Some people call me a hero. I can’t disagree with them, because it’s actually kind of true. Believe it or not, I’ve saved a drowning man, pulled a girl from a burning building, and I even saved a dog from being swept away by a nasty flood. My friends thought I was crazy, but I thought I was just exercising my humanity. That and I was kind of an adrenaline junkie. It was my guilty pleasure. I’ve been sky diving and bungee jumping on more than one occasion. I’ve jumped off the ledge of a huge waterfall hoping that I didn’t hit shallow water. I’ve got a couple of scars to show for my endeavors. I don’t really do the adventurous things that I used to anymore. Not after what happened.
About seven years ago, a couple of friends and I were just heading out from a New Year’s party. It was freezing outside, and we had to walk six blocks to get back to our dorms. We all started walking, dreading the next twenty minutes or so of minus twenty-degree weather.
“Hey, w – wait a minute,” Jarrod said in his drunken stammer, “it’d be faster if we cut through the park.” We all took a moment to think about it. The city made it a point to close the park down for some reason. Something about there being too many hazards, like falling trees or people drowning in the pond. Michelle cringed at the thought of walking through a knock-off cemetery. Jarrod, Ellisia and I chuckled at her. The cold wind blew and stung my cheeks. It would save us an extra eighteen minutes, so we decided to go through the park.
We quickly made our way to the entrance, hopped the gate, and started walking. It was quite beautiful at two in the morning. The light from the moon glistened off of the frost that clung to the tree branches. I remembered walking through this park with my parents as a child. Walking by the pond in the summertime to see tourists in their rented boats, enjoying the day. I was kind of excited to see what the pond would look like in the moonlight. It had been so long since I’d seen it, let alone in the middle of winter and in the dead of night. It would have been a very peaceful walk if Michelle and Jarrod weren’t rambling on about who could drink more and not puke all over everybody. Since Ellisia and I were the two most sober people of the group, we held them up and made sure they didn’t slip on the path and crack their heads open.
We approached the pond, and it looked absolutely stunning in the moonlight. Even better than I remembered. We all stopped to take in the beautiful view when Michelle noticed something.
“What the hell is that?” she queried, pointing to something out on the ice. We all looked closely and saw something that, I’m pretty sure made all our hearts jump into our throats. A little girl stuck out on the frozen wasteland. In a panic, we immediately ran towards the water’s edge, cell phones at the ready. Ellisia was the first to get anybody on the line. She frantically told the officer what was going on. All the while, the girl was just standing there. Not moving, not shouting out for help.
“Are you okay?!” I shouted, cupping my hands around my mouth to amplify my voice. She still stood there in silence. While we panicked on the shoreline, I heard something. Something faint, but noticeable. I told everyone to be quiet and listen. I cupped my ear with my hand and listened in the direction of the girl. I couldn’t quite make out what the sound was. Then it hit me.
“The ice is breaking,” I said. Someone had to go out there and get her now. My friends paced back and forth wondering what to do now. If they weren’t going to act on it, I was. I took a couple of deep breaths, braced myself, and then cautiously stepped out onto the ice. My trio of friends stopped pacing and saw that I was going out onto the pond.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Jarrod asked, in a somewhat shocked manner.
“Don’t go out there, please, just wait until the police get here.” Ellisia beckoned. But I couldn’t wait. If I did, she would fall through.
The adrenaline was really flowing now. I couldn’t help but smile just a little bit, and let out a nervous chuckle. I tried to walk as fast as I could, but it seemed like I wasn’t going fast enough. I tried to keep calm, and proceeded to step cautiously. My eyes were fixated on the ice below my feet.
“Wow, you really are quite the crazy individual, aren’t you?” I muttered under my breath. I heard it crack again. The goofy grin I wore suddenly vanished. I stopped for second only to notice that the ice wasn’t cracking below me. I sped up just a little bit more, still watching the ice, making sure that I didn’t make it crack in the process. As I got closer, I looked up and saw the girl with a little more definition. She was so pale. Almost as white as the snow. I thought maybe it was a trick of the light from the moon, but it looked like she was shining. It looked like she was covered with ice or frost or something. I questioned whether or not if she was even alive at this point. But then, how else would she be standing on the ice? I asked myself. Just then, she let out a noise. Something that was barely audible, but nonetheless a noise. I tore off my jacket and extended the warm article of clothing hoping she would take it. “Don’t worry sweetie, everything’s going to be all right,” I said reassuringly. I was almost close enough to put the jacket on her, and that’s when I noticed something that made me stop dead in my tracks.
She wasn’t standing on the ice. There was a patch of ice that I failed to see before, right behind her that was broken. There was something protruding from the frigid water holding her up. This pale, grey, spiked tentacle. My eyes widened as it squeezed her. That’s when I came to the realization that it wasn’t the ice that was about to break, when I heard her ribs snap and a wet gurgle escape her mouth. As it squeezed her, blood dripped from her mouth and from the wounds that the spikes had made in her torso. I looked down at the gaping hole in the ice. To this day, I still don’t know what the hell I saw. It was this pale grey… thing, covered head to toe with pitch-black veins, and jagged spikes covered its entire body. It had these huge crimson eyes bordered in black. And when it smiled, I saw two sets of rotted, yellow fangs. I dropped my jacket. I could hear my heart pounding louder and louder. I wanted to run, but my feet wouldn’t allow me. The corpse of the young girl was suddenly pulled through the hole that the creature had made, and I saw it swim off. My eyes darted back and forth across the ice, wondering where it went. It didn’t even dawn on me that my friends were halfway across the ice when I saw them making their way toward me. I tried to yell at them – I tried to tell them to run, but all that came out was this pathetic whimper. They called my name, pleading that I hurry and come to shore with them before I fall through the ice too. I pushed passed my fear and made my feet move. I ran as fast as I could, trying not to slip on the ice.
“Run! Get the hell off the ice!” I warned them. They extended their hands to me and started walking my way again.
“Come on, hurry up!” Jarrod yelled back.
“Just go! Just go – get off the ice now!” I hollered back, desperately pleading for them to run.
Just then, I felt cold water and a jagged edge at my ankle. I fell and bumped my head on the cold surface. Before I knew it, I was being pulled into the icy depths of the pond. When my body was submerged in the water, it felt like a thousand daggers cutting into my skin. When the water hit my eyes, I thought the liquid inside was going to freeze. I immediately closed them. I tried not to scream from the pain. I had to conserve my air. But then I felt the tentacle cut into my ankle and another tentacle reach around my shoulder and squeeze. It kept pulling and pulling – it dislocated my shoulder. I couldn’t do it anymore. I screamed, letting out almost all of my air. I thrashed trying to break free. That only caused its spikes to cut deeper, allowing the frigid water to freeze my bloodstream even faster. I felt the warm tears behind my eyelids, and the burning in my lungs. I tried to scream one last time, but it started choking me with its tentacle. The spikes tore into my throat, and I opened my eyes again. Then I saw it. Those red eyes looked even more menacing now that it was up close. It wore a sinister smile as it licked my face. I started to feel light-headed. This was the end.
No, I thought to myself. I am not dying like this. I pushed passed the pain in my shoulder, raised my hands to its mouth and started widening its jaw. It squirmed, trying to shake me. I felt the tentacles loosen, and its teeth cut into my hands. I looked up and saw three hands submerged into the water. I was so exhausted by that point, but I had to keep fighting. I kicked, I squirmed, and I did what I had to in order to free myself. I used more force on its jaw, and I felt it crack. It let out this God awful screech, let me go, and swam off into the cold darkness below. I could feel the water start to enter my lungs. I tried to swim to the surface, but I was just so tired. I was barely able to extend my hand toward my friends. The last thing I remember seeing was the light of the moon before everything went dark.
* * * * * *
I awoke the next morning to the beeping of a heart monitor. I was in the hospital. I was covered with the thickest, warmest blankets ever. I tried to move, but when I did, pain shot through my entire body. My head, shoulder, throat, ankle, everything was just throbbing from the pain. My friends walked into the room, saw that I was awake and rushed over. They told me that they were able to grab ahold of me, pulled me from the water and rushed me to the hospital. They then bombarded me with questions pertaining to what pulled me into the water.
“Trust me,” I said, very weakly. “You don’t want to know.”
“Well, are you going to tell the cops what happened?” Michelle asked. I decided to just tell the police that I was drunk, and felt like doing something adventurous. ‘Cause, let’s face it, would they seriously believe me if I told them some water monster lured me out there and tried to kill me? Yeah, given the right state of mind, I wouldn’t fall for it either.
Needless to say, I don’t partake in any more heroic acts. I also haven’t been anywhere near water since. I’ve obtained a phobia of it, as you can well imagine. After college, my friends and I went our separate ways, did our own things. I have a family now, and so does Ellisia. We get together sometimes for playdates, and reminisce about old times. Some parts are left out. It doesn’t really matter though. I still have nightmares about that night. That thing under the ice. Its crimson eyes. I always tell myself that it happened a long time ago, and I try to put it behind me. It usually helps. Up until two weeks ago. Ellisia had taken her boys, my son and my daughter ice skating. She took them to her late father’s house by the lake. It was just them there. When she brought them home, my son said something that sent a chill up my spine. He said that he saw a very pale girl standing on the ice. And by her feet was a pale grey bump with two red dots.
Creepypasta offline - Spring Flu by: Emily Thurtithrea
The spring flu had been going around the school like usual, but some people were sicker than normal. They didn’t just have fever and headache – their faces were blotchy, their eyes bulged, and they all wheezed like they’d just run up ten flights of stairs without stopping. Cara McCormack was the first one who was really serious, though. I had the pleasure of being in bio with her when she opened her mouth to answer a question, but vomited a fountain of blood instead.
She was only the first. Pretty soon, classes were being constantly interrupted by students turning ashen and sprinting out the door, trying to make it to the bathroom before everything came up. The nurse’s office was flooded with wheezing, puking, fainting patients in a matter of hours. Of course, this being 1991, we didn’t have the option of calling parents to pick us up – going to the nurse was the only option. We didn’t know yet the nurses’ calls to the outside weren’t going through, and at that point, no one cared, because halfway through lunch, someone walked into the boys’ bathroom and found Paul Maschhoff lying dead in a puddle of blood and vomit. Unsurprisingly, all hell broke loose.
The panic was indescribable. All pretenses of having classes stopped. Teachers herded us into the gym, but it was impossible to get 700 terrified teenagers to sit quietly when their friends could be dying. Meanwhile, people were still getting sick. I remember gingerly patting someone’s back as she wheezed and tried to catch a breath, imagining that I could see plague germs crawling on her sweater, up my arm, and swarming over my skin. I jerked my hand away, and immediately felt terrible for being so callous.
Just then, a handful of teachers filed back into the gym, wearing lab coats borrowed from the science department. The makeshift masks that covered their mouths and noses transformed them from teachers we’d known for years into nameless robots. They corralled us into lines and called students up one by one. After a hasty examination – no stethoscopes, no thermometers, just a quick once-over – kids were sent outside, or to the back of the gym. In, out, in, in, in, out, out, out. They were separating us, sick from healthy.
As I drew closer to the front of the line, I suddenly felt a hand squeeze mine and practically jumped out of my skin.
“Chill out, it’s just me,” a voice whispered. I relaxed slightly at the sight of my best friend Katie, but her pinched, worried face had me concerned all over again. “Are you sick?” she asked nervously, her eyes searching my face.
“I don’t think so,” I said, realizing that I hadn’t even stopped to think about that all day. I ran through a mental checklist: Chills? No. Fever? No. Wheezing? No. Uncontrollable vomiting? Obviously not. “I guess I’m safe for now. How are you? Are you –”
“Next!” a masked teacher barked, beckoning me up to the front of the line. I meekly stepped up and opened my mouth as instructed. “Auditorium,” he said brusquely, checking something off on his clipboard.
"Why are we going to –” I began, but he cut me off without meeting my eyes.
“Auditorium, now!”
I slinked off and tried to wait for Katie, but another teacher snapped at me to move along. I stopped and gaped at him. It was my physics teacher, Mr. Claeys, who had seen me every single day for two years, and now he wouldn’t even look at me.
“Mr. Claeys? What’s going on?” I asked, immediately embarrassed by how squeaky and terrified my voice came out. “Why aren’t we being sent home? Where are the sick kids going? Why –”
“I can’t tell you anything. Just get to the auditorium,” he snapped. I gaped at him. What the hell was going on?
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Katie emerge from the doors, and I felt weak with relief. At least we were still together. We hustled off to the auditorium, where groups of students were huddled together, glancing around wildly every time someone entered the room, looking for their friends. Masked teachers stood around the walls and hushed us every time someone spoke.
I grabbed Katie’s arm and steered her into a row of seats far from the teachers.
“Katie, something’s wrong,” I began, whispering as quietly as possible.
"Did you just notice?!” she snapped hysterically. “Or is this a normal occurrence for you? People dying in the middle of the school day?”
“No, obviously – I mean, something’s wrong with the teachers. Why aren’t they letting us out? They should be sending us home or at least bringing doctors in here, but they’re cooping us up with other sick kids. Do our parents know? What’s happening? We have no way of knowing what’s going on!”
Her eyes widened in horror. “Well… they have us separated? So we should be okay, right?”
“For how long?” I whispered back. “Yeah, we’re separated, but we’ve all been exposed. Just you wait, pretty soon someone in the “healthy” room with us is going to start spewing. We can’t stay away from it. Katie, we’re all going to get it, we’re all going to die! We need to get out of here!”
“Quiet down, now!” a voice barked. I hadn’t even realized that my voice was escalating in panic. The room started to swirl and I couldn’t slow down my breathing. Oh my god, was I getting sick? I’m going to die, my brain was screaming. I’m going to die, I’m going to die!
“Emily, you need to calm the hell down,” Katie said. “Come on, breathe. In and out. In and out. We’re going to be fine, we’re going to get out of here and everything will be okay.”
I nodded weakly and put my head between my knees. Breathe in, breathe out. Katie rubbed my back gently.
“Everything will be okay,” she murmured again.
She was wrong.
Kids in the auditorium with us started getting sick, just like I predicted. It started with heavy wheezing as they struggled to get air into their lungs. Their faces turned pasty and blotchy, and they shivered violently like leaves in a high wind. Friends of the sick kids tried to shield them from the teachers, but they couldn’t hide the inevitable vomit and blood. Teachers grabbed the sick ones by the elbows and marched them out – to where, we didn’t know. Katie and I huddled in a corner. At some point, I realized I was crying, but couldn’t remember when I had started.
I don’t know how long we were in that auditorium – it felt but years, but was probably just a few hours – before the vice principal poked her head in and beckoned for the teachers to go outside. Everyone looked around at each other nervously, afraid to talk for fear that the teachers would come back in and scream at us. But they didn’t come back. Finally, one senior boy stood up.
“I’m going out,” he said, voice shaking. “We’re right by the front doors, we can get out. Come on, who’s with me? This is insane!”
We were all frozen on the spot. He stared us down until finally a few others slowly stood and walked to the doors to join him. They peeked out the doors and quietly tiptoed out into the hall. The rest of us sat in terrified silence, waiting… and then there was a scream.
“THE DOORS ARE LOCKED! WE CAN’T GET OUT!”
It was a match that lit us on fire. Suddenly we weren’t frozen to the spot and silent anymore – we leaped over chairs and ran out of the room to the massive glass doors. Hysteria took over. Kids were banging on the doors, screaming, throwing heavy objects at them, but the thick glass wouldn’t give.
Oh my god, we were all going to die! What was happening?! I had to be dreaming. This wasn’t possible. The teachers had locked us in here!
Someone shouted a warning as a group of teachers rounded the corner. Katie seized my hand, and we took off at a dead run. Kids fanned out all over the school trying to escape. We banged on every door, but to no avail – they were locked and blocked off. I saw Mr. Claeys running full-tilt towards us, so I panicked and dragged Katie into the first open classroom I saw, and we piled chairs against the door to keep him out.
Then, breathing heavily, we turned around.
Bodies were stacked everywhere.
My head reeled and I almost blacked out. There were so many – at least 15 kids – and I know some of them. There was Lily, and Danny, and Jennifer, and that girl who sat beside me in calculus and copied my homework… oh my god, they were all dead. They were dead. They were dead. I couldn’t stop repeating the phrase in my mind.
A high-pitched noise was building louder and louder. It took me a minute to realize it was Katie, screaming her lungs out. I lunged at her and slapped her, shocking her into silence.
“Pull it together,” I hissed, acutely aware that I myself was far from pulled together.
“I CAN’T!” she yelled hysterically. “I just came to school today and like usual and now I’m going to die – we’re all going to die! We’re all going to die in a puddle of our own blood while the teachers lock us in! What the hell is going on? What’s happening? Why is this happening?” She crumpled to the ground and sobbed.
Somehow, seeing her fall apart gave me a steely resolve. One of us had to stay sane, and for now, it was going to be me. I jerked her roughly to her feet.
"Come on, we’re getting out of here!” I ordered. There was no way we were going to hide in a room full of bodies – I’d find somewhere else to wait while we figured out a plan. We crept out the door and tiptoed down the hall to the next classroom. I pulled the handle and flung myself inside.
Bodies everywhere, covered in blood. The stench was already setting in. All of their eyes were open.
Next classroom. More dead kids. They were everywhere, and I lost count of how many were dead. This plague, or whatever it was, was moving fast. How many people were left alive? I finally slumped to the floor in the third classroom we entered, trying not to look at the bodies. My inner strength drained out rapidly, and I gave into tears.
Suddenly, Katie hushed me. “Listen,” she whispered, pressing her ear against the door.
Out in the hall, I could hear two teachers’ voices. I thought I could tell that one of them was Mr. Claeys. I didn’t recognize the other one. She was weeping and her voice cracked on every word.
“Why is this happening?” she choked out. “Why can’t we get out? Who’s doing this to us? I can’t do this anymore, I can’t see any more kids die!”
I stared at Katie. Maybe… maybe the teachers weren’t the ones locking us in. Maybe it was someone else. But why couldn’t they do something about it? They could call 911, and the police could get us out of here! Before I could even open my mouth to whisper to Katie, Mr. Claeys answered my question.
“I don’t know, and the phone lines are dead. I don’t know what’s going on. We’ve lost control of the students. We can’t separate them anymore, and there are so many dying. They’re – I’m – we’re just going to have to…” his voice trailed off incoherently, and he started hyperventilating. Great, now the teachers were losing it too.
We heard footsteps as Mr. Claeys and the other teacher walked away, and then silence. Katie and I fell into a stupor, our heads still leaning against the door. We sat like that until the sky darkened.
Katie stirred slightly. “Our parents will be wondering about us by now,” she murmured. “Or people who have to go to work, or something. They’ll all be late. Someone will find us, right?”
I couldn’t answer. Nothing made sense.
It occurred to me that I desperately had to use the bathroom. Somehow, biological needs didn’t go away amid terror. Katie and I edged down the hallway quietly, heading for the bathroom, but we didn’t even need to bother – no one was around, and the school was silent as the grave. Which was fitting, of course. We wandered the halls in a daze, looking for signs of life, but there were none. Were we the last ones alive? I couldn’t believe the thought. Surely this disease hadn’t killed over 700 people in one day.
We fell asleep in a supply closet – the one place that was free of rotting bodies. I faded in and out of nightmares, listening to Katie’s rhythmic breathing.
Suddenly, I jerked out of my half-slumber. Something was wrong. Katie’s breathing was no longer regular and even – she was gasping for air, as though her throat was slowly closing in on itself. I stared at her in horror and she stared back, starting to shake with chills.
“No, oh my god, no, this can’t be happening! Not you too!” I gabbled breathlessly. Not Katie too. Hadn’t enough people died? I prayed to any god that might be out there to rescue us, but no one came. We were all alone.
I watched Katie’s terrified face transform into red and white patches and felt her skin radiate heat. I held her tightly as she shook uncontrollably, teeth chattering so much that she couldn’t speak. Not Katie, not Katie, not Katie, please God… not Katie… Her rasping breath grew louder and louder, and something in her face changed, like she could see death coming for her.
"Emily, please –” she started to say, but I never found out what she wanted, because the next thing I knew, she was retching blood all over me.
Have you ever held your dying best friend in your arms and watched the light leave her eyes?
Have you ever screamed and sobbed to an empty universe when you felt her heart stop beating?
Have you sat there for hours and felt her skin cool?
I don’t remember how long I was there before the SWAT team came. I don’t know who alerted them or how they got in. I remember wandering the school in a daze, the only living person in a mausoleum.
I do remember being in the hospital for a very long time. I remember not speaking for months. I remember the police and the social workers sitting me down and explaining that one of the biology teachers apparently had a secret lab in his home and had cooked up this virus. No one knew why. No one had ever suspected something like that coming from him.
It didn’t matter. You might be surprised, but I never looked into the case file or found out more about what happened. Nothing mattered. In one day, I had lost everyone. At 16 years old, I knew the horror of staring at body after body of my friends and teachers, until I was utterly numb to the sight. And I have spent the rest of my life wondering why I alone survived.
Even after more than 20 years, when spring flu season comes around, I see one sick person and I’m instantly back at high school, covered in the blood of my dead best friend.
Think about that the next time you come down with what you think is a nasty cold, and be grateful that’s all it is.
She was only the first. Pretty soon, classes were being constantly interrupted by students turning ashen and sprinting out the door, trying to make it to the bathroom before everything came up. The nurse’s office was flooded with wheezing, puking, fainting patients in a matter of hours. Of course, this being 1991, we didn’t have the option of calling parents to pick us up – going to the nurse was the only option. We didn’t know yet the nurses’ calls to the outside weren’t going through, and at that point, no one cared, because halfway through lunch, someone walked into the boys’ bathroom and found Paul Maschhoff lying dead in a puddle of blood and vomit. Unsurprisingly, all hell broke loose.
The panic was indescribable. All pretenses of having classes stopped. Teachers herded us into the gym, but it was impossible to get 700 terrified teenagers to sit quietly when their friends could be dying. Meanwhile, people were still getting sick. I remember gingerly patting someone’s back as she wheezed and tried to catch a breath, imagining that I could see plague germs crawling on her sweater, up my arm, and swarming over my skin. I jerked my hand away, and immediately felt terrible for being so callous.
Just then, a handful of teachers filed back into the gym, wearing lab coats borrowed from the science department. The makeshift masks that covered their mouths and noses transformed them from teachers we’d known for years into nameless robots. They corralled us into lines and called students up one by one. After a hasty examination – no stethoscopes, no thermometers, just a quick once-over – kids were sent outside, or to the back of the gym. In, out, in, in, in, out, out, out. They were separating us, sick from healthy.
As I drew closer to the front of the line, I suddenly felt a hand squeeze mine and practically jumped out of my skin.
“Chill out, it’s just me,” a voice whispered. I relaxed slightly at the sight of my best friend Katie, but her pinched, worried face had me concerned all over again. “Are you sick?” she asked nervously, her eyes searching my face.
“I don’t think so,” I said, realizing that I hadn’t even stopped to think about that all day. I ran through a mental checklist: Chills? No. Fever? No. Wheezing? No. Uncontrollable vomiting? Obviously not. “I guess I’m safe for now. How are you? Are you –”
“Next!” a masked teacher barked, beckoning me up to the front of the line. I meekly stepped up and opened my mouth as instructed. “Auditorium,” he said brusquely, checking something off on his clipboard.
"Why are we going to –” I began, but he cut me off without meeting my eyes.
“Auditorium, now!”
I slinked off and tried to wait for Katie, but another teacher snapped at me to move along. I stopped and gaped at him. It was my physics teacher, Mr. Claeys, who had seen me every single day for two years, and now he wouldn’t even look at me.
“Mr. Claeys? What’s going on?” I asked, immediately embarrassed by how squeaky and terrified my voice came out. “Why aren’t we being sent home? Where are the sick kids going? Why –”
“I can’t tell you anything. Just get to the auditorium,” he snapped. I gaped at him. What the hell was going on?
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Katie emerge from the doors, and I felt weak with relief. At least we were still together. We hustled off to the auditorium, where groups of students were huddled together, glancing around wildly every time someone entered the room, looking for their friends. Masked teachers stood around the walls and hushed us every time someone spoke.
I grabbed Katie’s arm and steered her into a row of seats far from the teachers.
“Katie, something’s wrong,” I began, whispering as quietly as possible.
"Did you just notice?!” she snapped hysterically. “Or is this a normal occurrence for you? People dying in the middle of the school day?”
“No, obviously – I mean, something’s wrong with the teachers. Why aren’t they letting us out? They should be sending us home or at least bringing doctors in here, but they’re cooping us up with other sick kids. Do our parents know? What’s happening? We have no way of knowing what’s going on!”
Her eyes widened in horror. “Well… they have us separated? So we should be okay, right?”
“For how long?” I whispered back. “Yeah, we’re separated, but we’ve all been exposed. Just you wait, pretty soon someone in the “healthy” room with us is going to start spewing. We can’t stay away from it. Katie, we’re all going to get it, we’re all going to die! We need to get out of here!”
“Quiet down, now!” a voice barked. I hadn’t even realized that my voice was escalating in panic. The room started to swirl and I couldn’t slow down my breathing. Oh my god, was I getting sick? I’m going to die, my brain was screaming. I’m going to die, I’m going to die!
“Emily, you need to calm the hell down,” Katie said. “Come on, breathe. In and out. In and out. We’re going to be fine, we’re going to get out of here and everything will be okay.”
I nodded weakly and put my head between my knees. Breathe in, breathe out. Katie rubbed my back gently.
“Everything will be okay,” she murmured again.
She was wrong.
Kids in the auditorium with us started getting sick, just like I predicted. It started with heavy wheezing as they struggled to get air into their lungs. Their faces turned pasty and blotchy, and they shivered violently like leaves in a high wind. Friends of the sick kids tried to shield them from the teachers, but they couldn’t hide the inevitable vomit and blood. Teachers grabbed the sick ones by the elbows and marched them out – to where, we didn’t know. Katie and I huddled in a corner. At some point, I realized I was crying, but couldn’t remember when I had started.
I don’t know how long we were in that auditorium – it felt but years, but was probably just a few hours – before the vice principal poked her head in and beckoned for the teachers to go outside. Everyone looked around at each other nervously, afraid to talk for fear that the teachers would come back in and scream at us. But they didn’t come back. Finally, one senior boy stood up.
“I’m going out,” he said, voice shaking. “We’re right by the front doors, we can get out. Come on, who’s with me? This is insane!”
We were all frozen on the spot. He stared us down until finally a few others slowly stood and walked to the doors to join him. They peeked out the doors and quietly tiptoed out into the hall. The rest of us sat in terrified silence, waiting… and then there was a scream.
“THE DOORS ARE LOCKED! WE CAN’T GET OUT!”
It was a match that lit us on fire. Suddenly we weren’t frozen to the spot and silent anymore – we leaped over chairs and ran out of the room to the massive glass doors. Hysteria took over. Kids were banging on the doors, screaming, throwing heavy objects at them, but the thick glass wouldn’t give.
Oh my god, we were all going to die! What was happening?! I had to be dreaming. This wasn’t possible. The teachers had locked us in here!
Someone shouted a warning as a group of teachers rounded the corner. Katie seized my hand, and we took off at a dead run. Kids fanned out all over the school trying to escape. We banged on every door, but to no avail – they were locked and blocked off. I saw Mr. Claeys running full-tilt towards us, so I panicked and dragged Katie into the first open classroom I saw, and we piled chairs against the door to keep him out.
Then, breathing heavily, we turned around.
Bodies were stacked everywhere.
My head reeled and I almost blacked out. There were so many – at least 15 kids – and I know some of them. There was Lily, and Danny, and Jennifer, and that girl who sat beside me in calculus and copied my homework… oh my god, they were all dead. They were dead. They were dead. I couldn’t stop repeating the phrase in my mind.
A high-pitched noise was building louder and louder. It took me a minute to realize it was Katie, screaming her lungs out. I lunged at her and slapped her, shocking her into silence.
“Pull it together,” I hissed, acutely aware that I myself was far from pulled together.
“I CAN’T!” she yelled hysterically. “I just came to school today and like usual and now I’m going to die – we’re all going to die! We’re all going to die in a puddle of our own blood while the teachers lock us in! What the hell is going on? What’s happening? Why is this happening?” She crumpled to the ground and sobbed.
Somehow, seeing her fall apart gave me a steely resolve. One of us had to stay sane, and for now, it was going to be me. I jerked her roughly to her feet.
"Come on, we’re getting out of here!” I ordered. There was no way we were going to hide in a room full of bodies – I’d find somewhere else to wait while we figured out a plan. We crept out the door and tiptoed down the hall to the next classroom. I pulled the handle and flung myself inside.
Bodies everywhere, covered in blood. The stench was already setting in. All of their eyes were open.
Next classroom. More dead kids. They were everywhere, and I lost count of how many were dead. This plague, or whatever it was, was moving fast. How many people were left alive? I finally slumped to the floor in the third classroom we entered, trying not to look at the bodies. My inner strength drained out rapidly, and I gave into tears.
Suddenly, Katie hushed me. “Listen,” she whispered, pressing her ear against the door.
Out in the hall, I could hear two teachers’ voices. I thought I could tell that one of them was Mr. Claeys. I didn’t recognize the other one. She was weeping and her voice cracked on every word.
“Why is this happening?” she choked out. “Why can’t we get out? Who’s doing this to us? I can’t do this anymore, I can’t see any more kids die!”
I stared at Katie. Maybe… maybe the teachers weren’t the ones locking us in. Maybe it was someone else. But why couldn’t they do something about it? They could call 911, and the police could get us out of here! Before I could even open my mouth to whisper to Katie, Mr. Claeys answered my question.
“I don’t know, and the phone lines are dead. I don’t know what’s going on. We’ve lost control of the students. We can’t separate them anymore, and there are so many dying. They’re – I’m – we’re just going to have to…” his voice trailed off incoherently, and he started hyperventilating. Great, now the teachers were losing it too.
We heard footsteps as Mr. Claeys and the other teacher walked away, and then silence. Katie and I fell into a stupor, our heads still leaning against the door. We sat like that until the sky darkened.
Katie stirred slightly. “Our parents will be wondering about us by now,” she murmured. “Or people who have to go to work, or something. They’ll all be late. Someone will find us, right?”
I couldn’t answer. Nothing made sense.
It occurred to me that I desperately had to use the bathroom. Somehow, biological needs didn’t go away amid terror. Katie and I edged down the hallway quietly, heading for the bathroom, but we didn’t even need to bother – no one was around, and the school was silent as the grave. Which was fitting, of course. We wandered the halls in a daze, looking for signs of life, but there were none. Were we the last ones alive? I couldn’t believe the thought. Surely this disease hadn’t killed over 700 people in one day.
We fell asleep in a supply closet – the one place that was free of rotting bodies. I faded in and out of nightmares, listening to Katie’s rhythmic breathing.
Suddenly, I jerked out of my half-slumber. Something was wrong. Katie’s breathing was no longer regular and even – she was gasping for air, as though her throat was slowly closing in on itself. I stared at her in horror and she stared back, starting to shake with chills.
“No, oh my god, no, this can’t be happening! Not you too!” I gabbled breathlessly. Not Katie too. Hadn’t enough people died? I prayed to any god that might be out there to rescue us, but no one came. We were all alone.
I watched Katie’s terrified face transform into red and white patches and felt her skin radiate heat. I held her tightly as she shook uncontrollably, teeth chattering so much that she couldn’t speak. Not Katie, not Katie, not Katie, please God… not Katie… Her rasping breath grew louder and louder, and something in her face changed, like she could see death coming for her.
"Emily, please –” she started to say, but I never found out what she wanted, because the next thing I knew, she was retching blood all over me.
Have you ever held your dying best friend in your arms and watched the light leave her eyes?
Have you ever screamed and sobbed to an empty universe when you felt her heart stop beating?
Have you sat there for hours and felt her skin cool?
I don’t remember how long I was there before the SWAT team came. I don’t know who alerted them or how they got in. I remember wandering the school in a daze, the only living person in a mausoleum.
I do remember being in the hospital for a very long time. I remember not speaking for months. I remember the police and the social workers sitting me down and explaining that one of the biology teachers apparently had a secret lab in his home and had cooked up this virus. No one knew why. No one had ever suspected something like that coming from him.
It didn’t matter. You might be surprised, but I never looked into the case file or found out more about what happened. Nothing mattered. In one day, I had lost everyone. At 16 years old, I knew the horror of staring at body after body of my friends and teachers, until I was utterly numb to the sight. And I have spent the rest of my life wondering why I alone survived.
Even after more than 20 years, when spring flu season comes around, I see one sick person and I’m instantly back at high school, covered in the blood of my dead best friend.
Think about that the next time you come down with what you think is a nasty cold, and be grateful that’s all it is.
Creepypasta offline - I Love Numbers by: Tyler Ouellette
I love numbers, even numbers to be exact. I like that there are 48 stairs leading up to my cell. I like that I get precisely four hours of leisure time every day, no more, no less. I like that my wake up time, my breakfast time, my lunchtime, and my dinner time all happen on times ending in zero. I like that there are 80 cells in my block, 20 on each of the four floors. I like that my cell is on the fourth floor, six doors down. I don’t like that there are 17 bars on my cell door. I don’t like that my prisoner number is 15393, all odd numbers, my least favorite. I hate that I was only able to kill 19 people before I was caught.
It began when I was a child. Six years, eight months, and fourteen days old to be exact. At first, I started by counting the letters in my name, Oliver. Eventually, my desire for even numbers forced me to move on to anything and everything around me. My family began calling my routine my “Counts.” My Counts would happen all throughout the day. As soon as I woke up at 6:44 a.m., I would count 20 teeth, 20 teeth, 20 teeth, 20 teeth, the same as the day before. After counting my action figures (twelve, twelve, twelve, twelve) I would shower. Showering was one of my favorite parts of the day because I could control the numbers. Every shower was set to the tenth notch, the perfect temperature, and lasted exactly 600 seconds, 10 minutes. These numbers are my favorite because they’re even numbers, but also because they end in zero. At 7:14, I would walk down the 14 stairs in our house, counting each one along the way. I would eat my cereal, meticulously counting the number of seconds each spoonful took to chew. Before getting on the bus at 7:39, I would count our fridge magnets: seven, seven, seven, seven. This is where my family first started noticing my Counts. At first, they thought it was just a normal quirk little kids have when they learn something new. Soon enough, though, my Counts became worse.
My first-grade teacher, Ms. Sullivan, would tell my parents that I wasn’t as developed as the other kids. She noticed that I would take longer than the other students on every assignment. At first, my parents didn’t understand why; they thought I was doing great based on my Counts at home. They began asking me questions, usually nine questions every night. I hated their questions, I hated that they didn’t ask one more or one less to be even, but I always answered. Through hearing my responses, they began to realize that my Counts weren’t just my young brain trying to understand numbers. I would tell them about how when I was at school, I couldn’t focus on my work because there were too many things to count. The number of books on the shelf, the number of markers and colored pencils and crayons strewn across the craft table, the number of branches on the tree right outside the classroom window. One of my favorite Counts was when I would count the kids in the classroom: sixteen, sixteen, sixteen, sixteen, an even number. When someone was absent, though, it could throw off the entire day. I had an even more difficult time trying to get my work done. All I could focus on was the feeling that something was unbalanced in the room.
Eventually, my parents took me to the doctor. While I was waiting in the examination room, I counted the jars on the desk (three, three, three, three), the lights in the room (six, six, six, six), and anything else in the room that my eyes fell upon. After waiting eight minutes and 54 seconds, my doctor, Dr. Stephanie, finally arrived. She started asking me questions that made me uncomfortable, but I knew my parents wanted me to answer, so I did.
“Oliver,” she started to question me, “what’s on your mind right now?”
“The pens in your pocket. Three. I don’t like three,” I responded.
“And why don’t you like the number three?”
“It’s an odd. I like evens. They’re the good numbers.”
“That’s great! I like the evens better too. So when you’re counting, you must always count an even number of times then?”
Looking back on this conversation, it seems like Dr. Stephanie was just appeasing me since I was only six years, ten months, and twenty-two days old.
“Always four times. Sometimes more times if I need to.”
“Your parents tell me that you aren’t paying attention to your work at school. Is this because you’re too busy counting?”
“Yeah. There’s lots to count in Ms. Sullivan’s room. I never feel like I’m done counting yet.”
“I could see why that would be hard to focus! Hopefully, we can do something to help improve your work, okay? I just need to speak to your parents out in the hall for a minute and we’ll be right back in. Don’t move a muscle!”
Dr. Stephanie left me in the room alone while she talked to my parents in the hall, forgetting to close the door as they left. I looked down at the floor and started counting the tiles for the sixth time since I entered the office. As I was counting, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, I heard Dr. Stephanie quietly mention something about medication. I didn’t know what this meant at the time, but obviously my parents did and they did not like it. They started yelling, “Our son does not need medication,” and “We will not be coming back to this office!” My mother grabbed my arm and took me out to the car before I was able to finish counting the tiles. I never asked what was wrong; I was too busy counting all the street signs on the way home. They never took me to another doctor again.
Nothing changed after the meeting with Dr. Stephanie. I continued to do my Counts every day and I still struggled in school because I just could not focus. Two months and three days after the doctor’s appointment, a new student, Parker, joined our class. Seventeen, seventeen, seventeen, seventeen students in the class. The classroom had become permanently unbalanced because of Parker. I hated him. My ability to focus on my work dropped even lower. The Counts got even worse since I was constantly craving even numbers.
One day after school, my desire got too strong. I remembered Parker was on my bus and lived on my street. The bus stopped at its fourth stop, our stop, and we both got off. Instead of going to my house, I decided to follow Parker to see where he lived. I counted the steps as I lurked behind him out of his line of sight. We got to his house after 474 steps. I watched from a distance as he walked in through the front door, unsure of my next move. After 12 minutes and 19 seconds, he came back outside to play basketball in his driveway. At the time, my childish mind thought the perfect way to get back at him would be to push him and yell at him. I approached him in his driveway and said, “Parker, you’re a big meanie and I don’t want you in my class! You messed up my Counts!”
He turned around and looked at me with a confused look. Obviously, he had no idea what my Counts were, but it felt invigorating to finally yell at him. He started to talk but wasn’t able to get the words out before I pushed him to the ground.
I’ll never forget the sound of my first kill. It was a hollow noise, but with an alarming crack, like a wooden baseball bat shattering. His head just happened to land on the only rock in his entire driveway. A puddle of red began to soak the pavement around his head. He wasn’t moving. Even though I was only six at the time, I knew I had done something very wrong. I really didn’t mean to hurt him. I just wanted to push him down to scare him. I turned around and ran home after only waiting for four seconds. While I was running, all I could think was What if I hurt him? and I didn’t mean to. When I arrived home, I was glad to see my parents weren’t back from work yet. This gave me some time to pull myself together. They came home at 5:27 and I stayed quiet for the rest of the night.
The next day in class, I was doing my Counts and I only counted sixteen, sixteen, sixteen, sixteen students. Parker wasn’t here. Ms. Sullivan gathered us all in a circle and started speaking to us in a somber voice.
“Okay, everyone, you may have noticed that Parker isn’t here today,” she started.
We all nodded.
“Well, Parker had an accident yesterday while he was playing outside. He hit his head very hard and won’t be able to come to class anymore. This is very sad for me and it is okay for you all to be sad too. If anyone needs anything today, come talk to me, okay?”
“Okay,” we all say in unison.
“Great. Now let’s all go back to our desks so we can begin class.”
As we all got up and started heading back to our desks, I began thinking of Parker. At the time, I knew very little about death, but I knew it was permanent. I knew what I had done to Parker was permanent. Initially, this scared me. I was worried someone would find out that I was the one that pushed him. That it was my fault he wasn’t going to be coming to class anymore. The more I thought about this, I realized the class would always be even now. Sixteen, sixteen, sixteen, sixteen. My Counts wouldn’t be messed up anymore. I was responsible for controlling the numbers. Usually, when I controlled the numbers, it was for little things like the number of bites of food I took or how many times I counted something, This time, I controlled the entire classroom; I made the whole thing feel balanced again. I could use this ability for the rest of my life and that’s exactly what I did.
The next five years and six months were rather uneventful. No one ever found out that I was the one who killed Parker. The cops deemed it an accident, saying that he tripped while he was out playing by himself. I had just started sixth grade which meant going to a new school and discovering all new things to count. I had six classes, five of which had an even number of students. The only one that didn’t was my science class. Every day I would go to the class and feel unbalanced. My Counts were messed up and my ability to work had taken a hit again. I decided I needed to control the numbers. I knew that this girl in my class, Paige, had a crush on me. She would follow me around and always interrupt my Counts. I was so irritated by her; she would be my next target.
This time, I didn’t want it to be an accident. I wanted to feel the responsibility of controlling the numbers. For three weeks and three days, I plotted the perfect plan. First, I would ask Paige to the school dance that was only two weeks and six days away. While we were at the dance, I would tell her that I wanted to kiss her. Finally, we would sneak off to the bathroom where I would kill her and make the numbers even again.
Paige obviously said yes when I asked her to the dance. The next two weeks and five days went by painfully slow as all I could think about was controlling the numbers. Finally, though, the day of the dance arrived. My parents dropped me off at the school and I waited outside for seven minutes and 43 seconds. She couldn’t even wait a little bit longer to make an even amount of time. She really is the worst, I thought to myself as we walked inside. She was ecstatic that I finally acknowledged her and actually asked her to the dance. We reached the cafeteria, where the dance was being held and saw a dark room with loud music and sixth graders running around like animals. I always hated school dances because there were just too many things to count: the number of kids, the number of songs they played, how long each song was, the number of different foods they were serving, and so much more. I knew, however, that coming to this dance would be worth it.
“Would you mind if we danced over there?” I asked, pointing to the corner of the room closest to the bathroom.
“Of course not,” she said, slightly confused, but still happy that I had asked to dance with her.
Neither of us knew how to dance so we awkwardly just shuffled around for 10 minutes and 54 seconds until finally, I said, “Hey, Paige? Would you maybe, um, want to kiss me? We could go into the bathroom so it’s not so dark.”
I was incredibly nervous. Not because I didn’t want to kiss her, but because I was finally going to be able to control the numbers.
“O-o-okay,” she responded, flustered.
I grabbed her arm and rushed her off to the girls’ bathroom. As soon as we got there, I made sure no one else was hiding in the stalls. We were alone. She had a huge smile on her face, and I faked a smile for her too. As we were both leaning in for the kiss, I felt around for the corner of the sink. I placed my hand on the right side of her head. Instead of guiding her face to mine, I slammed her head into the corner of the sink, leaving a red smudge. She immediately collapsed to the ground. I put my ear to her nose and counted ten seconds. She wasn’t breathing. I had finally done it; I controlled the numbers. The high I felt from making the numbers even was like nothing I had ever experienced. My brain was overwhelmed by even numbers. I was in control of all the numbers again and this time I was wholly responsible. However, I wasn’t done yet. I needed to make this look like an accident. I grabbed a wet floor sign out of the nearest janitor’s closet and rushed back to the bathroom. Thankfully, no one had found Paige yet. I splashed some water on the ground and on the bottom of Paige’s shoes. Next, I just placed the wet floor sign right at her feet and ran back out to the dance. No one ever found out I was the one who killed her.
As I grew older, I never outgrew my Counts or my overwhelming desire for even numbers. I continued to kill the people who messed up my Counts. Natalie, when I was 14 for being the seventh member in my English group, Caleb, when I was 19 for being my third roommate, Marcus, when I was 22 for always leaving out TV volume on an odd number, Sheryl when I was 24 for sending out 17 or 13 or 15 emails every day, and 12 other people who irritated me. I learned to get creative with my kills since I needed to make them look like accidents or make sure the bodies would never be found. Sometimes I would hit people in the head hard enough to kill them and plant props to give the appearance that they slipped and hit their head. Other times I would slip poison into people’s food which would cause their organs to shut down and not cause any suspicion on an autopsy. One time, I hung a person while they were still alive to make it look like a suicide. I never left any evidence until my 19th and final kill.
My 19th kill was a man named Ellis that I worked with. Ellis wasn’t the odd number in a group and he didn’t do anything noticeable in odd amounts, but he would always interrupt my Counts. When I was at my desk, I would count my picture frames (four, four, four, four) and he would interrupt me multiple times a day. I was so irritated by him, I knew I had to kill him.
Since we worked together, it was easy to figure out where I would kill him: by his car after work. I kept a wooden bat in my car that I often used on many of my victims. The end of the day came and I saw Ellis getting ready to leave, so I quietly gathered all my belongings, put on my coat, and slipped out before he could. I rushed down to my car, grabbed my bat, and hid in the bushes near his car. After waiting three minutes and 16 seconds, I heard the click of his car unlocking. Now was my chance. Without saying a word, I darted out from the snowy bushes right in front of him and brought my bat down onto his skull. The impact made a loud, hollow cracking noise and shattered my bat. I immediately knew something wasn’t right. Ellis fell to the ground, the front of his head slightly indented. He was still breathing. Before I could react, he stumbled onto his feet and slugged me right across the face. I remember feeling my nose bleeding, but I wasn’t paying attention to it. Instead, I was focused on finishing what I started. I raised the splintered end of the bat that I still had in my hand and brought it down onto his skull one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight times before he finally stopped breathing.
Before I left, I had to make it look like he slipped on ice. Since it was winter at the time, I poured water right at Ellis’ feet, knowing it would freeze within minutes. Next, I took what was left of my bat and hit the side mirror four times to make it look like Ellis hit his head on it after he slipped. Finally, I gathered all nineteen splinters of my bat and went home. I was thrilled to no longer have to worry about Ellis interrupting my counts. My excitement, however, didn’t last very long.
The next few days went on as normal as they possibly could be. I did all my Counts without any interruptions, which was a wonderful and new feeling. The people in the office mourned over Ellis, but I didn’t care; he was just one less person I had to worry about counting. Everything was going great until five days after the murder. On that day, I heard a knock on my door while getting ready for worked. I rushed downstairs, counting them as I went, and opened the door. Three cops greeted me with a pair of handcuffs.
“Oliver Miller, you are under arrest for the murder of Ellis Langdon.”
After 19 kills, I had finally been caught. I felt incomplete, like a huge part of me had just been taken away. Obviously, I knew I was going to jail for what I had done which meant I would never get my 20th kill. I would be incomplete for the rest of my life.
Apparently, what had happened was when Ellis punched me in the face, he got some of my blood on his knuckles. It was tested and traced back to me. They searched my car while I was at work one day and found the remains of the bat, which had his DNA all over it.
After I was arrested for Ellis’ murder, the cops launched a full investigation on me. They connected 17 out of the 18 other murders I had committed to me. The only one they couldn’t prove I did was Parker, but at that point, it didn’t matter. I had killed more people in thirty-eight years than three serial killers do in their whole lifetime, combined. My court trial went as anyone would expect: I plead not guilty, there was way too much evidence against me, I was found guilty. The worst part was when the judge was reading the verdict, he granted me 19 life sentences, one for every person I had killed. He knew it would be another odd number that would nag me for the rest of my life.
I have been in prison for six years, nine months, and 14 days. Every single day has been hell. I’m constantly craving more even numbers, but I know if I kill someone in here, I get thrown in solitary for seven days. My whole life feels unbalanced. My Counts haven’t felt right ever since I got in here. The only thought that has run through my head for the past six years is 19, 19, 19, 19. I can’t handle the incomplete feeling anymore. Tonight, I will get my 20th kill: myself.
It began when I was a child. Six years, eight months, and fourteen days old to be exact. At first, I started by counting the letters in my name, Oliver. Eventually, my desire for even numbers forced me to move on to anything and everything around me. My family began calling my routine my “Counts.” My Counts would happen all throughout the day. As soon as I woke up at 6:44 a.m., I would count 20 teeth, 20 teeth, 20 teeth, 20 teeth, the same as the day before. After counting my action figures (twelve, twelve, twelve, twelve) I would shower. Showering was one of my favorite parts of the day because I could control the numbers. Every shower was set to the tenth notch, the perfect temperature, and lasted exactly 600 seconds, 10 minutes. These numbers are my favorite because they’re even numbers, but also because they end in zero. At 7:14, I would walk down the 14 stairs in our house, counting each one along the way. I would eat my cereal, meticulously counting the number of seconds each spoonful took to chew. Before getting on the bus at 7:39, I would count our fridge magnets: seven, seven, seven, seven. This is where my family first started noticing my Counts. At first, they thought it was just a normal quirk little kids have when they learn something new. Soon enough, though, my Counts became worse.
My first-grade teacher, Ms. Sullivan, would tell my parents that I wasn’t as developed as the other kids. She noticed that I would take longer than the other students on every assignment. At first, my parents didn’t understand why; they thought I was doing great based on my Counts at home. They began asking me questions, usually nine questions every night. I hated their questions, I hated that they didn’t ask one more or one less to be even, but I always answered. Through hearing my responses, they began to realize that my Counts weren’t just my young brain trying to understand numbers. I would tell them about how when I was at school, I couldn’t focus on my work because there were too many things to count. The number of books on the shelf, the number of markers and colored pencils and crayons strewn across the craft table, the number of branches on the tree right outside the classroom window. One of my favorite Counts was when I would count the kids in the classroom: sixteen, sixteen, sixteen, sixteen, an even number. When someone was absent, though, it could throw off the entire day. I had an even more difficult time trying to get my work done. All I could focus on was the feeling that something was unbalanced in the room.
Eventually, my parents took me to the doctor. While I was waiting in the examination room, I counted the jars on the desk (three, three, three, three), the lights in the room (six, six, six, six), and anything else in the room that my eyes fell upon. After waiting eight minutes and 54 seconds, my doctor, Dr. Stephanie, finally arrived. She started asking me questions that made me uncomfortable, but I knew my parents wanted me to answer, so I did.
“Oliver,” she started to question me, “what’s on your mind right now?”
“The pens in your pocket. Three. I don’t like three,” I responded.
“And why don’t you like the number three?”
“It’s an odd. I like evens. They’re the good numbers.”
“That’s great! I like the evens better too. So when you’re counting, you must always count an even number of times then?”
Looking back on this conversation, it seems like Dr. Stephanie was just appeasing me since I was only six years, ten months, and twenty-two days old.
“Always four times. Sometimes more times if I need to.”
“Your parents tell me that you aren’t paying attention to your work at school. Is this because you’re too busy counting?”
“Yeah. There’s lots to count in Ms. Sullivan’s room. I never feel like I’m done counting yet.”
“I could see why that would be hard to focus! Hopefully, we can do something to help improve your work, okay? I just need to speak to your parents out in the hall for a minute and we’ll be right back in. Don’t move a muscle!”
Dr. Stephanie left me in the room alone while she talked to my parents in the hall, forgetting to close the door as they left. I looked down at the floor and started counting the tiles for the sixth time since I entered the office. As I was counting, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, I heard Dr. Stephanie quietly mention something about medication. I didn’t know what this meant at the time, but obviously my parents did and they did not like it. They started yelling, “Our son does not need medication,” and “We will not be coming back to this office!” My mother grabbed my arm and took me out to the car before I was able to finish counting the tiles. I never asked what was wrong; I was too busy counting all the street signs on the way home. They never took me to another doctor again.
Nothing changed after the meeting with Dr. Stephanie. I continued to do my Counts every day and I still struggled in school because I just could not focus. Two months and three days after the doctor’s appointment, a new student, Parker, joined our class. Seventeen, seventeen, seventeen, seventeen students in the class. The classroom had become permanently unbalanced because of Parker. I hated him. My ability to focus on my work dropped even lower. The Counts got even worse since I was constantly craving even numbers.
One day after school, my desire got too strong. I remembered Parker was on my bus and lived on my street. The bus stopped at its fourth stop, our stop, and we both got off. Instead of going to my house, I decided to follow Parker to see where he lived. I counted the steps as I lurked behind him out of his line of sight. We got to his house after 474 steps. I watched from a distance as he walked in through the front door, unsure of my next move. After 12 minutes and 19 seconds, he came back outside to play basketball in his driveway. At the time, my childish mind thought the perfect way to get back at him would be to push him and yell at him. I approached him in his driveway and said, “Parker, you’re a big meanie and I don’t want you in my class! You messed up my Counts!”
He turned around and looked at me with a confused look. Obviously, he had no idea what my Counts were, but it felt invigorating to finally yell at him. He started to talk but wasn’t able to get the words out before I pushed him to the ground.
I’ll never forget the sound of my first kill. It was a hollow noise, but with an alarming crack, like a wooden baseball bat shattering. His head just happened to land on the only rock in his entire driveway. A puddle of red began to soak the pavement around his head. He wasn’t moving. Even though I was only six at the time, I knew I had done something very wrong. I really didn’t mean to hurt him. I just wanted to push him down to scare him. I turned around and ran home after only waiting for four seconds. While I was running, all I could think was What if I hurt him? and I didn’t mean to. When I arrived home, I was glad to see my parents weren’t back from work yet. This gave me some time to pull myself together. They came home at 5:27 and I stayed quiet for the rest of the night.
The next day in class, I was doing my Counts and I only counted sixteen, sixteen, sixteen, sixteen students. Parker wasn’t here. Ms. Sullivan gathered us all in a circle and started speaking to us in a somber voice.
“Okay, everyone, you may have noticed that Parker isn’t here today,” she started.
We all nodded.
“Well, Parker had an accident yesterday while he was playing outside. He hit his head very hard and won’t be able to come to class anymore. This is very sad for me and it is okay for you all to be sad too. If anyone needs anything today, come talk to me, okay?”
“Okay,” we all say in unison.
“Great. Now let’s all go back to our desks so we can begin class.”
As we all got up and started heading back to our desks, I began thinking of Parker. At the time, I knew very little about death, but I knew it was permanent. I knew what I had done to Parker was permanent. Initially, this scared me. I was worried someone would find out that I was the one that pushed him. That it was my fault he wasn’t going to be coming to class anymore. The more I thought about this, I realized the class would always be even now. Sixteen, sixteen, sixteen, sixteen. My Counts wouldn’t be messed up anymore. I was responsible for controlling the numbers. Usually, when I controlled the numbers, it was for little things like the number of bites of food I took or how many times I counted something, This time, I controlled the entire classroom; I made the whole thing feel balanced again. I could use this ability for the rest of my life and that’s exactly what I did.
The next five years and six months were rather uneventful. No one ever found out that I was the one who killed Parker. The cops deemed it an accident, saying that he tripped while he was out playing by himself. I had just started sixth grade which meant going to a new school and discovering all new things to count. I had six classes, five of which had an even number of students. The only one that didn’t was my science class. Every day I would go to the class and feel unbalanced. My Counts were messed up and my ability to work had taken a hit again. I decided I needed to control the numbers. I knew that this girl in my class, Paige, had a crush on me. She would follow me around and always interrupt my Counts. I was so irritated by her; she would be my next target.
This time, I didn’t want it to be an accident. I wanted to feel the responsibility of controlling the numbers. For three weeks and three days, I plotted the perfect plan. First, I would ask Paige to the school dance that was only two weeks and six days away. While we were at the dance, I would tell her that I wanted to kiss her. Finally, we would sneak off to the bathroom where I would kill her and make the numbers even again.
Paige obviously said yes when I asked her to the dance. The next two weeks and five days went by painfully slow as all I could think about was controlling the numbers. Finally, though, the day of the dance arrived. My parents dropped me off at the school and I waited outside for seven minutes and 43 seconds. She couldn’t even wait a little bit longer to make an even amount of time. She really is the worst, I thought to myself as we walked inside. She was ecstatic that I finally acknowledged her and actually asked her to the dance. We reached the cafeteria, where the dance was being held and saw a dark room with loud music and sixth graders running around like animals. I always hated school dances because there were just too many things to count: the number of kids, the number of songs they played, how long each song was, the number of different foods they were serving, and so much more. I knew, however, that coming to this dance would be worth it.
“Would you mind if we danced over there?” I asked, pointing to the corner of the room closest to the bathroom.
“Of course not,” she said, slightly confused, but still happy that I had asked to dance with her.
Neither of us knew how to dance so we awkwardly just shuffled around for 10 minutes and 54 seconds until finally, I said, “Hey, Paige? Would you maybe, um, want to kiss me? We could go into the bathroom so it’s not so dark.”
I was incredibly nervous. Not because I didn’t want to kiss her, but because I was finally going to be able to control the numbers.
“O-o-okay,” she responded, flustered.
I grabbed her arm and rushed her off to the girls’ bathroom. As soon as we got there, I made sure no one else was hiding in the stalls. We were alone. She had a huge smile on her face, and I faked a smile for her too. As we were both leaning in for the kiss, I felt around for the corner of the sink. I placed my hand on the right side of her head. Instead of guiding her face to mine, I slammed her head into the corner of the sink, leaving a red smudge. She immediately collapsed to the ground. I put my ear to her nose and counted ten seconds. She wasn’t breathing. I had finally done it; I controlled the numbers. The high I felt from making the numbers even was like nothing I had ever experienced. My brain was overwhelmed by even numbers. I was in control of all the numbers again and this time I was wholly responsible. However, I wasn’t done yet. I needed to make this look like an accident. I grabbed a wet floor sign out of the nearest janitor’s closet and rushed back to the bathroom. Thankfully, no one had found Paige yet. I splashed some water on the ground and on the bottom of Paige’s shoes. Next, I just placed the wet floor sign right at her feet and ran back out to the dance. No one ever found out I was the one who killed her.
As I grew older, I never outgrew my Counts or my overwhelming desire for even numbers. I continued to kill the people who messed up my Counts. Natalie, when I was 14 for being the seventh member in my English group, Caleb, when I was 19 for being my third roommate, Marcus, when I was 22 for always leaving out TV volume on an odd number, Sheryl when I was 24 for sending out 17 or 13 or 15 emails every day, and 12 other people who irritated me. I learned to get creative with my kills since I needed to make them look like accidents or make sure the bodies would never be found. Sometimes I would hit people in the head hard enough to kill them and plant props to give the appearance that they slipped and hit their head. Other times I would slip poison into people’s food which would cause their organs to shut down and not cause any suspicion on an autopsy. One time, I hung a person while they were still alive to make it look like a suicide. I never left any evidence until my 19th and final kill.
My 19th kill was a man named Ellis that I worked with. Ellis wasn’t the odd number in a group and he didn’t do anything noticeable in odd amounts, but he would always interrupt my Counts. When I was at my desk, I would count my picture frames (four, four, four, four) and he would interrupt me multiple times a day. I was so irritated by him, I knew I had to kill him.
Since we worked together, it was easy to figure out where I would kill him: by his car after work. I kept a wooden bat in my car that I often used on many of my victims. The end of the day came and I saw Ellis getting ready to leave, so I quietly gathered all my belongings, put on my coat, and slipped out before he could. I rushed down to my car, grabbed my bat, and hid in the bushes near his car. After waiting three minutes and 16 seconds, I heard the click of his car unlocking. Now was my chance. Without saying a word, I darted out from the snowy bushes right in front of him and brought my bat down onto his skull. The impact made a loud, hollow cracking noise and shattered my bat. I immediately knew something wasn’t right. Ellis fell to the ground, the front of his head slightly indented. He was still breathing. Before I could react, he stumbled onto his feet and slugged me right across the face. I remember feeling my nose bleeding, but I wasn’t paying attention to it. Instead, I was focused on finishing what I started. I raised the splintered end of the bat that I still had in my hand and brought it down onto his skull one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight times before he finally stopped breathing.
Before I left, I had to make it look like he slipped on ice. Since it was winter at the time, I poured water right at Ellis’ feet, knowing it would freeze within minutes. Next, I took what was left of my bat and hit the side mirror four times to make it look like Ellis hit his head on it after he slipped. Finally, I gathered all nineteen splinters of my bat and went home. I was thrilled to no longer have to worry about Ellis interrupting my counts. My excitement, however, didn’t last very long.
The next few days went on as normal as they possibly could be. I did all my Counts without any interruptions, which was a wonderful and new feeling. The people in the office mourned over Ellis, but I didn’t care; he was just one less person I had to worry about counting. Everything was going great until five days after the murder. On that day, I heard a knock on my door while getting ready for worked. I rushed downstairs, counting them as I went, and opened the door. Three cops greeted me with a pair of handcuffs.
“Oliver Miller, you are under arrest for the murder of Ellis Langdon.”
After 19 kills, I had finally been caught. I felt incomplete, like a huge part of me had just been taken away. Obviously, I knew I was going to jail for what I had done which meant I would never get my 20th kill. I would be incomplete for the rest of my life.
Apparently, what had happened was when Ellis punched me in the face, he got some of my blood on his knuckles. It was tested and traced back to me. They searched my car while I was at work one day and found the remains of the bat, which had his DNA all over it.
After I was arrested for Ellis’ murder, the cops launched a full investigation on me. They connected 17 out of the 18 other murders I had committed to me. The only one they couldn’t prove I did was Parker, but at that point, it didn’t matter. I had killed more people in thirty-eight years than three serial killers do in their whole lifetime, combined. My court trial went as anyone would expect: I plead not guilty, there was way too much evidence against me, I was found guilty. The worst part was when the judge was reading the verdict, he granted me 19 life sentences, one for every person I had killed. He knew it would be another odd number that would nag me for the rest of my life.
I have been in prison for six years, nine months, and 14 days. Every single day has been hell. I’m constantly craving more even numbers, but I know if I kill someone in here, I get thrown in solitary for seven days. My whole life feels unbalanced. My Counts haven’t felt right ever since I got in here. The only thought that has run through my head for the past six years is 19, 19, 19, 19. I can’t handle the incomplete feeling anymore. Tonight, I will get my 20th kill: myself.
Creepypasta offline - Better Films by: Alice Thompson
My brother has always had a dream of being a great filmmaker.
For as long as I can remember it’s been his obsession. He got a video camera for his eighth birthday and would literally film everything with it, even the most mundane things. He would have us do ‘interviews’ for the camera, make little movies for himself. I thought it was cute at first, I really did. I would always help him with whatever little ‘project’ he was doing this time.
As time went on though something started to change. I can’t really say what made him the way he was but he became increasingly arrogant, increasingly difficult. Our parents definitely spoiled him. Spent a small fortune making sure he got the education he needed to pursue his dream of becoming a director, paid for any of the expensive equipment he needed for making and editing his own little movies, helped pay the salaries of any crew or actors he hired for the little short films he produced.
Maybe it was that which made him become so arrogant and mean spirited. But increasingly he became that worst kind of cliché…the ‘artist’ obsessed with their ‘vision’ and treating everyone in their lives like crap, the self-centered, petulant child in an adult’s body. I’d like to say that I called him out on any of this but the sad fact is that I went right along with him on it.
It started in his teens. Verbal abuse and the occasional slap any time that I didn’t do something right or quickly enough for his liking. I should have stood up to him, told him to get lost. But I found myself totally under his thumb, unable to say no or simply get him out of my life. To be honest, looking back, I can see just how unhealthy the whole thing was.
Now before you go getting the wrong idea there was never anything incestuous here. My brother was just a bully, a little tyrant who enjoyed bossing people around and I basically became his personal servant. He would belittle me and everything I thought, said or tried to do. Any time I tried to build myself up, he’d tear me down and make me feel like I couldn’t accomplish anything on my own, couldn’t even survive out there without him.
I should have known better I suppose but it had started from when we were so young that honestly a part of me came to genuinely believe the things he said. A part of me was too scared of trying to make it out there in the big wide world by myself that I put up with my brother’s constant bullying and taunting and increasingly shrill, angry demands because I was scared of being alone, being cut off from the only family I had left.
Our parents had passed away by this point and we had no contact with the rest of the family. Without my brother I’d be all by myself…his overbearing presence in my life had prevented me from making any real friends and the thought of trying to build a life for myself BY myself was one that just terrified me.
So I did as I was told.
He would say ‘Joan, get me coffee’ and I’d drive all the way across town to the one Starbucks he liked to get him coffee. He’d say he needed extras and I’d devote weeks of my life to arranging and carrying out interviews. He’d demand some expensive piece of equipment and I’d spend however much it cost to get it.
That was my life now. My brothers P.A/maid.
The subject of my brother’s short films and mini-documentaries had become increasingly dark and surreal over the years. He would create short, strange and frightening little pieces designed only to unsettle and scare. Or sometimes just ones that were so bizarre, so utterly devoid of plot, logic or reason that it was impossible to tell what, if anything, he was trying to achieve or convey with them.
His documentaries were much the same. He would either film about gang crime, serial killers and rapes or else create disjointed scenes. He once filmed a dog, starving and injured on the street for several hours. Just filming it struggling to move, to breathe. Just filmed the thing’s pain. Some nights when I went down to get a glass of water I would see him sat there in the lounge, in the dark, watching these movies he made. Just staring at the screen.
And then one day he told me about what his newest film was to be about.
It turned out that he’d begun to hear stories of an urban legend in the film industry. It wasn’t something that was widely talked about or acknowledged and the people who DID talk about it always seemed to do so with a certain nervousness and paranoia, as if afraid that even mentioning it was dangerous.
It was called Better Films.
Supposedly it was a studio or individual who made incredibly strange movies. None of those we talked to who would admit to having watched a Better Films production would go into any detail about what was on the tapes (And the films were ONLY available on VHS from what we could uncover) but all of them seemed to be incredibly disturbed by what they had seen.
One had gone so far as to remove anything from their home that could play video or audio.
A guy who ran a small DVD and video store told us that he’d met with some representatives of Better Films just once, a pair of men dressed in red suits. He’d described them as looking like they’d been ‘Mutilated’ and claimed that one had been missing an eye and an ear while another was minus a hand and his nose. The scarring around these wounds looked ugly and raw.
They’d given him a business card which had nothing on it except for the logo (A cartoonish, childlike drawing of a frowning face) and the tagline ‘Making Better Films for a Better Audience’ along with a website address where they claimed he could purchase their titles for his store if he wished to help ‘Support independent art’.
He’d checked it out, expecting some kind of artsy foreign stuff in black and white. He had instead found a site full of strange and confusing clips that left him scratching his head and that provided no clear way to order ANYTHING. He said the whole web page appeared to be in Japanese.
And yet a week later a black bin bag was on the front step of his shop and inside were several tapes, all with the Better Films logo on their labels. We asked him if he still had the tapes and my brother in particular was very insistent that we get to watch them. The man refused and my brother offered him increasingly large sums of money to buy or borrow one of the tapes. Finally, the man just held up a finger to my brother’s lips, before speaking.
“Now you listen to me and listen good, boy. I’ve seen your type. I know the look you got in your eye right now. I get a lot of weirdos in here, browsing the adult section, asking if I’ve got anything ‘Stronger’.
“I know what you’re after. I know what you’re thinking. So I’m gonna tell you this and then you’re gonna leave my store.
“What’s on those tapes ain’t no illegal little thrill for some gore hound trying to find himself a real life snuff movie.
“What’s on those tapes isn’t anything like what you’re imagining.
“What’s on those tapes is WORSE.
“And I ain’t selling or renting them to no one…especially not some half-wit little pervert with more money than sense.”
My brother stormed out in a rage with me following close behind. As I left the store owner called out to me. I turned to see him looking at me, with an expression of genuine concern on his face now.
“You want my advice, you stay away from him, Miss. Things he’s looking into, you don’t want nothing to do with.”
I suppose I should have taken his advice. But by this point I doubt there was anything that could convince me to abandon my brother, so great was the hold he had over me. And so I continued to assist him as he dug deeper and deeper into the mystery of Better Films.
We managed to piece a few things together. The earliest encounter anyone seemed to have had with their work seemed to be in the mid-sixties. One person we spoke to claimed that he’d known someone who’d been in a movie for them in the mid-seventies, a porn star who’d been hired right off the set of a film he’d been doing and had gone missing for almost seven months. He’d come back with a lot of cash and a hell of a lot of bad dreams.
Another said that the company went back even further, that there’d been something called Better Productions back before there’d even been silent films. Said her mother had told her stories that she’d heard from her grandmother who’d heard them from her grandmother. Some spooky bogeyman stuff about some performer named Elizabeth Walker.
We even found someone who claimed to have grown up watching a TV show Better Films had made. Sunshine Street, she said it had been called and she went on and on about how strange it had been and how she’d always remembered that logo…it was the first thing that had come to mind when she’d heard the name. She said it always used to creep her out, the way the frown would curve into a smile at the end of each episode. The animation looked eerie, that was how she described it.
And then my brother came home one day with a woman. A woman who he claimed was a producer who worked at Better Films.
I was dumbfounded. For all the work we had put into this I hadn’t expected us to get anywhere. To be honest I was pretty much convinced the whole thing was just some ghost story, that if there ever had been a ‘Better Films’ there was nothing more to it than some low budget production company that had made a few creepy little flicks and then folded up. All the weirdness around it, all the little hints and dark suggestions we’d gotten about there being something more sinister about the whole thing, I’d put that down to just people making stuff up.
Or at the very least, people having heard various stories about Better Films from unreliable sources and then passing them along.
But here was someone who claimed to work for the company, in the flesh.
She introduced herself as Ms Kismet. Her hair was a bright red, almost certainly dyed. I can’t believe that any hair could be naturally as bright as hers looked. She dressed in a red suit and like the men our ‘friend’ at the video store had described, she looked as though someone had gone out of their way to mutilate her body.
One eye was missing, as was an ear and her nose. Three fingers were missing from her right hand as well. I tried hard not to stare but all of these looked like they had been done so crudely, so violently that it made me wince.
She and my brother spoke at length for some time. I was not allowed to listen in or take part in whatever they were talking about but after a while they stepped out of the lounge and my brother asked to speak with me alone for a moment.
He told me that he had convinced the woman to let him actually come to the filming of one of Better Films movies and to meet with the director responsible for their work. To actually interview people who worked at the highest levels of this production company and get the real story about what it was they did.
However to secure this he’d had to offer the woman a form of ‘Payment’ he said. And that payment was her getting to spend a night with me, where I would do anything she wished.
I could have slapped him.
I wanted to hit him. Instead I just yelled, told him that this was too much. That I wasn’t going to have him selling me like his personal property, like a slave. He shrugged, seeming not to care about my anger, my hurt.
“It’s not that big of a deal. You like women, right? You’ll probably enjoy it. And she’s promised that you won’t be hurt in any way.”
His tone was cold, emotionless. It was clear that he couldn’t care less whether I’d be hurt or not, couldn’t care less what this person he knew nothing about and had only just met wanted to do with me. That he didn’t give a damn about my wellbeing or my safety, that I was just another tool for him to use to make his damn movies.
“Oh well that makes it perfectly okay then! And while you were selling me off to this total stranger did it occur to you to ask what I thought about it? To ask for my consent, my opinion on whether or not I want to have to spend a night with some woman who for all we know makes a hobby out of making snuff movies?”
He stared at me for a few moments, his expression totally unreadable. And then, slowly, he spoke.
“If you don’t like it then of course I can’t force you to do it. You can say no. You can refuse.
“Just like I can refuse to let you continue to live here with me. Just like I can refuse to support you financially anymore.
“But don’t worry. I’m sure there are plenty of job opportunities for ugly, witless, talentless little things who barely made it through high school with no real skills or likable qualities.
“I’m sure the local burger joint is just desperate for someone to mop their floors and clean out their grease traps.
“And who knows? Maybe after a year or two you’ll be able to afford a place that barely has any roaches or rodents scurrying about in it. It’s not like anyone will be able to stand you long enough to come visit so really it won’t matter what it looks like.
“You’ll be the only one living out your sad, lonely life in it.”
I felt like I would cry. I wanted to tell him he was wrong, to go to hell. I wanted to storm out and never see or talk to him again. But part of me kept telling me that he was right, that I was everything he said I was. A loser, an idiot without any skills or good qualities about me. A stupid, pathetic child who wouldn’t survive without him.
I felt like garbage, like dirt. I felt the way he had always made me feel, for as long as I could remember now. And meekly I just mumbled that I would do it, that I would agree to spending a night with Ms Kismet.
We met at a motel, a sleazy looking place on the edge of town. She had sorted out a room for the night and told me to come alone, with one of my brother’s cameras. I was terrified, more and more as I walked to the room she had told me to come to, terrified of what she might do to me, of what could happen. If she killed me my brother would probably help her hide the body.
I knocked and I heard her familiar voice tell me to enter. The room was pitch black as I stepped in, almost impossible to see. I could make out Ms Kismet, sat in a chair beside the bed. There was a knife on the table beside her. I have never felt more scared, more utterly frightened for my life than I did in that moment.
“Sit on the bed. And start filming,” she said. My legs shaking, I somehow managed to make myself walk over to it and do as she asked, sitting down and swinging the camera up to film her. I began to ask what she wanted me to do, what she wanted me to film. She just told me to keep the camera rolling and not stop until she instructed me to. Nothing else.
She whistled loudly and from the bathroom a dog came limping out. It looked like it hadn’t been fed in days, thin and unhealthy looking. As I watched, Ms Kismet picked up the knife from the table…and began to slice lines into her hand.
My jaw dropped. As I watched, as I filmed, she cut deeply into her own flesh, blood beginning to pour from the wound. She lowered her hand to within reach of the starving animal and allowed the dog to lap at the blood now trickling from the fresh cut. After a while she would withdraw her hand and repeat the process, cutting into her hand and then her arm, slicing deep wounds into her skin and letting the dog drink her blood.
I felt ill. Worse was the look on her face as she did it, that rictus grin that never changed, never left her. She kept that horrible forced smile on her face no matter how much or how deeply she cut herself, looking like something out of a nightmare. Sat there in the dark, smiling that awful smile.
Finally she put the knife down and reached into the drawer of the table it had lain upon. She withdrew a pair of scissors and, as I watched, placed the little finger of her right hand in-between them. Slowly, she closed the blades around that digit.
Do you know what it sounds like, the crunch of bone as a finger is severed by a pair of scissors? I do now. I could feel the vomit rising in my throat as she slowly cut off that finger, the grin still fixed to her face as she cut through flesh and bone. It fell to the floor, the dog pouncing on it. And finally she told me I could stop filming.
I was shaking, feeling ill, feeling worse than I had expected to feel. I didn’t know what this was or why she had asked me to do this and I didn’t want to know.
And then suddenly her arm shot out, grabbing me by the leg, her faces inches from mine. The grin was gone now, replaced by a look of pure terror, of the worst kind of fear I had ever seen on another person’s face. Her eye darted side to side, her body shook. I could feel the blood from her fresh injuries soaking into my clothes.
“HELP ME!”
The words were desperate, spoken as if it actually caused her pain to say them, coming out as a broken and pathetic whimper.
“For the love of god…please…she’s going to kill us all. Don’t you understand? She’s going to kill us all.
“She’s…”
And then she stopped, her words cutting off. A little squeak of pain came from her as if someone had grabbed her by the throat.
And I realised we weren’t alone in that room.
Stood in the dark, in one corner of the room was another woman. She was dressed in a tuxedo, with a featureless white latex mask over her face. There were no eye holes in the mask and yet somehow, as she stood there motionless in the dark, I felt that she was looking at us. That she could see us, could see me. That she was studying me intently, watching me very closely indeed.
I felt more afraid than ever before. That motionless woman in the white mask, stood silently in the blackness made my heart pound, made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. I had to get out of this room. I stood up, turned and ran. I ran out of the room, down the stairs, out into the parking lot. I didn’t even bother to get into my car, I just ran out into the street and away from that motel.
Away from Ms Kismet.
Away from the woman in the white mask.
It was the next day that Ms Kismet showed up at my brother’s home. She was all smiles once again and thanked me for my time. My brother had asked no questions about what had happened, most likely because he couldn’t care less. And he was happy to hear that Ms Kismet would now arrange for him a meeting with their director, at the set of the current production they were working on right now.
Kismet made it quite clear that this invitation was for my brother only, which suited him just fine. He told me to stay at the house and work on editing the footage we’d put together so far and said he’d be back as soon as possible with the interviews with the director and actors involved in Better Films newest movie. He was beaming, clearly happy that he’d gotten his way. That now he would get to finish his movie with actual footage of what Better Films did.
As much as I hated him, in a way I wanted to tell him not to go. In a way I was actually scared for him, worried about what might happen. He was a bastard but he was my brother. But I kept my mouth shut and let him go off with Ms Kismet, waiting for his return.
And I waited.
And waited.
After it had been several hours I started to worry.
When he hadn’t returned at the days end I called the police. They told me that I had to wait a few days to file a missing persons report and told me not to worry, that most of the time people showed up long before that time had passed.
My brother didn’t. And so I went to the cops and I told them about him and about what he’d been working on and about Ms Kismet. I described her to them and told them about Better Films which they reacted to sceptically…I can’t say I blame them. I told them about the woman in the white mask and they looked at me like I was crazy or making it up.
Again, I really can’t hold that against them. The whole thing was so bizarre and unsettling that I don’t know that I would have believed it if someone told me about it. They told me they would look into it and said they would be in touch with any developments in the case, anything they managed to turn up. They told me not to worry about my brother, that they were certain he would turn up.
The longer I waited without news, the less I worried though. The less I cared about him at all. Finally free of his bullying, his endless taunts and insults I found myself becoming more confident, more assured. I began to go out. I began to talk to people, to actually start to make friends. I even met a girl at a little bar not far from my brother’s house who I began to see as more than friends.
I started sorting out job interviews. I started feeling good about myself, looking in the mirror and not feeling like crap for once. I felt happy, actually happy for the first time in a very long time indeed. I felt like I had worth and value and that I could make it on my own.
A package came a few months ago. It had no stamp, no address and nothing written on it. Just a brown package, left on the doorstep of my brother’s place. I opened it up to find a video cassette inside, with a label on it that simply read ‘We make documentaries too’
I was worried now. Nervous and yet curious at the same time, not wanting to know what was on the tape and needing to know at the same time. I walked over to the television and slid the tape into the old VCR my brother still owned that I had never bothered to throw out since he had gone missing. It began to play.
It was footage of us. Footage of us going around to talk to people about Better Films. Footage of us going into the video store where we’d met the man who claimed to have seen some of Better Films movies, footage of us going to the homes of those people we’d interviewed about this, footage of us walking down the street going to and from places.
On several occasions it zoomed in on my brother, whoever was behind the camera seeming to be focused on him. I stared at it, a chill running through me. How long had they been filming us for? How long had they been following us, watching our every move? How long had they known about us before Ms Kismet had met with my brother?
The tape went to static for a few moments and I thought it was over. I was wrong. Red light spilled out of the screen as the picture returned, bringing with it an agonized chorus of screams and howls of agony. On the screen was my brother.
He was suspended by what looked like metal hooks, rusty metal hooks, his body hanging from them in a veritable maze of razor wire. The wire wound around his body, cutting into his flesh, seeming to move like metal snakes. Whoever was manipulating the wire was off-screen but the effects were very clear. He was missing a hand, a leg and his ears, his mouth open wide.
Screams were all around. The source of them was not visible but I could hear what sounded like dozens of voices all screaming with him, all howling and shrieking in pain. His eyes were wide and terrified, his body jerking and twitching as he screamed the same words over and over again, the same two words.
“HELP ME!”
I stood there, staring at the scene for a moment. My brother trapped somewhere, in what appeared to be a private hell on earth. Having god knows what else done to him by these people for reasons I would probably never know. I walked over to the set. I turned off the tape. I unplugged the VCR and the TV.
And, knowing that I would never mention this tape to anyone I knew, I whispered a few words to myself.
“No, I won’t, brother.”
I burned the tape.
To this day my brother has never been found.
For as long as I can remember it’s been his obsession. He got a video camera for his eighth birthday and would literally film everything with it, even the most mundane things. He would have us do ‘interviews’ for the camera, make little movies for himself. I thought it was cute at first, I really did. I would always help him with whatever little ‘project’ he was doing this time.
As time went on though something started to change. I can’t really say what made him the way he was but he became increasingly arrogant, increasingly difficult. Our parents definitely spoiled him. Spent a small fortune making sure he got the education he needed to pursue his dream of becoming a director, paid for any of the expensive equipment he needed for making and editing his own little movies, helped pay the salaries of any crew or actors he hired for the little short films he produced.
Maybe it was that which made him become so arrogant and mean spirited. But increasingly he became that worst kind of cliché…the ‘artist’ obsessed with their ‘vision’ and treating everyone in their lives like crap, the self-centered, petulant child in an adult’s body. I’d like to say that I called him out on any of this but the sad fact is that I went right along with him on it.
It started in his teens. Verbal abuse and the occasional slap any time that I didn’t do something right or quickly enough for his liking. I should have stood up to him, told him to get lost. But I found myself totally under his thumb, unable to say no or simply get him out of my life. To be honest, looking back, I can see just how unhealthy the whole thing was.
Now before you go getting the wrong idea there was never anything incestuous here. My brother was just a bully, a little tyrant who enjoyed bossing people around and I basically became his personal servant. He would belittle me and everything I thought, said or tried to do. Any time I tried to build myself up, he’d tear me down and make me feel like I couldn’t accomplish anything on my own, couldn’t even survive out there without him.
I should have known better I suppose but it had started from when we were so young that honestly a part of me came to genuinely believe the things he said. A part of me was too scared of trying to make it out there in the big wide world by myself that I put up with my brother’s constant bullying and taunting and increasingly shrill, angry demands because I was scared of being alone, being cut off from the only family I had left.
Our parents had passed away by this point and we had no contact with the rest of the family. Without my brother I’d be all by myself…his overbearing presence in my life had prevented me from making any real friends and the thought of trying to build a life for myself BY myself was one that just terrified me.
So I did as I was told.
He would say ‘Joan, get me coffee’ and I’d drive all the way across town to the one Starbucks he liked to get him coffee. He’d say he needed extras and I’d devote weeks of my life to arranging and carrying out interviews. He’d demand some expensive piece of equipment and I’d spend however much it cost to get it.
That was my life now. My brothers P.A/maid.
The subject of my brother’s short films and mini-documentaries had become increasingly dark and surreal over the years. He would create short, strange and frightening little pieces designed only to unsettle and scare. Or sometimes just ones that were so bizarre, so utterly devoid of plot, logic or reason that it was impossible to tell what, if anything, he was trying to achieve or convey with them.
His documentaries were much the same. He would either film about gang crime, serial killers and rapes or else create disjointed scenes. He once filmed a dog, starving and injured on the street for several hours. Just filming it struggling to move, to breathe. Just filmed the thing’s pain. Some nights when I went down to get a glass of water I would see him sat there in the lounge, in the dark, watching these movies he made. Just staring at the screen.
And then one day he told me about what his newest film was to be about.
It turned out that he’d begun to hear stories of an urban legend in the film industry. It wasn’t something that was widely talked about or acknowledged and the people who DID talk about it always seemed to do so with a certain nervousness and paranoia, as if afraid that even mentioning it was dangerous.
It was called Better Films.
Supposedly it was a studio or individual who made incredibly strange movies. None of those we talked to who would admit to having watched a Better Films production would go into any detail about what was on the tapes (And the films were ONLY available on VHS from what we could uncover) but all of them seemed to be incredibly disturbed by what they had seen.
One had gone so far as to remove anything from their home that could play video or audio.
A guy who ran a small DVD and video store told us that he’d met with some representatives of Better Films just once, a pair of men dressed in red suits. He’d described them as looking like they’d been ‘Mutilated’ and claimed that one had been missing an eye and an ear while another was minus a hand and his nose. The scarring around these wounds looked ugly and raw.
They’d given him a business card which had nothing on it except for the logo (A cartoonish, childlike drawing of a frowning face) and the tagline ‘Making Better Films for a Better Audience’ along with a website address where they claimed he could purchase their titles for his store if he wished to help ‘Support independent art’.
He’d checked it out, expecting some kind of artsy foreign stuff in black and white. He had instead found a site full of strange and confusing clips that left him scratching his head and that provided no clear way to order ANYTHING. He said the whole web page appeared to be in Japanese.
And yet a week later a black bin bag was on the front step of his shop and inside were several tapes, all with the Better Films logo on their labels. We asked him if he still had the tapes and my brother in particular was very insistent that we get to watch them. The man refused and my brother offered him increasingly large sums of money to buy or borrow one of the tapes. Finally, the man just held up a finger to my brother’s lips, before speaking.
“Now you listen to me and listen good, boy. I’ve seen your type. I know the look you got in your eye right now. I get a lot of weirdos in here, browsing the adult section, asking if I’ve got anything ‘Stronger’.
“I know what you’re after. I know what you’re thinking. So I’m gonna tell you this and then you’re gonna leave my store.
“What’s on those tapes ain’t no illegal little thrill for some gore hound trying to find himself a real life snuff movie.
“What’s on those tapes isn’t anything like what you’re imagining.
“What’s on those tapes is WORSE.
“And I ain’t selling or renting them to no one…especially not some half-wit little pervert with more money than sense.”
My brother stormed out in a rage with me following close behind. As I left the store owner called out to me. I turned to see him looking at me, with an expression of genuine concern on his face now.
“You want my advice, you stay away from him, Miss. Things he’s looking into, you don’t want nothing to do with.”
I suppose I should have taken his advice. But by this point I doubt there was anything that could convince me to abandon my brother, so great was the hold he had over me. And so I continued to assist him as he dug deeper and deeper into the mystery of Better Films.
We managed to piece a few things together. The earliest encounter anyone seemed to have had with their work seemed to be in the mid-sixties. One person we spoke to claimed that he’d known someone who’d been in a movie for them in the mid-seventies, a porn star who’d been hired right off the set of a film he’d been doing and had gone missing for almost seven months. He’d come back with a lot of cash and a hell of a lot of bad dreams.
Another said that the company went back even further, that there’d been something called Better Productions back before there’d even been silent films. Said her mother had told her stories that she’d heard from her grandmother who’d heard them from her grandmother. Some spooky bogeyman stuff about some performer named Elizabeth Walker.
We even found someone who claimed to have grown up watching a TV show Better Films had made. Sunshine Street, she said it had been called and she went on and on about how strange it had been and how she’d always remembered that logo…it was the first thing that had come to mind when she’d heard the name. She said it always used to creep her out, the way the frown would curve into a smile at the end of each episode. The animation looked eerie, that was how she described it.
And then my brother came home one day with a woman. A woman who he claimed was a producer who worked at Better Films.
I was dumbfounded. For all the work we had put into this I hadn’t expected us to get anywhere. To be honest I was pretty much convinced the whole thing was just some ghost story, that if there ever had been a ‘Better Films’ there was nothing more to it than some low budget production company that had made a few creepy little flicks and then folded up. All the weirdness around it, all the little hints and dark suggestions we’d gotten about there being something more sinister about the whole thing, I’d put that down to just people making stuff up.
Or at the very least, people having heard various stories about Better Films from unreliable sources and then passing them along.
But here was someone who claimed to work for the company, in the flesh.
She introduced herself as Ms Kismet. Her hair was a bright red, almost certainly dyed. I can’t believe that any hair could be naturally as bright as hers looked. She dressed in a red suit and like the men our ‘friend’ at the video store had described, she looked as though someone had gone out of their way to mutilate her body.
One eye was missing, as was an ear and her nose. Three fingers were missing from her right hand as well. I tried hard not to stare but all of these looked like they had been done so crudely, so violently that it made me wince.
She and my brother spoke at length for some time. I was not allowed to listen in or take part in whatever they were talking about but after a while they stepped out of the lounge and my brother asked to speak with me alone for a moment.
He told me that he had convinced the woman to let him actually come to the filming of one of Better Films movies and to meet with the director responsible for their work. To actually interview people who worked at the highest levels of this production company and get the real story about what it was they did.
However to secure this he’d had to offer the woman a form of ‘Payment’ he said. And that payment was her getting to spend a night with me, where I would do anything she wished.
I could have slapped him.
I wanted to hit him. Instead I just yelled, told him that this was too much. That I wasn’t going to have him selling me like his personal property, like a slave. He shrugged, seeming not to care about my anger, my hurt.
“It’s not that big of a deal. You like women, right? You’ll probably enjoy it. And she’s promised that you won’t be hurt in any way.”
His tone was cold, emotionless. It was clear that he couldn’t care less whether I’d be hurt or not, couldn’t care less what this person he knew nothing about and had only just met wanted to do with me. That he didn’t give a damn about my wellbeing or my safety, that I was just another tool for him to use to make his damn movies.
“Oh well that makes it perfectly okay then! And while you were selling me off to this total stranger did it occur to you to ask what I thought about it? To ask for my consent, my opinion on whether or not I want to have to spend a night with some woman who for all we know makes a hobby out of making snuff movies?”
He stared at me for a few moments, his expression totally unreadable. And then, slowly, he spoke.
“If you don’t like it then of course I can’t force you to do it. You can say no. You can refuse.
“Just like I can refuse to let you continue to live here with me. Just like I can refuse to support you financially anymore.
“But don’t worry. I’m sure there are plenty of job opportunities for ugly, witless, talentless little things who barely made it through high school with no real skills or likable qualities.
“I’m sure the local burger joint is just desperate for someone to mop their floors and clean out their grease traps.
“And who knows? Maybe after a year or two you’ll be able to afford a place that barely has any roaches or rodents scurrying about in it. It’s not like anyone will be able to stand you long enough to come visit so really it won’t matter what it looks like.
“You’ll be the only one living out your sad, lonely life in it.”
I felt like I would cry. I wanted to tell him he was wrong, to go to hell. I wanted to storm out and never see or talk to him again. But part of me kept telling me that he was right, that I was everything he said I was. A loser, an idiot without any skills or good qualities about me. A stupid, pathetic child who wouldn’t survive without him.
I felt like garbage, like dirt. I felt the way he had always made me feel, for as long as I could remember now. And meekly I just mumbled that I would do it, that I would agree to spending a night with Ms Kismet.
We met at a motel, a sleazy looking place on the edge of town. She had sorted out a room for the night and told me to come alone, with one of my brother’s cameras. I was terrified, more and more as I walked to the room she had told me to come to, terrified of what she might do to me, of what could happen. If she killed me my brother would probably help her hide the body.
I knocked and I heard her familiar voice tell me to enter. The room was pitch black as I stepped in, almost impossible to see. I could make out Ms Kismet, sat in a chair beside the bed. There was a knife on the table beside her. I have never felt more scared, more utterly frightened for my life than I did in that moment.
“Sit on the bed. And start filming,” she said. My legs shaking, I somehow managed to make myself walk over to it and do as she asked, sitting down and swinging the camera up to film her. I began to ask what she wanted me to do, what she wanted me to film. She just told me to keep the camera rolling and not stop until she instructed me to. Nothing else.
She whistled loudly and from the bathroom a dog came limping out. It looked like it hadn’t been fed in days, thin and unhealthy looking. As I watched, Ms Kismet picked up the knife from the table…and began to slice lines into her hand.
My jaw dropped. As I watched, as I filmed, she cut deeply into her own flesh, blood beginning to pour from the wound. She lowered her hand to within reach of the starving animal and allowed the dog to lap at the blood now trickling from the fresh cut. After a while she would withdraw her hand and repeat the process, cutting into her hand and then her arm, slicing deep wounds into her skin and letting the dog drink her blood.
I felt ill. Worse was the look on her face as she did it, that rictus grin that never changed, never left her. She kept that horrible forced smile on her face no matter how much or how deeply she cut herself, looking like something out of a nightmare. Sat there in the dark, smiling that awful smile.
Finally she put the knife down and reached into the drawer of the table it had lain upon. She withdrew a pair of scissors and, as I watched, placed the little finger of her right hand in-between them. Slowly, she closed the blades around that digit.
Do you know what it sounds like, the crunch of bone as a finger is severed by a pair of scissors? I do now. I could feel the vomit rising in my throat as she slowly cut off that finger, the grin still fixed to her face as she cut through flesh and bone. It fell to the floor, the dog pouncing on it. And finally she told me I could stop filming.
I was shaking, feeling ill, feeling worse than I had expected to feel. I didn’t know what this was or why she had asked me to do this and I didn’t want to know.
And then suddenly her arm shot out, grabbing me by the leg, her faces inches from mine. The grin was gone now, replaced by a look of pure terror, of the worst kind of fear I had ever seen on another person’s face. Her eye darted side to side, her body shook. I could feel the blood from her fresh injuries soaking into my clothes.
“HELP ME!”
The words were desperate, spoken as if it actually caused her pain to say them, coming out as a broken and pathetic whimper.
“For the love of god…please…she’s going to kill us all. Don’t you understand? She’s going to kill us all.
“She’s…”
And then she stopped, her words cutting off. A little squeak of pain came from her as if someone had grabbed her by the throat.
And I realised we weren’t alone in that room.
Stood in the dark, in one corner of the room was another woman. She was dressed in a tuxedo, with a featureless white latex mask over her face. There were no eye holes in the mask and yet somehow, as she stood there motionless in the dark, I felt that she was looking at us. That she could see us, could see me. That she was studying me intently, watching me very closely indeed.
I felt more afraid than ever before. That motionless woman in the white mask, stood silently in the blackness made my heart pound, made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. I had to get out of this room. I stood up, turned and ran. I ran out of the room, down the stairs, out into the parking lot. I didn’t even bother to get into my car, I just ran out into the street and away from that motel.
Away from Ms Kismet.
Away from the woman in the white mask.
It was the next day that Ms Kismet showed up at my brother’s home. She was all smiles once again and thanked me for my time. My brother had asked no questions about what had happened, most likely because he couldn’t care less. And he was happy to hear that Ms Kismet would now arrange for him a meeting with their director, at the set of the current production they were working on right now.
Kismet made it quite clear that this invitation was for my brother only, which suited him just fine. He told me to stay at the house and work on editing the footage we’d put together so far and said he’d be back as soon as possible with the interviews with the director and actors involved in Better Films newest movie. He was beaming, clearly happy that he’d gotten his way. That now he would get to finish his movie with actual footage of what Better Films did.
As much as I hated him, in a way I wanted to tell him not to go. In a way I was actually scared for him, worried about what might happen. He was a bastard but he was my brother. But I kept my mouth shut and let him go off with Ms Kismet, waiting for his return.
And I waited.
And waited.
After it had been several hours I started to worry.
When he hadn’t returned at the days end I called the police. They told me that I had to wait a few days to file a missing persons report and told me not to worry, that most of the time people showed up long before that time had passed.
My brother didn’t. And so I went to the cops and I told them about him and about what he’d been working on and about Ms Kismet. I described her to them and told them about Better Films which they reacted to sceptically…I can’t say I blame them. I told them about the woman in the white mask and they looked at me like I was crazy or making it up.
Again, I really can’t hold that against them. The whole thing was so bizarre and unsettling that I don’t know that I would have believed it if someone told me about it. They told me they would look into it and said they would be in touch with any developments in the case, anything they managed to turn up. They told me not to worry about my brother, that they were certain he would turn up.
The longer I waited without news, the less I worried though. The less I cared about him at all. Finally free of his bullying, his endless taunts and insults I found myself becoming more confident, more assured. I began to go out. I began to talk to people, to actually start to make friends. I even met a girl at a little bar not far from my brother’s house who I began to see as more than friends.
I started sorting out job interviews. I started feeling good about myself, looking in the mirror and not feeling like crap for once. I felt happy, actually happy for the first time in a very long time indeed. I felt like I had worth and value and that I could make it on my own.
A package came a few months ago. It had no stamp, no address and nothing written on it. Just a brown package, left on the doorstep of my brother’s place. I opened it up to find a video cassette inside, with a label on it that simply read ‘We make documentaries too’
I was worried now. Nervous and yet curious at the same time, not wanting to know what was on the tape and needing to know at the same time. I walked over to the television and slid the tape into the old VCR my brother still owned that I had never bothered to throw out since he had gone missing. It began to play.
It was footage of us. Footage of us going around to talk to people about Better Films. Footage of us going into the video store where we’d met the man who claimed to have seen some of Better Films movies, footage of us going to the homes of those people we’d interviewed about this, footage of us walking down the street going to and from places.
On several occasions it zoomed in on my brother, whoever was behind the camera seeming to be focused on him. I stared at it, a chill running through me. How long had they been filming us for? How long had they been following us, watching our every move? How long had they known about us before Ms Kismet had met with my brother?
The tape went to static for a few moments and I thought it was over. I was wrong. Red light spilled out of the screen as the picture returned, bringing with it an agonized chorus of screams and howls of agony. On the screen was my brother.
He was suspended by what looked like metal hooks, rusty metal hooks, his body hanging from them in a veritable maze of razor wire. The wire wound around his body, cutting into his flesh, seeming to move like metal snakes. Whoever was manipulating the wire was off-screen but the effects were very clear. He was missing a hand, a leg and his ears, his mouth open wide.
Screams were all around. The source of them was not visible but I could hear what sounded like dozens of voices all screaming with him, all howling and shrieking in pain. His eyes were wide and terrified, his body jerking and twitching as he screamed the same words over and over again, the same two words.
“HELP ME!”
I stood there, staring at the scene for a moment. My brother trapped somewhere, in what appeared to be a private hell on earth. Having god knows what else done to him by these people for reasons I would probably never know. I walked over to the set. I turned off the tape. I unplugged the VCR and the TV.
And, knowing that I would never mention this tape to anyone I knew, I whispered a few words to myself.
“No, I won’t, brother.”
I burned the tape.
To this day my brother has never been found.
Creepypasta offline - Santa's Other Workshop by: Derek Hawke (a.k.a. Killahawke1)
Perpetual darkness lingered at the top of the world. Thick ice, frigid air, and snow covered the lifeless mountainscape. However, the endless night did not go unchallenged. A single source of light illuminated the sky and drove back the darkness. Nestled between two snow-covered mountain, a little cottage sat with puffy billowing smoke rising from its chimney. Ignoring the fact that the nearest civilization was thousands of miles away, to the casual eye, the house was simply a warm and welcoming home. Still, one might say to themselves, “What an odd thing to find in such a bleak place. How could such a thing come to be?”
Like most things found in the North Pole, not everything is as it appears. The land was unforgiving and cruel. It could take your life within minutes. Only a select number of creatures were given permission to live in this harsh and relentless wilderness. All others who entered this domain did it of their own accord; such as the residents of this tiny little home. However, these individuals were like no other and with a little bit of magic at their disposal, they lived happy and joyful lives.
At first glance, it would appear it was nothing more than a simple, ordinary home inhabited by an elderly couple who loved each other dearly. If this were your conclusion, you would be mistaken. In reality, a magical secret existed below, for the small house was much more than meets the eye. The little house was not just a home but the tip of a mystical workshop hidden beneath the ice.
For centuries, children around the world found joy from the efforts of the hidden workshop. All year round, tiny magical hands toiled and labored to create toys and playthings for all the good children of the world. Elves, the last of the magical creatures from old, dwelt within its walls and used their mystical nature to create wondrous and joyful things for Christmas morning. Three days after the Winter Solstice, the old man would put on his heavy coat and boots, take to the air and deliver his Christmas joy to every last child.
Like everything in the cosmos, there must be a balance. For every night, there must be a day; every beginning has an end. And, with every kind child, there was a naughty little boy or girl to be found.
Far below the bright lights, singing, and happy elves creating and building new and fantastic toys, there was another workshop. There, the warmth of the hearthstones could not reach. While the purpose of the upper workshop was to bring happiness, the other was dark and sterile. It too had a purpose. It was here where the masses of cheap and easily broken toys were made. There was no love put into these objects. Never would a child’s eyes brighten with wonder and awe upon seeing these gifts on Christmas morning. In his wisdom, the old man knew that even a naughty child should not be forgotten during this time of goodwill. However, the old man was no fool and had no desire to waste his resources on such unsatisfying tasks. This responsibility was handed to the banished and exiled elves that inhabited the deepest bowels below the Workshop. Those with selfish hearts and greedy desires. Stripped of their immortality, they wasted away in the dark with only the trinkets and flimsy materials to pass the time.
Erhgra E’tah sat in the poorly lit corner of a tattered workbench. His focus was entirely devoted to the old and worn piece of brass in his hands. The clangs of his hammer hitting metal rang out and echoed through the dark halls and passageways. He pounded the brass sheet relentlessly until the metal slowly began to surrender its shape and bend to Erhgra’s design. Suddenly the hammer flew out of the mad elf’s grasp. He examined his limp hand, trying to will it back into his control. Fury filled his heart as he watched the necrotic flesh sloughed off his bony hand. He didn’t have much time.
His other hand was weak, but still capable of grasp. He reached into his toolbox and removed a long warped nail and stabbed it into the back of his paralyzed hand. He pushed on the nail head until its tip broke through the skin and emerged through his palm. Immediately, the pain surged and shot up his arm. The thick and rigid tendons loosened within his hand, giving him temporary use of his digits once more.
The elf picked up his hammer and resumed molding the shape of the brass plate. With each impact upon the brass, he poured his rage into his creation. How ironic that the product of his tireless work was meant for the ones he hated the most. His deteriorating body was fading fast. He possessed just enough magic to fuel the curse he would cast upon the object. When finished, his gift would be placed with the other junk toys and cheap trinkets. It would make its way to “them” and find a child on Christmas morning. The curse will take hold and slowly begin tearing apart their lives. It will channel their essence back to him and reignite his immortality. The object would pass from one child, then to another, century after century.
He had just enough magic left to evoke his curse!
Erhgra had once lived and worked above. Like any other elf before him, he loved nothing more than to create beautiful and wondrous toys and gizmos. However, in his heart, he wished that he could keep some of his creations for himself. One day, his eyes fell upon a beautiful music box his friend D’lahela had created. The music box was extraordinary; meant as a gift to a King’s firstborn. It was magnificent. Crafted from oak wood, it bore an elaborate gold design on each of its sides. When opened, a figurine of three children danced hand in hand to a beautiful lullaby around a magnificent Christmas tree.
Erhgra E’tah had never desired anything more in his entire life. It filled his heart with jealousy. He became resentful that this precious and rare treasure would go to an undeserving human infant. The little girl didn’t deserve it! It should go to him, he thought. So, under cover of darkness, Erhgra slipped into the work area and took the music box.
Unable to sleep and anxious to put the finishing touches on his prized creation, D’lahela decided to return to the workshop. To his surprise and shock, he caught the elf attempting to steal the special music box. D’lahela was enraged, for greed and thievery amongst elves were extremely offensive and not tolerated. Erhgra begged his friend not to report his transgression, but D’lahela was unmoved by the pleas and turned to tell the others of Erhgra’s crime. Desperate, Erhgra did the only thing left for him to do. He grabbed a hammer and brought it down on his friend’s head over and over again until no more life remained in the broken body.
Despite his meticulous efforts to conceal his crime, he could not escape the sight and wisdom of the old man. Humiliated and dishonored, the elf was banished from the Workshop and his precious music box was taken from him and given to the little princess. Stripped of his immortality, Erhgra E’tah was cast into the cold and dark corridors of the Other Workshop to spend his remaining days, never to create a beautiful thing again. As the seasons passed, his hatred for all children grew and ate away at his sanity. He gritted his teeth knowing that the children of man were given everything and he had nothing!
Hunched over his work, Erhgra feverishly worked to complete his masterpiece. He stared down at the anvil and hammered down on the brass. Each strike brought the faces of a child into his mind.
“It lives in warmth.” The blunt hammer formed the metal into a hollow cylinder.
“It stuffs its face with sweets and treats.” Stumpy legs were welded into place.
“It gets everything it asks from mummy and daddy.” A malformed head and crooked ears took shape.
“It gets anything its little heart desires!” The brass surface was scrubbed of debris and grime.
“It gets everything it wants!” Small turquoise stones were affixed to the brass body.
“I hate it!” One glimmering red ruby stone was bound to the left side of the figurine’s head.
“I hate it!” Finally, a second red ruby was embedded into the surface on the face’s other side.
“I hate them all!”
In the glow of the fire, Erhgra held up the brass figurine. It was a disturbing representation of a rabbit. Its body was a lattice of crisscrossed brass strips bejeweled with a pale blue turquoise stone at each intersection. Its head was malformed and gave the impression of a dead thing instead of a pleasant rabbit full of life. He placed the atrocious thing upon an open silver locket that contained a mirror on each of the hinged inner sides. With the rabbit figurine facing one of the mirrors, he carefully opened a vial that held a clear fluid. It was lymph. The lymph from an elf was the source of magic that flowed through their bodies like that of blood from the second set of unique arteries found within its own circulatory system and pumped by a very special second heart.
Only a few tiny drops fell out of the vial. It splashed onto the figurine and mirrored locket illuminating them with a golden glow. Erhgra closed his eyes and spoke the words of wormwood in his elven tongue. The clear liquid turned black and stained the surface of both the rabbit statuette and silver locket. The glow turned a deep purple then slowly faded. Pleased with the outcome, he gently placed a cloth over the object without making eye contact to obscure it from sight and ever so carefully placed it in a small box decorated with holiday cheer.
Finished with his work, Erhgra turned to leave, pushing past the corpses of several elves hanging upside down from the support beams of the Other Workshop. Their lifeless bodies drained completely of every last drop of magical lymph from slit throats. Erhgra’s calculation had been correct. He had just enough magic to fuel the curse placed on the object. The mad elf smiled and begun to laugh. For the first time in a very long time, Erhgra E’tah’s heart filled with anticipation at the approach of Christmas morning.
The little girl sat in a large pile of torn wrapping paper from the many gifts she found under the Christmas tree. On the morning of December twenty-second, Gabby awoke earlier than everyone else. She went downstairs and glared at the many presents that continuously tempted her. It was as if they teased and mocked her every time she looked at the colorful and beautiful wrapping paper. She would receive such a terrible scolding from her parents, but she couldn’t wait any longer. At first, it would only be one gift she opened. Then it became two, then another and another. Before she knew it, all of her presents had been opened. Despite getting everything she asked for, the desire for more still was not satisfied.
When Gabby stood, a small gift next to the base of the Christmas tree caught her eye. She could have sworn it had not been there before. The wrapping paper was worn and yellowed with age. Written in big words was a tag that said: “To Gabriella.” It was like no other, and she surely would have seen it before now. Puzzled, she removed the wrapping paper and found a box that contained a smaller sealed box and a scroll. She opened the scroll and read:
Congratulations, lucky one! You are the proud owner of Pepe, the Rabbit. Pepe loves you and will be your best friend in the whole world. Pepe is a friend like no other, and he will give you everything your heart desires.
To be Pepe’s friend, you must listen to him, and never disobey the following instructions:
1. Place Pepe on his locket facing the mirror.
2. Never look Pepe in the eyes. He is ever so bashful and only likes to see you through his mirror.
3. You may ask anything of Pepe three times. In three days’ time, he will grant any and all you asked of him.
4. Never look Pepe in the eyes. It bears repeating! He does not like it and will be “upset” if you disobey this rule.
Remember, lucky little boy or girl; Pepe loves you. He loves you more than anyone else in the whole wide world. Pepe will make sure that no one will hurt you ever again. And if you love Pepe, you will listen to him and do whatever he asks of you.
Pepe loves you, and no one can ever come between you and him.
Pepe loves you.
Like most things found in the North Pole, not everything is as it appears. The land was unforgiving and cruel. It could take your life within minutes. Only a select number of creatures were given permission to live in this harsh and relentless wilderness. All others who entered this domain did it of their own accord; such as the residents of this tiny little home. However, these individuals were like no other and with a little bit of magic at their disposal, they lived happy and joyful lives.
At first glance, it would appear it was nothing more than a simple, ordinary home inhabited by an elderly couple who loved each other dearly. If this were your conclusion, you would be mistaken. In reality, a magical secret existed below, for the small house was much more than meets the eye. The little house was not just a home but the tip of a mystical workshop hidden beneath the ice.
For centuries, children around the world found joy from the efforts of the hidden workshop. All year round, tiny magical hands toiled and labored to create toys and playthings for all the good children of the world. Elves, the last of the magical creatures from old, dwelt within its walls and used their mystical nature to create wondrous and joyful things for Christmas morning. Three days after the Winter Solstice, the old man would put on his heavy coat and boots, take to the air and deliver his Christmas joy to every last child.
Like everything in the cosmos, there must be a balance. For every night, there must be a day; every beginning has an end. And, with every kind child, there was a naughty little boy or girl to be found.
Far below the bright lights, singing, and happy elves creating and building new and fantastic toys, there was another workshop. There, the warmth of the hearthstones could not reach. While the purpose of the upper workshop was to bring happiness, the other was dark and sterile. It too had a purpose. It was here where the masses of cheap and easily broken toys were made. There was no love put into these objects. Never would a child’s eyes brighten with wonder and awe upon seeing these gifts on Christmas morning. In his wisdom, the old man knew that even a naughty child should not be forgotten during this time of goodwill. However, the old man was no fool and had no desire to waste his resources on such unsatisfying tasks. This responsibility was handed to the banished and exiled elves that inhabited the deepest bowels below the Workshop. Those with selfish hearts and greedy desires. Stripped of their immortality, they wasted away in the dark with only the trinkets and flimsy materials to pass the time.
Erhgra E’tah sat in the poorly lit corner of a tattered workbench. His focus was entirely devoted to the old and worn piece of brass in his hands. The clangs of his hammer hitting metal rang out and echoed through the dark halls and passageways. He pounded the brass sheet relentlessly until the metal slowly began to surrender its shape and bend to Erhgra’s design. Suddenly the hammer flew out of the mad elf’s grasp. He examined his limp hand, trying to will it back into his control. Fury filled his heart as he watched the necrotic flesh sloughed off his bony hand. He didn’t have much time.
His other hand was weak, but still capable of grasp. He reached into his toolbox and removed a long warped nail and stabbed it into the back of his paralyzed hand. He pushed on the nail head until its tip broke through the skin and emerged through his palm. Immediately, the pain surged and shot up his arm. The thick and rigid tendons loosened within his hand, giving him temporary use of his digits once more.
The elf picked up his hammer and resumed molding the shape of the brass plate. With each impact upon the brass, he poured his rage into his creation. How ironic that the product of his tireless work was meant for the ones he hated the most. His deteriorating body was fading fast. He possessed just enough magic to fuel the curse he would cast upon the object. When finished, his gift would be placed with the other junk toys and cheap trinkets. It would make its way to “them” and find a child on Christmas morning. The curse will take hold and slowly begin tearing apart their lives. It will channel their essence back to him and reignite his immortality. The object would pass from one child, then to another, century after century.
He had just enough magic left to evoke his curse!
Erhgra had once lived and worked above. Like any other elf before him, he loved nothing more than to create beautiful and wondrous toys and gizmos. However, in his heart, he wished that he could keep some of his creations for himself. One day, his eyes fell upon a beautiful music box his friend D’lahela had created. The music box was extraordinary; meant as a gift to a King’s firstborn. It was magnificent. Crafted from oak wood, it bore an elaborate gold design on each of its sides. When opened, a figurine of three children danced hand in hand to a beautiful lullaby around a magnificent Christmas tree.
Erhgra E’tah had never desired anything more in his entire life. It filled his heart with jealousy. He became resentful that this precious and rare treasure would go to an undeserving human infant. The little girl didn’t deserve it! It should go to him, he thought. So, under cover of darkness, Erhgra slipped into the work area and took the music box.
Unable to sleep and anxious to put the finishing touches on his prized creation, D’lahela decided to return to the workshop. To his surprise and shock, he caught the elf attempting to steal the special music box. D’lahela was enraged, for greed and thievery amongst elves were extremely offensive and not tolerated. Erhgra begged his friend not to report his transgression, but D’lahela was unmoved by the pleas and turned to tell the others of Erhgra’s crime. Desperate, Erhgra did the only thing left for him to do. He grabbed a hammer and brought it down on his friend’s head over and over again until no more life remained in the broken body.
Despite his meticulous efforts to conceal his crime, he could not escape the sight and wisdom of the old man. Humiliated and dishonored, the elf was banished from the Workshop and his precious music box was taken from him and given to the little princess. Stripped of his immortality, Erhgra E’tah was cast into the cold and dark corridors of the Other Workshop to spend his remaining days, never to create a beautiful thing again. As the seasons passed, his hatred for all children grew and ate away at his sanity. He gritted his teeth knowing that the children of man were given everything and he had nothing!
Hunched over his work, Erhgra feverishly worked to complete his masterpiece. He stared down at the anvil and hammered down on the brass. Each strike brought the faces of a child into his mind.
“It lives in warmth.” The blunt hammer formed the metal into a hollow cylinder.
“It stuffs its face with sweets and treats.” Stumpy legs were welded into place.
“It gets everything it asks from mummy and daddy.” A malformed head and crooked ears took shape.
“It gets anything its little heart desires!” The brass surface was scrubbed of debris and grime.
“It gets everything it wants!” Small turquoise stones were affixed to the brass body.
“I hate it!” One glimmering red ruby stone was bound to the left side of the figurine’s head.
“I hate it!” Finally, a second red ruby was embedded into the surface on the face’s other side.
“I hate them all!”
In the glow of the fire, Erhgra held up the brass figurine. It was a disturbing representation of a rabbit. Its body was a lattice of crisscrossed brass strips bejeweled with a pale blue turquoise stone at each intersection. Its head was malformed and gave the impression of a dead thing instead of a pleasant rabbit full of life. He placed the atrocious thing upon an open silver locket that contained a mirror on each of the hinged inner sides. With the rabbit figurine facing one of the mirrors, he carefully opened a vial that held a clear fluid. It was lymph. The lymph from an elf was the source of magic that flowed through their bodies like that of blood from the second set of unique arteries found within its own circulatory system and pumped by a very special second heart.
Only a few tiny drops fell out of the vial. It splashed onto the figurine and mirrored locket illuminating them with a golden glow. Erhgra closed his eyes and spoke the words of wormwood in his elven tongue. The clear liquid turned black and stained the surface of both the rabbit statuette and silver locket. The glow turned a deep purple then slowly faded. Pleased with the outcome, he gently placed a cloth over the object without making eye contact to obscure it from sight and ever so carefully placed it in a small box decorated with holiday cheer.
Finished with his work, Erhgra turned to leave, pushing past the corpses of several elves hanging upside down from the support beams of the Other Workshop. Their lifeless bodies drained completely of every last drop of magical lymph from slit throats. Erhgra’s calculation had been correct. He had just enough magic to fuel the curse placed on the object. The mad elf smiled and begun to laugh. For the first time in a very long time, Erhgra E’tah’s heart filled with anticipation at the approach of Christmas morning.
The little girl sat in a large pile of torn wrapping paper from the many gifts she found under the Christmas tree. On the morning of December twenty-second, Gabby awoke earlier than everyone else. She went downstairs and glared at the many presents that continuously tempted her. It was as if they teased and mocked her every time she looked at the colorful and beautiful wrapping paper. She would receive such a terrible scolding from her parents, but she couldn’t wait any longer. At first, it would only be one gift she opened. Then it became two, then another and another. Before she knew it, all of her presents had been opened. Despite getting everything she asked for, the desire for more still was not satisfied.
When Gabby stood, a small gift next to the base of the Christmas tree caught her eye. She could have sworn it had not been there before. The wrapping paper was worn and yellowed with age. Written in big words was a tag that said: “To Gabriella.” It was like no other, and she surely would have seen it before now. Puzzled, she removed the wrapping paper and found a box that contained a smaller sealed box and a scroll. She opened the scroll and read:
Congratulations, lucky one! You are the proud owner of Pepe, the Rabbit. Pepe loves you and will be your best friend in the whole world. Pepe is a friend like no other, and he will give you everything your heart desires.
To be Pepe’s friend, you must listen to him, and never disobey the following instructions:
1. Place Pepe on his locket facing the mirror.
2. Never look Pepe in the eyes. He is ever so bashful and only likes to see you through his mirror.
3. You may ask anything of Pepe three times. In three days’ time, he will grant any and all you asked of him.
4. Never look Pepe in the eyes. It bears repeating! He does not like it and will be “upset” if you disobey this rule.
Remember, lucky little boy or girl; Pepe loves you. He loves you more than anyone else in the whole wide world. Pepe will make sure that no one will hurt you ever again. And if you love Pepe, you will listen to him and do whatever he asks of you.
Pepe loves you, and no one can ever come between you and him.
Pepe loves you.
Creepypasta offline - The Problem with the Drains by: Kris Mueller
“Man, that shift sucks!” I hear it all the time. I can understand why people say it; I used to think the same thing. I still do some days. I’m one of the lucky people that go to work while everybody else is sleeping soundly in their nice warm bed. It does have its perks, though. Most importantly for me, I’m all by myself, all night long. No bosses breathing down my neck, no co-workers getting on my nerves. Truth is, I just don’t play very well with others. Never have. It’s how I landed here on the midnight shift in the first place. I was getting under everybody’s skin during the day, and I’d had my fill of them as well. I’d ruffled too many feathers, as I often do. They probably would have just canned me altogether except for the fact that I’m damn good at my job, so they just changed my shift instead.
All’s well that ends well, and if I’m being completely honest, I was happy they did it. I mean, don’t get me wrong- it’s far from perfect. Sleeping during the day can be… problematic. The rest of the world doesn’t give a damn that you’re trying to get some shut-eye. Kids play, and dogs bark. Salesmen knock, and sirens scream. All things considered, though, everything was actually going really smoothly until the problem with the Drains started.
You see, I’m an overnight engineer in an office building. It’s not a huge building, not a skyscraper or anything like that, but big enough to need a mechanic to babysit it all night. There’s a whole mess of systems running 24/7 in a big building to keep everything ticking the way it’s supposed to. Electric, HVAC, plumbing… all the things office workers take for granted. I keep their computer servers cool and their air clean and breathable. Nice and warm at your desk on a 10-degree day in February? Thank a building engineer. Did you ever see “The Wizard of Oz”? Guys like me are “the man behind the curtain.” Like I already said, I’m quite good at it, and for the most part, everything ran smoothly the way it was supposed to. But then there were the drains…
It all started a couple of weeks after I began working the graveyard shift. I was making my rounds, checking the boilers and water pumps when I noticed a strange smell, and a pool of water around one of the circular floor drains in the boiler room. Plumbing clogs weren’t all that unusual in a large building, especially when it came to the toilets. You can’t imagine what people try to flush down those things. But a clogged floor drain was unusual. They’re really only there to help with damage control in the event of a flood if a boiler or a pump were to let go. To see one backed up was weird. Maybe one of the daytime guys swept the floor, didn’t feel like going to find a dustpan and swept a bunch of crap down there. When it came right down to it, the how and the why didn’t matter. What did matter was that it was my problem at that point, and it needed to be fixed. So I got to work taking care of it like I had a hundred times before on a hundred other clogged drains.
I tried a plunger first, looking for the quick, easy fix, but that didn’t do the trick. Grabbed a short manual auger to try to clear the trap out. The trap, in case you don’t know, is the bend below a drain that stays filled with water all the time. The water in the trap forms a liquid seal, and it’s the reason you don’t smell an entire city’s sewer system every time you walk past a sink or toilet. It’s also very prone to catching things and causing clogs. The auger didn’t work either, which meant the problem was even deeper than that. It was time to break out the big guns.
I went down to my shop and retrieved the “end all, be all” of drain clearing tools: A heavy-duty, 200-foot-long motorized snake. Enough length and power to tackle even the nastiest blockages. It had an auger head attached, which could push through whatever was causing the trouble and get the water flowing again. I set it up next to the drain, pulled my gloves on, and got to work. I fed about 10 feet in by hand and then got the snake spinning with the foot pedal switch. The electric motor simultaneously spun the snake and slowly fed it into the pipe. I was surprised to see how deep the clog actually was. I watched the length markers appear on the metal snake from within the drum, and then disappear again as they spun down into the drain. 20 feet, 40, 60, 80… all the way to 160 feet! I was starting to worry that I’d run out of snake before I reached the obstruction, when I felt it hit something. The motor labored slightly as the auger pushed into the clog. Then, something strange happened. It seemed as though the snake got pulled out a bit, like when a fish on a hook swims away and takes some of your fishing line with it. I didn’t think much of it and was relieved to see the pooled up water receding into the drain. Mission accomplished! I reversed the direction of the motor and began feeding the snake back into the drum, wiping it dry as I went. When I got to the 20-foot marker, I remembered hearing a strange noise that almost seemed to come from the drain itself. It sounded like a faint screech- but not the metal on metal scraping that rang out as a snake spun inside a cast iron drain pipe. It sounded almost… like an animal crying out.
I should take a minute to make something clear: spending many hours alone in a huge building at night can have some nasty side effects. Combined with the inherent lack of sleep that came with overnight work, solitude can sometimes make you think you heard or saw something that wasn’t really there. I was ready to dismiss the sound until I saw what was on the head of the metal snake as the last 5 feet emerged from the dark drain. There was a strand of what looked like dark grayish rubber hung up onto the auger. There was also some slimy pinkish matter around it, and I couldn’t for the life of me imagine what it was that I had just spun the snake into. I didn’t think much more of it as a wiped the snake clean and started mopping up around the drain. After that, the rest of the night played out like any other, and I went home as soon as my relief arrived.
I had some trouble sleeping the night and had what I can only describe as a general feeling of unease that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. After tossing and turning for most of the afternoon, sleep finally did take me. I only got about 3 hours’ worth, however, before I heard the alarm buzzing to signal the start of a new workday.
I didn’t get along with any of the daytime engineers, and we rarely spoke. Instead, I always learned of the day’s events by reading the logbook that we kept in our control room. On that particular day, I saw that a different drain had backed up in the basement. Much like the night before, they had needed the big snake to clear it. This didn’t surprise me too much. Sometimes when you cleared a blockage, it would get itself stuck further down the line, and you’d end up with another clog shortly after. I assumed that’s what had happened. On the bright side, the basement was the last stop on the way to the sewer, so if they cleared the blockage down there, I figured that it would be gone for good. Unfortunately, I’d soon learn otherwise.
At around 4 am, I was sitting at a bench in the boiler room looking through some maintenance records when I heard a light slapping sound from across the large room, near the boilers. I walked over to check it out, and as I approached, I could see the all-familiar sheen of pooled water around the floor drain closest to the boilers. As I got closer, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The source of the wet slapping sound was a thin gray tendril protruding from the drain, about 8 inches long. It seemed to be flipping around, slapping the floor surrounding the drain. My heart started racing as I gawked at what quite clearly seemed to be a limb of something alive inside a mechanical room floor drain. I reached for a nearby broom and swatted at it, but it just started slapping around more eagerly, as if excited by the new stimulus. Beginning to panic, I did the first thing that I thought of and ran over to the boiler’s blowdown valve, used for bleeding off 190-degree boiler water into the drain, which was currently home to the curious gray nuisance. I opened the valve just a bit, and the chemically-treated, scalding hot water had the desired effect.
The sound that followed was unmistakable- It is the same wounded screech that I had heard the night before, only much closer, and much louder. The strip of flesh began to bubble and blister before retracting as fast as slippery gray lightening back down into the drain. The pool of boiler water, mixed with the water that had been there before, disappeared into the drain with a whoosh. I closed the boiler valve and tried to compose myself. Overtiredness was the obvious cause of this impossible hallucination, I told myself. The amount of sleep I was getting each night just wasn’t enough for a human to operate properly on. Disbelief set in, and I started to wonder if I had dozed off at the bench in the boiler room and dreamt the whole thing. But there was no mistaking the smell- the awful putrid smell that now hung in the air.
It was nearing the end of my shift, so I made all of my usual equipment checks and retreated to the control room, which had absolutely, positively no floor drains — a very desirable quality for me at that moment. I added my notes to the logbook, making no mention whatsoever of the particular events that would have been considered completely insane by the engineers that would come in to relieve me.
Another restless day in bed. Very little sleep. I couldn’t get the vision of the scalded tentacle and the sound of the horrible scream out of my mind. The alarm buzzer was silenced instantly by my hovering hand that had already been held above the alarm clock waiting for the number to change. By that time, my eyes felt puffy and irritated. My skin was crawling, and even the slightest sound seemed deafening. Anybody that has experienced long stretches with little sleep would recognize the symptoms- severe, honest-to-God sleep deprivation was setting in. I was going to shower, but took one look at the drain in the tub and thought better of it. I splashed some cold water on my face, pulled on some clothes that seemed relatively clean, and headed out to work.
When I arrived, the logbook detailed a busy day that had been plagued with complaints of slow draining sinks and gurgling toilets that wouldn’t clear completely when flushed. My nightly rounds eventually brought me into the boiler room, where I saw not one, but three tendrils of at least two feet in length slapping and probing around the boiler drain that was once again very badly clogged with a large pool of water around it. Without a moment of hesitation, I went to the shop and retrieved the foot-pedal-operated drain snake once again, only this time I switched the auger tip out for a heavy-duty cutting head, guaranteed to rip through and clear any blockage when other attachments won’t get the job done. When I returned to the boiler room, I plugged in and readied the snake close to the boilers, but not close enough to be within reach of the hideous gray tentacles. I cracked the boiler drain valve slightly as I had the night before, releasing a bit more of the blistering-hot water down into the drain. This caused the creature in the drain to screech, and retreat partially back down into the drain. Acting as fast as I could, I immediately fed the snake forcefully down the drain several feet, pushing the tendrils further down, and causing another loud cry of pain.
The creature let out a different, angrier roar now, and tendrils shot up and out, in spite of the thick metal coil that I was hand-feeding hard into what I assumed was the creature’s body. I was beginning to reach for the footswitch, but the tentacles started weaving feverishly, and then they began wrapping themselves up and around the heavy metal snake. Before I could even process what was happening, one had started wrapping itself around my wrist. I recoiled quickly and managed to pull my left hand free, but in the next instant- two more thick tendrils had started slithering their way around my right wrist and then up my entire arm! Panicked, I tried to pull and rip at the thick slimy bonds with my left hand, but more tentacles emerged from the drain to wrap that hand as well. They were moving too fast for me to contend with, and I quickly found myself overpowered.
Nothing that had happened up until that point compared to the terror and despair that I felt next. Unable to free myself, I felt that, slowly but surely, I was being pulled toward the drain. There was nothing that I could do, and my hands had become useless in the tangle of gray whips. Head-first, I was sliding inch by horrifying inch closer to the four-inch drain opening that this creature intended to somehow squeeze me through. In a moment of complete and utter dumb luck, I saw that my foot was very close to the pedal switch that would engage the snake motor. With every last bit of my remaining strength, I pulled back hard against the creature enough to swing my leg over and just barely catch the switch with the very tip of my toe. The result was immediate, and very effective. The motor whirred to life, and some of the tendrils released at once, flailing frantically around the drain. Others got bound up around the now spinning snake and were ripped apart from the sheer force. The pool of water around the drain began to change color to first a light pink, and then a deep, thick crimson. The snake’s cutting blades continued to tear through the soft flesh of the unseen creature with the steady rhythmic churning that only a strong electric motor can provide. The tendrils moved wildly at first, then more slowly. Finally, to my great relief, they stopped moving altogether. I took my foot off the switch and became aware of a very welcomed relative silence in the boiler room. Another moment later, the gray appendages receded completely into the drain and the pooled blood and water went down with them, bubbling and gurgling as it slowly disappeared into the darkness.
After taking a moment to collect myself, I made the decision to leave the building right then and there. I left everything just as it was. When the day shift arrived, they’d inexplicably find 100 feet of bloody snake stuck in a drain pipe in the boiler room, and that was perfectly fine by me. If I had tried to explain, they would never have believed me anyway.
I’m not sure how many days it has been, but I do know that I still haven’t slept. Since then, I spend most of my time in my bedroom, far from most of my house’s indoor plumbing. There’s a bucket that I have close by for when nature calls. Every time I feel as though I’m about to drift off to sleep, I hear the soft, wet slapping that I heard that first night when I saw the tentacle. Every time I get up out of bed to check the kitchen and bathroom, however, the sound stops, and I don’t find anything there.
All’s well that ends well, and if I’m being completely honest, I was happy they did it. I mean, don’t get me wrong- it’s far from perfect. Sleeping during the day can be… problematic. The rest of the world doesn’t give a damn that you’re trying to get some shut-eye. Kids play, and dogs bark. Salesmen knock, and sirens scream. All things considered, though, everything was actually going really smoothly until the problem with the Drains started.
You see, I’m an overnight engineer in an office building. It’s not a huge building, not a skyscraper or anything like that, but big enough to need a mechanic to babysit it all night. There’s a whole mess of systems running 24/7 in a big building to keep everything ticking the way it’s supposed to. Electric, HVAC, plumbing… all the things office workers take for granted. I keep their computer servers cool and their air clean and breathable. Nice and warm at your desk on a 10-degree day in February? Thank a building engineer. Did you ever see “The Wizard of Oz”? Guys like me are “the man behind the curtain.” Like I already said, I’m quite good at it, and for the most part, everything ran smoothly the way it was supposed to. But then there were the drains…
It all started a couple of weeks after I began working the graveyard shift. I was making my rounds, checking the boilers and water pumps when I noticed a strange smell, and a pool of water around one of the circular floor drains in the boiler room. Plumbing clogs weren’t all that unusual in a large building, especially when it came to the toilets. You can’t imagine what people try to flush down those things. But a clogged floor drain was unusual. They’re really only there to help with damage control in the event of a flood if a boiler or a pump were to let go. To see one backed up was weird. Maybe one of the daytime guys swept the floor, didn’t feel like going to find a dustpan and swept a bunch of crap down there. When it came right down to it, the how and the why didn’t matter. What did matter was that it was my problem at that point, and it needed to be fixed. So I got to work taking care of it like I had a hundred times before on a hundred other clogged drains.
I tried a plunger first, looking for the quick, easy fix, but that didn’t do the trick. Grabbed a short manual auger to try to clear the trap out. The trap, in case you don’t know, is the bend below a drain that stays filled with water all the time. The water in the trap forms a liquid seal, and it’s the reason you don’t smell an entire city’s sewer system every time you walk past a sink or toilet. It’s also very prone to catching things and causing clogs. The auger didn’t work either, which meant the problem was even deeper than that. It was time to break out the big guns.
I went down to my shop and retrieved the “end all, be all” of drain clearing tools: A heavy-duty, 200-foot-long motorized snake. Enough length and power to tackle even the nastiest blockages. It had an auger head attached, which could push through whatever was causing the trouble and get the water flowing again. I set it up next to the drain, pulled my gloves on, and got to work. I fed about 10 feet in by hand and then got the snake spinning with the foot pedal switch. The electric motor simultaneously spun the snake and slowly fed it into the pipe. I was surprised to see how deep the clog actually was. I watched the length markers appear on the metal snake from within the drum, and then disappear again as they spun down into the drain. 20 feet, 40, 60, 80… all the way to 160 feet! I was starting to worry that I’d run out of snake before I reached the obstruction, when I felt it hit something. The motor labored slightly as the auger pushed into the clog. Then, something strange happened. It seemed as though the snake got pulled out a bit, like when a fish on a hook swims away and takes some of your fishing line with it. I didn’t think much of it and was relieved to see the pooled up water receding into the drain. Mission accomplished! I reversed the direction of the motor and began feeding the snake back into the drum, wiping it dry as I went. When I got to the 20-foot marker, I remembered hearing a strange noise that almost seemed to come from the drain itself. It sounded like a faint screech- but not the metal on metal scraping that rang out as a snake spun inside a cast iron drain pipe. It sounded almost… like an animal crying out.
I should take a minute to make something clear: spending many hours alone in a huge building at night can have some nasty side effects. Combined with the inherent lack of sleep that came with overnight work, solitude can sometimes make you think you heard or saw something that wasn’t really there. I was ready to dismiss the sound until I saw what was on the head of the metal snake as the last 5 feet emerged from the dark drain. There was a strand of what looked like dark grayish rubber hung up onto the auger. There was also some slimy pinkish matter around it, and I couldn’t for the life of me imagine what it was that I had just spun the snake into. I didn’t think much more of it as a wiped the snake clean and started mopping up around the drain. After that, the rest of the night played out like any other, and I went home as soon as my relief arrived.
I had some trouble sleeping the night and had what I can only describe as a general feeling of unease that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. After tossing and turning for most of the afternoon, sleep finally did take me. I only got about 3 hours’ worth, however, before I heard the alarm buzzing to signal the start of a new workday.
I didn’t get along with any of the daytime engineers, and we rarely spoke. Instead, I always learned of the day’s events by reading the logbook that we kept in our control room. On that particular day, I saw that a different drain had backed up in the basement. Much like the night before, they had needed the big snake to clear it. This didn’t surprise me too much. Sometimes when you cleared a blockage, it would get itself stuck further down the line, and you’d end up with another clog shortly after. I assumed that’s what had happened. On the bright side, the basement was the last stop on the way to the sewer, so if they cleared the blockage down there, I figured that it would be gone for good. Unfortunately, I’d soon learn otherwise.
At around 4 am, I was sitting at a bench in the boiler room looking through some maintenance records when I heard a light slapping sound from across the large room, near the boilers. I walked over to check it out, and as I approached, I could see the all-familiar sheen of pooled water around the floor drain closest to the boilers. As I got closer, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The source of the wet slapping sound was a thin gray tendril protruding from the drain, about 8 inches long. It seemed to be flipping around, slapping the floor surrounding the drain. My heart started racing as I gawked at what quite clearly seemed to be a limb of something alive inside a mechanical room floor drain. I reached for a nearby broom and swatted at it, but it just started slapping around more eagerly, as if excited by the new stimulus. Beginning to panic, I did the first thing that I thought of and ran over to the boiler’s blowdown valve, used for bleeding off 190-degree boiler water into the drain, which was currently home to the curious gray nuisance. I opened the valve just a bit, and the chemically-treated, scalding hot water had the desired effect.
The sound that followed was unmistakable- It is the same wounded screech that I had heard the night before, only much closer, and much louder. The strip of flesh began to bubble and blister before retracting as fast as slippery gray lightening back down into the drain. The pool of boiler water, mixed with the water that had been there before, disappeared into the drain with a whoosh. I closed the boiler valve and tried to compose myself. Overtiredness was the obvious cause of this impossible hallucination, I told myself. The amount of sleep I was getting each night just wasn’t enough for a human to operate properly on. Disbelief set in, and I started to wonder if I had dozed off at the bench in the boiler room and dreamt the whole thing. But there was no mistaking the smell- the awful putrid smell that now hung in the air.
It was nearing the end of my shift, so I made all of my usual equipment checks and retreated to the control room, which had absolutely, positively no floor drains — a very desirable quality for me at that moment. I added my notes to the logbook, making no mention whatsoever of the particular events that would have been considered completely insane by the engineers that would come in to relieve me.
Another restless day in bed. Very little sleep. I couldn’t get the vision of the scalded tentacle and the sound of the horrible scream out of my mind. The alarm buzzer was silenced instantly by my hovering hand that had already been held above the alarm clock waiting for the number to change. By that time, my eyes felt puffy and irritated. My skin was crawling, and even the slightest sound seemed deafening. Anybody that has experienced long stretches with little sleep would recognize the symptoms- severe, honest-to-God sleep deprivation was setting in. I was going to shower, but took one look at the drain in the tub and thought better of it. I splashed some cold water on my face, pulled on some clothes that seemed relatively clean, and headed out to work.
When I arrived, the logbook detailed a busy day that had been plagued with complaints of slow draining sinks and gurgling toilets that wouldn’t clear completely when flushed. My nightly rounds eventually brought me into the boiler room, where I saw not one, but three tendrils of at least two feet in length slapping and probing around the boiler drain that was once again very badly clogged with a large pool of water around it. Without a moment of hesitation, I went to the shop and retrieved the foot-pedal-operated drain snake once again, only this time I switched the auger tip out for a heavy-duty cutting head, guaranteed to rip through and clear any blockage when other attachments won’t get the job done. When I returned to the boiler room, I plugged in and readied the snake close to the boilers, but not close enough to be within reach of the hideous gray tentacles. I cracked the boiler drain valve slightly as I had the night before, releasing a bit more of the blistering-hot water down into the drain. This caused the creature in the drain to screech, and retreat partially back down into the drain. Acting as fast as I could, I immediately fed the snake forcefully down the drain several feet, pushing the tendrils further down, and causing another loud cry of pain.
The creature let out a different, angrier roar now, and tendrils shot up and out, in spite of the thick metal coil that I was hand-feeding hard into what I assumed was the creature’s body. I was beginning to reach for the footswitch, but the tentacles started weaving feverishly, and then they began wrapping themselves up and around the heavy metal snake. Before I could even process what was happening, one had started wrapping itself around my wrist. I recoiled quickly and managed to pull my left hand free, but in the next instant- two more thick tendrils had started slithering their way around my right wrist and then up my entire arm! Panicked, I tried to pull and rip at the thick slimy bonds with my left hand, but more tentacles emerged from the drain to wrap that hand as well. They were moving too fast for me to contend with, and I quickly found myself overpowered.
Nothing that had happened up until that point compared to the terror and despair that I felt next. Unable to free myself, I felt that, slowly but surely, I was being pulled toward the drain. There was nothing that I could do, and my hands had become useless in the tangle of gray whips. Head-first, I was sliding inch by horrifying inch closer to the four-inch drain opening that this creature intended to somehow squeeze me through. In a moment of complete and utter dumb luck, I saw that my foot was very close to the pedal switch that would engage the snake motor. With every last bit of my remaining strength, I pulled back hard against the creature enough to swing my leg over and just barely catch the switch with the very tip of my toe. The result was immediate, and very effective. The motor whirred to life, and some of the tendrils released at once, flailing frantically around the drain. Others got bound up around the now spinning snake and were ripped apart from the sheer force. The pool of water around the drain began to change color to first a light pink, and then a deep, thick crimson. The snake’s cutting blades continued to tear through the soft flesh of the unseen creature with the steady rhythmic churning that only a strong electric motor can provide. The tendrils moved wildly at first, then more slowly. Finally, to my great relief, they stopped moving altogether. I took my foot off the switch and became aware of a very welcomed relative silence in the boiler room. Another moment later, the gray appendages receded completely into the drain and the pooled blood and water went down with them, bubbling and gurgling as it slowly disappeared into the darkness.
After taking a moment to collect myself, I made the decision to leave the building right then and there. I left everything just as it was. When the day shift arrived, they’d inexplicably find 100 feet of bloody snake stuck in a drain pipe in the boiler room, and that was perfectly fine by me. If I had tried to explain, they would never have believed me anyway.
I’m not sure how many days it has been, but I do know that I still haven’t slept. Since then, I spend most of my time in my bedroom, far from most of my house’s indoor plumbing. There’s a bucket that I have close by for when nature calls. Every time I feel as though I’m about to drift off to sleep, I hear the soft, wet slapping that I heard that first night when I saw the tentacle. Every time I get up out of bed to check the kitchen and bathroom, however, the sound stops, and I don’t find anything there.
Creepypasta offline - Santa's Magic by: Amaris J. Gagnon
The night of Christmas Eve 2008 is a blur, depending on how much medication I am given that day. I can avoid the nurses for a couple of hours, but not too long. I suppose you’ve heard about me in the papers or on your favorite serial killer show. No, I was never convicted. What the media claimed was all lies anyway. No one knew what happened that night except me – which is why the police blamed me. My name is Max and my name is all I carry now. You’ve probably heard of ghost towns around the U.S. My town is one of them. Located in the foggy mountains of Oregon, most people have never heard of the town “Asher.” It was the kind of town where people never left, and if they did, they always returned. Things and people always had a habit of coming back. Bad memories, sadness, pain, and grief always stuck around. Festering at night right before one tried to go to bed, piling on itself, growing deeper in the dirt. There are forests, but not as many trees as you’d think we would have. Green doesn’t grow in this town. The dirt won’t let it.
No matter how much sage you burned, it couldn’t cleanse this place. This town was haunted, but perhaps, the people were first. I don’t consider myself haunted, I just think I was born wrong. When I was brought into this world, my mother told me that I wasn’t like other babies. I had a solemn-looking face and dark eyes. She also said that I refused to cry. I still can’t cry. My eyes won’t produce tears. The doctors say it’s a disorder. Even when my grandmother died, I never cried. Or when my mother would scream at me, I never flinched. Or when my dog got hit by a car.
Nothing.
I didn’t feel things like other kids or people. I don’t feel at all.
When I was six, I knew something was wrong when I accidentally cut half my finger off and I never screamed. There is something within me that isn’t in other people. I guess it was destiny for the events that took place. Some kind of fated magic.
Whenever my mother got drunk, she would tell me that I was a stone boy and that all stone boys went to hell. She was bi-polar when she wanted to be. When she loved me, she loved me, but when she despised the fact that she had a kid, she hated me. There was never an in-between.
My father was too busy pretending nothing was wrong, with his head in the clouds of denial, he always knew how to make himself feel better. All he had to do was look away or leave the house. Too bad I couldn’t live in those clouds with him. Instead, I was always on my own, sitting in silence at the kitchen table, staring out the window in the back seat of our car, waiting for some better day to come, but better days never came.
2008 was a year of many things for me. I had started 8th grade and was finally one year from high school. My voice got significantly deeper and life seemed like it had possibilities, until my parents separated. The separation made my home life worst. My mother drank more and my father never came home. The teachers blamed me for not paying attention, but what they didn’t know was that I hadn’t eaten in two days. The school bully would make fun of my ribs and call me names. We called him Dan the Giant. At almost 6 feet at thirteen years old, he was monstrous. The only person scarier than him was his father. His dad was taller than him and viler. Even the teachers were scared. Dan had dyslexia too, but he wasn’t that bright, to begin with. Any kid that mentioned or corrected him got the beating. Any kid that existed, to be honest, got a beating. Dan stuck gum in my hair the Friday before Winter Break. The teacher had to cut chunks of my brown curly strands to get it out. My father blamed me saying I deserved it because I refused to stick up for myself. How the hell was I supposed to stick up to a six-foot behemoth? They would all get theirs, I promised myself. One day – they would get it. This whole town.
The teacher had us all do an exercise. She called it Santa’s Magic. We had to write a letter to Santa asking what we wanted the most. The other kids laughed. We all knew Santa Claus wasn’t real. For a moment, I believed, because I had nothing else to believe in. I asked Santa for something very important. Something I’ve wanted for a long time. Something only Santa could give me.
* * * * * *
I was making a can of soup when my mother stumbled through the kitchen, knocking the bowl out of my hand. “Pick it up!” she yelled. Not wanting to get hit, I found some towels and soaked up the liquid. My father looked down at me from the living room without saying a word. Instead, he took his coat and left. God, I hated my parents. They were pieces of cow crap and they knew it. The whole town knew who my mom was by the bars she would frequent and lose her clothes in. Dan the Giant once told the class that my mother was nothing but a no-good whore and my father a loser mechanic. That was the day I punched Dan. Of course, he punched back and harder. Neither of us got in trouble. The principal didn’t want to get involved. That was the thing with the town of Asher. No one wanted conflict, and yet there was always conflict. No one wanted to get involved, yet everyone usually was.
I put the soaked-up towels in the basement and went to mop the floor. I was angry because that was the last can of soup. No one went food shopping anymore and when something did pop up, usually someone took it and hid it. I scrambled through the cabinets for anything else I could find. There was nothing. I teared up, my stomach growling, and I drank a glass of water to appease the pain. My mother sat in the corner of the kitchen with her bottle, laughing.
“Where did your father go?” She asked, stuttering over her words.
“I don’t know,” I responded.
“One day I’m going to leave this earth and never come back. Then what are you all going to do?” She laughed again. “You’re just like your father. Small, weak, and pitiful. I didn’t want you, but he made me keep you,” she chided. “I never wanted kids, but there you were one day. A mistake.”
“Stop,” I muttered under my breath.
“Or what?” my mother replied, vicious as ever.
My father came back through the door. He took one look at my mother and went upstairs to his room.
“The kids in the town say you’re a whore,” I screamed.
My mother got up from the ground as quickly as she fell back over.
“What the hell did you just call me?”
“My friends say you’re nothing but a dirty whore!”
My mother reached into the drawer and grabbed a knife.
“You piece of shit. How dare you dare call me that. How do you think I pay for this place? Your father, who hasn’t had a job in months? Your weak and useless father. Weak and useless! And you know what? You’re just like him!” She screamed. My mother took another swing at the bottle and then at me.
“Just get out! Get out! Get out of my house! GET OUT!” she screamed.
I grabbed my backpack and ran out, not looking back. I just ran, not knowing where I was going. I ran knowing that I couldn’t go back. Tears flowed down my eyes and my chest felt like it was going to drop out my ass. I must have pissed myself because my pants were wet. I ran through the streets, past the school, past the town, into the woods. The sun had already gone down and the night took over creating an eerie path on the outskirts of town. I didn’t care. I ran through the trees, going off the path, finally stopping when I had no air left in my lungs. My legs collapsed and I sat against a tree.
The wind blew against my face and for the first time throughout that entire run, I realized I was utterly alone. Not just in these woods. I had no family. I had no friends. I had no one. I wanted to not exist anymore. For a moment, I wondered what it would have been like to die. To not be me. Until something shuffled amongst the leaves. I got up and looked out into the darkness. I couldn’t see anything. I tried to tell myself that it was nothing until I heard the shuffling again. It was Oregon, so perhaps it was a bear or an animal moving about. The shuffling was heavy. Shuffling and steps being taken by something big and bigger than me. I tiptoed in the dark to try to find the path. I was mortified. With no flashlight or even the moon to help, I was blind. I heard the shuffling again, except closer.
My heart was like an engine failing. I couldn’t breathe. I kept walking, knowing that whatever the hell was shuffling in that darkness, knows I was there. It was when I felt a hand on my shoulder that I started to run. I didn’t know if I was going the right way or if I going deeper into the forest, but I ran. As much as I hated my parents, I would gladly go back to my crazy mother than be in the woods with something I couldn’t see. Luckily, I was going the right way as I heard a car drive by. I made it back to the road, but I could still feel whatever it was in that wood, behind me. I waved at the car driving, screaming for help. I took a rock and threw it at the car. It smashed a window. The car stopped and reversed.
“Help me!” I screamed. The car pulled over and a man wearing a red plaid shirt with a long grimy beard got out of the car.
“Help!” I yelled.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing, you little shit?!” he screamed, examining his car.
“There’s something after me!” I yelled.
“I don’t give a fuck. Look what you did, you little shit.”
“There’s someone out there following me. Please!” I pleaded.
“You better hope your parents can pay for this or I’ll chop off your balls as payment!” he screamed.
The grimy bearded man grabbed me by my neck and slammed me against the car.
“Or maybe I should do it now,” he said. His breath smelled like beer and rotten cheese. He was missing a tooth on the left side of his mouth. I turned away, terrified.
Before he could strike me, I fell to the ground. Something dragged the bearded, grimy man away from me.
“Kid, get the gun in my car!” he yelled at me, blood coming from his nose.
I went into his truck and found a revolver under the seat. I could hear something attacking the bearded man. The thing from the woods. I could hear the tearing of flesh and the breaking of his bones. I grabbed the man’s phone that had dropped on the ground and put it on flashlight mode. The man was dragged into the woods, screaming, leaving a bloodstain on the road behind. I screamed and went into the car, locking the doors. I didn’t know how to drive a car, but I figured it out. I put my foot on the brakes and out the gear in drive. Even though I put my foot on the gas, the car wouldn’t move. Whatever creature took that man, came back, this time, for me. It was holding the car from the back. I got out and started running back through the dark. I tried to call 911 on the dude’s cell-phone, but something knocked it out of my hand, smashing it to the ground.
I stopped, feeling the creature circling me. I prepared myself to be torn apart like the grimy bearded man. Instead, I felt a stale breath on my neck. I turned around, not seeing anything. I knew it would be any moment before it killed me. I closed my eyes and waited. My hand raised on its own. Whatever this creature was, held my hand and grasped it, holding it. I shakily lifted the light from the cell-phone to its face. It was ugly with white pale and scaly skin. Its mouth was oversized with teeth that protruded from its bloodied mouth. A long slippery tongue occasionally stuck on the way a snake’s tongue feels the environment. It was tall, and had black coal eyes that gave a merciless stare.
“What are you?” I asked.
The cold eyes looked into mine, but it gave no response.
“Th… th… thank you,” I muttered.
I felt an ice droplet on my nose. It started to snow. I didn’t know what this thing was, but it decided that I would call it Creature.
Creature cried into the night. Its shrieks echoed in the air. I was still scared, but something felt safe with it. It did save me from that man.
“Are you alone, too?” I asked.
It shook its head. Whatever Creature was, it understood me.
The creature took one last look at me and ran into the woods, disappearing into the trees.
I ran home and away from what would be a future crime scene. I was terrified, confused, but also curious. I opened my front door quietly, hoping that no one was awake and tiptoed to my bedroom.
* * * * * *
The next morning, the entire town was talking of bears, thieves, or wild animals that must have taken Burton John -A.K. A – The grimy bearded man. That was his name. Only I knew what happened to Burton and he was definitely dead. I guessed Creature took the body and finished it off elsewhere. My mother left me alone the next day, perhaps out of guilt. My father never asked me how I was. I quickly got dressed and went off to school.
I didn’t notice the dirt in my hair leftover from last night. Dan the Giant made jokes to the class about how poor my family was that we couldn’t afford water and that we were all dirty people. I ignored him, but he just wouldn’t stop. For an entire 30 minutes, he kept going, unable to control himself. The teacher sat at her computer drinking her coffee, living in her clouds of denial, and pretending nothing was wrong.
Then the thought came to me.
How interesting would it be to have Creature eat Dan?
It was murder, I quickly realized, and I was not a murderer. Dan kept going for the rest of the class period. Something changed in me. I realized Dan didn’t deserve mercy. He deserved to get eaten. He was a piece of shit and he would eventually grow up to be a shit adult. People like him never grew out of their shit-ness. Kids like Dan either became violent men that preyed in bars or violent cops that preyed on civilians.
No one would miss him.
Remembering the gum in my hair and I knew that something had to be done. He had to be punished. We all got let out early for Christmas Eve. I skipped the bus and walked back down to where Creature was. Police and townies were all over the woods. There was no way I would be able to find him.
I went back home. My mom was going through one of her cycles where she bought food, cooked dinner, and acted like she didn’t just kick me out the other day. This “happy” cycle only lasts a couple of hours before someone says or does something that tips the scale and she’s full-blown crazy again. I took the opportunity to eat and go to my room. Not more than an hour later after my father mentioned that the gas got turned off did she tip. I started packing a bag for myself. I put on my shoes and left for the front door. I wanted to get ahead of the storm and look for Creature. The second I opened it, my mother’s hand slammed it shut.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” she asked.
“Why do you care?” I snapped back.
“You’re not going anywhere.”
“I’m not going to sit in this house as you hit and yell at me. I’ll just leave.”
My father walked by us, slinking up the stairs to his room.
“Mom, I’m leaving.”
She grabbed me by my throat.
“Tell me what you’re going to do again.”
I couldn’t breathe. She took a shoe and hit my leg with it.
“It’s your fault we can’t pay the bills. All you do is take from us! You’re lucky we don’t put you out into the street.”
I felt my lungs tearing inside from the pain. I was a minute from passing out when a loud crash through the window made my mother let go. I didn’t have to look for my friend after all because there it was, in my living room. It walked on the broken glass unhurt like Jesus on water. It ran to my mother and grabbed her and threw her across the room. My father came downstairs and upon seeing Creature, ran for his gun. Creature was too fast. It slit my father’s ankles and he fell down the stairs. Creature put its foot on top of my father’s stomach until it protruded, squishing and disemboweling him. My mother tried to run, but Creature threw a table at her, stopping her. “Please! Take him! Take him!” she pleaded, pointing at me, tears rolling down her eyes.
Creature wrung her neck, and with one final snap, crushed it. Blood poured from her eyes and nose. I sat in silence looking at what it had done to my parents. The two people that raised me from when I was a baby. My parents who loved me, beat me, and told me I was scum, and hated me for existing. I felt nothing for them, as I looked upon their bloodied faces. I suppose it was at that moment that something else changed. I took Creature’s hand and we left my house. We found an old Santa’s costume and I dressed him. A red hat, and a red and black suit. He just wanted to belong like me.
Santa had finally come to the town of Asher.
We started at my neighbor’s houses. One by one, killing them all. Their screams like a symphony in the night. I watched as he pulled organs out, smashed people’s heads, picked out teeth, and splattered blood on Christmas trees.
Oh, how the red brightened the magical night.
When we reached Dan’s house, I knew I wanted to relish the moment when he saw who was behind his death. Creature slashed Dan’s father’s throat and with its sharp claws, stabbed his mother. Dan screamed in horror as Creature inched closer to him. I smiled at Dan who looked back with a face I’ll never forget. To be honest, it was a look of defeat. Creature took Dan and limb by limb, tore him apart. His agony was my cloud of denial and his suffering my alcohol and I was drunk in it. When we were done, I watched Creature feed on some of the bodies, offering me chunks of eyeball, brain, and liver. I wondered where this beast had come from, but it didn’t matter. He was my friend and he answered my one Christmas wish. A wish only Santa could give.
Before the night had ended, Creature took one last look at me, but I somehow knew he wasn’t coming back. There was no ceremonious farewell, this beast went back into the darkness from where it came, and I didn’t even feel sad. My friend was gone, and I still felt nothing.
You see, I just wanted to be alone.
When the news hit that a town massacre had occurred, the world was in shock. The only survivor was a fourteen-year-old boy. I told the police no lies that night.
I told them that Santa Claus had come to town.
No matter how much sage you burned, it couldn’t cleanse this place. This town was haunted, but perhaps, the people were first. I don’t consider myself haunted, I just think I was born wrong. When I was brought into this world, my mother told me that I wasn’t like other babies. I had a solemn-looking face and dark eyes. She also said that I refused to cry. I still can’t cry. My eyes won’t produce tears. The doctors say it’s a disorder. Even when my grandmother died, I never cried. Or when my mother would scream at me, I never flinched. Or when my dog got hit by a car.
Nothing.
I didn’t feel things like other kids or people. I don’t feel at all.
When I was six, I knew something was wrong when I accidentally cut half my finger off and I never screamed. There is something within me that isn’t in other people. I guess it was destiny for the events that took place. Some kind of fated magic.
Whenever my mother got drunk, she would tell me that I was a stone boy and that all stone boys went to hell. She was bi-polar when she wanted to be. When she loved me, she loved me, but when she despised the fact that she had a kid, she hated me. There was never an in-between.
My father was too busy pretending nothing was wrong, with his head in the clouds of denial, he always knew how to make himself feel better. All he had to do was look away or leave the house. Too bad I couldn’t live in those clouds with him. Instead, I was always on my own, sitting in silence at the kitchen table, staring out the window in the back seat of our car, waiting for some better day to come, but better days never came.
2008 was a year of many things for me. I had started 8th grade and was finally one year from high school. My voice got significantly deeper and life seemed like it had possibilities, until my parents separated. The separation made my home life worst. My mother drank more and my father never came home. The teachers blamed me for not paying attention, but what they didn’t know was that I hadn’t eaten in two days. The school bully would make fun of my ribs and call me names. We called him Dan the Giant. At almost 6 feet at thirteen years old, he was monstrous. The only person scarier than him was his father. His dad was taller than him and viler. Even the teachers were scared. Dan had dyslexia too, but he wasn’t that bright, to begin with. Any kid that mentioned or corrected him got the beating. Any kid that existed, to be honest, got a beating. Dan stuck gum in my hair the Friday before Winter Break. The teacher had to cut chunks of my brown curly strands to get it out. My father blamed me saying I deserved it because I refused to stick up for myself. How the hell was I supposed to stick up to a six-foot behemoth? They would all get theirs, I promised myself. One day – they would get it. This whole town.
The teacher had us all do an exercise. She called it Santa’s Magic. We had to write a letter to Santa asking what we wanted the most. The other kids laughed. We all knew Santa Claus wasn’t real. For a moment, I believed, because I had nothing else to believe in. I asked Santa for something very important. Something I’ve wanted for a long time. Something only Santa could give me.
* * * * * *
I was making a can of soup when my mother stumbled through the kitchen, knocking the bowl out of my hand. “Pick it up!” she yelled. Not wanting to get hit, I found some towels and soaked up the liquid. My father looked down at me from the living room without saying a word. Instead, he took his coat and left. God, I hated my parents. They were pieces of cow crap and they knew it. The whole town knew who my mom was by the bars she would frequent and lose her clothes in. Dan the Giant once told the class that my mother was nothing but a no-good whore and my father a loser mechanic. That was the day I punched Dan. Of course, he punched back and harder. Neither of us got in trouble. The principal didn’t want to get involved. That was the thing with the town of Asher. No one wanted conflict, and yet there was always conflict. No one wanted to get involved, yet everyone usually was.
I put the soaked-up towels in the basement and went to mop the floor. I was angry because that was the last can of soup. No one went food shopping anymore and when something did pop up, usually someone took it and hid it. I scrambled through the cabinets for anything else I could find. There was nothing. I teared up, my stomach growling, and I drank a glass of water to appease the pain. My mother sat in the corner of the kitchen with her bottle, laughing.
“Where did your father go?” She asked, stuttering over her words.
“I don’t know,” I responded.
“One day I’m going to leave this earth and never come back. Then what are you all going to do?” She laughed again. “You’re just like your father. Small, weak, and pitiful. I didn’t want you, but he made me keep you,” she chided. “I never wanted kids, but there you were one day. A mistake.”
“Stop,” I muttered under my breath.
“Or what?” my mother replied, vicious as ever.
My father came back through the door. He took one look at my mother and went upstairs to his room.
“The kids in the town say you’re a whore,” I screamed.
My mother got up from the ground as quickly as she fell back over.
“What the hell did you just call me?”
“My friends say you’re nothing but a dirty whore!”
My mother reached into the drawer and grabbed a knife.
“You piece of shit. How dare you dare call me that. How do you think I pay for this place? Your father, who hasn’t had a job in months? Your weak and useless father. Weak and useless! And you know what? You’re just like him!” She screamed. My mother took another swing at the bottle and then at me.
“Just get out! Get out! Get out of my house! GET OUT!” she screamed.
I grabbed my backpack and ran out, not looking back. I just ran, not knowing where I was going. I ran knowing that I couldn’t go back. Tears flowed down my eyes and my chest felt like it was going to drop out my ass. I must have pissed myself because my pants were wet. I ran through the streets, past the school, past the town, into the woods. The sun had already gone down and the night took over creating an eerie path on the outskirts of town. I didn’t care. I ran through the trees, going off the path, finally stopping when I had no air left in my lungs. My legs collapsed and I sat against a tree.
The wind blew against my face and for the first time throughout that entire run, I realized I was utterly alone. Not just in these woods. I had no family. I had no friends. I had no one. I wanted to not exist anymore. For a moment, I wondered what it would have been like to die. To not be me. Until something shuffled amongst the leaves. I got up and looked out into the darkness. I couldn’t see anything. I tried to tell myself that it was nothing until I heard the shuffling again. It was Oregon, so perhaps it was a bear or an animal moving about. The shuffling was heavy. Shuffling and steps being taken by something big and bigger than me. I tiptoed in the dark to try to find the path. I was mortified. With no flashlight or even the moon to help, I was blind. I heard the shuffling again, except closer.
My heart was like an engine failing. I couldn’t breathe. I kept walking, knowing that whatever the hell was shuffling in that darkness, knows I was there. It was when I felt a hand on my shoulder that I started to run. I didn’t know if I was going the right way or if I going deeper into the forest, but I ran. As much as I hated my parents, I would gladly go back to my crazy mother than be in the woods with something I couldn’t see. Luckily, I was going the right way as I heard a car drive by. I made it back to the road, but I could still feel whatever it was in that wood, behind me. I waved at the car driving, screaming for help. I took a rock and threw it at the car. It smashed a window. The car stopped and reversed.
“Help me!” I screamed. The car pulled over and a man wearing a red plaid shirt with a long grimy beard got out of the car.
“Help!” I yelled.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing, you little shit?!” he screamed, examining his car.
“There’s something after me!” I yelled.
“I don’t give a fuck. Look what you did, you little shit.”
“There’s someone out there following me. Please!” I pleaded.
“You better hope your parents can pay for this or I’ll chop off your balls as payment!” he screamed.
The grimy bearded man grabbed me by my neck and slammed me against the car.
“Or maybe I should do it now,” he said. His breath smelled like beer and rotten cheese. He was missing a tooth on the left side of his mouth. I turned away, terrified.
Before he could strike me, I fell to the ground. Something dragged the bearded, grimy man away from me.
“Kid, get the gun in my car!” he yelled at me, blood coming from his nose.
I went into his truck and found a revolver under the seat. I could hear something attacking the bearded man. The thing from the woods. I could hear the tearing of flesh and the breaking of his bones. I grabbed the man’s phone that had dropped on the ground and put it on flashlight mode. The man was dragged into the woods, screaming, leaving a bloodstain on the road behind. I screamed and went into the car, locking the doors. I didn’t know how to drive a car, but I figured it out. I put my foot on the brakes and out the gear in drive. Even though I put my foot on the gas, the car wouldn’t move. Whatever creature took that man, came back, this time, for me. It was holding the car from the back. I got out and started running back through the dark. I tried to call 911 on the dude’s cell-phone, but something knocked it out of my hand, smashing it to the ground.
I stopped, feeling the creature circling me. I prepared myself to be torn apart like the grimy bearded man. Instead, I felt a stale breath on my neck. I turned around, not seeing anything. I knew it would be any moment before it killed me. I closed my eyes and waited. My hand raised on its own. Whatever this creature was, held my hand and grasped it, holding it. I shakily lifted the light from the cell-phone to its face. It was ugly with white pale and scaly skin. Its mouth was oversized with teeth that protruded from its bloodied mouth. A long slippery tongue occasionally stuck on the way a snake’s tongue feels the environment. It was tall, and had black coal eyes that gave a merciless stare.
“What are you?” I asked.
The cold eyes looked into mine, but it gave no response.
“Th… th… thank you,” I muttered.
I felt an ice droplet on my nose. It started to snow. I didn’t know what this thing was, but it decided that I would call it Creature.
Creature cried into the night. Its shrieks echoed in the air. I was still scared, but something felt safe with it. It did save me from that man.
“Are you alone, too?” I asked.
It shook its head. Whatever Creature was, it understood me.
The creature took one last look at me and ran into the woods, disappearing into the trees.
I ran home and away from what would be a future crime scene. I was terrified, confused, but also curious. I opened my front door quietly, hoping that no one was awake and tiptoed to my bedroom.
* * * * * *
The next morning, the entire town was talking of bears, thieves, or wild animals that must have taken Burton John -A.K. A – The grimy bearded man. That was his name. Only I knew what happened to Burton and he was definitely dead. I guessed Creature took the body and finished it off elsewhere. My mother left me alone the next day, perhaps out of guilt. My father never asked me how I was. I quickly got dressed and went off to school.
I didn’t notice the dirt in my hair leftover from last night. Dan the Giant made jokes to the class about how poor my family was that we couldn’t afford water and that we were all dirty people. I ignored him, but he just wouldn’t stop. For an entire 30 minutes, he kept going, unable to control himself. The teacher sat at her computer drinking her coffee, living in her clouds of denial, and pretending nothing was wrong.
Then the thought came to me.
How interesting would it be to have Creature eat Dan?
It was murder, I quickly realized, and I was not a murderer. Dan kept going for the rest of the class period. Something changed in me. I realized Dan didn’t deserve mercy. He deserved to get eaten. He was a piece of shit and he would eventually grow up to be a shit adult. People like him never grew out of their shit-ness. Kids like Dan either became violent men that preyed in bars or violent cops that preyed on civilians.
No one would miss him.
Remembering the gum in my hair and I knew that something had to be done. He had to be punished. We all got let out early for Christmas Eve. I skipped the bus and walked back down to where Creature was. Police and townies were all over the woods. There was no way I would be able to find him.
I went back home. My mom was going through one of her cycles where she bought food, cooked dinner, and acted like she didn’t just kick me out the other day. This “happy” cycle only lasts a couple of hours before someone says or does something that tips the scale and she’s full-blown crazy again. I took the opportunity to eat and go to my room. Not more than an hour later after my father mentioned that the gas got turned off did she tip. I started packing a bag for myself. I put on my shoes and left for the front door. I wanted to get ahead of the storm and look for Creature. The second I opened it, my mother’s hand slammed it shut.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” she asked.
“Why do you care?” I snapped back.
“You’re not going anywhere.”
“I’m not going to sit in this house as you hit and yell at me. I’ll just leave.”
My father walked by us, slinking up the stairs to his room.
“Mom, I’m leaving.”
She grabbed me by my throat.
“Tell me what you’re going to do again.”
I couldn’t breathe. She took a shoe and hit my leg with it.
“It’s your fault we can’t pay the bills. All you do is take from us! You’re lucky we don’t put you out into the street.”
I felt my lungs tearing inside from the pain. I was a minute from passing out when a loud crash through the window made my mother let go. I didn’t have to look for my friend after all because there it was, in my living room. It walked on the broken glass unhurt like Jesus on water. It ran to my mother and grabbed her and threw her across the room. My father came downstairs and upon seeing Creature, ran for his gun. Creature was too fast. It slit my father’s ankles and he fell down the stairs. Creature put its foot on top of my father’s stomach until it protruded, squishing and disemboweling him. My mother tried to run, but Creature threw a table at her, stopping her. “Please! Take him! Take him!” she pleaded, pointing at me, tears rolling down her eyes.
Creature wrung her neck, and with one final snap, crushed it. Blood poured from her eyes and nose. I sat in silence looking at what it had done to my parents. The two people that raised me from when I was a baby. My parents who loved me, beat me, and told me I was scum, and hated me for existing. I felt nothing for them, as I looked upon their bloodied faces. I suppose it was at that moment that something else changed. I took Creature’s hand and we left my house. We found an old Santa’s costume and I dressed him. A red hat, and a red and black suit. He just wanted to belong like me.
Santa had finally come to the town of Asher.
We started at my neighbor’s houses. One by one, killing them all. Their screams like a symphony in the night. I watched as he pulled organs out, smashed people’s heads, picked out teeth, and splattered blood on Christmas trees.
Oh, how the red brightened the magical night.
When we reached Dan’s house, I knew I wanted to relish the moment when he saw who was behind his death. Creature slashed Dan’s father’s throat and with its sharp claws, stabbed his mother. Dan screamed in horror as Creature inched closer to him. I smiled at Dan who looked back with a face I’ll never forget. To be honest, it was a look of defeat. Creature took Dan and limb by limb, tore him apart. His agony was my cloud of denial and his suffering my alcohol and I was drunk in it. When we were done, I watched Creature feed on some of the bodies, offering me chunks of eyeball, brain, and liver. I wondered where this beast had come from, but it didn’t matter. He was my friend and he answered my one Christmas wish. A wish only Santa could give.
Before the night had ended, Creature took one last look at me, but I somehow knew he wasn’t coming back. There was no ceremonious farewell, this beast went back into the darkness from where it came, and I didn’t even feel sad. My friend was gone, and I still felt nothing.
You see, I just wanted to be alone.
When the news hit that a town massacre had occurred, the world was in shock. The only survivor was a fourteen-year-old boy. I told the police no lies that night.
I told them that Santa Claus had come to town.
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