimmed. There was a wintry chill on the wind now, and the nights were drawing in.

    I began hearing strange things at night; it dawned on us there were events unfolding far from mundane country life. The quiet alone  was transformative, we hadn’t seen a bird in days. Instead there was an anomolous hum, soft and unnoticeable, except for in the pin-drop silence of half-dream near-sleep. Monotonous but deviously entrancing, a harmony of the most heavenly order. My immediate thoughts were to protect my family from the eerie intrusions, living in the ordinarily-quiet countryside. Lingering doubts founded on basest instinct warned me this could be a siren's call, but that was simply my test.I accepted the sound wholly, allowing the angelic choir to comfort me as a rod and staff might. My wife, dismissive of the profound as she was, suggested it was local wildlife, or distant music travelling on the breeze.

   We slept well regardless. A little too well, in fact. We concurred that sleep became less satisfying over that first week- tiredness plagued us next, and we would find ourselves drifting asleep during the day, even though the servants did all the common work sufficiently. Next came the sleepwalking, and, one-by-one, said servants began to diminish. The lady’s maid informed my wife that many of them had run away on account of superstition and paranoia, apparently it had been boiling over for many weeks. Others were unnaccounted for. There was a vague aura of wonderment. These strange incidents being brought to light were puzzle pieces that didnt fit but implied a pattern which the devout could easily understand.

   It was decided we would move, at last, back to the city, as my wife had wanted so long during the more turbulent period of our marriage. She was never happy with my retirement from medicine, perhaps upset I was never the most esteemed doctor. I am more fulfilled as a priest, but she hated the quiet, the isolation, and my newfound assertiveness. We never got the chance to leave, and how marvellous that is!

    It was a mild, particularly humid morning. We had just taken breakfast when, from Nowhere, the deathly-thick blackness of moonless-midnight-sky overcame the soft autumnal morning sunlight, and all healthy vibrancy left our estate. It was sudden and completely alien. I know the unlight was a flood, sent to purify. There was only void where the sun had shone, blotted out like a candle. An awesome sight to behold! Yet despite the darkness we were shown the way- we could still see, somehow. The sigh of a thousand trumpets was the fanfare of the glistening chariot, illuminating our righteous path.

We knew we must follow.

    The burning light of our saviours stung at first, but the otherwordliness of the orb in the sky repacing the sun drew us in. Me, my wife and baby followed, walking in a trance, before breaking into a run as the groaning force of pure light accelerated a little with a strangely sweet smell of roasting meat. The light seemed to fade and we were in pitch dark yet my vision continued, though hindered. I could follow by sound, and I wasn’t far.

   My eyes adjusted further, and the strange smell of hissing colours stung at my unprepared earthly eyes: sensory events took place that I cannot convey, except to further revel in their wonderment!

    Our gardens were unfamiliar and I was lost outside in the dark, alone, in the wide-open, as unpredictable volatile events of epic proportions challenged every belief I had ever held about the stability of normal reality. I was but a minuscule instrument in this grand orchestra, slowly being tuned. It was in this context I found her. The soulless form of a human female was shrivelled, incinerated by cleansing fire on the cold soil. My wife’s sin caught up to her and she was rightly punished. I was so glad. I was giddy with excitement, in fact, moreso as I realised my son was gone from her blackened, burnt rigor mortis grip. He must have been pure! He was taken up! I needed to be with him, in the promised land. There was hope of salvation yet!

     I’m afraid to say holy visitation is often indistinguishable from disturbing surreal nightmare. The ghostly visitors who descended from their chariot were not how I believed angels to be. They moved like fire and glowed like the moon. Gaseous and aesthetically aggressive in more ways than I could concieve. All a test, I know, and their melancholy singing soothes me.

    Sight is blurred and falling from me now, but I walk on. Towards them. The more I fall into waking sleep, the more I am awakened; the more I drift from autonomy, the more I feel in control and reinvigorated.My destruction, then, will be my ascension. I know the Lord works in mysterious ways, so I shall follow them to the end, leaving this letter to the fortunate souls who may find it when I am gone. Rejoice! I walk into God's burning light to face His tests.

Farewell!

Further analysis has been inconclusive, but possible fragments of meteroite were found embedded in the paper, and trace amounts of blood, as if it had formed a vapour. No further explanations have been possible.

[weirdspookystories]

Liminal Nightmares

    Complete disorientation. You find yourself by the sea, on a relatively short cliff. You have no memory of how you got there and the location is entirely unfamiliar.

    You’re a little light-headed and your legs feel weak a moment. You sit on the soft grass to gather yourself, focusing on your breathing. It is at this point you smell something on the bracing ocean breeze. It is familiar and not entirely unpleasant, nutty like burnt hair. The unseasonably-warm sunshine falters behind a wall of rippled cloud, mirroring the calm sea, the light fading gently. Clear and cogent thought seems a little out of reach for a moment. You are in a state of shock, but in a peaceful way. The time is unclear but the daylight suggests mid-morning.

   Closing your eyes and forcing some concentration through the haze, you reconsider current events. Part of you actually welcomes the mystery and tranquility of the apparent teleportation following worrying recent changes at work, and the impact the increased stress has had on your home life. It’s taken a physical as well as social toll on you, too. Troubled sleep with haunting nightmares leading to a constant tiredness. You’ve felt very distant and detached recently; not yourself. As a result you’ve been living life through a sludgy veneer of aching and mild dissociation, a limbonic state of uncomfortable grogginess.

    You realise your sleeping patterns must be causing more trouble, as the only plausible explanation you can think of for your strange situation is an extreme case of somnambulism, sleepwalking. It worries you,then, why you might have subconsciously attached to this place. Why was it relevant to your sleeping mind? Images of hooded cultists from your nightmares are brought, with a pang of dread, to mind. This felt like a waking nightmare, and you pinch yourself just to be certain. It hurts, though the pain lingers a little too long and your other senses are dulled. Your vision is a little fuzzy, too.

   It is at this point you no longer feel alone, here. This intensifies into a sense of complete vulnerability, sat on the exposed seafront, lost. You quickly get to your feet, looking around. You feel a little paranoid. On edge. With a satisfying enough answer and your previous calm dissipating rapidly, you decide it is time to find a way home. There are pylons on a hill, at the horizon, surrounded by gradually-more-dense woodland. Big metallic blemishes on the landscape. It feels vaguely familiar somehow, and you feel the only man-made landmark you’ve seen is your best bet as far as choosing a direction. You begin to walk, purposefully and confidently, in spite of the gentle sensory fog. You can’t even fool yourself into confidence, though.

    This is when you see them. In the distance, behind the forms of trees, the suggestion of shadows can be made out. They move unnaturally and methodically, however. It is hard to be sure, but their movements are eerily humanoid. Memories of sleep paralysis grope at your faltering reasoning and as they do you begin feeling strain on your leg muscles. It’s almost as if the presence of these mysterious shadows are thickening the air itself. There’s a strange calm in the quiet and slowness of this place, but you feel a little too cold and completely drained of energy.

   Walking inland a short-seeming stretch of time, you reach the woodland. Despite being less exposed you feel nothing good can come of the woods. The magic wilderness, warned of in old fairytales, the memory of which floods you with nostalgia and a longing for the comforts of home. You attempt to quicken your pace but struggle to; your legs feeling too heavy, the exertion too great. A brisk walk is as fast as you can move, even as you burn with adrenaline and fear from the sight of another shadow moving out of place. Beams of light are scattered evenly and mottled by the trees, but you are fairly sure you saw something you absolutely should not. Still, you are hopelessly lost in the woods…you decide against every natural instinct to call feebly out to the possible stranger. No reply, and, in fact, the whole woodland goes silent; even the trees and breeze die out. Like the sun fading behind clouds and like your own dimmed senses. Completely afraid, you back carefully away from the apparition, movement seemingly even more of an effort now, your pace painfully slow at best.

   There is an unknown, unseen force in these woods. It seems to be applying just enough pressure for you to understand your total powerlessness. Or perhaps allowing you enough freedom to enact maximum emotional torture. You think perhaps the woods are not silent but you have been deafened somehow, and in this unfamiliar, unnatural place, this thought terrifies you more than the sudden quiet did. What unholy sounds would you hear if the veil was lifted? You are lost in more than one sense, and all you can do is keep walking at an achingly meandering pace, with only thoughts of home and safety to keep yourself from giving in. You notice numbly that you have been walking in a circle, trapped in disorientation.

You feel this place is cursed somehow, forsaken.

   While it feels that days must have passed, no time at all has, the weak sunlight burns on from the same position behind endless seafloor-wrinkled clouds. You’ve reached the hill, and see a small building through the trees, by the pylon. Hoping there is a worker, or at least a phone inside, you climb up to the simple block of slight familiarity in an unfamiliar wilderness. Guided there, as you were, by every fibre of your sense and reason, it feels like a great achievement in this hostile environment to have arrived.

   The door is ajar and the single room is a bare concrete cell, but inside there is a little warmth and shelter; it feels remotely safe. You also notice you have a lot more freedom of movement, you feel a sense of relief as if you’ve surface for air, and you can hear again. You know you can’t stay though. You are trapped and cornered here, which is perhaps even worse than exposure. There’s something out in those woods and you have to get home, so, while you can move freely, you decide to make a break for it.

   Immediately out of the building you stumble and are trapped again in the monotony of dulled senses and imprisonment of your movement, though it seems to be getting worse, rapidly, your muscles now straining more than ever before for excruciatingly little movement. You are a few steps from the industrial shell when you bear witness to the shadow people, but your screaming is internal and silent. The bland palette of the world has twisted into a sickening array of garish vibrancy, everything suddenly too bright. You are immobilised in the presence of these entities. You are utterly helpless and alone. They close in.

   Complete disorientation. You find yourself by the sea, on a relatively short cliff. You have no memory of how you got there and the location is entirely unfamiliar.

[weirdspookystories]

The Terrible Beauty of the Things You’ll See

Susan could never be found. She formed the final puzzle piece, and of all my creations, she was my magnum opus. I would be reborn.

    Susan had lead a satisfying existence, with a decent job and happy home life. It was her ordinariness that was perhaps most appealing, a little folksy, perhaps, but she was more special than she could have understood.

    It was at work in the machine shop last month that her eye was brutally taken. Her work was diligent and highly praised, but the protective eye-wear provided by management was cheap, and there was a horrible accident involving some unpredictable, razor-sharp metal shrapnel. The pained wail was piercing enough to drown out the grinding industrious machinery for a moment. She was rushed to the lunch room and emergency services were called immediately. There was blood, quite a lot. The metal shard was pencil-thick, piercing the retina deeply and injuring the eyelid. Susan was in shock like everyone else. Coworkers’ rudimentary first aid training kicked in but no-one was entirely sure what to do with themselves, until the paramedics arrived. After she was taken to hospital the heavy atmosphere in the shop was sombre as a closed-casket funeral. They worked in silence that day.

   She returned to work, after only a week recuperating, with an imitation eye made of simple glass. The detail was incredible but it lacked any real kind of depth. It was flawed art. The realism disarmed people at first, but the curious looks she began to notice at work in the weeks after disappointed her completely, reminding her of her new facial incompleteness.

    Hating what the job had stolen from her, and her pathetic employers offering a pittance for compensation, Susan stormed out, and, in her haste, and without depth perception, Susan tripped and fell, her new ocular prosthetic falling out. Co-workers rushed to help her, but her hurt pride and misdirected shame meant she grabbed her eye as quickly as possible and got up on her own.

   She failed to realise in her rush that what she then put into her head was not her eye. It looked the same, after all, why should she have noticed? A masterpiece. This fumble set events in motion that would change everything.

   It was in bed with her wife Rebecca that night that Susan realised her prosthetic was a foreign body. It was comparatively too heavy, emitting heat, lubricating and, strangest of all, showing her a kaleidoscope of geometric shapes when she closed what she would refer to as her eye. It was beyond her understanding, assuming it was merely a quality of a very realistic replica. It wasn’t until waking up and trying to take it out for a shower, she realised in horror that it was a bizarre imitation of her glass eye. Innate desperation took hold of her reaction, and she tried prying it out, and in response, the orb in her head began to sting and burn her socket. The pain was as excruciating as the original injury and flesh melted around the intruder. She cried in pain and fear. Her real eye twitched. It felt so very alien and wrong to have the weight of the Other in the intimate confines of her own cranium.

   Though she wasn’t sure why, Susan wanted to keep this a secret from everyone, even Rebecca; she felt no-one should see what had happened. It felt deeply shameful somehow. Apart from redness and a little swelling the affected area was not too suspicious. But she could no longer sleep, closing her eyes opened her to nauseating psychedelic visuals and dizzyingly twisting, vibrant Rorsach inkblot-shapes, which seemed garishly real.

    It was in this sleep deprived state she began to hallucinate more vivid apparitions. She could see through both eyes sometimes, in miraculous 20-20 vision. However, records would disregard Rebecca’s explanation of Susan’s confession of the things she saw. Distorted inhuman figures whose exact forms were incomprehensibly shifting constantly and geometric patterns that were physically impossible and hurt to see. In some ways she saw what would happen to her, too. The eldritch leviathan she would witness.

    Migraines became a routine and Susan had become effectively bed-bound, so Rebecca cared for her when she could, but she was busy with her own work commitments. Rebecca was worried and, wanting to support her as best she could, contacted a counselor, but by then it would be too late.

A missing persons report was filed, and the search was very extensive, but Susan could never be found. She was much too far away.

   It was midnight, on a moonless night, with a warm glow to the summer breeze, when I guided her away in a lifeless trance. She could provide me a compatible vessel. I needed her vision, her unknown power, a power even I could not fully understand. So I was her shepherd. I granted her wondrous sights, and the patterns of the stars themselves became glorious beacons of my will, geometric patterns which would direct her to a cave, a cave that would in turn guide her to the beating heart of the earth, where the ancient portal would be found. The pattern is complete now…and I, a dying god, who first spawned life on this planet millennia ago, have begun to rebuild.

People were my art, but now I am both.

[weirdspookystories]

Herald of Angels

   I absolutely believe there was a paranormal force at work, but it was no ghost. This had been contact from somewhere further away than I think is comprehensible.

   Despite police efforts a large crowd formed that muggy, sunny afternoon. A strange, sickeningly sweet smell had been reported by the family living in the apartment below, and on investigation, it was found that the elderly resident had passed away. As coroner, it was my job to identify the body and investigate cause of death, but I’ll spare technicalities for brevity and understanding. It is no overstatement that this was my strangest case, in many years of practice.

   She was preserved perfectly, and where usually cause of death is difficult to determine, I believe she had died a few months prior to discovery of the corpse, most likely from cardiac failure. The smell had been rotting food and other…possessions, which I will explain shortly. She was in a foetal position when she died, and the bedsheets indicated some form of struggle, likely from the pain or some kind of fitting, as I believe there was no foul play involved. In fact, this is all I could really determine at first, even after hours of solid hard work, working many nights and hours of my own time. The investigation completely took over my life for a few months. It came to the point of obsession.

   What had me so intrigued wasn’t just the unusually well-preserved body but the earthly possessions of an otherwise-ordinary, old woman with no known next-of-kin. In centuries past, she might have been decried a witch, maybe by some in the present, too. The small apartment was homely and snug, with diaries and leather-bound books on topics beyond my understanding scattered not-untidily. Diagrams and writings were hung on most walls and the few houseplants were all rare medicinal breeds. For all I knew she was practicing the ancient pursuit of alchemy, in a search for eternal youth or an extension of her life. Many of her possessions did seem to have been caught out of time, decades old yet immaculate.

    That was merely the background to her more chilling interests, made apparent from a less-immaculate, well-worn workbench. Obviously this was the focus of the room and my investigation for a long time. There was a gruesome altar or some kind of mysterious fetish, formed of rotten flesh, skeletal remains and occult symbols, but most of the surrounding paperwork and writings were ruined by a filthy tar-like substance.

   Having pulled strings and gained access to other materials at the police station on the case, analysis of all writings and texts found suggested only mental deterioration. None of the books could be found to have existed and none of the diagrams made any kind of sense to any kind of expert. In confidence…I confess, I accessed the police evidence locker, taking one of the more well-worn hardbacks home. What I could make sense of were the scrawled notes of  the deceased. Bizarre shopping lists of groceries whose names alone would constitute blasphemy, incantations in a strange dialect of latin, and esoteric symbols that had a profound effect on me. Monotone, etched illustrations filled many pages, many of which could be inadequately described only as angels. Grotesque angels.

   I needed to confess this, I needed to confide, because this case, years later, is still on my mind all day, every day, and I cannot take it any more. As a coroner, you learn fast to desensitise yourself to violence and cope with the extremities of human suffering, but this is far stranger than that, this is something from beyond our conception of life, and I feel it grip me and corrupt my soul.

I need more than a confidant, in fact, I need a favour. A big favour; I’m sorry.

   You see, there was something I couldn’t include in my pathological examination report. Something I really need help with, and I’m sure I can trust in you, as you’ve always trusted in me, the many years we’ve known each other. There was a foreign body in the cadaver, which I managed to extract. It was too horrifying to document, and the only explanation I could find for it was some form of…egg-clutch, I think. I understand it’s been years, but I’ve kept them frozen. I need your help to understand this, I need you to try to incubate them. It must happen, I can feel it.

[weirdspookystories]

Subterrannea

I became a wildlife photographer to find stability in life, but when I fell into that crumbling bunker, I felt part of my soul leave my body.

    I remember most clearly of all that it had been such a beautiful autumn morning. Brisk and refreshing, the air full of falling leaves and birdsong. I had walked away from the beaten track and climbed a hill for a better panorama shot of the vibrant green valley. It was there that the ground gave way and I fell suddenly, falling with a hideous crunch, ankle-first. The following is a little hazy from the shock and intensity, the fiery agony was absolute, but I lay there screaming and weeping for what must have been close to an hour. Panic stripped away any shame or semblance of civility until only primal survival instinct remained.

   I knew to stop the bleeding I had to tear off a shirt sleeve to form a tourniquet around my thigh. As my eyes had gradually adjusted like slow old lenses, I fumbled hurriedly through my rucksack for anything that might help, I managed to retrieve some painkillers, bandages, water, my torch and phone. I applied the bandage after pouring some water on my caustically-stinging wound to clean it and applied the bandage. The torch was dead, of course, and my phone had no signal, but had a little battery left so I was forced to use that as a light source for a while instead.

   There was no way I could reach where sharp shafts of bright light now pierced violently into the ugly, tomblike cell, to climb back out. Certainly not with my injury. But by now I’d decided I was finished with panic and was determined to fight my way through this and breathe fresh air again as soon as possible.

   The derelict tunnel stank of something deeply unwholesome. Damp concrete and something I’d never smelt before. I also noticed, as I finished whimpering in pain, an inconsistent, deep mechanical-sounding whirring or grinding noise. Some kind of power source maybe, but how would it still be running? Forcing myself to stand, my ankle still screaming at me in torture, I took stock of my surroundings as best I could before deciding arbitrarily a direction. I was in a corridor, but could not see either end. The concrete was cold, damp and felt too processed to be lurking under such a nice area of undisturbed countryside. Furthermore, while the ceiling was high, the walls felt too close. Bad past experiences were inadvertently brought to mind and I shuddered. I couldn’t let fear drown me now. Had to push on.

    My joint and bones were crushing into each other like scraping teeth, while my bandage was already starting to soak through. I felt the wound throb. Breathing was short and fast from adrenaline. Beyond the pain and desperation to escape very little crossed my mind, except that vague paranoid feeling of being watched. Maybe it was the stress or injury, but I began to feel the bunker was haunted. There was something here utterly unnatural, I was sure; I was intruding.

   Old buildings are notoriously hazardous. I should know. My friend was paralysed when we went urban exploring. Trespassing at an old office block that seemed damp and unhealthy though stable.  I was just through a doorway when the floor collapsed behind me and he fell, landing horribly. He begged me not to leave him to go get help, and I could relate to that now. Alone, injured horribly and lost, acting on animal instinct. This was why I preferred the wide outdoors to confined spaces and probably why old buildings felt so skin-crawlingly…wrong. Not to mention that old buildings can be uninhabitable, literally toxic, and poor ventilation can mean escaped natural gases may accumulate. They become something between man-made and natural at once: crumbling shells left wasted, forgotten, to be slowly reclaimed.

   After an indeterminate stretch of painful limping against the abrasive wall, scraping me like rough sandpaper, I emerged into a room with a profound echo. The smells of damp earth and rusting electronics were more potent here, but there were no real signs that nature had forced past the wartime defences. I hated how alien the room felt. A very specific feeling I still can’t put my finger on, that years later I sometimes wake up in a cold sweat about. The indescribable feeling clings to me like a pollutant, a scar. I knew I was not alone in that room. I didn’t know who it could be…my mind raced through thoughts of ghosts, trapped officers unaware the second world war was over, or even some top-secret rusting robotic experiment. I had goosebumps.

   What I did find was a lot of old monitors, audio equipment and broken computers suggesting the brutal grey hellhole was meant to be some kind of listening post after the second world war, in case we lost. Or to monitor allied civilians to root out spies. Either guess lent the dusty equipment a more morbid feel and detached it from the above landscape. Whatever happened here was unnatural and morally concrete-grey.

   I hurriedly searched the unaired room, my breath still in tatters and lower leg in pain, but found little more than a lighter and some documents. The latter seemed like an alien language, being so full of coded jargon. Perhaps an emotionally reactive exaggeration, but the people working here must have been so integrated in their huge machines and technical language they were more like robots than people. It was there, thinking this, while stood in a cold concrete bubble cut off from the natural world, that I discovered the source of the wheezing whirring. It was traumatisingly close. It was in that panicked final moment of dying light that my whole body tensed and I froze, holding my breath until I felt I’d pass out.

The noise wasn’t decades-old machinery but organic breathing. My phone died and total darkness took hold again.

   I had shone my phone at the beast in the moment before the battery died. It seemed to be asleep. I was mildly relieved to see that it remained asleep as I crept slowly away, past a desk towards the wall, but my injured leg gave way, and I fell excruciatingly across some loudly-cracking debris. It was a skeleton. There was shuffling movement. I think at this point it had begun to awaken, which forced me to search for a way out even faster. I wasn’t able to retrace my steps due to how close it would bring me to the behemoth and I was completely swallowed in the dark, pushing against industrial walls in a panicked search for other doors. My silent frenzy was hopeless and I sensed movement behind me, across the room. The hulking entity had moved, it had to be awake now.

    By sheer luck, I felt a rough rusted-metal panel. There was a door here, and, I realised, one of the documents I had found had a 4-digit passcode for the panel. Total relief washed over me and I knew I was going to make it through this. I visualised fields, hills and clean air. Feeling for the positioning of the buttons carefully, I gleefully punched the numbers in and shoved the heavy steel door.

   Too heavy. The code was wrong. I was desperate, it had been so naive of me to believe a random sequence of numbers would be my salvation. I cried, collapsing where I was, still following the unseen movement across the room. I kept my sobs quiet, but I had lost hope, I no longer cared, intimidated beyond all dignity or self-preservation. Intense fear controlled my actions rather than thoughts of self defense, and in hindsight that is my only good explanation for the bad choice I made. The lumbering creature drew nearer, and on instinct I grabbed the lighter I’d found earlier in a desperate attempt to search the room again. After a few fumbling attempts I managed to light it.

    Explosion.

    The heat was intense and suffocating and I was close enough that it seemed like an apocalyptic tempest tearing down the walls. I was lacerated by debris. I smashed my head on the wall with a horrific crack from the shock-wave. I was winded in the blast. The ceiling caved in, concrete shards and earth pinning me down.  The pale, fading sunlight stung my eyes, though not nearly as much as the explosion.

    To this day, those pained ululations break me out in a cold sweat. The spectral beast was injured too, provoked into an ungodly rage.

   It was a miracle, then, that I could then claw my way to the surface on a longer block of ceiling, covered in dirt, blood, my own filth and concrete dust. I myself must have looked hideous and unnatural. But it was as I struggled on my arms back into the world that I finally saw it, in the pale pink light of the setting sun. It was just a bear, hibernating in a crumbling human-cave, but brutally mauled in the gas explosion I caused. I felt equally sorry for it as terrified by it. Approaching me, I saw its fur was singed, muzzle was half torn off and it walked with a limp. Towards me.

    I scrambled in the dirt to my feet, immediately falling again, my only reserves of strength coming from pure adrenaline. Everything span and my vision blurred nauseatingly, everything was uncertain. There had been a smear of blood where I landed after the blast: I was heavily concussed and keeping reality in sight was a constant strain by now. It was all too much and I felt-light headed, my vision swimming, colours overly vibrant. Falling unconscious here was unthinkable with the enraged demon stalking me, but all I could do was crawl through the mud, as it slowly sunk in how brutally injured I actually was. I trailed blood from my head injury, mangled leg and uncounted cuts, and the surreal image burned into my eyes. I couldn’t make sense of it, the pain having not kicked in and the concussion still nauseating me.  I tried focussing on my breathing but couldn’t help grunting and crying.

   I had to move, to get to safety, and being out in the open at last, feeling the late-evening breeze, gave me hope, despite my injuries. I pushed through it all, fought off the urge to vomit, pulling myself forwards, taking drinking in deep, clean breaths. Crawling, then stumbling into an exhausted limping jog, tripping many times but forcing myself on, even with stitches. My injury was worsening but I was sure the bear would be hungry and angry. I drank and poured the remaining supply of water over myself to fight my fading consciousness.

   Hours went on, until stars shimmered like sunshine on waves and the soft glow of the moon gave me strength beyond strength. I was hungry, had no energy, was still losing blood, and was lost in the wilderness with an ethereal bear spirit following me.

   I collapsed at some point, but I’m not sure when or where, and woke up in the bright, pristine hospital, perhaps days later. I don’t know what force kept me alive. I would see it again though, most nights for the next few weeks, a ghostly vision in my traumatised nightmares. Fur singed off, face terribly disfigured and always utterly vengeful. It was somehow very human-like but simultaneously hauntingly transcendent. I was always chased through endless concrete mazes in complete darkness before it always caught me. Totally inevitable, every time. I felt it tear me apart in every conceivable way and could not sleep without the inescapable terrors.

  There was no way I couldn’t go back.  I had to redeem myself by paying tribute to this spirit. I believed absolutely after enough sleep deprivation that it was my only hope to reclaim my humanity. It will happen now, I can see it somehow, it is inevitable. Fate, maybe...

[weirdspookystories]

Lost in the Storm

   I’m not much of a storyteller, and there isn’t much story to tell. Especially with how long ago it was, and all. These migraines don’t help either.

   The migraines all seemed to begin a few decades ago, with a blizzard, as strange as that sounds. We’d had snow, but this was freak weather, this was walking through a solid sheet of the freezing stuff. Shudderingly cold, the roar of the blasting ice winds and total visual obstruction turned rural peace and silence into icy chaos in a few minutes. Being caught in the storm while walking the dog was unexpected enough that I was already cold and on edge, when, while pulling my inadequate hood tighter, I realised I’d changed direction. I was kinda lost, and at this point could barely see Zeke, my dog, at the end of his short leash.

   I could feel pulling on the leash though, and I tugged back to keep my dog close. Unfortunately his curiosity was persistent, pulling me, and, being lost, I decided to trust his superior instincts and senses, especially as he whined over the scream of the gale. I felt the now-familiar pressure beginning to conspire in my head. I had no idea what we were about to stumble into, but I could see illumination through the snow and some kind of mechanical grinding became audible as we got close, too. I felt detached from myself when it came into view, struggling to comprehend the dark shapes forming as I trudged nearer.

   Forming from the bitter canvas of the snowstorm was a mangled mechanical mess of dark metal, blood and fire. What seemed to have been a car had flipped at speed. Headlights glared into the sub-zero abyss. I remember calling out uselessly to offer help against the animal yelling of the hellish weather. I was drawn nearer, despite the fire, to find the driver was dead. I couldn’t see any particular injury at first but the image that stuck with me deepest is how her face seemed…off.

   Uncanny valley was an understatement of that misshapen bone structure. This was more than those glassy, empty eyes dead people get. Clearly her skull was shattered on the steering wheel from impact, but the face itself was intact apart from a nosebleed. I couldn’t tell how many passengers had been in the rear seats, due to the way the car was crushed and the unidentifiable mass of mangled flesh. It seemed too many for the size of the car, from the sheer quantity of viscera. An image I cannot forget.

  I had to get away and throw up. I could hear my pulse and my vision tunnelled somewhat, losing focus, I had a nosebleed and my extremities were going numb. And this is also where my memory gets fuzzier. I couldn’t find my dog, and wasn’t sure at what point I lost him. I was in a panic and surrounded again by an aura of pure freezing hostility, until a figure approached me. I think there must’ve been someone else in the wreck, the driver’s twin sister: she was unhurt but otherwise identical to the woman with the distorted face. Her expression seemed as lost as I felt.

  “Y-you hurt? Can I, uh, help you at all?” I yelled, on unresponsive ears, “Are you hurt?” She just came closer, a little too close actually, and I realised then she also had the same unseeing eyes. I just assumed she was blind, especially because her mannerisms were…unusual, to put it politely. We stood there a moment as the storm frenzied around us, with the silhouette of the gruesome crash still looming. I glanced away, and it was then that I vividly recall her face began to distend and warp around the mouth and it seemed she was chewing or something on her swollen mouth. I went into frozen shock, but believed she was somehow injured from the crash and trying to speak. Whatever this thing was, her whole face unfurled; skin seemed to rip and tear, with her maw an insectoid mass of mandibles and vulgar inhumanity. A creaking groan like old floorboards and wet gravel spewed from that broken face. Everything about that encounter feels uncomfortable, out-of-place, wrong. Recoiling in horror, I must have slipped on the impacted snow and smashed my head, because next thing I know, I’m on my aching back, shivering on the cold hard ground.

   The whiteout had faded to intermittent flurries, and, perhaps more troubling than a relief, there was no sign at all now of the demonic apparition. There was ash in the snow where the burning car was, the bitter scent of smoke lingered, and that was all. My dog was beside me, at least, his collar missing. Obviously it was unclear, but I think now that it was maybe some kinda ghastly, huge parasite in that poor woman’s head, that, or she’d never been human at all. Maybe it wasn’t even a car that’d crashed. We don’t have that kinda weather, either. All things considered I don’t trust my memory enough to come to any real conclusions…definitely not now with all these headaches I’ve been getting.

   If that’s not enough, it was the police who came to me. Showed up real fast after I woke up. When I finally managed to get an order to my thoughts and a little calm, that unsettled me as much as anything. No idea how they could have known, but honestly, I’m just glad they stopped me from freezing to death!

   You know, I’m pretty sure this breaches the confidentiality they made me sign… but there are bigger, stranger forces than documents. Been looking over my shoulder for too many years to keep this quiet. Go safe out there.