E is for Eviscerated

I woke to the beeping of my alarm clock. It had gotten less annoying after several years of usage, but I still contemplated getting a new one that played a song or something interesting to make my mornings less rough. God, I'm getting too old for this.

Our precinct has been flooded with all kinds of weird calls lately. Naked tweekers on a stabbing spree, strange murders where the corpse was almost entirely mummified, and then those… things… running around. When I heard the reports about some bear-man thing lurking around the city, I dismissed them as drug-addled hallucinations or some odd misinterpretation of a harmless sports mascot… but after what happened, after seeing one up close, I'm now beginning to think that these reports had some basis in fact.

My close encounter began when Sheriff Jansen gave me a new job last week: to investigate the kidnappings of a couple of scientists from various organizations around the city. We'd just arrested a few hooligans running around in animal masks and coveralls like bank robbers from a bad action movie, and we found a few leads. Jansen left the rest up to me.

Yesterday, I ended up investigating an old mall downtown (Riverwood, I think it was called), which was abandoned back in the 90s, though they still haven’t demolished it. Jansen told me about an uptick in weird activity there as of late; he had heard from a couple kids that a tall, rather plain looking man was walking in and out of the building. Nothing new there; kids loved to sneak in to toke up, drink, settle a dare, or other things. I've even had to chase off a group of self-proclaimed "urban explorers" looking for their 15 minutes of fame on YouTube. There have also been a couple of strange horror stories about that mall from the teens who went inside, as well as rumors of junkies who went in there, never to come out. So I’ve come to believe that, whatever was going on, this mall was a ‘den’ of sorts for some unsavory folk.

The dead mall was only a five-minute drive from the police station, and it looked about as run down as I’d heard. The windows were either boarded up or broken, a door was missing, the walls were cracked and decaying, and the sign was mostly illegible. Well I didn’t choose this job for a good time now did I? I hesitantly walked in, and the first thing that caught me was the stench. After so many years as an officer you get to realize how places smell. This place had a musty odor, mixed in with that still-lingering artificial smell you often associate with Big Retail, but something else caught me off guard, it was like there was something else, a stench of decay.

Now, you would come to expect that kind of musty stench from a dead mall, but this wasn’t building rot or mildew… no… I knew what this was without a doubt.

Something dead.

If my nose had  carried me through a decade of police work, it was gonna help me out here too. I certainly wasn't looking forward to calling in a dead body and then ending up on Channel 5 BREAKING NEWS, but protocol is protocol I guess. I followed the strange scent of decay to about halfway through the first row of shopping centers before something caught me off guard. I looked into the old HexWorks in front of the closed-off Sears to find not empty shelves and abandoned racks, but rather, a pitch black abyss in the store. It was probably just super dark in there, nothing to worry about. At least that's what I told myself, but I still felt uneasy; I guess abandoned malls do that to people. They just don't look… natural. I mean, when you think of malls you immediately picture the hustle and bustle of shoppers looking for their last-minute Christmas gifts, right?

I continued for another few yards before hearing something I didn’t want to hear. Breathing. It sounded ragged, but close. Was it some junkie high on bath salts or god knows what? Or something… well… more distressed? I ran back to the HexWorks to possibly find them. It was back to normal, no black void or anything there, just the occasional empty shelving stack here and there. Strange. Maybe it was just my imagination.

I was beginning to breathe heavily, trying to listen to the… wait… maybe it was my own breathing that I heard - no… it was still there… and closer than ever too! I whipped around to look what was behind me.

A grin, a terrifying glowing white grin with two beady white eyes! There was no hallway anymore, just blackness. My mind was racing, was this a ghost? Was I hallucinating? Was it gonna kill me?! I could do nothing but freeze and hyperventilate as we stood there. It wasn’t moving, just staring at me, and breathing. Despite my brain screaming for me to get out of there, and against all better judgement, I reached out to touch it. When my hand made contact with its skin, my fingers felt a sticky tar-like substance that I could have sworn felt like congealed blood, and my hand passed right through it like oatmeal. It cowered back with a noise I could only describe as alien. A garbled, low scream that I knew would haunt me for years to come. It turned, then walked away, leaving only one message scrawled on the wall in still-dripping black inky liquid.

#FOLLOW ME

I was shaken to a fault. But nobody said this job would be pleasant, I had to keep searching. Perhaps this mall really was haunted. I decided to press on and discovered that, upon closer inspection, the shelves inside the shop appeared to be covered with the same liquid that smattered the wall. After observing most of the area, I decided to open the back door behind the counter. The stench hit me like a wall. Was this the source of the decay smell? What I saw when I rounded the corner terrified me. A black figure, with the same stretched grin from earlier. There was a human body next to it, very obviously dead, and had been for a while.

That… thing… was eating the body. I cannot stress this enough… it was EATING the body. It was tearing its teeth into the skin, and ripping out chunks of flesh before swallowing. It had already stripped one leg to bone like a goddamn drumstick and was now proceeding onto the other. The sight was as terrifying as it was mesmerizing and I watched it slowly chew the still-bloody meat, transfixed.

From this distance I could see its form a bit more clearly. It was hunched over like a bear eating a deer - well now that I think about it, with its more humanoid proportions, it looked like one of those feral children I’d heard about on Nat Geo. Its muzzle twisted and snapped bone as it descended to bite again and I could make out the bear-like shape of its head. Stylized, as if it was one of those teddy bears.

After an unbearable amount of time watching it eat, it noticed me, turning its head towards me and standing up, allowing me to see its distinctly segmented appearance. I instinctively backed away, fearing that I would be its next meal, but it did not advance. Instead, its hand raised up and pointed to the left, where there was a very large opening in the rotting drywall. It opened it’s blood-soaked mouth, uttered something unintelligible, and began to walk through the door.

#FOLLOW ME

Police intuition had me pulling out my phone in order to snap a picture of the corpse in order to send to the coroner's office, but as the camera was focusing on the corpse, the creature was already upon me and forcefully knocked me to the ground, grabbing the phone out of my hand. It looked at the phone curiously, before crushing it in an instant, then throwing it into the mangled human remains, where it likely knew I wouldn’t retrieve it. It began to walk back through the hole in the wall, passing through like it wasn't even there, leaving me to stand there dumbfounded.

All I could think of was how its appearance reminded me of those animatronics back at the pizzeria I sometimes took my kids to. That one originally founded out in the West that folded after a bout of horrific tragedies. It had left its mark throughout the US here and there over the years thanks to certain franchising opportunities, but one by one they shuttered their doors, their mascots scrapped for parts at some junkyard who knows where. This thing, whatever it was, definitely resembled their main mascot, the bear one, complete with a matte top hat, except all black, darker than shadows. Yet here it was, walking around in a lithe, predatory gait, far smoother than the stiff, robotic movements the real deal barely entertained my children with long ago.

I'd heard about the murders, the bites, the disappearances that were the stuff of urban legends, but this was a whole new level of messed up.

Afraid of becoming the subject of yet another tragic rumor, I was left with no choice but to follow the shadow further in.

The hole led to the storage room of a Grovewood Clothiers store. Among the many moth-eaten, old clothes were a few new ones, soaked in blood. Things were only getting more and more disturbing as we continued through the mall, and I had a gut feeling it would attack me if I strayed too far off course, reached for my sidearm or light, or tried to call for backup via my radio. Eventually we got to another main hallway. This was obviously a hobo den; there were trash cans everywhere, scorched on the inside where fire would be kept. There were cans of food littering the floor, some oddly spotless. The black monster picked one up, still half full of rotting food, and began to crudely shove the rotted beans into its mouth. Once the main mass of food was gone, it extended a limb-like tongue into the can, and began to lick up the bug-eaten moldy remains, before dropping the can, crushed and now slathered in that same black liquid, to the ground.

We passed through the hallway and made a turn. The stench of decay was changing from one of rotting food to the same corpse scent from before, except somewhat… different. That sickly sweet odor that strangely reminded me of meat at the supermarket. At the end of the hallway there was a small, barely intact door, held open for me by that shadow. The moment I walked in, the door slammed shut, and I looked back to see that the creature had disappeared. The only things in the room were a small, barely functioning light on the verge of flickering out altogether, and another corpse. This one was unlike the others however. It was utterly destroyed.

The right eye had no flesh around it, just a single eye in a bony socket, rolled back into the head. The skull looked more like a fucking clam, the face split open like a morbid flower, the entire left side almost entirely torn off as if someone planted a bomb inside of it; the brain was visible and the entire cheek was shredded open, hanging off the face. It reminded me of that suicide I was called to recently where some insane asylum escapee pulled a Kurt Cobain at a metal scrapyard. There was a large hole in the torso and his intestines looked like scrambled eggs, ribs splayed open like the mouth of hell itself. His arms were also torn apart, with one large torn piece in his left forearm, exposing only flesh and shattered bone; his right hand had almost no flesh, and several of his fingers were just bone. His legs were the mostly intact, except for his right femur, which had had been mostly stripped of skin and flesh. All of these injuries made it look like something destroyed him from the inside out. The weirdest thing about it, the entire body was completely dry, no blood anywhere.

This was too much, even for me. I vomited in my mouth; not wanting to desecrate a corpse, however, I managed to stomach it back down. Once I opened my eyes, I could not believe what I was seeing; it, no-*he* was looking at me. The eye, that nauseatingly emerald green eye, had rolled back into position, and was focused right fucking on me. I must’ve been hallucinating before right? There’s no way this dude was still alive. His eye was always in this spot, no issues right. Well, there was an issue, he began to stand up. No… he was being dragged up like a puppet. His body wretched like you would expect from something that destroyed, and his intestines spilled out of his abdominal cavity, some even onto the floor. His arm moved to his head, and with a slow, terrible movement, he pushed it back together. He never broke eye contact.

He slowly stood up straight, cradling his damaged arm before letting it fall limply to the side. A raspy sound escaped through a hole in his neck, as well as his mouth. Was he… was he… laughing? “What… are you?” I asked, the fear obvious in my voice. His raspy chuckle turned louder, until it was a terrifying unholy cackle that reverberated throughout the whole room. He began to limp towards me, his damaged leg impairing him immensely. I backed away, I had never felt this kind of fear in my life. My back hit the wall, and he kept walking. Until he was right up in my face.

I looked into his green eyes, and, for a second, I could see the man he once was. A poorly put together man who had obviously seen things. He might have been amiable, might have been terrifying, it’s hard to tell from a corpse. For a moment, I could have sworn that I saw a flicker of longing in those eyes, as if he were envious of the living, like myself. Who knows what this man had gone through to put him in such a state? I almost felt bad for him, until I realized my situation. His bony hand raised up to face level, before swiftly grabbing my forehead

Several images swept through my head, the victims, the sea, the shadows, the string, the terrible, horrible experiments. What on Earth had he gone through? It was then I felt millions of fingers sifting through my memories, every private secret laid bare for this… monster to see. I watched helplessly as visions of my wife and kids swirled around my mind repeatedly like a broken record, before being replaced by other unfamiliar images. The police chief's words replayed in my head over and over again, this time overlaid with another voice.

“You’re seeing them, aren’t you? What they did to me…”

I didn't so much hear those words as I felt them being blasted into my head like warped radio static. The images then shifted, becoming blurry as my mind was being thrown through thousands of possible futures, most of them horrible. More deformed animatronics, such as a golden bear with a camera for a face, a fox that had been torn in half, and blood… so much blood… forming knots like a spiderweb of red twine. Then just as rapidly as the images came, they stopped.

He tossed me to the floor and my ribs hit the concrete with a sickly crack as a jolt of pain pulsed through my body. I looked up to see the creature from before standing behind him; like a twisted mirror, it was mimicking his body.

“I̩̣̹͞ͅs͚̝͎̬̦͔ ̜̜̠̻͖̩͉t̸͍̩̤̭H̨͎͉͙ͅi̩͚͎z̮̩̲̺̼͖͙ ̯̤̗̬w̷͕͉̘z̩͉̞͙͖̹h҉̤̘A̯T͇̣̼͙͎͜ ̦y̴̯͇o͔̱Ṵ̦̲̬̠ ҉̝̞̯ͅo̲͓̯͖͘ͅR҉̞̜̬e҉͎̙̪d̗͕͙̜̜̼e͉r̜͓̮̝̲͈̠͠e̯͎̕d̺͖Ḑ̳̳͕̲,̵͉̩̗ ̠L̫̺̪̯o͏̥u̢̪͈̙͓͎̗͙R̫͚̣̖̝R̯̘̖̖̝d̘̩͓̩ ̧̞͖̭Ar̪̬̼̖̝͚͇̕e̲̥̪̲S̩̠̥?̫͈̻́”

It spoke relatively clearly now. Ares, his name was Ares. The shambling corpse gave a swift nod, before ordering something quietly to the beast. Its form collapsed as it turned into an amorphous spectre, and in a split second, Ares was covered in the inky liquid, which began to flow into the wounds and torn flesh. The gore and entrails began to close up, and, when the process completed, he looked as if he was in perfect health… his skin was now smooth and without blemish, his dead eyes were two black balls, and his hands were virtually flawless. He looked too perfect. He looked artificial. The face in particular, it looked like a Ken doll with the exact features I’d imagined before, except more idealized, like the many dusty mannequins around the mall. He stared at me with a cold expression devoid of any emotion, then broke out into an unnerving smile.

“Go ahead, I don't care if you call this in. Nobody would believe you anyway.”

Once again this voice was screamed into my head. Whatever this thing was, it was terrifying, and I had to get out of here. I ran towards the door without looking back at Ares, that man-thing, even once. I kept running until I was completely lost. I decided to rest, far away from that thing.

I looked around for a place to sit. I found what I had been looking for at an old McDonald's. I sat down on one of the cheaply made chairs that had since rusted and deteriorated over time. I took a deep breath to calm myself down, and almost puked. The stench was horrific, like that death stench from earlier, but somehow so much worse.

I pinched my nose in order to eliminate the stench. There’s only one place that this stench could be coming from; the back room. The moment that I opened the kitchen, I couldn’t believe what I saw. I’ve seen some terrible things in my day, but nothing like this. The entire kitchen floor was covered in bodies. At least 26 different, horribly maimed carcasses. I backed up out of fear, I couldn’t stomach this one down, I puked all over the floor. Nowhere was safe in this place. I turned around, only to see that thing standing over me, looking as perfect as ever. He gave me a friendly smile, before his hand covered my eyes and I found myself melting away into the darkness.

I woke up to sunlight. Was it all a dream, had I just dozed off? I found myself sitting outside the mall next to an old, graffitied dumpster. I could still feel where his cold hand touched me. I didn’t want to think that it was real, that something *sinister* was permeating the abandoned space. I decided that it was smartest not to quell my doubts by going back inside.

Upon returning to the police station, I reported my gory discovery and asked to leave early, calling in sick for the rest of the week too. When I got home, I barely said hello to my wife Kristy and sat down on the La-Z-Boy without even changing out from my sweaty uniform. My son Tommy was playing with his PSP in the living room while my daughter Cassie came over to me holding her teal spectacled bunny toy in one hand and rubbing her eyes with the other.

"Daddy? I had a bad dweam."

I wish I could say the same.

After Kristy sent the kids to bed, I turned on the TV only to see a live broadcast as police cars swarmed the mall and a SWAT team was called, only to find the whole place deserted. The office was buzzing with rumors upon my return, with speculation ranging from a mass suicide to a cannibal serial killer.

I pondered that night's events over and over in my mind, grasping at any possible explanation. I needed time to process all this, and I still don't know exactly why that thing spared me, but I had the distinct feeling that it let me live because it already took what it needed from my memories. Whatever lead I knew about the missing scientists was unwillingly given to it. Something that seemed to help its… mission.

Or perhaps it saw something more primal.

It had seen something that had been taken from it, something very valuable, something that it would do anything to get back.

It had seen the joy of having a family, of laughing children, of simply living normally. Something that I believe it could never attain. Whatever it was, no, whatever HE was, I didn’t want to think about it.

I tried to bury this incident and move on, and I never planned to speak up about it. The reason I write this now, however, is a police report I recently saw that only confirmed my nightmares.

There are others like Ares out there.

Tomorrow I resign from the police force; it’s about time I retired anyway. I’ve got a family now, I can’t be dying on them, and I have a feeling that if I keep up this work, if I continue to investigate Ares...

Maybe that won’t be so [unlikely](/r/26FrightsofFreddy).