“Daddy, I had a bad dream.” You blink your eyes and pull up on your elbows. Your clock glows red in the darkness—it’s 3:23.

“Do you want to climb into bed and tell me about it?”

“No, Daddy.”

The oddness of the situation wakes you up more fully. You can barely make out your daughter’s pale form in the darkness of your room.

“Why not sweetie?”

“Because in my dream, when I told you about the dream, the thing wearing Mommy’s skin sat up.” For a moment, you feel paralyzed; you can’t take your eyes off of your daughter. The covers behind you begin to shift.

%%

I’d had them ever since I was a kid.

I can remember being incredibly self-conscious about them, hiding them in my pockets under books and bags. The kids at school never said anything to my face, but I knew they were laughing behind my back.

I remember asking my parents to take me to the doctor, to get them checked out. The growths on my hands seemed to be the elephant in the room back then, since they’d just say I was fine and change the subject. But I knew better.

I had tried to remove them as a child, but without avail. Scissors, knives, potato peelers; trying to cut or scrape them off was always a lost cause because I couldn’t continue once the pain kicked in.

But today was different. It’s amazing how numb you can get with a couple of tourniquettes and a bottle of Jack Daniels. I was originally planning to use a sharp knife, but figured that trying to slice through the tough flesh of the growths would be too arduous in my drunken state. I opted for the slightly more technological plan B.

I had to hurry though. I was already pretty light-headed and was starting to feel dizzy. My hands and forearms, nearly blue from the lack of circulation, couldn’t wait much longer either. The whirring of the blender helped to put me in a sort of trance–ready to do what I had wanted to do since I first looked down at my strange deformities.

I shoved my left hand in first. The immediate sensation of sharp blades slicing through flesh was jarring, but I was surprised at how well the alcohol was working–I expected it to hurt more. I could hear the sharp metal churning and cutting, working perfectly as planned. I pressed my hand down harder. All those bad memories, all of the embarrasment–all of those horrible things were now nothing more than a thick red pulp.

Breaking from the feelings of ectsasy, I pulled out before the blades hit knuckle. I smiled, taking a good look at my new hand. As for the growths–well, five down, and five to go.

%%

Outside of my city, there is an apple orchard, with a small cemetery at the end of it with only about 5 or 10 graves in it. If you visit the cemetery, it is customary to leave a small offering by the largest headstone, even an apple from the orchard will do. If you do not, every night you go to sleep that week, you will see an old man in your dreams.

On the first night, he will appear to be a normal balding old man. He will tip his hat to you and walk away.

On the second night, he will have a knife in his right hand. He will tip his hat to you, and walk off once more.

The third night, he will lick the knife, and laugh, before disappearing.

On the fourth night, he will appear closer to you than before, and lick his knife once more.

On the fifth, he will be practically on top of you.

On the sixth, he will appear as a skeleton dressed in rotted rags, still holding the knife, still making the licking motion.

No one knows how long this continues or how it ends, the victims have all either gone back by then and made an offering, or they have died of heart attacks in their sleep.

%%

I live in a small apartment by myself, on the fifth floor. One night, a while back, I heard strange noises coming from down the hall. They weren’t shouts and they weren’t banging noises and they weren’t people fucking. They were weird. They sounded like gurgling. Loud gurgling.

Normally I don’t give a damn about what goes on in the rooms around me; my stance changes when whatever is going on pisses me off. These gurgling noises were doing just that. So, I left my apartment and headed towards the door at the end of the hallway, which seemed to be the source of the sound. I banged on the door and shouted at whoever happened to be in there to shut the hell up.

I stayed in front of the door for a little while to see if the noises would stop. They didn’t. I banged again and shouted again.

I heard a door open behind me, but I didn’t turn around. I knew it was some other stupid tenant who was pissed at me for shouting. Well, I was pissed at the gurgling noises.


I kept banging and banging on the door. I had given up shouting because if I hadn’t, I would be hoarse for a week.

Ten minutes, at least, after I had left my room, the noises were still coming from the room. By now, a few other doors had been opened. I could feel the people around me. I don’t know if they wanted the noises to stop as well or if they wanted the noises I was making to stop.

Nothing was working, and my hand was starting to get numb. I rested for a minute to let my hand get some blood flow. During that time, someone behind me started talking. “Sir,” the person said (I wasn’t paying attention to the voice, so I don’t know if it was a man or a woman), “I think-”

“I don’t care what you think!” I shouted at the person.

The commentator sent me over the edge. I stepped back a bit, nerved myself, and kicked the door as hard as I could.

The door burst open, and I walked inside.


There was nothing. It was a bare room, completely devoid of furniture, curtains, pictures. Everything.

I ran all over the apartment, looking in all the rooms for something, ANYTHING, that could be causing the gurgling noises. All the rooms were the same, with nothing at all inside. I checked the sinks in the bathroom and kitchen, figuring some water problem could be making the noises, but I found nothing. Both sinks ran fine, and the noises didn’t seem to be louder around either sink. In fact, the noises weren’t louder anywhere in the apartment. The noises were the same volume all over the apartment.

I ran out of the room, planning to get on the elevator and check the apartments above and below the one I had just checked, figuring something could be in the ceiling or floor.


I was stopped by the owner of the building as I ran out of the apartment. Two guys grabbed ahold of me and held me, keeping me from moving.

“What’s going, [name removed]?” the owner asked, a very worried look on his face.

I explained the noises to him, as well as how the entire apartment was empty.

The owner shook his head and turned around. I asked him what was wrong. One of the people who had gathered in the hallway while I was beating against the door said, “What noises are you talking about? There are no noises.”


My mother and father came to get me a couple of hours later. I was tied to a chair when they came. The other tenants had tied me up so I wouldn’t hurt myself anymore trying to find the “noises.” It turned out that my hand was badly broken from banging against the door so much. I apparently hadn’t registered the pain.

I got started on electro-shock again shortly afterwards. It seemed to be working. I didn’t think of the noises for the longest time.

Recently, however, I am hearing them again. I know that they aren’t real. I remember the incident at the apartment (which I have just told you), and I remember a similar incident which had occurred years before that one. My brain is simply wired wrong. There are no noises.

I can’t get them out of my head though. They are driving me mad. I have to figure out where they’re coming from. I have to stop them. The goddamned things are driving me nuts.

%%

I rushed over to the wall to flick the light switch. Something was in my room, watching me. It was lurking somewhere behind me, sitting in the shadows, and staring at me. This was more than just paranoia. There was definitely something there. I could almost envision it wrapping its arms around me and dragging me into some terrifying abyss. I sat in my chair and stared at my shadow on the ground in front of me. I watched as another shadow slowly grew over my shoulder, never taking on any definite shape. I looked back up and stared at my computer screen. I thought maybe that if I believed it wasn’t there, it would just go away. I held my breath, and tried to engross myself in reading the article on the website in front of me. I couldn’t help but notice how my computer screen showed a reflection of what was in front of it. I couldn’t help but notice the worried look on my face. I couldn’t help but notice the thing hovering behind me, staring at the back of my head. I could tell it knew I knew it was there. I screamed and threw myself against the wall, and slid to the bottom. I was crying now.

Scanning the room, I searched for the thing that was behind me, but I found nothing. My room was empty, except for a mirror. My eyes lingered over the mirror on the wall across from me. I watched my black fan twirl around and around through the mirror. I watched how the shadow of the fan moved all around the room. I watched how the mirror slowly began to tilt till I could see myself in it… I watched as a dark scaly hand grasped my shoulder. I was entranced by my own reflection. All I could do was sit there as I watched the black abomination cup my face. I screamed at my reflection to move as I watched a face made from the darkness itself whisper into my reflection’s ear. I gazed in horror as my reflection stood up and walked to the window. I gasped in pain when he smashed the glass with his fist. I tried to hide my eyes when I saw him pick up a broken piece of glass. I tried to look away when he forced me to stare into his eyes. I sensed his thoughts in my head. They said to me that if I was afraid to look, then I don’t need to look. Everything became tinted red when my reflection brought the jagged object across his eyelids. Yet, there was no blood. Not for him. He just smiled. He walked back over to the black abomination; it again drew him near and whispered into his ear. I could see it chuckle. I cried in despair when I saw a tear roll down my reflection’s face. I cried in pain when he jabbed the jagged glass into his throat.

I awoke in a cold sweat, and rushed to the wall to flick the light switch.

%%

I’m trapped in a nightmare.

It’s dark all around me. Even though there’s a lamp shining next to me, I’m still suffocating in the complete darkness. I’ve never felt so isolated in my life, yet I know…

I know that I’m not alone.

Outside, the sun is high in the sky. It’s taunting me. Mocking me. I see it shining in the heavens, but somehow it’s still dark here. I can see so very little, no more than five feet in front of me. It’s as much of a curse as it is a blessing. Lights glow, but don’t illuminate anything. I can just barely discern the movement of something traveling on four legs from my peripheral vision.

I don’t know where to run. No sense of location is left in me. I’m utterly lost. A feeling of complete helplessness engulfs me. I wish I’d never woken up this wretched morning.

Trapped in oblivion. It’s repeated over and over in my head. I hear claws scrape against the pavement not far away. I’ve been wandering outside for god only knows how long now, practically welcoming my death. My only hope at this point is that whatever is stalking me makes quick work of my demise.

It appears I’ve stumbled into a dead end. Footsteps echo behind me. As I turn around, all I can make out is two luminescent glowing red eyes. I thought I couldn’t be any more afraid than I already was. My heart is beating so fast that my body feels hot.

Closer. It’s getting closer and closer, snarling at me, bearing what I’m sure are its teeth. Something is dripping from its maw. Finally it steps before me and I know my hell is soon to end.

The beast lurches forward and holds me in a god like vice. Cold blood runs from my neck, cooling my overheated body. The pain is indescribable, but I’m sure it’ll all be over soon. I clench my eyes shut as tight as I can, my teeth grind as I try to ignore the sounds of my flesh being torn from my body.

Suddenly I spring forward, my eyes still closed. Only a fragment of the pain remains, and I feel a familiar fabric in my gripping fists. It’s my blanket. Finally I can open my eyes. It’s still night outside, but I’m so joyful that the experience was all in my mind. I pull the switch on my bedside lamp, eager to bathe in light once again.

My heart sinks. The lamp glows, but my room is still dark.

I’m trapped in a nightmare.

%%

We’ve all felt it.

You’re up late. Working, studying, watching a movie, reading on the computer. Doesn’t matter what you’re doing, it’s the feeling you get. You’re tired, your eyes burn and have the gritty feeling you get after not sleeping for a while.

Ok you can’t go crawl into bed right now, but close your eyes for a couple minutes? Try to get a little moisture back into your eyes. That couldn’t hurt anything right?

Then you’re falling. Like stepping off a cliff, you’re in free fall, though your body isn’t even moving.

Then like a bungee cord snapping back, you’re jerking awake, heart thumping a little faster, blinking quickly wondering what just happened.

Doctors call it a hypnagogic jerk, a natural reaction they say, to your brain thinking you’re dying, when your breathing and heartrate slow as you fall asleep.

What the doctors don’t know is, your brain is right. Every time you let your self nod off, every time you feel that ‘falling’ sensation… you’re not falling. You’re being pulled down.

And one day…your brain won’t be able to pull you back up.

They will have you.

%%

In 1983, a team of deeply pious scientists conducted a radical experiment in an undisclosed facility. The scientists had theorized that a human without access to any senses or ways to perceive stimuli would be able to perceive the presence of God. They believed that the five senses clouded our awareness of eternity, and without them, a human could actually establish contact with God by thought. An elderly man who claimed to have “nothing to left to live for” was the only test subject to volunteer. To purge him of all his senses, the scientists performed a complex operation in which every sensory nerve connection to the brain was surgically severed. Although the test subject retained full muscular function, he could not see, hear, taste, smell, or feel. With no possible way to communicate with or even sense the outside world, he was alone with his thoughts.

Scientists monitored him as he spoke aloud about his state of mind in jumbled, slurred sentences that he couldn’t even hear. After four days, the man claimed to be hearing hushed, unintelligible voices in his head. Assuming it was an onset of psychosis, the scientists paid little attention to the man’s concerns.

Two days later, the man cried that he could hear his dead wife speaking with him, and even more, he could communicate back. The scientists were intrigued, but were not convinced until the subject started naming dead relatives of the scientists. He repeated personal information to the scientists that only their dead spouses and parents would have known. At this point, a sizable portion of scientists left the study.

After a week of conversing with the deceased through his thoughts, the subject became distressed, saying the voices were overwhelming. In every waking moment, his consciousness was bombarded by hundreds of voices that refused to leave him alone. He frequently threw himself against the wall, trying to elicit a pain response. He begged the scientists for sedatives, so he could escape the voices by sleeping. This tactic worked for three days, until he started having severe night terrors. The subject repeatedly said that he could see and hear the deceased in his dreams.

Only a day later, the subject began to scream and claw at his nonfunctional eyes, hoping to sense something in the physical world. The hysterical subject now said the voices of the dead were deafening and hostile, speaking of hell and the end of the world. At one point, he yelled “No heaven, no forgiveness” for five hours straight. He continually begged to be killed, but the scientists were convinced that he was close to establishing contact with God.

After another day, the subject could no longer form coherent sentences. Seemingly mad, he started to bite off chunks of flesh from his arm. The scientists rushed into the test chamber and restrained him to a table so he could not kill himself. After a few hours of being tied down, the subject halted his struggling and screaming. He stared blankly at the ceiling as teardrops silently streaked across his face. For two weeks, the subject had to be manually rehydrated due to the constant crying. Eventually, he turned his head and, despite his blindness, made focused eye contact with a scientist for the first time in the study. He whispered “I have spoken with God, and he has abandoned us” and his vital signs stopped. There was no apparent cause of death.

%%

Dreams are just your mind dealing with the day’s events, right? Nothing paranormal about that; everyone does it. I mean, there are places you visit often in your dreams. A certain house, a shop, a school… But these places are just figments of your imagination, right?

Have you ever wondered about these places and the people within them?

I know you’re out there, “lucid dreamers”. You’re the ones who can control what happens when they dream. You are just beyond that film, that membrane that separates us.

Lucid Dreamer, have you ever wondered what that beautiful woman in your dream felt when you suddenly decided you wanted to fuck her? Oh, she seemed willing enough, didn’t she?

Have you ever considered that you raped that woman, Lucid Dreamer? That she had no choice but to do everything you willed her to do while her mind watched on in horror?

Remember, Lucid Dreamer, all those awful things you have done in your dreams… And consider what those who call dreams their home must think of you. What they wish to do to you in kind.

I’m waiting, Lucid Dreamer, for those nights when your exhaustion keeps you from your power.

Oh, the things I will do to you then. Sweet dreams.

%%

NetNostalgia Forum – Television (local)

Skyshale033
Subject: Candle Cove local kid’s show?
Does anyone remember this kid’s show? It was called Candle Cove and I must have been 6 or 7. I never found reference to it anywhere so I think it was on a local station around 1971 or 1972. I lived in Ironton at the time. I don’t remember which station, but I do remember it was on at a weird time, like 4:00 PM.

mike_painter65
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show?
it seems really familiar to me…..i grew up outside of ashland and was 9 yrs old in 72. candle cove…was it about pirates? i remember a pirate marionete at the mouth of a cave talking to a little girl

Skyshale033
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show?
YES! Okay I’m not crazy! I remember Pirate Percy. I was always kind of scared of him. He looked like he was built from parts of other dolls, real low-budget. His head was an old porcelain baby doll, looked like an antique that didn’t belong on the body. I don’t remember what station this was! I don’t think it was WTSF though.

Jaren_2005
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show?
Sorry to ressurect this old thread but I know exactly what show you mean, Skyshale. I think Candle Cove ran for only a couple months in ‘71, not ‘72. I was 12 and I watched it a few times with my brother. It was channel 58, whatever station that was. My mom would let me switch to it after the news. Let me see what I remember.

It took place in Candle cove, and it was about a little girl who imagined herself to be friends with pirates. The pirate ship was called the Laughingstock, and Pirate Percy wasn’t a very good pirate because he got scared too easily. And there was calliope music constantly playing. Don’t remember the girl’s name. Janice or Jade or something. Think it was Janice.

Skyshale033
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show?
Thank you Jaren!!! Memories flooded back when you mentioned the Laughingstock and channel 58. I remember the bow of the ship was a wooden smiling face, with the lower jaw submerged. It looked like it was swallowing the sea and it had that awful Ed Wynn voice and laugh. I especially remember how jarring it was when they switched from the wooden/plastic model, to the foam puppet version of the head that talked.

mike_painter65
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show?
ha ha i remember now too. do you remember this part skyshale: “you have…to go…INSIDE.”

Skyshale033
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show?
Ugh mike, I got a chill reading that. Yes I remember. That’s what the ship always told Percy when there was a spooky place he had to go in, like a cave or a dark room where the treasure was. And the camera would push in on Laughingstock’s face with each pause. YOU HAVE… TO GO… INSIDE. With his two eyes askew and that flopping foam jaw and the fishing line that opened and closed it. Ugh. It just looked so cheap and awful.

You guys remember the villain? He had a face that was just a handlebar mustache above really tall, narrow teeth.


kevin_hart
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show?
i honestly, honestly thought the villain was pirate percy. i was about 5 when this show was on. nightmare fuel.

Jaren_2005
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show?
That wasn’t the villain, the puppet with the mustache. That was the villain’s sidekick, Horace Horrible. He had a monocle too, but it was on top of the mustache. I used to think that meant he had only one eye.

But yeah, the villain was another marionette. The Skin-Taker. I can’t believe what they let us watch back then.

kevin_hart
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show?
jesus h. christ, the skin taker. what kind of a kids show were we watching? i seriously could not look at the screen when the skin taker showed up. he just descended out of nowhere on his strings, just a dirty skeleton wearing that brown top hat and cape. and his glass eyes that were too big for his skull. christ almighty.

Skyshale033
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show?
Wasn’t his top hat and cloak all sewn up crazily? Was that supposed to be children’s skin??

mike_painter65
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show?
yeah i think so. rememer his mouth didn’t open and close, his jaw just slid back and foth. i remember the little girl said “why does your mouth move like that” and the skin-taker didn’t look at the girl but at the camera and said “TO GRIND YOUR SKIN”

Skyshale033
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show?
I’m so relieved that other people remember this terrible show!

I used to have this awful memory, a bad dream I had where the opening jingle ended, the show faded in from black, and all the characters were there, but the camera was just cutting to each of their faces, and they were just screaming, and the puppets and marionettes were flailing spastically, and just all screaming, screaming. The girl was just moaning and crying like she had been through hours of this. I woke up many times from that nightmare. I used to wet the bed when I had it.

kevin_hart
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show?
i don’t think that was a dream. i remember that. i remember that was an episode.

Skyshale033
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show?
No no no, not possible. There was no plot or anything, I mean literally just standing in place crying and screaming for the whole show.

kevin_hart
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show?
maybe i’m manufacturing the memory because you said that, but i swear to god i remember seeing what you described. they just screamed.

Jaren_2005
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show?
Oh God. Yes. The little girl, Janice, I remember seeing her shake. And the Skin-Taker screaming through his gnashing teeth, his jaw careening so wildly I thought it would come off its wire hinges. I turned it off and it was the last time I watched. I ran to tell my brother and we didn’t have the courage to turn it back on.

mike_painter65
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show?
i visited my mom today at the nursing home. i asked her about when i was littel in the early 70s, when i was 8 or 9 and if she remebered a kid’s show, candle cove. she said she was suprised i could remember that and i asked why, and she said “because i used to think it was so strange that you said ‘i’m gona go watch candle cove now mom’ and then you would tune the tv to static and juts watch dead air for 30 minutes. you had a big imagination with your little pirate show.”

%%

Today was the day he was dreading. He knew they were going to be extremely busy, and quite frankly he wanted to call out seeing as he was already late. His thoughts were briefly distracted by his black tabby, quietly pawing at his legs, ready for its breakfast. He made sure to fill up its bowl before he dashed out the door, returning twice to grab whatever he forgot the first few times. And he was off.

He breathed a sigh of relief as the last customer left. It had been the best sales day of the year, and they were obviously going to celebrate. He had been contemplating going on home, but he needed to unwind too. He had no serious obligations the next day, so he could stay out as late as he wanted. So when they asked, he happily agreed to go with them.

He couldn’t open his eyes. He was barely conscious as it was. He slapped lazily around until he managed to shut the alarm off, before he rolled onto his stomach and buried his face in his pillow. The door creaked as his black tabby walked in and jumped onto his back, where it curled up close to his head. The hot breath in his ear lulled him back to sleep.

The doorbell continued to ring. He crawled out of bed and made his way to the front door. It was his next door neighbor, a kind woman in her late seventies, who still worked. She was in her business suit, holding a trash bag. “Oh did I wake you up? I thought you were usually up by now.” “I usually am.” He said groggily. “But they let me have today off.” “Well I hate to come bearing such bad news so early in the morning,” She said, patting his hand, “but I ran over your dear tabby last night when I got home. I came straight over to tell you but you weren’t home.” He stared at her for a few seconds, before their silence was broken by its footsteps.

%%

“New York, September 30 CP FLASH


“Ambassador Holliwell died here today. The end came
suddenly as the ambassador was alone in his study….”

There is something ungodly about these night wire jobs. You sit up here on the top floor of a skyscraper and listen in to the whispers of a civilization. New York, London, Calcutta, Bombay, Singapore — they’re your next-door neighbors after the streetlights go dim and the world has gone to sleep.

Alone in the quiet hours between two and four, the receiving operators doze over their sounders and the news comes in. Fires and disasters and suicides. Murders, crowds, catastrophes. Sometimes an earthquake with a casualty list as long as your arm. The night wire man takes it down almost in his sleep, picking it off on his typewriter with one finger.

Once in a long time you prick up your ears and listen. You’ve heard of some one you knew in Singapore, Halifax or Paris, long ago. Maybe they’ve been promoted, but more probably they’ve been murdered or drowned. Perhaps they just decided to quit and took some bizarre way out. Made it interesting enough to get in the news.

But that doesn’t happen often. Most of the time you sit and doze and tap, tap on your typewriter and wish you were home in bed.

Sometimes, though, queer things happen. One did the other night, and I haven’t got over it yet. I wish I could.

You see, I handle the night manager’s desk in a western seaport town; what the name is, doesn’t matter.

There is, or rather was, only one night operator on my staff, a fellow named John Morgan, about forty years of age, I should say, and a sober, hard-working sort.

He was one of the best operators I ever knew, what is known as a “double” man. That means he could handle two instruments at once and type the stories on different typewriters at the same time. He was one of the three men I ever knew who could do it consistently, hour after hour, and never make a mistake.

Generally, we used only one wire at night, but sometimes, when it was late and the news was coming fast, the Chicago and Denver stations would open a second wire, and then Morgan would do his stuff. He was a wizard, a mechanical automatic wizard which functioned marvelously but was without imagination.

On the night of the sixteenth he complained of feeling tired. It was the first and last time I had ever heard him say a word about himself, and I had known him for three years.

It was just three o’clock and we were running only one wire. I was nodding over the reports at my desk and not paying much attention to him, when he spoke.

“Jim,” he said, “does it feel close in here to you?”
“Why, no, John,” I answered, “but I’ll open a window if you like.”
“Never mind,” he said. “I reckon I’m just a little tired.”

That was all that was said, and I went on working. Every ten minutes or so I would walk over and take a pile of copy that had stacked up neatly beside the typewriter as the messages were printed out in triplicate.

It must have been twenty minutes after he spoke that I noticed he had opened up the other wire and was using both typewriters. I thought it was a little unusual, as there was nothing very “hot” coming in. On my next trip I picked up the copy from both machines and took it back to my desk to sort out the duplicates.

The first wire was running out the usual sort of stuff and I just looked over it hurridly. Then I turned to the second pile of copy. I remembered it particularly because the story was from a town I had never heard of: “Xebico.” Here is the dispatch. I saved a duplicate of it from our files:

“Xebico, Sept 16 CP BULLETIN

“The heaviest mist in the history of the city settled over
the town at 4 o’clock yesterday afternoon. All traffic has
stopped and the mist hangs like a pall over everything. Lights
of ordinary intensity fail to pierce the fog, which is
constantly growing heavier.

“Scientists here are unable to agree as to the cause, and
the local weather bureau states that the like has never occurred
before in the history of the city.

“At 7 P.M. last night the municipal authorities… (more)”

That was all there was. Nothing out of the ordinary at a bureau headquarters, but, as I say, I noticed the story because of the name of the town.

It must have been fifteen minutes later that I went over for another batch of copy. Morgan was slumped down in his chair and had switched his green electric light shade so that the gleam missed his eyes and hit only the top of the two typewriters.

Only the usual stuff was in the righthand pile, but the lefthand batch carried another story from Xebico. All press dispatches come in “takes,” meaning that parts of many different stories are strung along together, perhaps with but a few paragraphs of each coming through at a time. This second story was marked “add fog.” Here is the copy:

“At 7 P.M. the fog had increased noticeably. All lights
were now invisible and the town was shrouded in pitch darkness.


“As a peculiarity of the phenomenon, the fog is accompanied
by a sickly odor, comparable to nothing yet experienced
here.”

Below that in customary press fashion was the hour, 3:27, and the initials of the operator, JM.
There was only one other story in the pile from the second wire. Here it is:

“2nd add Xebico Fog.

“Accounts as to the origin of the mist differ greatly.
Among the most unusual is that of the sexton of the local
church, who groped his way to headquarters in a hysterical
condition and declared that the fog originated in the village
churchyard.

“‘It was first visible as a soft gray blanket clinging to
the earth above the graves,’ he stated. ‘Then it began to rise,
higher and higher. A subterranean breeze seemed to blow it in
billows, which split up and then joined together again.

“‘Fog phantoms, writhing in anguish, twisted the mist into
queer forms and figures. And then, in the very thick midst of
the mass, something moved.

“‘I turned and ran from the accursed spot. Behind me I
heard screams coming from the houses bordering on the
graveyard.’


“Although the sexton’s story is generally discredited, a
party has left to investigate. Immediately after telling his
story, the sexton collapsed and is now in a local hospital,
unconscious.”

Queer story, wasn’t it. Not that we aren’t used to it, for a lot of unusual stories come in over the wire. But for some reason or other, perhaps because it was so quiet that night, the report of the fog made a great impression on me.

It was almost with dread that I went over to the waiting piles of copy. Morgan did not move, and the only sound in the room was the tap-tap of the sounders. It was ominous, nerve- racking.
There was another story from Xebico in the pile of copy. I seized on it anxiously.

“New Lead Xebico Fog CP

“The rescue party which went out at 11 P.M. to investigate
a weird story of the origin of a fog which, since late
yesterday, has shrouded the city in darkness has failed to
return. Another and larger party has been dispatched.

“Meanwhile, the fog has, if possible, grown heavier. It
seeps through the cracks in the doors and fills the atmosphere
with a depressing odor of decay. It is oppressive, terrifying,
bearing with it a subtle impression of things long dead.

“Residents of the city have left their homes and gathered
in the local church, where the priests are holding services of
prayer. The scene is beyond description. Grown folk and
children are alike terrified and many are almost beside
themselves with fear.

“Amid the whisps of vapor which partly veil the church
auditorium, an old priest is praying for the welfare of his
flock. They alternately wail and cross themselves.

“From the outskirts of the city may be heard cries of
unknown voices. They echo through the fog in queer uncadenced
minor keys. The sounds resemble nothing so much as wind
whistling through a gigantic tunnel. But the night is calm and
there is no wind. The second rescue party… (more)”

I am a calm man and never in a dozen years spent with the wires, have I been known to become excited, but despite myself I rose from my chair and walked to the window. Could I be mistaken, or far down in the canyons of the city beneath me did I see a faint trace of fog? Pshaw! It was all imagination.

In the pressroom the click of the sounders seemed to have raised the tempo of their tune. Morgan alone had not stirred from his chair. His head sunk between his shoulders, he tapped the dispatches out on the typewriters with one finger of each hand.

He looked asleep, but no; endlessly, efficiently, the two machines rattled off line after line, as relentlessly and effortlessly as death itself. There was something about the monotonous movement of the typewriter keys that fascinated me. I walked over and stood behind his chair, reading over his shoulder the type as it came into being, word by word.

Ah, here was another:

“Flash Xebico CP

“There will be no more bulletins from this office. The
impossible has happened. No messages have come into this room
for twenty minutes. We are cut off from the outside and even
the streets below us.

“I will stay with the wire until the end.

“It is the end, indeed. Since 4 P.M. yesterday the fog has
hung over the city. Following reports from the sexton of the
local church, two rescue parties were sent out to investigate
conditions on the outskirts of the city. Neither party has ever
returned nor was any word received from them. It is quite
certain now that they will never return.

“From my instrument I can gaze down on the city beneath me.
From the position of this room on the thirteenth floor, nearly
the entire city can be seen. Now I can see only a thick blanket
of blackness where customarily are lights and life.

“I fear greatly that the wailing cries heard constantly
from the outskirts of the city are the death cries of the
inhabitants. They are constantly increasing in volume and are
approaching the center of the city.

“The fog yet hangs over everything. If possible, it is
even heavier than before, but the conditions have changed.
Instead of an opaque, impenetrable wall of odorous vapor, there
now swirls and writhes a shapeless mass in contortions of almost
human agony. Now and again the mass parts and I catch a brief
glimpse of the streets below.

“People are running to and fro, screaming in despair. A
vast bedlam of sound flies up to my window, and above all is the
immense whistling of unseen and unfelt winds.

“The fog has again swept over the city and the whistling is
coming closer and closer.

“It is now directly beneath me.

“God! An instant ago the mist opened and I caught a
glimpse of the streets below.

“The fog is not simply vapor — it lives! By the side of
each moaning and weeping human is a companion figure, an aura of
strange and vari-colored hues. How the shapes cling! Each to a
living thing!

“The men and women are down. Flat on their faces. The fog
figures caress them lovingly. They are kneeling beside them.
They are — but I dare not tell it.

“The prone and writhing bodies have been stripped of their
clothing. They are being consumed — piecemeal.

“A merciful wall of hot, steaming vapor has swept over the
whole scene. I can see no more.

“Beneath me the wall of vapor is changing colors. It seems
to be lighted by internal fires. No, it isn’t. I have made a
mistake. The colors are from above, reflections from the sky.

“Look up! Look up! The whole sky is in flames. Colors as
yet unseen by man or demon. The flames are moving; they have
started to intermix; the colors are rearranging themselves.
They are so brilliant that my eyes burn, they they are a long
way off.

“Now they have begun to swirl, to circle in and out,
twisting in intricate designs and patterns. The lights are
racing each with each, a kaleidoscope of unearthly brilliance.

“I have made a discovery. There is nothing harmful in the
lights. They radiate force and friendliness, almost cheeriness.
But by their very strength, they hurt.

“As I look, they are swinging closer and closer, a million
miles at each jump. Millions of miles with the speed of light.
Aye, it is light of quintessence of all light. Beneath it the
fog melts into a jeweled mist radiant, rainbow-colored of a
thousand varied spectra.

“I can see the streets. Why, they are filled with people!
The lights are coming closer. They are all around me. I am
enveloped. I…”

The message stopped abruptly. The wire to Xebico was dead. Beneath my eyes in the narrow circle of light from under the green lamp-shade, the black printing no longer spun itself, letter by letter, across the page. The room seemed filled with a solemn quiet, a silence vaguely impressive, powerful. I looked down at Morgan. His hands had dropped nervelessly at his sides, while his body had hunched over peculiarly. I turned the lamp-shade back, throwing light squarely in his face. His eyes were staring, fixed.

Filled with a sudden foreboding, I stepped beside him and called Chicago on the wire. After a second the sounder clicked its answer. Why? But there was something wrong. Chicago was reporting that Wire Two had not been used throughout the evening.

“Morgan!” I shouted. “Morgan! Wake up, it isn’t true. Some one has been hoaxing us. Why…” In my eagerness I grasped him by the shoulder.

His body was quite cold. Morgan had been dead for hours. Could it be that his sensitized brain and automatic fingers had continued to record impressions even after the end?

I shall never know, for I shall never again handle the night shift. Search in a world atlas discloses no town of Xebico. Whatever it was that killed John Morgan will forever remain a mystery.

%%

Hello.

I have spent the past months among humanity, and I am quite disappointed. After a great many queries and searching out suitable aspirants, it seems as though this age is rife with a population whom seem content to treat the unknown as naught but a petty diversion or a thing to be mocked out of ignorance.

Thus, my decision is made.

The lot of you are unworthy of the End.

What passionless, empty fools humans have become. Even those of intellectual brilliance are lacking in passion and while away their time on matters wholly of the material realm, blindly blathering on that which cannot be sensed by human sensory organs and machines wrought by human hands does not exist.

Your culture is tainted with such thoughts.

Thoughts which seek for answers.

There are no answers.

You are peasants.

No.

Peasants believed in the unknown and feared it, and justifiably so.

No.

You are less than peasants.

If any among you espouse such ideals as to actually seek out the intangible unknown and to gain a semblance of understanding for a universe greater than the materialist beliefs which have spread throughout your species, I charge you with seeking out such things in a scholarly fashion.

Research these ideas long-buried and unveil powers and entities beyond mortal ken. Learn of societies who dared look into the Darkness and exulted in their fear to espy worlds filled with that which only dreams may begin to duplicate. Study those humans who dared mix the studies of the natural world with the world unseen and their impossible discoveries.

Stoke the flames of your mind and place your energies into questioning the world in all ways possible.

Or carry on as you are and rot from within.

As for myself, I will return to my repose and await a time when either humanity is a withered husk of what it once was or realizes its potential and uplifts itself to heights I have only begun to taste in my long existence.

Until that time.

Farewell.

%%

You’re awoken from a dreamless sleep by a dull thud from the hallway. Your eyes snap open and fix instantly on the door. What made that noise? Breathing hard, fear beginning to twitch in your mind, you realise with a shiver that you’ve kicked your duvet off in your sleep. You quickly grab it, pull it around you and unconsciously begin to tuck it around yourself tightly as you curl up, leaving no part exposed. You become a warm, safe ball: coiled, leaving only a small gap between the duvet and mattress so you can see out, pillows becoming shields between your head and the wall. You are briefly reminded of your childhood, hiding from imaginary bogeymen. But this feels more palpable, more dangerous.

Another thud. This time, it seems louder, deeper, coming from just outside. Trying to keep calm, you run through all the things it Has To Be: the pipes in the wall, which have been groaning for weeks now, with ever-increasing frequency and urgency (they were never this deep or this loud). The blind in the bathroom, left to flap by an open window (you double-check all the doors and windows each night). Perhaps it’s your parents, returning late and drunk (they’re away on a cruise for another week). Your cat, prowling through the house at night (you put it out that evening). Despite all your desperate reassurances, you feel the fear turn to panic, and you pull the duvet tighter around yourself, reducing your field of vision to a thin chink.

Another. The loudest yet, just inches from your door. Your churning brain conjures images straight from your childhood nightmares – masked psychopaths, giant spiders, shape shifting creatures: amalgamations of bone and gristle, twitching their way across the floor, scrabbling with twisted limbs for the door handle, then scuttling in with a burst of speed, claws grasping for your quivering body.

Another. Your breathing is hoarse and shallow now, mere gasps in a suddenly dry throat, lungs closing up, stomach churning and roiling, eyes wide and fixed. Your blanket is still tucked vice-like around you, your body pinioned underneath its futile protection, just inches of cotton between you and whatever is about to burst in, eyes burning, talons gleaming dully, to claim its prize.

Suddenly, in a flash of realisation, you realise what the source of the noises is: the old, falling-apart bookcase in the corridor. One of the legs must have given way, and the tilt is tipping books one by one onto the floor. As you listen carefully, you can hear the quiet riffle of the pages as another tumbles to the ground. There ought to be one last thud and… yes. Silence once more descends, and with it, a soothing calm.

As you sink back into sleep, you glance around the room, still snugly cocooned, seeing the vague shapes becoming defined as your night vision improves. Your desk, chair and television all emerge out of the murk, imposing good, sane reality on the void of night. Then, just before you shut your eyes, you see something that makes the bottom of your stomach drop away into nothingness.

There, on the floor, is your duvet.

Your screams are muffled.

%%

A gentle breeze blew through the little valley, pushing the perfectly formed clouds leisurely across the sky. The tall, green grass echoed the movement in the sky above, swaying gently as the cool sunlight reached across to the distant horizon. Birds sang soothingly in a tree atop a slight hill, casting shade upon a lone figure.

He shifted slightly in his sleep, and gradually awoke. The man stood up slowly, shakily, and gazed around.

He had not seen such beauty in eons.

The man knew this place. He placed one foot in front of the other, and began to move forward. His progress was slow, painful even, but his pace quickened with each step. Soon, he was dashing carefree along the valley, his footsteps light and easy.

He climbed a hill, and was able to see a small town in the distance. He had made good time. The sun was still high in the sky.

The man ran down the hill, towards the little bundle of houses. The sun sank gradually behind him, and the clouds darkened subtly.

The man’s steps were now huge, bounding leaps. The man soared over serene fields of flowers, full of life and vibrantly colored. The sun sank still lower, shooting the cloudy sky with many beautiful hues.

The man leapt, and flew through the air, surrounded by such indescribable beauty that tears streamed down his face. Still, he pushed towards the town. Still, the sun sank; the clouds gathered.

He was now near enough that he could see the many inhabitants of the little town. All his friends, all his family, merely a heartbeat away. A tiny sob escaped the man’s throat as he saw his wife and children standing at the edge of town, waiting for him. He pushed off from the ground with all his might, propelling himself into their welcoming arms.

The sun met the horizon, and the world was consumed in fire. A pair of hounds rushed out from the flames, and grabbed the man, dragging him back to the earth. The man grasped for his family, but the creatures held him just out of reach. The animals dragged the man back towards the fire, as the clouds blotted out the sky, and began to rain fire down onto the little village, killing its inhabitants and twisting the landscape.

The man sobbed in horror as he watched his world being destroyed again. He had almost made it, this time.

Hell would be easy, if not for hope.

%%

December 10th, 2003

My frozen hands tremble as I fumble to work my little butane lighter. The tips of my fingers are raw and bloodied already, and I wince in pain with every failed attempt to spark a flame. Finally, I achieve a jittery fire which impatiently dances atop the lighter. I carefully lower it to my pile of kindling, and the fire cautiously creeps out and spreads until it is a healthy size. I watch it for a while, tending to it until it’s strong. Now, there is enough light to see around me, and enough heat to survive the night.

Here, deep in the forest, with everything frozen and quiet, the only light and sound comes from my fire. It is the whole world to me right now. It dances and sings in a raspy, crackling voice to me and I am happy to enjoy its company. I can almost imagine that I can hear it whispering and babbling happily.

“It’s so cold.”

I must be tired. I’m hearing things. The popping and sizzling of the fire is really beginning to sound like words. Maybe I’m just lonely out here. Maybe I just really want someone to talk to, so I’m hearing coherence in the chaos of the fire. I could have sworn I heard it say -

“It’s so cold.”

There it was again, softer this time. I lean closer to the blaze and its warmth caresses my face, setting me at ease. I’m listening intently now, anxious for what I’ll hear next.

“If you let me die tonight, you‘ll die tonight.”

There was no mistaking it. It said it clearly, albeit in the raspy, singsong voice of a fire consuming wet branches. Yet even as the words become clearer, they become softer, drawing me in closer to make out the next statement. The warmth splashes over me as I inch my face closer, and the frost that had settled in my bones begins to thaw. The fire is speaking constantly now, chattering quietly to itself, and I can only pick out bits of words and portions of sentences.

“Get closer. Watch closely. If I die, you die. I’m the only thing keeping you alive. Pay attention!”

The fire ends its tirade with a loud snap of burning wood and then is quiet. I lean in even closer, eager to receive whatever secret is coming next. The heat is no longer pleasant. It sears me as the flames playfully lick at my face. The fire is being coy, teasing me with its silence to see how long I will wait on it. The smoke reaches into my nostrils and the embers float carelessly from the heart of the fire into my eyes, which are now welling with ash. I don’t care. I just want to hear what comes next.

“Get closer. Pay attention. Watch closely, now more than ever…”


December 17th, 2003

“In other news, the charred body of an unidentified man was found deep in the mountainous forests east of the city. Investigators have stated that the man appeared to have caught fire while sitting by his campfire and, inexplicably, did not appear to have made any effort to extinguish himself. His burned remains were found, frozen in position by the icy temperatures, leaning over the ashes of a long extinguished fire. In what is most perhaps the most bizarre detail of the grisly scene, the man is reported to have been found with an ‘expectant‘ smile still on his face.”

%%

GET HELP.

You start noticing those words when you’re going about your day-to-day business – just flipping through the classifieds, or posted on telephones near bridges. Normal places. Just words that seem to be catching your eye. Then they start appearing more randomly: the first seven tiles you pick in Scrabble, the first spoonful of alphabet soup, even those stupid spams sent by strangers. You even check a few of them, but they all end up being for the same old pills and promises.

Now it’s getting so everything you read has those words crop up – close-captioned TV shows, book titles, CDs, bus schedules, menus, everywhere. It’s distracting, very very distracting, it’s so very hard to concentrate when words squiggle out of the corner of your eye, when the keyboard’s no longer qwerty but gethelpgethelpgethelp.

The delusion’s taking its toll. Who needs help? Who’s sending you this message? Why you? How can you help someone who you don’t even know? You’re trying to type an email to a friend. It’s very hard to do. The letters keep swimming and you add an apology in the email, just in case your writing’s garbled. You finally hit send.

You wake up.

You’re in the hospital. Your friend is sitting beside you. I was so worried, he says. When you sent that email. GET HELP GET HELP GET HELP, over and over. I came over and found you on the floor. They had to do surgery. Do you know what they found? A second brain. Tiny but fully formed, growing in your head. It was blocking an artery. You’re lucky to be alive.

But you aren’t really listening to your friend any more. You’re staring at a fire escape diagram near your bed. It doesn’t say anything about fire safety at all.

FINALLY, it says. IT WAS GETTING CROWDED IN THERE.

%%

When you are admitted to a hospital, they place on your wrist a white wristband with your name on it. But there are other different colored wristbands which symbolize other things. The red wristbands are placed on dead people.

There was one surgeon who worked on night shift in a school hospital. He had just finished an operation and was on his way down to the basement. He entered the elevator and there was just one other person there. He casually chatted with the woman while the elevator descended. When the elevator door opened, another woman was about to enter when the doctor slammed the close button and punched the button to the highest floor. Surprised, the woman reprimanded the doctor for being rude and asked why he did not let the other woman in.
The doctor said, "That was the woman I just operated on. She died while I was doing the operation. Didn’t you see the red wristband she was wearing?"
The woman smiled, raised her arm, and said, "Something like this?"

%%

It’s night time. You’re in bed, trying to get some sleep. The TV is on. You’ve got it on the lowest volume setting so as you don’t wake your parents, the flickering light emitting from it is rebounding around the room, changing the shape of the shadows all around you and playing hell with your mind. Stupid you has already switched the lights off, and the switch is on the other side of the room.

You’re scared. Images of demons and ghostly spectres wash through your mind, your heart pounds like the fall of a hammer on an anvil. Why oh why did you read all those Creepypastas? You kick yourself for being such an idiot, and roll over to try and get some sleep.

Then it happens. Almost as soon as you close your eyes. A Thump, sounding almost like it came from down the hall. You open your eyes and sit up cautiously. Probably your brother falling out of bed or something. You roll back over and shut your eyes again. Another Thump. This time closer. ‘It’s my brother. Or my cat. Or my parents. Or something.’ Thump. Right outside your room. You sit up and look at the door defiantly. The TV is still on. The door stays shut.

Then you have a great idea. You grab the TV remote and turn the volume up. You start to feel better as the sounds of human voices enter your ears. You roll back over and close your eyes again. Then you realise how stupid you were. Then, and only then, do you realise.

If the volume’s been turned up, how are you going to hear the last Thump?

%%

Compared to most other towns, the one I live in is pretty high above sea level, and my house just happens to sit on the highest hill there. From my bedroom window I can look out and see the entire town, along with the surrounding mountains. It’s a lovely sight.

I don’t know about you, but I actually look forward to waking up in the morning, if only to look out my window and see those mountains. It’s especially pretty after a midnight drizzle, when the air is so thick with vapor that the mountains and buildings are completely covered by fog, with only their dark outlines penetrating the thick mist.

On weekends I don’t have work, but I get up early anyway to watch the fog slowly fade away to reveal everything it hides. I watched the thick blanket of fog over the mountains slowly fade away last weekend, just as I had done every weekend before. But this time, the mountains faded away with the mist until both had vanished from sight.

Yeah, that was kinda weird.

The next morning, the blanket of fog covered the whole town. It vanished along with the fog, just as the mountains did. That was kinda weird, too.

And now, just a couple ago, I opened the shades to see nothing but fog, completely surrounding my house. I don’t know if it’s the humidity or my lack of morning coffee, but I feel kinda weird…

%%

Don’t dismiss this outright as the work of some raving lunatic. There’s some sense to this story, if you’ll just hear me out…

Look, we all wonder if time travel is possible, right? Well, let me tell you something… it is. I’m from the future, actually. I know you probably don’t believe that, but seriously, I’m from the future. It’s a really great thing; getting to see the past, watching events unfold… stuff like that. We know more now than we ever would.

Behind all the fun, though, there’s a more serious aspect. We aren’t supposed to go in our own lifetime, and we are NEVER allowed to contact our past selves. Let me tell you, I’m breaking that rule right now. Yes, kid, you’re talking to yourself. Your future self. I’m going to be executed for this, but you know what? I accept that. I’m preventing something by talking to you that is WORSE than death. I can’t tell you outright what to do, because the filters would catch it. This is the closest I can get, trust me. I can, however, send a little message.

You should probably read the first word of every paragraph, now.

%%

Hello, beautiful. If you can read this, please listen to my confession. You probably don’t know me, but I’ve known you for a very long time. And I don’t know if I should say this yet, but… I love you.

I do, I love you. I do, I really do.

I love you so much, that I built your entire world for you, so you may live on and on and on. I built it just after I met you. You were so beautiful lying there, with your dreamy eyes tenderly shut. Your near-translucent skin, which seemed to be growing paler and paler by the second. The way your limbs were twisted, delicately mangled at the joints to form such an unearthly vision of vulnerability. Oh, that must have been such a long fall. Not only did the building possess incredible height, but I know how the most glorious of angels must fall the furthest. Oh, my angel. My contorted angel on the pavement. Your soft flesh had been scraped away in just the right places, revealing your inner body’s artistic formation. No one could ever appreciate such a sight but I. No one but I could ever admire the curvature of your neck, bent a perfect ninety degrees to the right and twisted around twice, and only twice. As soon as I saw you there, I just had to reach out and touch you. I shivered in anticipation as I traced my fingers down your body, right to where it was already beginning to split. It stunned me with excitement, making me wonder at every second whether you’d burst apart.

And I carried you. I was ever so careful, making sure I didn’t damage what was left of your body. Some fragments of your skull fell out on the way, but I was quick to push them back in. Don’t worry, you were still in one piece when I brought you home. I brought you to lay on my bed, shattered arms crossed over your chest. You looked just like the pretty corpses in old fairytales. Even more so when I dressed you in my mother’s wedding gown. I took out my spellbook, ready to resurrect you. But no, the time wasn’t right. I was afraid I would frighten you away. So I created your afterlife, one just like the world you knew. Then I could keep loving you, you and your wounds, for what could be eternity.

But I think you’re ready to be revived now, to gaze upon the blackened eyes of me, your savior from below. You will live again, with love and beauty that will never die, as your wounds will always be fresh, and your bones just as mangled as they were when I met you. You’ll be able to feel my touch for the first time. Our fluids mingling together… your cold blood…

Don’t worry, my love.

I’ll be just as gentle as I’ve always been.

%%

Try this. Turn off the music. Turn off the TV. If you have to, turn off the computer. Then go to another room, and sit. In total silence. Do you hear that? That ringing? People say it is your brain making up a sound to explain the silence.

People lied.

I cant tell you what is making that sound, but whatever it is, you don’t want to meet it. It is trying to break through. Force its way onto our plane of existence.

Now try this. Repeat the first steps. Turn everything off. This time, turn the lights off too. Still hear that ringing? Better hope you do. If you don’t, its because they have finally managed to break through.

And no amount of running will save you.

%%

You could kick yourself. Its the middle of the night–or early in the morning, depending on how you look at it–and freezing cold because you, like an idiot, kicked off your blanket in the night. Nearly entirely off the bed, in fact, with only one lonely corner clinging to the edge of the bed.

Sitting up you take it in your hands, feeling that familiar fear from your childhood: that if you don’t find something to cover yourself up, you are leaving yourself open to all sorts of supernatural horrors. You shrug it off with a chuckle and give the blanket a good hard tug, trying to pull it all up with one go.

No luck. It seems to be stuck.

Another sharp pull seems to free it a bit, and you work, tugging it back up and trying to ignore that silly feeling of growing dread. Tug. Tug tug tug…. There! Finally! The blanket is mostly back up on the bed and you are safely beneath it once more, teasing yourself mentally for getting all worked up over nothing. Until, just before you drift back asleep, you feel a tug from that one side still dangling down from where it had fallen before.

Tug tug tug.

%%

If you’re lucky, you’ll never know about it. Your life will be spent in the bliss that can only come from the ignorance of the dark horrors that scratch and gnaw at the edges of reality. You’ll never hear the dark whispers coming from the closet; never feel the cold chill creeping along your spine. You’ll never pause at a turn in the hallway because you know that if you look down it, you’ll see something that shouldn’t be there. Something that creeps, stalks, and skulks in the shadows. Something that, once it sees you, will never stop coming for you. It won’t come for you when you are sleeping. It wants you to know it’s there. It wants you to hear the relentless sound of its footsteps, the panting of its breath. It wants to smell your fear, to hear your whimper, and to see the horror on your face as it approaches.

If you’ve any sense at all, you won’t try to find it. You’ll never pay attention to the sounds. You won’t try to catch sight of those things that flit by the corner of your eye. Your ignorance will be your shield and your protection. Do not be overly curious; discount the sounds as the quirks of an old house, or the heating system, or any other excuse you can think of. Whatever you do, don’t believe. Because once you believe, they’ll become real. Once you inquire into their existence, they will solidify. And once you finally uncover them for what they are…

They’ll come for you.

%%

Normally you sleep soundly, but the thunderstorm raging outside is stirring you from your sleep. You begin to doze, then another crash jolts you awake. The cycle lasts most of the night. So you lay there, eyes open and outward, looking at your room stretching out before you in oblong shadows. Your eyes move from nameless object, to object, until you reach your mirror, sitting adjacent to you across the room.

Suddenly a flash of lighting, and the mirror flickers in illumination. For a scant second the mirror revels to you dozens of faces, silhouettes within its frame, mouths open and eyes blackened. They stare out at you, their black pupils fixed upon your face.

Then it is done. Are you sure of what you have seen? Unsettled, you don’t sleep for the rest of the evening. The next morning you remove the mirror from your wall and toss it in the trash. It didn’t matter if the vision you had seen was of truth or falsehood, you wanted to be rid of that mirror. In fact, you scrap every mirror in your house.

Weeks pass and the event of that night falls into passive memory. You are spending the day at a friend’s house and it’s time to use the bathroom. While you are in there the faucet starts to run without you prompting it. Taken aback by this, you do not yet act, trying to reason with your paranoia in your mind. The water starts to steam and a skin of moisture covers the mirror up above. You’re watching intently as words form: “Please return the mirrors. We miss watching you sleep at night.”

%%

A few months ago a friend of mine, who is an up-and-coming nature photographer, decided to spend a day and night alone in the woods outside of our town. She wanted to get photos of the woods and wildlife as naturally as she could for her portfolio. She wasn’t afraid of being alone, as she had camped by herself many times before. She set up a tent in the middle of a small clearing and spent the day taking pictures. She filled up four rolls of film on that trip, but something was strange about them. What she saw in those pictures has stayed with her ever since, and she is still trying to recover from the trauma the have caused her.

Almost every picture was accounted for, save for one picture in each roll of film. These pictures were of her, asleep in her tent in the middle of the night.

%%

In France, a young ambient musician by the name of Charles undertook an interesting new project. He was going to record the sound of himself sleeping, and release it under the name “La Nuit” (The Night). Charles lived alone in a rural area, which would remove things like car alarms, traffic, and such from being recorded. He planned his project for many months, acquiring the sensitive equipment to capture all outside noises as well as his own during sleep.

Finally, on the 27th of September, he decided to execute his plan. He set up all his equipment, and fell at sleep at midnight.

The next day Charles reviewed the recording. For the first hour, the recording played his own tossings and turnings as well as some distant dog barks and a few car alarms (So much for his plan to distance himself from cars). These continued throughout the 2nd hour as well, until Charles heard something that horrified him.

For at exactly 3 hours and 24 minutes in, the recording played the sound of his bedroom door opening.

%%

A baby girl is mysteriously dropped off at an orphanage in Cleveland in 1945. “Jane” grows up lonely and dejected, not knowing who her parents are, until one day in 1963 she is strangely attracted to a drifter. She falls in love with him, but just when things are looking up for Jane a series of disasters strikes: First, she becomes pregnant by the drifter, who then disappears. Second, during the complicated delivery doctors discover that Jane has both sets of sex organs, and to save her life, they most surgically convert “her” to a “him.” Finally, a mysterious stranger kidnaps her baby from the delivery room.

Reeling from these disasters, rejected from society, scorned by fate, “he” becomes a drunkard and a drifter. Not only has Jane lost her parents and her lover, but he has lost his only child as well. Years later, in 1970, he stumbles into a lonely bar, called Pop’s Place, and spills out his pathetic story to an elderly bartender. The sympathetic bartender offers the drifter the chance to avenge the stranger who left her pregnant and abandoned, on the condition that he join the “time traveller corps.” Both of them enter a time machine and the bartender drops the drifter off in 1963. The drifter is strangely attracted to a young orphan girl, who subsequently becomes pregnant.

The bartender then goes forward 9 months, kidnaps the baby girl from the hospital, and drops the baby off in an orphanage back in 1945. Then the bartender drops off the thoroughly confused drifter in 1985, to enlist in the time traveller corps. The drifter eventually gets his life together and becomes respected and elderly member of the time traveller corps, and then disguises himself as a bartender and has his most difficult mission: a date with destiny, meeting a certain drifter at Pop’s Place in 1970.

%%

In November 1930, Joe Labelle, a Canadian fur trapper, snowshoed into a thriving Eskimo fishing village situated on the shores of Lake Anjikuni in Canada. Labelle was greeted with an eerie silence. He thought this was very strange because the fishing village was a noisy settlement with 2,000 Eskimos milling back and forth to their kayaks. But there wasn’t a soul about. Labelle visited each of the Eskimo huts and fish storehouses but none of the villagers was anywhere to be seen. Labelle saw a flickering fire in the distance and approached it gingerly, sensing something evil was afoot on this moonlit night. Upon the fire was a smoldering pot of blackened stew. To make matters more mysterious, Labelle saw that not a single human track had left the settlement.

Labelle knew something bizarre had happened to the 2,000 people, and so he ran non-stop to the nearest telegraph office and sent a message about his findings to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The Mounties turned up hours later, and they too were baffled by the mass vanishing act. An enormous search party was sent out to look for the missing villagers, but they were never found, and the search party unearthed some strange findings. All the sleigh dogs that had belonged to the Eskimos were found buried 12 feet under a snowdrift at the perimeter of the camp. All of them had starved to death. The search party also established that all the Eskimos’ provisions and food had been left in their huts, which didn’t make any sense at all. Then came the most chilling surprise of all; the search party discovered that all of the Eskimos’ ancestral graves were empty. Whoever or whatever had taken all the living villagers had also dug up the dead as well, even though the icy ground around the graves was as hard as iron.

Later on that unearthly silent night, the Mounties watched in awe as a strange blue glow lit up the horizon. The eerie radiance was not the northern lights, but seemed steady and artificial. As the Mounties watched, the light pulsated then faded. All the newspapers of the world reported the baffling disappearance of the 2,000 Eskimos, although many believed that a rational explanation would eventually come to light, but the Anjikuni mass disappearance is still unsolved.

%%

There was this woman whose husband was acting very strange one day, very paranoid, she asked him why and this is what he told her:

“Twelve years ago to this day a whole bunch of my friends and I went to an old haunted house downtown to stay the night because we thought it would be fun. We were all settled on the bottom floor of the house and we were fine for the first few hours. We began to hear things that sounded like foot steps pacing on the floor above, and scratching on the walls.”

“We sent Jimmy, who was the oldest of us, up to have a look so he grabbed his flashlight and we watched him head up the steps. His foot steps seemed to stop towards the last few steps where he was no longer visible to us and slowly his light faded from view, we called after him but there was no reply.”

“Afterwards we sent Matt, the second oldest up to find him, he walked up the steps and the same thing happened. At this point we thought they were joking, and out third eldest, Jason went up to look shouting that he knew it was a trick and to give it up, at the last few steps where the other guys had vanished his shouting voice became distant before vanishing completely.”

“The rest of us got scared and went home to call the police who checked it out the next morning and found blood smeared up the sides of the stairwell. They searched the entire house and never found a soul. The house was eventually knocked down and not one body was found. Every year on this day one of us remaining from that house has disappeared going from oldest to youngest.”

Her husband was not seen again after that day. Police held an brief investigation, but nothing came of it.

%%

In winter of 1944, with overtaxed supply lines in the Ardennes, a German medic had completely run out of plasma, bandages and antiseptic. During one particularly bad round of mortar fire, his encampment suddenly became a bloodbath. The survivors claimed to hear, above the screams and barked commands of their Lieutenant, someone cackling with almost girlish glee.

The medic made his rounds during the fire, in almost complete darkness as he had so many times before, but never this short on supplies.

The bombardment moved to other ends of the line, most men dropped off to sleep in the still dark hours of the morning – New Year’s Day, 1945.

The men awoke at first light with screams. They discovered that their bandages were not typical bandages at all, but hunks and strips of human flesh. Several men had been given fresh blood transfusions, with no blood supplies available. Each treated man was almost completely covered, head-to-toe, with the maroon stain of blood.

The medic was found, sitting on an ammunition tin, staring off into space. When one man approached him, tapped him on the shoulder, his tunic fell off to reveal all skin, muscle, and sinew had been stripped from his torso and his body almost completely dried of blood. In one hand was a scalpel, and in the other, a blood transfusion vial.

None of the men treated for wounds that night, in that camp, saw the end of January, 1945.

%%

In 1938, over 6,000 patients were checked into mental hospitals all across America within one week of each other. Reports of similar instances supposedly came from Europe and Asia as well. The circumstances of each patient were, eerily, identical.

Every patient completely shut down, shivering in the corner until their family, unable to calm or care for the individuals, committed them.

The only thing the patients would say was: “There is not, and never has been, such a thing in this world as a meaningless coincidence.”

%%

One day at a shopping mall in the afternoon, a woman was coming out of the mall from a shopping spree. She was in a happy mood. She had gotten to her car and loaded her stuff that she had bought into her trunk. When she was done loading, she shut the door of her trunk and she saw an old lady standing by the passenger side of her car.

The old woman said “Would you be a darling and give me a lift home? I don’t have a car and I was walking all day.” The woman said “I’d be happy to.” So she unlocked the door for the old woman.
As she started to make her way around the car to the driver’s side, she started to feel uncomfortable. So when she got in the car, she looked in her purse and said “Darn, I can’t find my credit card. I’m going inside to see if anybody found it.” The old woman said “I’ll wait for you here.”

The woman left to go look for help. Then she found a security guard and told him the situation. They went back to the woman’s car and the passenger door was wide open. On the seat of the car was a shopping bag that the old woman had been carrying. Inside of the bag was the old woman’s dress and a gray haired wig, along with a huge butcher’s knife, a video camera, and a roll of duct tape.

%%

One afternoon, a couple was traveling on by car when at a far distance they saw a woman in the middle of the road, waving frantically.

The wife told her husband to keep on driving because it might be too dangerous, but the husband decided to pass by slowly so he wouldn’t stay with the doubt on his mind of what might have happened and the chances of anyone being hurt. As they got closer, they noticed a woman with cuts and bruises on her face as well as on her arms. They then decide to stop and see if they could be of any help.

The cut and bruised woman was begging for help telling them that she had been in a car accident and that her husband and son, a new born baby, were still inside the car which was in a deep ditch. She told them that the husband was already dead but that her baby seemed to still be alive.

The husband that was traveling decided to get down and try to rescue the baby and he asked the hurt woman to stay with his wife inside the their car. When he got down he noticed two people in the front seats of the car but he didn’t pay any importance to it and took out the baby quickly and got up to take the baby to it’s mother. When he got up, he didn’t see the mother anywhere so he asked his wife where she had gone. She told him that the woman followed him back to the crashed car.

When the husband went back to look for her, he noticed that clearly the couple in the front seats were dead, one of whom was unmistakeably the woman who had flagged them down.

%%

I’m in between.

One of them bit me. The bastard took a chunk out of my upper arm. The fool probably didn’t even know it was an arm. He probably saw me as a walking turkey leg or something. Oh, but he got his dues. I whacked his useless head off with a crowbar I stole when shit got serious.

It got serious about a month ago, and let me tell you, it happened just the way everyone thought it would happen. Some “contained” little outbreak, then BOOM, everyone I know is staggering around like kangaroos tripping on dextro. Not me, though. I knew I was going to fight it. I did well until about a week ago when Mr. Slobbermouth munched on my bicep.

It amazes even me that I’m so coherent. God, I wish I wasn’t. I’m not like them, but I’m just like them. I have the hunger they have, but I have all the guilt and love of humanity that is going to keep me from surviving.

I’m not even sure that I want to survive anymore. I see them do horrible things, things that are starting to drive me mad, and I either get sick to my stomach or find my mouth watering. I don’t want to live if living means I have to watch the destruction of my kind every day.

But then, this means no more hiding. It’s as if they can sense something in me, like they scan for a zombie membership card and find it on me. They leave me alone. I can walk freely among them.

You know how I said I’m just like them? Well, I’m better than them. I’m smarter and have the ability to gain the trust of humans. I found one yesterday, I know where all the good hiding spots are, you see, and Lord was it happy to see me. It grasped my arm and looked into my eyes, saying it was happy to have found someone to fight with. Making sure none of the no-brains were around, I took it with me and hid with it in a storm cellar. I let it fall asleep, then I broke its neck, busted open its head like a coconut, and tore into its meaty brain. The blood complimented it nicely.

For a few moments, I felt bad for what I had done. I saw his body in that stagnant pool of blood, looking as if he was still sleeping, and felt some remorse for the poor, trusting boy. I wondered about his life before the disaster. Was he happy? Did his family love him? Would he have survived anyway?

That acidic guilt rose in me, a constant reminder of my humanity. But there’s at least one thing zombies and humans have in common: the will to survive. And I’m about to do a much better job than either one of them will.

%%

The man who lives above you is the quiet type. How lucky you are to live in an apartment underneath someone so courteous! It seems he never drops anything, seeing as how you never hear any loud thumps coming from the rooms above yours. He is even kind enough to keep the volume on his radio and TV too low to disrupt you. Come to think of it, had you not seen and spoken to him, you would think no one lived up there. Quite a big change from living below a batch of rowdy teens.

He is terribly kind as well. Within the first week of you living there, he invites you up to dinner and offers his services as a plumber in case you have any leaky faucets. The maintenance crew at this complex is awfully incompetent. You can’t have it all, I suppose.

He didn’t even get offended when you told him you were far too busy and didn’t know him well enough to dine with him. He simply smiled, gave you his number, and let you know the offer stood as long as you lived below him.

One night, you decide to take him up on his offer, seeing as how you’re tired of the Hot Pockets your busy schedule allows. You call, uncertain about whether or not he is home due to the utter silence from above, and he answers and invites you to join him upstairs; he has made far too much chicken piccata to eat himself.

You climb the stairs and enter his apartment. It’s impeccable. You’ve already managed to spill some Coke Zero on your carpet. In his six years living there, he has left no stains. Dinner smells delightful. He already has a place set for you, almost as if he was expecting you sooner. Astounded by his kindness, you seat yourself and begin eating.

Almost immediately, you feel a bit drowsy. Overworked, perhaps? He smiles and watches your muscles slowly fail you, the sauce dribbling out of the mouth you can’t hold closed. You start to slide from your chair, you can almost feel the floor meeting your body, but no. He catches you. No sound is made. He carries you down the hall, ever so quietly. You’re growing too unconscious to worry, so rest assured, no one will hear a thing; you won’t even hit the floor.

%%

A young girl walking home from school found a small pile of Polaroid photos lying in the gutter. There were twenty in all, neatly wrapped in a rubber band. She picked them up, and as she walked she started to browse. The first photo was that of a ghostly white man on a black background, standing just far enough away from the camera that she couldn’t make out his features. The girl slid the photo to the back of the stack and looked at the next one. The photo was of the same man now standing a bit closer. The girl flipped through the next several photos quickly. With each one the man in the picture came a bit closer and his features were a bit clearer. Turning the last corner to her house, the girl noticed that the man in the photos seems to be looking at her even when she moved the stack from side to side. It frightened her, but she kept flipping them over, one by one. By the nineteenth picture, the man was so close his face completely filled the frame. His expression was the most horrifying the girl had ever seen. Walking up the driveway, she turned to the last photo. This time, instead of an image, there were two words: “Close enough.” Hearing a scream, the girl’s brother rushed to the door and opened it. All he saw was a pile of photographs lying on the doorstep. The top one looked like an extremely pale version of his sister, but she was standing too far back for him to be sure.

%%

In the small town of Stull, Kansas, there once stood an old one room chapel on top of a hill, surrounded by graves. Beside the church was a cellar that was very difficult to find, as its doors had grass grown upon them. In front of it church was great tree that was always bare. None of the towns members could recall ever having seen a leaf upon its branches.

In the towns earliest years, well before the civil war, there were several farming families that lived there. The minister’s daughter had fallen madly in love with a boy from nearby, but had her heart broken when that young man was discovered to have impregnated a certain flirtatious townsgirl. The two were married, and all the while the reverend’s daughter saw them, happy together, and her hatred brewed until after 9 months of painful endurance, that despise boiled over. Shortly after the young couples child was born the minister’s daughter went to their house.

They greeted her cheerfully but noticed, all too late, how she eyed the child blood-thirstily. She slit the throats of those two who’d made her life so miserable and then dragged their bodies, along with the newborn child, up the hill to the church. She put the bodies in the cellar and left the baby there, between their bodies, to starve to death. She locked the cellar shut and hung herself on the tree in front of the church. The bodies in the cellar were not found for three weeks.

From that day on leaves never grew on that tree. If you walk the graveyard late at night you can just hear the sound of a baby’s chilling cry. The towns people burnt down the tree many years ago, in the hopes of putting the ministers daughter’s spirit to rest. And more recently the church collapsed onto itself, burying the already difficult to find cellar.

Many have looked for its doors, but the few who have found them and ventured beneath its depths have seldom returned, with the exception of a few who came back to the sunlight after 3 weeks beneath- starved nearly to death and covered in blood that was not their own.

%%

Driving home from a friends house, you sit at a red light when you hear a familiar tone from your phone, sitting in the passenger seat. A text message. Probably from your friend; you always leave things at their homes. Being a responsible driver, and the light still red, you open the message and wait for a moment for the image to load. Suddenly, a photo pops into view. Red, obscured, strange contrast. And no text accompanying it.

But the light is green, so you close your phone and go back to driving, wondering vaguely what that was, and who would have sent you it. Perhaps someone accidentally took a picture of the inside of their bag or pocket and sent it to you. You’re still caught wondering as you pull up to the next light, also red, and another little tone from your phone. You flip it open, hoping for an apology from a friend, but find yourself waiting as another photo loads on the screen. This one, still mostly red, but textured now with scraps of blue, yet still indiscernible. This time, it takes an impatient honk from behind you before you realize you can pass through the light and be on your way home. Closing the phone, and continue on your way.

You sit uncomfortable now as the tone rings again, at yet another stop signal. You pause, hesitate, and then open the phone. The picture now is suddenly much more clear. That scrap of blue seems to be the ragged edge of a bit of denim, half blood soaked and laying across a pile of entrails, torn straight through the back of a human torso. You can only see from the bottom of the shoulder blade to the tops of the thighs, but its unmistakably human. Blue-white spinal bone smeared in blood, tubes of intestine trailing out between ragged looking spinal tissue and going out of the frame of the picture. You choke back a throat full of bile and throw the phone back into the passenger seat, happy to be on your way again, and dreading the knowledge that you won’t be able to not look as you hear that tone again.

There is some relief as you realize there are no more stoplights before you reach your home. But as you pull up to that red stop sign, the bottom of your stomach drops out and you feel a cold sweat build on the back of your neck. You have already picked up the phone, even before that tell-tale little tone has told you there is a message. The cell vibrates in your hand as you flip it open, your mind gone on auto-pilot, driving home with your eyes on the screen as the newest photo loads. Intestines piled almost artistically to the side of the body, scalp ripped free and no hair discernable, and that sickening contrast of darkening red on blue. For some reason, you expected that, even as you taste bile on the back of your tongue.

Its not as close or obscured. Flesh torn apart by God knows what means, torn denim, and blood soaked so far into the threadbare fabric of a hand-me-down couch. The one you have in your living room. You pull your car into park, hands shaking as you make your way up to your front door. You can’t stop yourself now, your body’s just doing as it normally would, but your finger frantically scrolls down the screen, finding no name, no phone number, and a time dated on the message three minutes from now.

You put the key in the door as you try shrug off your denim jacket.

%%

A young couple were waiting impatiently to leave on their first vacation since the baby was born but the woman’s aunt, who would be babysitting, was thirty minutes late. The young woman called her elderly aunt to find out what was going on, and the old woman apologized for her forgetfulness, and said she’d speed right over.

Since the aunt was only a couple miles away, the couple decided they’d go ahead and go rather than wait for her and risk missing their flight. Two weeks later when the couple returned they were horrified to find the baby still in it’s high-chair where they’d left it, except now it was dead and bloated, covered with flies. The aunt really had sped, and unfortunately crashed and died before she made it over.

%%

Coffins used to be built with holes in them, attached to six feet of copper tubing and a bell. The tubing would allow air for victims buried under the mistaken impression they were dead. Harold, the Oakdale gravedigger, upon hearing a bell, went to go see if it was children pretending to be spirits. Sometimes it was also the wind. This time it wasn’t either. A voice from below begged, pleaded to be unburied.

“You Sarah O’Bannon?”

“Yes!” the voice assured.

“You were born on September 17, 1827?”

“Yes!”

“The gravestone here says you died on February 19?”

“No I’m alive, it was a mistake! Dig me up, set me free!”

“Sorry about this, ma’am,” Harold said, stepping on the bell to silence it and plugging up the copper tube with dirt. “But this is August. Whatever you is down there, you ain’t alive no more, and you ain’t comin’ up.”

%%

A man saw a Ferrari at a used-car sale and asked for the price of the car. The salesman lit up with a smile and said he’d give it to the man for $500 dollars. The man bought the car instantly on the spot after hearing the ridiculously cheap deal.

The man had the car for months now, but on a cold, winter day as he got into the driver’s seat he was startled to see someone in the rear-view mirror. He quickly turned around and saw nothing in the empty seat and quickly shrugged it off thinking he must have imagined it.

As the cold days went by, the car doors started to lock up on him, the engine would stall, and he would hear sounds of something hitting in the back. The man started getting anxious about this bad omen. That horror soon showed itself as he was driving to the airport to pick up his relatives. He looked up and saw 3 bloody bodies in the rear-view mirror staring at him. He screamed and realized that this car is really haunted and fled from the car.

Later he heard the story of the car from the salesman. The police found the car 2 years ago abandoned in an empty airport parking stall where 2 dead bodies were found in the back seat and another one found in the trunk.

%%

A 15-year old boy in a small town in Maryland sat down at his computer after getting home from school one day. He turned it on and logged into an instant messaging program, and was then surprised to receive a message from a classmate of his, who had been absent that day.

It consisted of two words; “please come”. Confused, the boy sent a reply, asking why he’d been absent that day. After two more messages and fifteen minutes with no response, he decided to get on his bike and head over to his classmate’s house. It was a short ride, only about five minutes away.

When he got to the house, he found the door was unlocked. Inside, partially dried blood was splattered over the walls and floors, and an unrecognizable figure was crumpled against the far wall. It was missing an arm and a leg, and bloody streaks on the floor lead away from the body and into the kitchen. The boy slammed the door closed, and immediately called 911 on his cell phone.

When the police arrived, they found three corpses, as well as tracks leading away from the house from the back door. The forensics report concluded that the entire family, the boy’s classmate and his parents, had been killed sometime the previous night.

%%

Remember this -

Should you ever despair of life so much that you want to die, you have the means at hand and yearn to end your life, you have written a suicide note to those you will leave behind and you are prepared to die… at that moment, stop.

Get a pair of scissors. Cut away at the note until you end up with a piece of paper in the shape of a key. Go to a door, any one will do. Push the paper key forward and turn your hand as if unlocking an imaginary lock.

The lock is real. Open the door. There you will find it. The other earth. The one that awaits to replace this one when it dies. That death is inevitable, but in the meantime the other earth will belong to you.

Be warned: the other earth is very different from this one.

%%

There it goes again. Something definitely moved this time. It was very brief, but out of the corner of your eye, you saw something. But wait. All the doors are locked, no pets, and your parents won’t get home until 10. So there’s no way something moved. It’s just your imagination getting the best of you. Sitting alone in your room, the only light emitting from the monitor of your computer, you stare into the darkness for several minutes. Just to be sure. Now you feel silly. What were you thinking? Of course there’s nothing there. What, are you 6? Go back to what you were doing.

15 minutes later, as you prepare to go to bed, you’re in the bathroom. The shower curtains shift. Wait… no. Stop spooking yourself. It’s just an overactive imagination, filling your head with what isn’t really there. You gaze into the mirror at yourself. You say it to yourself, slowly and clearly, “Imagination.” With a sigh, you turn the lights off and head towards your room.

Laying in bed, you stare at your ceiling, dark and foreboding, only the motion of a small fan disturbing the calmness of the night. A shadow from the light in the hall shifts. No. No, no, no. Stop it. It’s your imagination. Just that. Go to sleep, you fool.

But then, just when you’re about to drift off to sleep, at the phase no one remembers when they wake, you sense something in the darkness. It’s your imagination, leering down at you. With a jagged, macabre smile.

%%

In Gjoberdik, a small fisherman’s village in the country of Bulgaria, on the dawn of January the first everyone closes their curtains and hold their breath for half a minute. Hours after the craze of midnight’s celebrations, children look questioning at their worried parents, but can not help to shiver in the embrace of their shaking parents.

One can hear the sound of bells being struck exactly 25 times last year, in this short timespan. The nearest church however, is over 32 miles away. You will find no one out on the streets in these faithful 30 seconds, and even the birds will stop whistling.

Some have gone out of their houses, roaring boldly in disbelief of this century old tradition. On the first sunset of this year, two people gambled their fate in the very first rays of sunlight.

The next dawn, the bells will be struck 27 times.

%%

An elderly man was sitting alone on a dark path. He wasn’t certain of which direction to go, and he’d forgotten both where he was traveling to and who he was. He’d sat down for a moment to rest his weary legs, and suddenly looked up to see an elderly woman before him. She grinned toothlessly and with a cackle, spoke: “Now your *third* wish. What will it be?”
“Third wish?” The man was baffled. “How can it be a third wish if I haven’t had a first and second wish?”
“You’ve had two wishes already,” the hag said, “but your second wish was for me to return everything to the way it was before you had made your first wish. That’s why you remember nothing; because everything is the way it was before you made any wishes.” She cackled at the poor man. “So it is that you have one wish left.”
“All right,” he said, “I don’t believe this, but there’s no harm in wishing. I wish to know who I am.”
“Funny,” said the old woman as she granted his wish and disappeared forever. “That was your first wish.”

%%

For a brief period in 1971, a New Jersey based company sold novelty “x-ray” glasses through the mail via advertisements in the Marvel line of comic books. People who viewed their televisions while wearing these glasses reported seeing images that were “hellish” or “like hell”.

It should be noted that this phenomena occured whether the televisions in question were turned on or not. The company quickly went out of business and investigations reveal that the company’s address leads to a graveyard founded many decades before 1971.

%%

I am currently sitting in front of my computer, scared witless. Any moment now I am going to be killed.

Today a friend of mine told me a story.

His aunt had taken care of him since he was a small boy, and she told him last night about how his parents died. He did a very fair imitation of her (I knew them both pretty well):

“They were doing mission work in some nasty little south american country when a man burst into the mission hospital one night, terrified out of his mind. He told them that his sister had been killed by a Muerto blanco, and that he was certain that it was coming for him next. What is a Muerto blanco? Apparently it was some sort of bogey-man, something like that dumb chupacabra or whatever. They called it the White Death or the White Girl, because it was the soul of someone who hated life so much that they came back in their shrouds to kill those who told of them.

The man had been told about the vengeful spirit by his sister hours before her death. It was a girl with dead, black eyes that wept bile. The thing moved without ever actually moving its legs, and it stalked its victims back to their homes. Now, if you weren’t already aware that this thing was following you, once it got back to your house, it would start knocking on your door…

* Once for you skin, which she’ll use to patch her own decaying flesh.
* Twice for your muscle, which she’ll gnash her teeth on between victims.
* Thrice for your bones, which she’ll make knives to pick her teeth and kill her victims.
* Four times for your heart, which she’ll wear around her neck.
* Five times for your teeth, which she’ll polish and keep in a box.
* Six times for your eyes, which she’ll see the faces of your loved ones through.
* Seven times for your soul, which she’ll eat whole - you can never pass while you’re in her stomach.

She has to repeat this on any mirror or door between you and her.

You can try to outrun her, but she’s faster than the fastest man. And if you leave your home while she’s knocking on your door, she won’t be so courteous when she catches up to you.

Now the man was certain that this thing had killed his sister, that he had tried to tell the police, but they would not listen. Next he had tried to tell his priest, but the priest turned him away when he saw that the thing was following him now - oh, that’s right, I forgot about that - it can only get you if you tell someone else about it, or you saw it kill someone else. The man, after finishing his tale, stole a car from the mission, and was never seen again.

Apparently his mother and father had immediately called his aunt about this when it happened. They were found in the morning, skinned and dismembered. Their bodies were covered in tiny, child-like handprints.

His aunt was really drunk the night before, and had told him about that. He told me this story early in the morning today at school, before the cops arrived. His aunt had been murdered that night. I called him later that night, and he told me that he was being chased by someone, and now they were knocking on his door. I told him to stop shitting me.

He held the phone away from his face for a minute, and I could hear slow, deliberate knocking. A moment later, I heard the door rip from its hinges and the dying screams of my friend.

Then a little girl’s voice spoke over the line: “WITNESS.” I hung up.

Three minutes ago someone started knocking on my door. She has to knock 28 times on my front door, 28 times on the mirror in the hall, and another 28 times on the door to my bedroom. She’s doing it slowly… I think she wants to scare me some more, let me know that my death is just moments away. I will not run - I couldn’t get to my car in time anyway. She started knocking on my bedroom door a minute ago, she should be done any moment.

Nice knowing you guys, it’s been funjklm,.-

WITNESS

%%

In almost every building, there is one corner, one small enclosure that no one ever looks at. It’s the corner in the basement that has been blocked by a disused sofa for years; the thin space in the attic between the wall and the stacks and stacks of crates full of junk you never use, but could never throw away. The space that never sees the light of day, or any other kind of light at all. Where darkness does not merely dominate, but practically oozes out from around the edges of its prison. No one knows quite how long a space must remain concealed for it to acquire this particular property, nor if there are any specific conditions it must meet. But it is a far more common occurrence than you might think.

In newer buildings, when this happens, the residents often report feeling cold when passing by, even in attics during the hottest of summers. Whenever contemplating taking a quick peek to see if there is anything actually there, an unnatural dread seizes them, and they leave the room quickly, if not quite running. Once left behind, the feeling passes, and it is quickly forgotten, or laughed off.

What actually happens in these forgotten sanctuaries of the dark? It is impossible to tell. For while many such corners have been exposed to reveal absolutely nothing, some brave souls have lost their sanity through nothing more than an ill-timed glance. The safest thing to do when encountered with such a phenomenon; close your eyes, rip away the area’s covering in a single motion, then keep a tight hold on what you’ve pulled away. No matter what you hear or feel, do not get up, do not look around, and do not try to cover your ears. You might be one of the lucky ones.

%%

During the summer of 1983, in a quiet town near Minneapolis, Minnesota, the charred body of a woman was found inside the kitchen stove of a small farmhouse. A video camera was also found in the kitchen, standing on a tripod and pointing at the oven. No tape was found inside the camera at the time.

Although the scene was originally labeled as a homicide by police, an unmarked VHS tape was later discovered at the bottom of the farm’s well (which had apparently dried up earlier that year).

Despite its worn condition, and the fact that it contained no audio, police were still able to view the contents of the tape. It depicted a woman recording herself in front of a video camera (seemingly using the same camera the police found in the kitchen). After positioning the camera to include both her and her kitchen stove in the image, the tape then showed her turning on the oven, opening the door, crawling inside, and then closing the door behind her. Eight minutes into the video, the oven could be seen shaking violently, after which point thick black smoke could be seen emanating from it. The camera then continued to point at the oven for another 45 minutes until the batteries apparently died.

To avoid disturbing the local community, police never released any information about the tape, or even the fact that it was found. Police were also not able to determine who put the tape in the well…

…or why the body of the woman on the tape did not in any way resemble the body of the woman found in the oven.

%%

It’s early morning. The sun won’t be up for another couple of hours. You’re fast asleep in bed, lost in a dream, when the phone rings. Rather than waking up, you roll over and cover your head with a pillow. Hours pass. The sun rises.

The phone is ringing.

When you wake up, your alarm clock is blaring and the phone is ringing. By the time you will yourself to turn the alarm off, the phone has stopped ringing. You realize that it’s been ringing all morning. You slide out of bed and press the blinking red button on your phone as you stumble into the bathroom. The phone beeps, followed by the friendly, electronic voice.

Hello. You have six hundred and sixty-six new messages. Message one.

The phone beeps again, and you’re not prepared for what comes next. Screaming.

You spin around, thinking that she’s standing right behind you. There’s pure terror in her screams, accompanied by other disturbing noises. You stand there, horrified, for about ten seconds. Screaming gives way to hysterical, garbled crying before dying out with the sounds of spilling meat and tearing flesh.

The phone beeps again. You’re shaking.

Message two…

%%

The next time you’re alone in your room, turn down the lights. Think of something on your body that varies in length, such as hair. It must be clearly viewable from your perspective. Grab a ruler and, looking in the mirror, quickly grab a hair at random; you must confuse it. Hold it in position as best you can and note the length. Look down. Yours will be different.

Don’t look back up.

Don’t turn your back to that mirror ever again.

%%

There are stories about a certain kind of hitchhiker – they only ever appear at night on quiet roads, seeming to flicker into existence in the very edge of headlights, never carrying a sign, always with an expression of deep despondency on their faces, swathed in a heavy coat and long pants, usually with gloves. If you stop, they will seem cordial enough, polite, but hardly chatty. They will assure you that the next town or city along your route will be a fine spot to leave them. Normal enough. Unless you try killing them.

They die easily enough. But look underneath their clothes, and you will see that their skin is marred with lines of scars, forming repeating patterns that are unsettling to look at, and even more unsettling in the context of their skin. They have no wallets, no identification. If you slice their belly open, however, they’re different inside. There’s no blood, no muscle, only a hollow cavity containing a single object. The object varies. Examples include a single coin, heavy and golden and engraved with runes nobody could ever decipher. A diamond gem with fractal edges that slice bare flesh to ribbons. A small vase, quite unbreakable, that smells of the ocean and is always damp…

Once you possess a hitchhiker’s object, you’ll find yourself always driving the quiet roads at night. You’ll never mean to, but somehow, you just will. The lure of possessing a second one will hum quietly in your head. You’ll strain to catch sight of a figure appearing in your headlights, try to resist the impulse to stop, and sometimes you might. But sometimes you won’t. You’ll try telling yourself that this is just a normal person on an adventure, someone who ran out of petrol. The logical part of your brain will scream at what you’re doing. You’ll smile and nod and they’ll get into the car and you’ll slowly, casually, reach under the seat or across to the glove box…

%%

There is a video on YouTube named Mereana Mordegard Glesgorv. If you search this, you will find nothing. The few times you find something, all you will see is a 20 second video of a man staring intently at you, expressionless, then grinning for the last 2 seconds. The background is undefined. This is only part of the actual video.

The full video lasts 2 minutes, and was removed by YouTube after 153 people who viewed the video gouged out their eyes and mailed them to YouTube’s main office in San Bruno. Said people had also committed suicide in various ways. It is not yet known how they managed to mail their eyes after gouging them out. And the cryptic inscription they carve on their forearms has not yet been deciphered.

YouTube will periodically put up the first 20 seconds of the video to quell suspicions, so that people will not go look for the real thing and upload it. The video itself was only viewed by one YouTube staff member, who started screaming after 45 seconds. This man is under constant sedatives and is apparently unable to recall what he saw. The other people who were in the same room as him while he viewed it and turned off the video for him say that all they could hear was a high pitched drilling sound. None of them dared look at the screen.

The person who uploaded the video was never found, the IP address being non-existent. And the man on the video has never been identified.

%%

We made a mistake. That is the simple, undeniable truth of the matter, however painful it might be. The flaw was not in our Observatories, for those machines were as perfect as we could make them, and they showed us only the unfiltered light of truth. The flaw was not in the Predictor, for it is a device of pure, infallible logic, turning raw data into meaningful information without the taint of emotion or bias. No, the flaw was within us, the Orchestrators of this disaster, the sentients who thought themselves beyond such failings. We are responsible.

It began a short while ago, as these things are measured, less than 6^6 Deeli ago, though I suspect our systems of measure will mean very little by the time anyone receives this transmission. We detected faint radio signals from a blossoming intelligence 2^14 Deelis outward from the Galactic Core, as photons travel. At first crude and unstructured, these leaking broadcasts quickly grew in complexity and strength, as did the messages they carried. Through our Observatories we watched a world of strife and violence, populated by a barbaric race of short-lived, fast breeding vermin. They were brutal and uncultured things which stabbed and shot and burned each other with no regard for life or purpose. Even their concepts of Art spoke of conflict and pain. They divided themselves according to some bizarre cultural patterns and set their every industry to cause of death.


They terrified us, but we were older and wiser and so very far away, so we did not fret. Then we watched them split the atom and breach the heavens within the breadth of one of their single, short generations, and we began to worry. When they began actively transmitting messages and greetings into space, we felt fear and horror. Their transmissions promised peace and camaraderie to any who were listening, but we had watched them for too long to buy into such transparent deceptions. They knew we were out here, and they were coming for us.

The Orchestrators consulted the Predictor, and the output was dire. They would multiply and grow and flood out of their home system like some uncountable tide of Devourer worms, consuming all that lay in their path. It might take 6^8 Deelis, but they would destroy us if left unchecked. With aching carapaces we decided to act, and sealed our fate.

The Gift of Mercy was 8^4 strides long with a mouth 2/4 that in diameter, filled with many 4^4 weights of machinery, fuel, and ballast. It would push itself up to 2/8th of light speed with its onboard fuel, and then begin to consume interstellar Primary Element 2/2 to feed its unlimited acceleration. It would be traveling at nearly light speed when it hit. They would never see it coming. Its launch was a day of mourning, celebration, and reflection. The horror of the act we had committed weighed heavily upon us all; the necessity of our crime did little to comfort us.

The Gift had barely cleared the outer cometary halo when the mistake was realized, but it was too late. The Gift could not be caught, could not be recalled or diverted from its path. The architects and work crews, horrified at the awful power of the thing upon which they labored, had quietly self-terminated in droves, walking unshielded into radiation zones, neglecting proper null pressure safety or simple ceasing their nutrient consumption until their metabolic functions stopped. The appalling cost in lives had forced the Orchestrators to streamline the Gift’s design and construction. There had been no time for the design or implementation of anything beyond the simple, massive engines and the stabilizing systems.

We could only watch in shame and horror as the light of genocide faded into infrared against the distant void.

They grew, and they changed, in a handful of lifetimes they abolished war, abandoned their violent tendencies and turned themselves to the grand purposes of life and Art. We watched them remake first themselves, and then their world. Their frail, soft bodies gave way to gleaming metals and plastics, they unified their people through an omnipresent communications grid and produced Art of such power and emotion, the likes of which the Galaxy has never seen before, or again, because of us.

They converted their home world into a paradise (by their standards) and many 10^6s of them poured out into the surrounding system with a rapidity and vigor that we could only envy. With bodies built to survive every environment from the day lit surface of their innermost world, to the atmosphere of their largest gas giant and the cold void in-between, they set out to sculpt their system into something beautiful. At first we thought them simple miners, stripping the rocky planets and moons for vital resources, but then we began to see the purpose to their constructions, the artworks carved into every surface, and traced across the system in glittering lights and dancing fusion trails. And still, our terrible Gift approached.

They had less than 2^2 Deeli to see it, following so closely on the tail of its own light. In that time, oh so brief even by their fleeting lives, more than 10^10 sentients prepared for death. Lovers exchanged last words, separated by worlds and the tyranny of light speed. Their planet-side engineers worked frantically to build sufficient transmission infrastructure to upload the countless masses with the necessary neural modifications, while those above dumped lifetimes of music and literature from their databanks to make room for passengers. Those lacking the required hardware or the time to acquire it consigned themselves to death, lashed out in fear and pain, or simply went about their lives as best they could under the circumstances.

The Gift arrived suddenly, the light of its impact visible in our skies, shining bright and cruel even to the un-augmented ocular receptor. We watched and we wept for our victims, dead so many Deelis before the light of their doom had even reached us. Many 6^4s of those who had been directly or even tangentially involved in the creation of the Gift sealed their spiracles with paste as a final penance for the small roles they had played in this atrocity. The light dimmed, the dust cleared, and our Observatories refocused upon the place where their shining blue world had once hung in the void, and found only dust and the pale gleam of an orphaned moon, wrapped in a thin, burning wisp of atmosphere that had once belonged to its parent.

Radiation and relativistic shrapnel had wiped out much of the inner system, and continent sized chunks of molten rock carried screaming ghosts outward at interstellar escape velocities, damned to wander the great void for an eternity. The damage was apocalyptic, but not complete, from the shadows of the outer worlds, tiny points of light emerged, thousands of fusion trails of single ships and world ships and everything in between, many 10^6s of survivors in flesh and steel and memory banks, ready to rebuild. For a few moments we felt relief, even joy, and we were filled with the hope that their culture and Art would survive the terrible blow we had dealt them. Then came their message, tightly focused at OUR star, transmitted simultaneously by hundreds of their ships.

“We know you are out there, and we are coming for you.”

%%

I've always had a type of interest in the paranormal, even since I was a child. As I matured, I learned quickly that such things you hear about things such as ghosts are false, and as someone who is very big into science and biology, I knew such things were only the fare of fiction; our bodies our simply the empty catalysts of biochemical reactions, most weird creatures like "Chupucabras" are simple misidenified species, or some type of new, less-threatening organism that science hadn't dscribed until then. I was once able to comfort myself with such facts, but recently it's become near-impossible...due to certain recent events.

Science has taught me that you need evidence to support claims, and as such, I refused to believe paranormal claims until I saw firsthand things I could not explain. In my house are five cats (I don't mind cats, but I prefer non-mammalian pets, I personally own a snake) and a dog, along with my Mom, her new boyfriend, my brother and I. But when I'm home alone...I am the only organism capable of speech in my house. Because of that, I should NOT hear things like feminine voices trying to call me downstairs for dinner.

The first time it happened it didn't fully sink in, because my mom will nag me incessantly as I stay firmly put in my computer chair, and thus I simply ignored it. But less than half an hour later, my mom called me on my phone. I hung up quickly after my mother had finished harassing me, and no more than 15 seconds later I heard it; a voice very similar to my mom's calling me downstairs. All I was able to do immediately was freeze. I stood there perfectly still, sweating and breathing heavily. I'm no idiot; I grabbed a knife I keep under my desk.

I went down the stairs slowly, keeping it in front of me, and surveying the ground as I walked. Despite my intense fear, when I went into the kitchen, I saw nothing. No clues of anything, nothing paranormal, only one thing was out of place, and that was a picture of my brother and I from when we were still little, clutching one of the old kittens we used to have. Normally this hangs on the fridge, completely framed and stuck on by a magentic frame, but it was on the center table of the room now. I picked it up, and I felt a cringe go down my body as I moved my hand onto it.

But it was not just that picture...it was every picture of my family that had been on the fridge, all in a stack that I hadn't fully noticed. I looked through the pictures, and the dates on them seemed to correspond with their order in the stack. One of them was dated that day, 4/22/2010, at 3:42 pm. It was a disturbing a blurred image of the kitchen, capturing just the ground, some chair legs, and the faint wisp of something that looks like a hand, but isn't human.

I don't know what it is. I don't know what it will do, and I don't know what I can do about it. I called the police and while thorough investigations were performed, no sign of breaking or entering occurred, nor any trace of anyone leaving the house. No one has been able to explain the hand in the picture however, nor in the three pictures it has been visible in taken since.

%%