Hello! My name is Helen Theodora Waite. Most of my stories have been previously posted on the nosleep subreddit, but I am reposting them here as a sort of archive of my work, as I vastly prefer the culture of tumblr to reddit for obvious reasons.
In terms of who I am as a person, I am a white woman in my early 20s. I was raised on a lot of old films and books, and as a result have a bit of an artistic preference for older media and literature.
Some of my favorite authors are Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and Robert W. Chambers.
If you are interested in making an audio adaptation of one of my stories please send me a message.
Do you ever think about how many people you used to know? All those lost connections, friends and relatives you haven’t seen in years, people whose names you’ve forgotten and who now exist only as faint, gentle memories.
I was on Facebook one evening, looking to see what my high school friends had been up to in the intervening years, when I received a private message from a profile I didn’t recognize, simply saying <Hello.> Her name was Stephanie London, and the profile picture was a conventionally attractive blonde woman, smiling for the camera. To be honest, there was a part of me that just wanted to block her on instinct, I’m far too used to spambots at this point to readily trust strangers messaging me apropos of nothing. But there was something faintly familiar about her face and name, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on, that made me choose to respond instead.
<Hello!> I typed, <Sorry, I’m afraid I’m not quite sure who you are. Do you know me from somewhere?>
I braced myself for a shady link to some porn site or something like that, but I was surprised to get an actually coherent response.
<We used to be friends in high school. I’d have reached out sooner, but it took me a while to find you. I hope it’s not weird to say, but I like your new name. Rose suits you far better than James lol.>
At this point the itch in the back of my mind was becoming excruciating, it felt like I was missing something incredibly obvious. There was something so familiar about her but I just couldn’t place it. After racking my brain unsuccessfully for a few minutes, I finally replied.
<Aw thanks! I’m very sorry, I am trying really hard to remember who you are, but for some reason it’s just not clicking. It’s been a while since high school though, and I’m sure you can remember how much of a scatterbrain I was back then, especially before I got on ADHD meds. Would you mind jogging my memory a bit?>
Her reply was instant.
<You used to call me Stefan.>
Instantly it came flooding back, memories of a lanky teenage boy with thick glasses, of cracked voice laughter at cringy videos, of being taught how to port forward my IP address in order to host late night gaming sessions. I clicked back to Stephanie’s profile picture, checking again. Faintly, past the makeup and the hair, I could see remnants of her old face, a familiar twinkle in the eyes. She must have gotten a lot of work done, I remember thinking, she looks like a completely different person.
<HOLY SHIT> I typed, frantically, <I didn’t even recognize you!! Congratulations, I suppose! How have you been?>
Her response, like the last one, was immediate. I almost thought she may have written it out in advance, copypasting it from a text file.
<I know this is a little out of nowhere, and I understand if you can’t or don’t want to, but would you be down to meet up tonight?>
I was a little taken aback. I mean, how often does a long-lost friend from high school turn up out of nowhere in your direct messages with a request to hang out that same day? Additionally, I found her directness slightly disconcerting.
<Tonight?> I asked, <I mean, I’d love to hang out with you sometime but that’s a little soon, isn’t it?>
Another instantaneous reply.
<Do you have something else you’d otherwise be doing? Again, I understand if you don’t want to.>
I thought about it for a second. I didn’t have anything else on my schedule, no excuse I could throw out to justify why I wouldn’t be able to. I’ve never been particularly good at lying either.
<I suppose not,> I said, <but I don’t know, it’s just one of those things, isn’t it? No offense but one kind of expects advance warning for this sort of thing.>
This time there was a pause, as though she were thinking carefully before replying.
<I’m very sorry. I’d have asked sooner, but this is really the only night I have free for a very long time. I’m sorry if this sounds weird to say, but I’ve missed you. We used to hang out basically every day back in high school, and I’ve just been pretty lonely recently to be honest. Anyway, I completely understand if you’re not able to.>
I felt a pang of guilt when she said she missed me. I hadn’t meant for us to drift apart, the winds of fate just seemed to blow in opposite directions for the both of us. I’d moved away for a while to complete college, and while we kept in contact for a year or two, we eventually just stopped keeping up. Since then I hadn’t even bothered to try talking with her. I made up my mind then and there.
<Don’t worry about it,> I typed, <I just was a little surprised is all. I’d be happy to hang out. Where are you staying at these days?>
<The same old house as always,> she replied, <I never left.>
- - -
We talked for a little bit more before deciding on a time for me to arrive. Fortunately my apartment was pretty close to where I used to live back in high school, so it wasn’t a particularly long drive to reach Stephanie’s house.
As I pulled up in front of the familiar suburban home that I’d spent so many pleasant afternoons at as a youth, I was overwhelmed with an intense wave of nostalgia. It didn’t seem to have changed in the slightest detail. The tacky lawn gnomes that her mother had insisted on putting up, the lawn that was perpetually brown because her father refused to ever use the sprinklers, the faint scent of the roses which lined the gravel path up to the inviting green door, all of it was exactly as I remembered. Every step I took awoke pleasant memories of summers long past, from a childhood that seemed now so far away.
And yet… something wasn’t quite right. I suppose it seemed almost too perfect, too unchanged. Stephanie hadn’t mentioned her parents, so I assumed she must be living alone now, but if that were true, why would so much of the house have remained utterly unchanged? I especially remembered her complaining when we were kids about the how kitschy the garden gnomes were, and it was a little strange to see them still standing.
I wasn’t able to think much of it, however, before the door to the house opened, and I saw Stephanie smiling shyly in the open doorway.
Now I’m not one who typically notices beauty in others. I’ve always held that it is what’s inside that counts, and if anything it feels disrespectful to pay too close attention to someone’s appearance. But with Stephanie, frankly I couldn’t look away.
It was easier to ignore when it was just her profile picture, but in person it was much more pronounced. There is a certain kind of beauty which isn’t supposed to exist, the faces you see in the movies, on billboards, the instagrams of celebrities. It is a standard you are meant to compare yourself to, but never reach, because no living human being looks like that. And yet, looking at Stephanie, I could see that same sort of beauty, the impossible ideal made flesh. Perfect symmetry, skin as smooth and unblemished as plastic, full lips, defined cheekbones, every single part of her seemed as though it had been perfectly sculpted by a master artisan. I was a little embarrassed to be looking at her; it felt like I had walked into a black tie event dressed in a t-shirt and shorts.
Nevertheless, I called out a hearty “Hello!” and moved in for the sort of hug you give to old friends you haven’t seen in quite a long while. She hesitated for a moment, as if unused to the concept, but then quickly seemed to understand, reciprocating and hugging back perhaps a bit tighter and longer than was to be expected.
“Look at you!” I exclaimed, gesturing vaguely at her, “You’ve really done well for yourself in the past… gosh has it really been 7 years?”
“I could say the same about you,” she replied, still gently smiling, “come on inside.”
Her voice was at once familiar yet strange. Most folks don’t really know this, but hormone replacement for trans women doesn’t alter your voice; if you want to sound more feminine, you just have to practice over time, altering your pitch and tone until it sounds right. Often we don’t really sound at all like how we used to before undergoing voice training. But with Stephanie, it just felt as though someone flipped a switch; she sounded exactly like the friend I had in my youth, but as a woman now.
The interior of the house was slightly less familiar than the exterior, but still felt like an intense blast from the past. Sure there were things moved here and there, and it seemed like all of the knick-knacks and trinkets that belonged to Stephanie’s parents were gone, but the furniture was all the same, and not much else had been altered.
“So uh, I didn’t really ask about it earlier, but your parents didn’t, y’know, die or anything did they?” Realizing how utterly insane that sounded, I added, “I mean, I’m just wondering because obviously you’re living on your own, and you didn’t move into a new place or anything.”
Fortunately, she didn’t seem to take any offense at my question, instead just chuckling a little.
“No, they’re both quite alright. They just moved away is all. They were kind enough to leave the house to me though. It feels nice, having the place to myself.”
I nodded awkwardly, still feeling as though I’d made a fool of myself.
“Can I get you something to drink?” she asked.
“A rum & coke if you can manage it,” I replied.
She nodded and started walking to the kitchen. I followed behind, looking around at all the familiar details of the house and trying to quell a growing nervousness in my chest. I’d always felt slightly uncomfortable around beautiful women, as though my presence was in some way inappropriate. This feeling of inadequacy was melting together with the intense nostalgia and faint uncanniness of Stephanie’s remarkable transition to form a lingering undertone of anxiety that I was eager to dull with alcohol.
I was extremely grateful when she handed me my drink, and gulped it down as quickly as felt socially appropriate. I’ve always been a bit of a lightweight, and estradiol hadn’t helped in that regard, so pretty soon my previous worry was deadened by the pleasant buzz of intoxication.
“So,” Stephanie began, “what have you been up to?”
- - -
We talked for hours, well past the point at which I had been planning to head back home. With the liquor serving as a social lubricant, I quickly found that, despite appearances, Stephanie hadn’t changed too much in the intervening years. Old inside jokes I hadn’t thought about in over half a decade just clicked back into place in my brain, the memories so fresh it was as if I had never forgotten them at all.
She showed an intense interest in basically anything I had to say, encouraging me to talk about each topic at length. Occasionally I would similarly try to encourage her to talk about her life, but she always seemed to redirect the topic of conversation back to me. I didn’t press the issue, figuring that if she didn’t want to talk about herself as much that was perfectly reasonable.
However, there were some points in the conversation that seemed a little bit… off. Once my filters had been sufficiently erased by drink, I asked a couple questions about her transition. I wasn’t necessarily surprised by it, in retrospect Stephanie had always showed the sorts of proclivities that most of us do before our eggs crack, so to speak, but I’ll admit that I was very curious as to how she’d achieved such a remarkable change.
Her responses were always quite vague, and she often seemed to not know what I was talking about. For example, at one point I asked something about if she was on pills, patches, or injections for her estrogen, and she just sort of looked at me blankly for a moment before asking me what I used. I told her I was using patches, and she nodded and said that’s what she was on as well. After a couple such moments, I got the impression she just didn’t want to talk about that sort of thing, and I dropped the topic. I didn’t want to make her uncomfortable, and I know that every trans person has a different experience with this sort of thing. If she wanted to keep her transition more private, that was perfectly reasonable.
It was around 1 in the morning when Stephanie suggested that I stay the night, and I accepted easily. I’d been having such a pleasant time, and even given the late hour I didn’t feel like going home just yet. I asked her if she had a spare bedroom or if I should just crash on the couch, and at that she just got very quiet, picking at her fingers a little bit as she avoided making direct eye contact.
“Don’t worry if it’s a mess or whatever, I don’t mind,” I said, trying to sound reassuring.
“No, no it’s not that,” she said, her voice sounding a little distant. I was a little confused.
“Oookay, so what exactly is the problem?” I asked.
Still unable to look up at me, Stephanie murmured out “Can you promise not to laugh?”
“Of course.”
She sighed, before straightening up a little bit, but still looking at her hands, now placed firmly on her lap.
“I never really knew how to say it but… I’ve always had a crush on you. Even before you…” she paused and gestured vaguely at me. “I mean even all the way back in high school. I just never said anything because, you know, I worried about what you’d think, what my parents would think, and just… I don’t know, I probably sound really stupid o-or creepy or something. I guess part of why I invited you here tonight was, well, I just didn’t want it all to have been a big missed opportunity. I wanted a chance to tell you.”
I was a little shocked. Not upset, mind you, but certainly surprised. I was silent for a few seconds, choosing my next words carefully and trying to think about how I felt about all this. I noticed a tear running down Stephanie’s cheek. It didn’t seem to leave any streaks in her makeup. I took a breath before responding.
“Stephanie, you’re not a creep. I’m a little surprised, but you don’t have anything to be ashamed of. I’m not offended or anything like that. I mean obviously I’m a little tired right now, so I’m not going to, y’know, decide anything immediately, but you didn’t do anything wrong by telling me. If anything I’m flattered. But, uh,” I scratched my neck, a little confused, “what exactly does this have to do with whether or not you have a spare bedroom.”
Stephanie muttered something I couldn’t quite hear.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t really catch that.”
“I was just wondering if maybe you’d… want to share a bed. Nothing sexual, or anything like that, nothing like that, but just… I’ve never had that before. I’ve always slept alone, and I just… I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked, I’ll set up the cou-”
I cut her off before she could finish, “Stephanie, it’s fine. And I’d be happy to. You haven’t talked much about yourself tonight, and I get the feeling that’s probably because you haven’t really had a good past few years. Even if you didn’t have a crush and just wanted the company, that’s fine. You’re my friend and I trust you. Besides, it’s kind of cold in here anyway, and I’m sure body heat is cheaper than turning up the central heating.”
She smiled, finally looking up and making slightly teary eye contact with me. She seemed happier than I’d ever seen her before.
“Thank you.”
- - -
I hadn’t brought a set of nightclothes with me, but Stephanie was kind enough to let me borrow one of her nightgowns. Her bedroom was different from what I remembered, but that’s to be expected after 7 years. It felt more mature, streamlined, with minimal decorations compared to the poster covered chamber that I remembered from youth.
I set a timer on my phone to wake me in the morning. After that Stephanie and I slipped into bed.
I can imagine some people may have been more uncomfortable than I was in such circumstances, but sleeping in the same bed as friends had become pretty normal for me over the past few years. I hadn’t told Stephanie, as I wasn’t quite sure how she’d react, but casual sexual encounters between friends had been a not infrequent occurrence in my life for quite some time now, so this kind of casual intimacy wasn’t anything especially weird to me.
For her part, Stephanie seemed very polite, shy even. She was practically falling off the bed out of an attempt to ensure that I had sufficient personal space until I told her that I didn’t mind if she wanted to be closer. Even then it still took her a little while to gradually inch nearer before she finally felt comfortable actually touching me.
It was odd, her touch. She was very cold, colder than anyone else I’d ever touched. It was to the extent that I was slightly worried about her, but I tried to pass it off as a case of poor circulation. She’d seemed completely healthy during the night’s discussion, and I didn’t want to come across as rude, so I simply ignored it and did my best not to shiver too much. Her breath, too, felt almost icy on my neck.
No matter how close she got, no matter how much I warmed the blankets, she always seemed to stay cold.
- - -
I awoke with a start to the sound of my phone’s alarm going off. There was a brief moment of confusion where I didn’t know where I was. I blinked rapidly in the bright sunlight shining in from the window, trying to get a read on my surroundings.
Even after my vision cleared, it still took me a while to realize where I was.
The room was utterly barren, save for bed frame and mattress. There was no other furniture. There wasn’t even a blanket. My clothes sat in a neat pile on the floor. I changed out of the nightgown I had borrowed, though I didn’t exactly know where to put it, so I just swung it over my shoulder for the time being.
“Hello?” I called out, “Stephanie? Are you there?”
There was no reply.
I left the bedroom, checking around the rest of the house for my host. Each room was just as empty as the bedroom, utterly devoid of furniture or decoration. I was getting a bit freaked out, as I genuinely could not think of a single explanation as to what was going on.
Eventually I just left the house entirely. Stepping outside, the front yard with its gnomes and roses had been completely redone, changed to a simple, bare lawn. There was a realtor’s sign advertising that the house was available for sale.
It was as if the previous night had never happened at all. The only proof I had was the nightgown on my shoulder.
- - -
When I got home, I tried to find the messages I’d received the previous day. There was nothing, not even so much as an error message indicating the profile had been deleted.
I tried searching Facebook for the name Stephanie London, but found nothing. After a few tries, I searched Stefan London instead.
It didn’t take me long to find the profile. The picture there was much more familiar; a young man with thick glasses, smiling for the camera blandly, a twinkle in his eye. Checking the profile, I noticed that it hadn’t been updated in quite some time, with the last post having been made exactly 4 years ago to the day.
That final post reads as follows:
<Hello all. This is Stefan’s mother. I’m very sorry to announce that Stefan committed suicide last night. I don’t really know what to say, other than that he will be missed, and that he was dearly loved. I’ll be posting details as to the funeral arrangements when we’ve gotten them figured out. I’m going to be leaving this page active as a memorial to him. I love you son, and I hope you’re in a better place now.>
I think I’m probably the only person who ever got to see the real Stephanie London. I think that she needed to express who she really was, just once, before she faded away. I hope that I was able to give her the closure she needed.
We still don’t know where it came from. It just washed up on the beach one day. It didn’t even seem to have any way that it could swim. Just a vague lump of pinkish, wrinkled flesh, with two legs and a tail dragging across the ground like an outdated dinosaur reconstruction. No eyes, no ears, no mouth. Just covered in tight, sphincter-like holes all over its body.
It was only about the size of an elephant at first, but that started to change even before the thing managed to stand up. I’ve seen the footage, someone started livestreaming it from a distance, at least until they dropped their phone and ran to join in on all the fun. It’s awful to see. Thousands of tourists, dropping what they were doing and just sprinting towards the creature, laughing and smiling, pushing each other out of the way, trampling on those who fell during the stampede.
Crawling one by one into the puckered orifices covering that thing’s body.
Did you know the only survivors of that incident where those who were too badly injured in the crush of single-minded human bodies to crawl inside? Did you know that when the paramedics got to them they were crying because they had been left behind?
When the thing managed to stand up and start moving, the crowd followed, climbing up its wrinkled, fleshy legs like ants swarming a newborn deer. It was swollen with the immense mass of humanity it had absorbed, more than doubled in size from when it washed up on the shore. At first it just seemed bloated, corpulent, dragging the added bulk along like so much dead weight, but as it continued its idiotic march it began to process the laughing horde into new biomass.
People leapt out of their cars to join with it when it reached the highway. It took weeks to clear away all the empty cars, left to broil in the hot sun. I don’t know what makes me more uncomfortable; the cars where we found the corpses of infants, dead of dehydration and heat, or the cars we found with empty booster seats.
It took a long time for the government to take any action against the thing, because nearly everybody who saw it wound up becoming a part of it. No time for them to call 911 before they felt the need to join it. It’s a small mercy that officials figured out what was happening when they did. But it was still too late to stop it from reaching the city.
The total population of the city was perhaps around 1 million, give or take a few ten thousand people. Do you know what it looks like to see a million people, crawling over one another like rats? How are you supposed to stop a thing like that? How are you supposed to keep them from rushing to kill themselves, so giddy with joy they don’t have time to listen to you plead with them?
The attempts by the gas masked riot police to stop the swarming crush of humanity was pitiful. Tear gas didn’t stop their laughter, didn’t stop their desire to become one with that thing from the sea. Even when they just started opening fire with automatic weapons, the horde showed no fear of their own deaths, just clambering over the bodies of the slain with wild abandon.
By the time the air force bombed the thing, it had grown to over 200 feet in height. Mercifully, whatever pheromone it had emitted to attract its prey seemed to dissipate fairly quickly with its death, though a few people did still try to get inside of the charred corpse.
Autopsy was, by necessity, conducted in a manner more similar to spelunking than conventional surgical exploration. The team was equipped with flashlights, hazmat suits, electric saws, and coils of rope. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for them, cutting into the steaming, reeking flesh, squirming through a digestive tract the width of a storm drain.
I can’t imagine what they must have felt when they saw all those smiling, happy bodies, melting with the walls of their final resting place.
I can’t imagine what they must have felt when they realized some of them were still moving.
Everyone knows about the Witching Tree. Everyone knows that it is different. It is tall, and gnarled, and has long spindly branches that reach up to the sky like the rigor mortis legs of a crushed spider. Nobody recalls ever seeing leaves on those branches, but the Witching Tree doesn’t feel dead.
It doesn’t look like any of the other trees around it, on the hill at the park. It’s not an oak, nor a pine, and certainly not one of those big redwoods that you’ve seen in the foothills. The Witching Tree is the Witching Tree.
You know you’re supposed to capitalize it when you write it out, just like God.
You have a feeling that it would know if you didn’t.
As long as there have been children, as long as there have been knives, there have been those who took it upon themselves to leave their mark on the natural world, carving their sign into the bark of a living thing to prove that they were there, that they were real. All of the rest of the trees in the park have at least a couple such scars from the vanity of children, a prepubescent drive for immortality. The Witching Tree has only one.
Nobody said you couldn’t carve your initials into the Witching Tree. There wasn’t a list of rules that you had to follow. Children just know these things. Most of them, anyway.
Tommy Colgate didn’t care about doing what he was supposed to. He’d say curse words in front of teachers, he’d pull girls’ pigtails, and he’d throw rocks at pigeons. He also had been given a shiny new whittling knife for his birthday.
All the other children watched when Tommy climbed up the hill, the sunlight glinting off his knife as he unfolded it. They all watched as he plunged it into the bark, carving out a jagged, clumsy “T.C.”
He seemed so smug when he came back down the hill, smiling like he’d just won the lottery. He was the first kid to carve his name on the Witching Tree. He would also be the last.
The other children weren’t surprised when Tommy didn’t come to school the next day. They weren’t surprised when they saw his obituary in the local newspaper, the one which conspicuously left out the cause of death. Those who went to the funeral weren’t surprised that it was a closed casket. Nobody carved their initials into the Witching Tree and got away with it.
Sometimes you can still hear some of the older kids whisper tales about Tommy Colgate, about the countless slashes that covered all over his body, arranged in odd patterns like some sort of alien language, and the rust-brown stains they found on the Witching Tree’s branches. They’ll laugh it off of course, say it’s just a ghost story.
But to this day, there is still only one set of initials carved into the Witching Tree’s bark.
A lot of your quirkier “I fucking love science” types will joke about us human beings as consisting of an intelligent organism, the brain, piloting around the body like some sort of fleshy mech suit. They’ll say that all this clumsy flesh is just a casing for the real life form within, the “man behind the curtain” so to speak. Rykors and kaldanes, y’know? But that’s all bullshit. It’s just a modern retelling of Cartesian dualism, an attempt at devising a secular conception of a soul. There is no meaningful distinction between some abstract, pseudoplatonic “mind” and the sweating, reeking hulks that are our bodies. We’re all just meat in the end, and no amount of philosophizing will ever truly be able to hide this fact.
It all started at a Japanese restaurant. I don’t remember the name of the place, it was a group excursion with friends and I didn’t get to pick where we went. Well, I say friends, but in all truth I don’t think I can even recall the names of the people I went with either, our only real point of connection was through my (former) friend Ted. Most people, I think, don’t actually have the energy to go out and make connections with other human beings, other ambulatory sacks of meat and bone. They get nervous, or overthink things, or are bad at managing time, et cetera, et cetera, an endless parade of excuses to avoid having to deal with the mortifying ordeal of being known. Ted, however, seemed to be able to ingratiate himself with nearly anyone imaginable. I have no idea how he maintained the intricate web of friendships and acquaintances that he possessed, and whenever I spent time with him he seemed to be introducing me to some new person he only met a week ago yet already knows their entire life story. I’d long since come to expect that whenever he asked to hang out, I wouldn’t be the only one attending.
I never really liked Ted much if you couldn’t already tell. He talked too much and too loudly, and never knew when to let a joke die. If there was a contest for beating dead horses, Ted would have won gold medal every time. But, he did possess some sort of natural charisma which caused folks to gravitate towards him, and I never was especially good at making friends, so whenever he sent out an invitation for his little get-togethers I would tag along out of the nagging fear that unless I spent time socializing on a semi-regular basis people might think I was a bit strange. Anything to keep up appearances, after all.
But, that’s not important. I’m rambling, trying to avoid getting to the point of what happened. It feels like maybe if I don’t think about it, if I don’t remember that night at the restaurant, it will have never happened, that maybe if I just go to bed I’ll wake up and everything will be normal again.
Ted was laughing slightly too loud at a joke that one of his new friends had said, and I could feel the prickle of second-hand embarrassment as I watched one of the other guests at the restaurant glance over to our table with a look of slightly detached judgment. My humiliation was cut short, however, when the waiter finally brought around our platter of food.
After a cringe inducing “arigato” escaped from Ted’s beaming, incredibly white mouth, we began divvying up the dishes to their corresponding diners. Usually I was somewhat cowardly when it came to ordering from restaurants, sticking to the beaten path with regards to what foodstuffs I felt comfortable ingesting, but for some Godforsaken reason on that particular day I had decided to be adventurous. I had ordered the sashimi. The plate full of raw fish was placed in front of me, and I gazed upon it with a sort of dull fascination.
I wasn’t disgusted, you must understand, I’m not some squeamish idiot who didn’t know that the raw fish I’d ordered would, indeed, be raw fish, but there was just something so simple about it, so… pure. No other ingredients, no fancy cooking techniques, just clean, uncooked fish, sliced into appealing portions and served with a side of soy sauce. I snapped the binding of the cheap wooden chopsticks before using them to pick up a piece gently, inspecting the sliced tuna for a few seconds as though I were observing some sort of laboratory specimen.
Ted peered up at me from his bowl of ramen with what I assume was meant as a look of encouragement. “Go on Delilah, are you gonna eat it or just look at it?” he asked, playfully.
I was about to respond when the tuna suddenly twitched on the end of my chopsticks. I’m not ashamed to admit that I shrieked as I pulled my hand away in alarm, causing the blob of fish to hit my plate with a meaty smack. Frankly under the circumstances I think it was a perfectly reasonable response.
All eyes turned towards me, and all I could do was point down at my plate, where the dismembered cut of fish was clumsily, blindly undulating towards me, like a slug having an epileptic fit. I was trapped in a booth seat, stuck between two strangers and unable to get out as this limbless blob of disembodied piscine tissue just kept twitching and spasming.
I wasn’t afraid for my life, I think. I don’t believe that I thought I was in any immediate danger, it’s not like the sashimi would be able to do anything. It had no teeth to bite with, no claws with which to cut me. What bothered me was simply that it was moving, and that it should not have been able to move. We don’t expect something which we are going to put into our mouths to still be twitching when we do so. The thought that I had very nearly been about to take a bite made me want to vomit.
Fortunately, my cry of terror had alerted one of the waiters, who, upon noticing the mobile meat, swiftly took the platter away while the rest of Ted’s friends tried their best to calm me down. The man himself, however, was too busy laughing to be of any assistance. He was still guffawing when I managed to extricate myself from the table and make my way back to my car. The moron never did know when to stop turning everything into a goddamn joke.
Now of course after I got home and calmed down a bit with the assistance of some Smirnoff, I took the time to look up what happened on the internet. A quick Google search confirmed that yes, sometimes, very rarely, raw meat can still move around a bit. Something to do with stored energy in the muscles, the cells not being quite yet dead. Fish seem to be particularly susceptible, but it appeared that all sorts of animals did something of a postmortem jig now and again. One particularly nauseating video showed the plucked, headless carcass of a chicken, spasming as though trying to escape as it lay atop a pile of its immobile comrades.
Now, knowing something is natural doesn’t necessarily make it stop being horrific. Understanding how static electricity functions doesn’t make a lightning strike any less shocking, if you’ll pardon the pun. But, at the very least, I was comforted by the knowledge that what I experienced was simply some sort of biological fuckup rather than a sign of the supernatural. At least, that’s what I thought at the time, anyway.
I remember the night after my first experience I had a particularly vivid nightmare. I was standing in the foyer of the Japanese restaurant, and it seemed very busy. A waiter ushered me over to a table, where a number of other people were already seated, including Ted who was guffawing loudly. Laying on the table was a blandly attractive naked woman, her body covered in sushi.
I never really understood the appeal of eating the sushi off of someone’s body, to be entirely honest, even accounting for my own heterosexuality. It’s not as though I’d want to eat off of a handsome man either. There’s something odd, the reduction of a human being into little more than a sexualized table. I mean it’s objectifying, obviously, but I suppose that’s the point, isn’t it? Regardless, I could feel my dream self’s skin crawl as I sat down in my appointed place, knowing that something horrible was about to happen.
As I watched, all of the little slices of fish began to wriggle free from their seaweed binding, squirming and twitching off of the beds of white rice. The woman on the table opened her mouth as the dozens of chunks of ambulatory flesh moved up towards her face. They began to crawl inside, stuffing her open mouth until she couldn’t breath, her face turning blue, but she just kept staying perfectly still, even as her exposed chest heaved up and down, desperately trying to get air into her blocked windpipe. All around me the other guests started to giggle and snicker at the sight, their mirth increasing in intensity as the woman slowly suffocated. When she finally stopped breathing entirely, the whole crowd was engaged in uproarious, hysterical laughter. After a few seconds, the corpse began to twitch and writhe in the same way the dead fish had, its glassy, blank eyes staring out from its lifeless face into nothing. I woke up sobbing.
It was a few weeks before I had my next encounter with unnaturally moving meat. In the intervening time I tried very hard to forget the whole matter, though I did make an effort to avoid Ted, social conformity be damned. Whenever I thought about his stupid laugh it made me feel sick all over again. As a matter of fact I spent a lot of time avoiding everyone, really. I prefer solitude, especially when after I’ve undergone something upsetting. It may seem silly that I’d go to all this fuss over a single piece of twitching sashimi, but I’ve always been fairly sensitive, and something about the whole concept of dead tissue still being able to move bothered me beyond belief. Maybe I just watched too many zombie films when I was a kid or something, who knows?
In any event, the second time happened at a company barbecue. Mandatory attendance, of course, it was that sort of a workplace, all focused on teamwork and working together “not just as a business, but as a family.” I don’t exactly know why I needed to be so focused on forming a bond with my coworkers when my own position as a data entry clerk left me working in blissful isolation for most of the time, but I imagine the overpaid men in suits who arranged these corporate equivalents of elementary school pizza parties instead of just giving out raises probably didn’t understand the concept of introversion. Anything to force employees back to the office after years of working from home, I suppose.
Fortunately I didn’t need to drive to the event, as it was just held in the parking lot during lunch hour, which I ordinarily spend sitting in my car curled up with a book (I could never stand the constant chatter of my coworkers in the break room). Like most corporate teamwork building events, it was simultaneously deeply awkward and a little bit sad. A few grills were set up with some bored looking catering staff cooking up burgers and steaks, while the halting half-laughter and polite tones of corporate enforced camaraderie emanated from the office drones clad in blandly professional outfits as they sat at the various card tables set up under white plastic tents.
I held out a paper plate like a priest soliciting donations from his congregation, and one of the underpaid pitmasters plopped a well-done steak onto it. I slathered it with a generous helping of barbecue sauce and then sat as far away from everyone else as I possibly could. Just because the powers that be could force me into attending this little gathering didn’t mean they could make me talk to anyone.
I sat glumly, stewing in my own petulance (I’m nothing if not self-aware) as I cut a piece off of my steak and popped it into my mouth without really looking at what I was doing. The texture was… off, somehow, and the flavor was unusual. I looked down at the steak to see that beneath the crispy, almost burnt exterior, the meat was quite rare, undercooked even, and was leaking blood onto my paper plate. It was thick too, not the watered down juices from a rare steak, but sticky, opaque, red as a bullfighter’s cape. Then, the hunk of charred flesh lunged towards me.
I don’t mean it twitched, I don’t mean it crawled, the thing leapt like a goddamned jackrabbit right at me. I fell backward in the cheap plastic folding chair, banging the back of my head against the concrete in the process which caused my vision to be filled with stars. I could feel the sticky, greasy piece of meat slithering across my chest, moving towards my open mouth, and I screamed in terror and pain. I could feel it pulsing as though it had a heartbeat, and the warmth from the grill made it feel sickeningly close to body heat.
It was only a few seconds before some of my coworkers rushed over to help, but it felt like an agonizingly long time as I lay there in pain, the quivering hunk of burnt flesh squirming closer to my face. Finally, someone helped me to my feet, and as though shy in the presence of other people, the steak seemingly lost its capacity for movement, falling to the ground with a wet splat.
Everyone wanted to know what happened, they kept asking me over and over again:
“Are you okay?”
“What’s wrong?”
“Are you hurt?”
The whole time I couldn’t focus on what they were saying for long enough to give a satisfying answer, I’d just see their red, fleshy tongues flapping in their mouths and feel sick all over again, feeling painfully aware of the blood that the steak had leaked all over my dress. They’re all just mounds of walking, talking, meat, covered in a thin layer of greasy, stinking skin and wrapped up in cloth to hide the truth of what they are. What we all are.
I managed to eventually stammer out some sort of excuse that my manager accepted as reason for me to take the rest of the day off, and I drove home after I calmed down enough to feel safe at the wheel. I didn’t tell anyone about the moving steak. I knew they wouldn’t believe me. It’s not like anyone else saw it that time.
When I got home I threw out all the meat in my refrigerator. Starving children in the third world be damned, I wasn’t going to risk having the fucking bologna try and smother me in my sleep. Call me paranoid if you want, but after what I’ve been through, I feel pretty goddamn vindicated. It’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you after all.
See, it didn’t stop with the steak. Even after I cut all meat out of my diet (I pretended it was a health thing), I still wasn’t free from dead flesh moving. It was little things at first. Dead flies on the windowsill twitching tiny legs previously held stiff with rigor mortis. Soggy worms that were still just moments before struggling to escape their watery tombs as I pass them by on the rain-soaked sidewalk. Hell, maybe it had been going on a while even before the sashimi incident and I just never noticed. But once I had an eye for it, it seemed to happen everywhere.
I knew it wasn’t natural. Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, dozens and dozens of times afterwards over and over until you feel like clawing your fucking eyes out rather than see another roadkill squirrel try to drag itself across the pavement towards you is a sign that God just hates you. I can’t even walk into grocery stores anymore, I have to get everything by delivery, because if I even get within a hundred yards of the meat department I might see the sausages and chicken breasts and steaks and pork chops and dozens of other plastic wrapped corpses gently flopping and spasming and twitching, trying desperately to break free of their refrigerated prisons to get towards me. I know I’m not just going crazy. Usually, nobody notices, the meat quieting as soon as anyone else is around, but not always. I remember once watching a young girl start crying as she saw a T-bone steak crawling like an inchworm behind the glass case of the meat counter. She asked her mother why it wasn’t dead. Meat asking the meat it budded off from why the meat which should be still is moving.
Who are you supposed to talk to about this sort of thing? Where were you supposed to go? It’s not like a shrink would do me any good as I am in no respect delusional, and I certainly was not going to try and seek out the assistance of a priest. If anything the moving meat has more firmly cemented my disenchantment with the prospect of divinity; any God that allows such violations of nature to exist is not one who is worthy of worship. I wasn’t going to beg on my hands and knees for the help of a deity who presides over a broken world.
So I just dealt with it. I kept away from grocery stores and supermarkets, I turned a blind eye to the twitching bugs and spasming roadkill, and I stuck to my new vegetarian diet. I also had to remove all the mirrors in my house. I couldn’t bear to look at my reflection anymore, to be reminded of the meat that is me. Every twitch of an eye, every deep breath, it all just felt like that same unnatural mobility of dead flesh. Go ahead and call it denial if you want, my disposal of the mirrors, but it gave me at least some peace of mind. Besides, I didn’t like looking at the bags under my eyes that I was getting from all the nightmares.
This continued for a while, my coping with the impossible by simply ignoring it. Maybe a month or two, though it is hard for me to remember exactly how long. Things weren’t perfect, I drank a lot and had a few breakdowns here and there, but who wouldn’t under the circumstances? My point is I was getting on with things, to the best of my ability, and not just crumbling from the pressure. I wasn’t going to be beaten by a bunch of lifeless tissue being puppeted around by some unknowable force. I’m stronger than that.
Then came my father’s sickness. It happens to everyone in the end, doesn’t it? Meat spoils, after all. I don’t remember all the details, the doctors used a lot of fancy sounding medical terminology for it, something about blood clots and brain damage, but what it all boiled down to is that the man who raised me was on his deathbed, unconscious and unresponsive.
I never knew my mother. She ran off at some point shortly after I was born, leaving daddy dearest to take care of me the best he could. And he did do his best, I’m sure of that now. He fucked up along the way, but everyone’s parents do. They’re not perfect. Nobody is perfect. We’re all just meat, after all.
I started spending a lot of time with my father. He spent so much of his life caring for me when I had just entered this world, I felt like it was only fair I was by his side as he left it. I wasn’t deluded into thinking that he’d get better, or even that he would be aware of my presence, but it felt right for me to be next to him. I didn’t want him to die alone.
I’d sit there by his side, reading from one of my books. Sometimes, if the mood struck me, I’d read aloud to him. There was never any recognition in his eyes, he’d just stare blankly at the ceiling, his rattling breathing providing a distant background hum, but I didn’t mind. If anything I kind of appreciated that he didn’t do much. I was so used to things that shouldn’t move moving that it almost felt like a relief to see something which should move remain more or less stationary.
Now, they didn’t have him hooked up to life support machines or anything like that, you must understand. Nothing to monitor his vital signs, no machine to keep his heart beating, he was just laying in bed under scratchy hospital blankets. My father wasn’t afraid of death, and had demanded that he not be resuscitated in the event of something like this happening to him. Better to die with dignity than be forced to live with the help of machines.
It was because of this lack of monitoring that I didn’t initially notice when he finally stopped breathing. I was just sitting there, reading, when all of a sudden I was struck by how quiet the hospital room was. I put down my book and looked over to the bed, and my father’s chest had ceased to rise and fall. He was gone, and I hadn’t even realized when it happened. I knew it was coming, but I wanted to be there for him, I wanted to hold his hand as he crossed that final threshold. That this was taken from me made me start to cry.
I grabbed hold of his hand, hoping to experience at least my father’s warmth for one last time before he went cold. There was still the faintest touch of heat in his calloused, old fingers, and the tears flowed freely down my face.
“I’m sorry”, I said as I squeezed his hand, “I’m so sorry dad.”
He squeezed back.
Gasping in surprise, I looked up, hoping against all hope to see my father’s smiling face as he woke up, as if from a long dream, miraculously alive and okay. But that isn’t what I saw. This isn’t that kind of story. This isn’t that sort of world.
The corpse that was my father began to twitch and spasm, writhing and squirming as if made of a hundred tiny pieces each trying to break free from the whole. What was once my father’s head rolled lazily to face me, doll eyes blankly staring forward as the lifeless thing wriggled towards me.
It was like watching an octopus move, each limb in possession of a mind of its own, its hand in a vice grip against mine. I tried to pull free but I couldn’t, it was grasping too tight. I screamed for help, calling for anybody to get this corpse, this meat, away from me. My cries were cut off as its other hand grasped my throat, bent awkwardly at an impossible angle as I heard its bones snap.
My vision faded to black, and the last thing I saw before I passed out was my father’s face, lifeless and dead, staring into nothing.
I lived, of course. I wouldn’t be sitting here typing this if I didn’t. Whatever unnatural force was animating the corpse, it didn’t stick around long enough to do any lasting damage beyond leaving some bruises on my neck. A nurse found me unconscious on the floor, my father’s body laying on top of me stiffly.
They didn’t even try to come up with a realistic explanation for what happened, they just said my injuries must have been self-inflicted during a “psychotic break brought about by the traumatic event”, because no doctor is going to believe a woman who says her dead father tried to strangle her to death. The most they humored me was admitting that it was possible that I witnessed some postmortem muscle spasms. Meat that didn’t know it was dead yet.
I’m working through it though. I’m facing my fears. That’s what you’re supposed to do as an adult right? You just sit down and deal with things, you don’t make a fuss about it. And so that’s what I’m doing, I’m handling all this with maturity and grace.
I’ve even started eating meat again.
Little pieces.
Nice, bite sized chunks.
I’ve almost gotten used to how it feels as it wriggles down my throat.
It’s different for everyone. Some of us figure it out when we’re in elementary school, others realize only very late into our lives. Me though? I’ve always known. Some of us interpret it as a very literal transformation; “I used to be a girl, now I’m a boy”. Others feel like we were always our “chosen” gender, simply forced by fate into a body we never asked for. I fall, very strongly, into the latter category. As long as I can remember, I dreamed of being a man, and I mean that very literally.
When I fell asleep, my dream self was quite different from my physical body, with broader shoulders, a square jaw, larger hands and feet, and a deep voice that fills any room I am in like an upright bass. It wasn’t always such a pronounced change of course. When I was very young, the differences were subtler, the unwanted waking nightmare of sexual dimorphism not yet wholly foisted upon me, but changes were still there. I always felt like something was wrong when I woke up to find myself with the long hair my mother insisted I couldn’t cut to the short length I desired. I remember once, after a birthday party, looking at myself in the mirror, wearing a nice, expensive dress I’d received as a gift, and thinking to myself how much happier I’d be wearing the suit I had on in my dreams the night before.
I didn’t have a word for it until high school though. My family was somewhat strict about my access to the internet and what sorts of films I was allowed to watch, so the first time I heard the word “transgender” was when I met someone else like me.
His name was Timothy, and in all truth we weren’t friends. Nobody was friends with Timothy, nobody wanted to hang out with the freak. There were many comments like “So if you’re a man, am I allowed to hit you?”, whispered slurs, and exaggerated caricatures drawn on scrap paper and surreptitiously passed around to a chorus of barely contained snickers. I’d like to say I never joined in, but peer pressure is a powerful force, especially when it comes to those of us who desperately want to fit in. I think part of me resented him too, for so flagrantly living the life I wanted to have. He wore a binder to flatten his chest, his hair was short and slicked back with gel, and he always dressed like someone out of a prior age, a holdover from an era of leather jackets, fast cars, and switchblades. I was jealous.
Eventually the bullying got bad enough that one of his bolder tormentors broke his arm. Nobody confessed to the act, and the school’s administration was less than cooperative in trying to find out who did it. Timothy’s parents wound up pulling him from school, and I never saw him again. My own parents saw it as a relief, saying that he was “a dangerous influence” and that his family should have sent him off to a psychologist rather than “indulging her delusions”. It was the first time I had ever heard them talk about someone like me, and the memory of my own mother and father describing with such vitriol how much they hated Timothy was permanently burned into my developing mind, a scar which I don’t think will ever heal.
I knew there was never any chance of being accepted by my family. At best, they’d see me as a victim of some perverted campaign to corrupt innocent young women into hating their bodies, at worst they’d treat me like a delusional freak. Either way, they would still see me as their daughter, and I very much doubt there is anything I could do to change that.
After so many years of being forced to hide who I am, I finally have the good fortune of living alone, far away from my parents and their bigotry. It was almost unbearable during the final few months of my living with them, when people like me became a political wedge and the hate spewing talking heads on the idiot box began telling horror stories of “groomers” and “radical gender ideology”. But I managed to get out and find a job. I was finally free to be myself. Well, more or less. I was out publicly to friends and coworkers, I bound my breasts, people called me Victor rather than the stupid name on my driver’s license, but in terms of actual medical treatment I was still stuck at square one.
The thing that they don’t tell you is it’s actually rather difficult to get on hormones, at least if you’re a transgender man. Estradiol and the like aren’t controlled substances, if worst comes to worst an uninsured trans woman can get her hands on some hormones via the gray market, and the process of getting a prescription is far quicker. Testosterone, however, is a Schedule III controlled substance, the same tier as anabolic steroids or ketamine. Getting a prescription is a bit more of an involved process, and going through unofficial channels could result in a felony if you get caught.
So, finally liberated from my family, I now had to deal with the frustration of the medical system. My crummy job working at a movie theater didn’t exactly have the best insurance plan, and by the time I did manage to get in touch with a doctor about getting an appointment set up, I was informed the soonest I could see someone would be several months at least. Without going into too much detail, certain conservative politicians in my state had made it rather difficult to get gender affirming care via telehealth, out of a fear that it would be too easy for “impressionable adolescents to permanently alter their bodies”. So I simply had to sit around and twiddle my thumbs, waiting for my turn at one of the rapidly dwindling number of clinics that offered consultations for getting on hormone replacement therapy.
Of course, I knew that hormones aren’t mandatory for being a “real man”, and I knew that even if I did manage to get on testosterone it wouldn’t make the bigots any more convinced of my masculinity, but I still couldn’t help but feel a twinge of sadness whenever I looked in the mirror. The reflection that stared back at me didn’t feel right, it didn’t feel like me. Do you have any idea how terrible it is to feel trapped in a body which is utterly wrong? To have your own flesh and blood betray you every second of every day?
I coped as best as I could, and spending time with supportive friends helped. But really, the most comforting thing throughout this ordeal was my dreams. Even if I couldn’t pass as male in the waking world, even if I had to deal with the “thank you miss”s and “howdy ma’am”s from the customers at work, when I slept it was as though my mind and body were in perfect alignment. It sometimes felt like my own mind was comforting me, covering me with a blanket of fantasy to soothe the pain. Even in my darkest nightmares, I always had a body that felt like it belonged to me.
Though my dreams are especially vivid while they last, I do find they tend to fade quite quickly upon awakening, something which has only seemed to get worse as I get older. To cope with this, I began to write down records of my nocturnal visions, first in a notebook, then later on a blog under the pseudonym of “DysphoricDreamer98”. I found it easier to reach for my phone to jot down a quick post while the memory was freshest than having to fiddle about with pen and paper. Besides, while my little blog wasn’t especially popular or anything, seeing people comment on my posts, especially other trans men, made me happy. It brought me a little joy to know I’m not alone.
Now, obviously I didn’t put out any sort of personal information on my blog. No photos, no mention of where I work, not my real name, Hell, not even which state I live in. This is why it was so odd when I found the package on my doorstep one morning, all wrapped up in brown paper and twine, addressed to DysphoricDreamer98. There was no return address, so I had no idea who could have sent it.
In a panic, I simply shut the door and left the package outside, running over to my computer to search the web to see if I’d been doxxed or something like that. I didn’t think I’d ever said anything particularly controversial, and it wasn’t as though I had any sort of wide audience. I wrote a digital dream journal with a follower count in the double digits for goodness sake, it’s not like I was a celebrity.
Once I was satisfied that I hadn’t had my personal information posted publicly or stolen in a leak of some sort, I opened my front door again and peaked out at the package, feeling oddly nervous, as if worried it was going to sprout teeth and bite me. After I was satisfied that it wasn’t going blow up or catch fire or anything like that, I brought it inside and set it down on my desk, cutting off the twine with my pocket knife and unwrapping it. I was greeted with an old wooden box, of the sort that would be used to hold expensive jewelry. It was covered all over with elaborate ornamentation, a combination of floral and geometric designs. There was something oddly hypnotic about the patterns formed by the embossed flowers and curving lines, and I spent about a minute simply admiring the craftsmanship of the thing before I actually set about opening it.
The contents of the box were a small glass vial filled with liquid, a metal syringe that looked as though it were fashioned in the Victorian era, and a note, written on very old parchment in elegant looking cursive. This is what it said:
Dear Sir,
You’ve spent every night dreaming of who you truly are. It is time to make those dreams into reality. Inject intramuscularly once per week, one milliliter. Expect results in 3-4 weeks.
Sincerely,
A friend
Now, I’m not stupid. Obviously I didn’t immediately start injecting myself with mysterious fluid I found in a box left on my front door by an anonymous stranger. As a matter of fact, my first thought was that someone was trying to poison me. I didn’t know who would want me dead, but given the circumstances I thought a little bit of paranoia was the healthiest approach to take. Part of me wondered if my family had somehow been informed of my blog, and were trying to discreetly assassinate me in order to ensure I’d never be able to medically or legally transition. I didn’t have any evidence of this, but it seemed far more logical than there being some hormone gifting Good Samaritan wandering about leaving vials of testosterone on the doors of disadvantaged trans men. Besides, whatever was contained within the vial didn’t look like testosterone, at least not in any form I was familiar with. It was tinged slightly purple, and seemed to sparkle when I held it up to the light.
I did consider calling the police, but I decided against it. Realistically all they’d do is confiscate the box, and I was worried that I could get in trouble if the contents of the vial did end up being some kind of poison or illicit substance. Besides, I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away.
And so, I tried to do my best to forget about the box and its contents. I didn’t tell anyone about it, not even my friends, though I’m not entirely sure why that is. I suppose I may have rationalized it as trying to keep myself safe from being reported to the police, but that’s not really true. Something about it just felt private to me, inherently it was a subject that necessitated secrecy. Its presence kept nagging at me, however, and it never felt like I’d ever be fully able to erase it from my mind. Sometimes, I’d open up the box and just stare at the vial for a while, considering it silently, before shutting the lid and pushing it back under the bed.
Regardless, I managed to more or less successfully ignore the box for around a month. It was a combination of many discrete factors that led to me giving in, and even after what I’ve experienced and even though I know it was a stupid decision, I’m unable to bring myself to feel any sort of regret for it.
The day I gave in started off terribly, with my period having decided to start a day earlier than usual. I don’t feel very positively about my reproductive system at the best of times, and my distaste only grows deeper when it decides to punish me for not getting pregnant with a torrent of blood. After dealing with that unfortunate surprise, I was then faced with my biweekly phone call with my mother, during which I had to play the unfortunate role of dutiful daughter, gritting my teeth whenever she referred to me by the name she gave me instead of my real one, and clenching my hand into a fist as I expressed in the politest tones that I could muster that no, I did not have a boyfriend yet. When she started to go on a rant about the latest news story she’d seen about “woke indoctrination” in schools, I made up some excuse about poor connection and ended the call. Then it was time for work.
The gendered politeness of the South is truly a tailor made Hell for people like me, and that day saw a constant stream of “ma’am”s and “miss”s that culminated in an elderly gentleman remarking “If you don’t mind me sayin’ miss, you are quite the beautiful young woman” while I tried very hard not to strangle him. But really, truly, I think that the deciding factor that made me open up that box and try my luck with my anonymous benefactor’s vial of mystery fluid was the text message I received as I walked through my front door, informing me that my consultation had been postponed again.
I’ll be honest, when I readied that first injection, part of me hoped it was poison. It wasn’t a large part of me, but that urge to just give up, embrace the call of the void and descend into a peaceful oblivion, it was there. “To sleep, perchance to dream”, as Shakespeare put it. When nonexistence no longer frightens you, it is far easier to take risks.
I didn’t use the syringe that came with the box. While it seemed to be in pristine condition, I didn’t trust something that looked that old, and I certainly had no desire to contract tetanus or something. I walked down to the farm supply store across from my apartment building and purchased some sterile syringes and needles there instead. When I got back to the apartment I spent a few minutes looking up where was best to inject, how to make sure I avoided pricking any veins and arteries, etc., until I finally felt fairly confident that I could actually do it successfully. There was no stalling after that, I didn’t want to give myself a chance to change my mind. I popped the cork on the vial, got a milliliter of that strange purple fluid into the syringe, and plunged the needle into my thigh.
It hurt far less than I thought it would, if I’m being honest. If you’d asked me before that day if I would have been able to perform injections myself, I’d have told you no. I’ve always felt slightly uncomfortable whenever I had to get a vaccine or have a blood test done, something about needles just made me deeply nervous. But this felt right, and outside of a slight pinch and some pressure as I pushed down the plunger, it was largely painless.
I pulled out the needle and applied a small bandage to the tiny puncture mark, though the needle was so thin no blood actually welled up at all. Then I went to bed early, hoping that tomorrow would be a better day.
I woke up the next morning, writing down my latest dream on my blog in the haze of half-consciousness, and then got out of bed, pleasantly noting that I was not, in fact, dead. Whatever the liquid in the vial was, it at the very least wasn’t toxic. There wasn’t even so much as a raised bump at the injection site. Thus began my routine of injecting the purplish mystery fluid into my thigh every Friday before bed.
Just as the note said, it was around the 4 week mark when I started to actually see results. I was washing my face as part of my morning routine when I noticed something faint on my upper lip. I looked closer to see it was a few dark hairs, sprouting out from the previously smooth skin of my face. Excitedly, I looked closer, seeing with delight that all over my jaw, here and there, little hairs were poking up from my flesh. I was beginning to grow facial hair. As a matter of fact, on closer inspection of the rest of my me, I was beginning to grow more hair all over my body. It wasn’t as though I’d awoken looking like Bigfoot, but it was a noticeable change from my appearance the night before. I was ecstatic.
Now, I have to be honest here, I didn’t actually know exactly how quickly testosterone was supposed to work, nor what the exact effects were. It may seem lazy but I never really had sat down to read out how long it would take, what specific results I could expect to see, etc. I think a part of me always saw it as a borderline unachievable fantasy, so there was no reason for me to ever look up the details. However, even I should have known better than to think what happened was normal.
For one thing, the injections worked fast. Once the four week mark was hit and the changes began, it was like a dam had broken. By 5 weeks my voice was already starting to deepen. 6 weeks in and I was able to grow a faint mustache. 7 weeks and I had chest hair. Looking back on it now, it should have been obvious to me that this was too fast. These sorts of things take months and years to accomplish, not weeks. There was a faint tinge of nervousness during the 12th week as I looked at myself in the mirror and realized I was taller than I was before. It was the first hint that something was wrong. Testosterone can do a lot of things, but it can’t change your bone structure.
That wasn’t the only sign that something was off. I began to get these feelings of deja vu on occasion, about once a week, and I could never place exactly what it was. I didn’t keep track of every time it happened, obviously, but I do remember a few of the most noteworthy examples.
The first time was when I was doing a bit of shopping downtown and saw a street performer, a clown riding atop a penny farthing bicycle. He wasn’t frightening at all, I’ve never been afraid of clowns, but there was something unsettling about him. He didn’t seem to fit in with his surroundings as he glided through the crowd, occasionally honking his horn and taking his hands off the handlebars to juggle some balls. Nobody else seemed to pay him any mind though, they just kept on walking past him. He seemed so familiar, and I struggled to try and remember if I’d seen him in some viral video or something.
Another incident I remember was at work. I was selling tickets, when a pair of customers walked up to the booth in lockstep. They were identical twins, each the spitting image of the other, and wore the exact same style of formal black suit.
“We’re here-” started the one on the left.
“-to purchase some tickets-” continued the twin on the right.
“-for the 2 o’ clock show” finished the first twin.
The pair of them frankly freaked me out, but I didn’t want to be rude, so I did as they asked and got them their tickets. They paid in cash, using only 2 dollar bills. They bowed in unison after I handed them their tickets, and then marched in time to the theater I had indicated. I actually checked the purchase logs later to make sure I hadn’t imagined it all, as well as looking in the register to see if their 2 dollar bills were still there, and everything was still there. Like with the clown, the oddest part was that they seemed so familiar, as if their names were right on the tip of my tongue.
I had another encounter at a thrift store. I was shopping for some new clothes (my increased height was making some of my older outfits not fit particularly well) when I was approached by a short gentleman with white hair, who asked me “Can I help you to find anything sir?”
I turned to respond that I was fine, when I noticed that his eyes were two different colors, one blue, one brown. Something about this made my mind scream at me to remember, that this was someone who I had met before, but I just couldn’t place my finger on why. I stuttered out some noncommittal grunt and he nodded before walking away. I stumbled out of the thrift store without buying anything and went straight home.
The most recent incident is what made me put all the pieces together. I was taking a nighttime walk, something I felt more comfortable doing now due to my increased bulk and deeper voice. I felt safer knowing that any creeps would be less likely to see me as a potential target, plus I’d been hitting the gym so I felt confident in my ability to fight off anyone who’d try. I was thinking about how much my life had improved since I’d gotten the package, and wondering about what I’d do once the vial had run out. There were only a couple doses left, but my HRT consultation was only a few days away. Should I try and get more of what I was already taking, or should I switch over to a more legitimate source? It wasn’t as though I had any method through which to contact my anonymous benefactor. As I pondered this, I heard a faint hissing noise from a nearby alley, a “pssst” like someone was trying to beckon me inside.
I peered down the alleyway cautiously, trying to get a good look at whoever was trying to attract my attention. I could see the faint outline of a figure hidden partially by the shadows, but I couldn’t make out any details. I gently touched my pocket knife, just to remind myself it was still there, and then stepped into the alley.
I know it sounds like a stupid decision, and it was, but at that moment I thought that they may have been the mysterious “friend” who’d given me the vial in the first place. I figured they may have wanted to deliver the next supply in person, and frankly I wanted to thank them for changing my life. I was still nervous, of course I was, but after all that had happened I didn’t want to seem ungrateful.
I stepped into the alley, cautiously, and made my way over to the figure. They hissed at me again, beckoning for me to come closer with a gloved hand. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I saw that they were a thin man in a long overcoat, wearing a wide brimmed hat and, despite the night, a pair of dark sunglasses. They looked like some sort of secret agent stock character. His mouth was stretched wide in a toothy grin. When I was about 10 feet from him, I stopped, and asked “Hello? Are you the person who gave me the package? With the vial?”
Without moving a muscle on his face, he hissed at me again, and then held up his hand in front of his face. Using his other hand, he began to slowly pull off the glove. It was hard to tell at first, in the darkness of the alley, what exactly I was seeing, besides the simple fact that the human brain has difficulty recognizing that which ought not to be. His fingers shone slightly as they moved sinuously in the pale reflected light of the far away streetlamps, glittering like stars. Then he began to walk towards me with shaky steps, and I realized with a sudden shock what I was looking at.
The man’s fingers were snakes.
I tried to back away, but he lunged for me, hissing erupting from his writhing fingers as they latched onto my shoulder, extending out several feet from his arm. I didn’t feel them break skin, however, fortunately my denim jacket seemed to take the brunt of it. I slashed at the wriggling serpents with my pocket knife and ran when they retreated from the flashing blade. I kept running all the way home, and didn’t stop running until I was safely in my apartment with the door firmly locked and bolted.
Despite the completely surreal and impossible nature of what had just happened, it all felt so familiar, and finally the gears in my brain started to move, and I realized what it was that linked all of the strange interactions I had. I turned on my computer, and went to check my blog, searching up keywords and reading through my recorded dreams with a sense of dawning horror.
September 12th, 2023
Dreamed I was a lion tamer in some sort of circus. The lions were full of stuffing, one accidentally got caught on some fencing and was ripped open, the audience loved it. They were still heavy though, I lifted one up and everyone cheered. I guess I was a strongman as well as a lion tamer. Dream ended with a clown on an old fashioned bicycle riding across a tightrope over a big pool of water. The ringmaster said the pool was full of piranhas, but all I saw were what looked like eels or big worms. I woke up when the clown fell off his bike.
October 24th, 2023
I was a knight, going to save a princess who was trapped in a big floating tower. Accompanied by a sloth for some reason. On the way there, encountered a very polite two headed ogre. Each head would finish the other’s sentences, and it would bow at me frequently. Eventually reached the tower, but the princess was happy there, and told me to go away. Woke up soon after.
November 17th, 2023
In an old library, trying to do some research for something, can’t remember what. Went to go get help from a librarian, but he was a husky with two different colored eyes, one blue, one brown*. Got distracted by this and we got to talking for the rest of the dream, my research forgotten. It was very philosophical, but I can’t actually really remember what we talked about much. He did call me a “handsome young man” though.*
January 2nd, 2023
Nightmare. Man made of snakes. Don’t want to think about it.
I sat back in my chair, one hand over my mouth. I felt sick. This wasn’t possible, this wasn’t something that could be real. I told myself that I must be hallucinating, that it couldn’t possibly be real life, but then I looked over at the shoulder of my jacket and noticed the bite marks in the rough fabric. There was even a broken off fang sticking out. I thought about the strange twins and their 2 dollar bills in the register. Besides, it wasn’t as though I was the only person who had noticed the changes to my body. My friends and coworkers had commented on it, customers addressed me as “sir”, I had to buy new clothes to fit my changed physique. This was real. Whatever it was I had been taking, it was making my dreams into reality.
There was a knock on my front door. I got up and checked the peephole, but nobody was there. Opening the door, I saw a new package, wrapped up in brown paper and tied up with string. It was addressed to DysphoricDreamer98.
I don’t know what to do from here. I’ve spent the past day just going through all the posts on my blog tagged “nightmare”, weighing the pros and cons of continuing my treatment. The package lies unopened on my kitchen table, for now. You’ve got to understand, this substance, whatever it is, has made me happier than I’ve ever been before, but I’m worried for my safety. I got lucky this time, I managed to get away, but what about the next time? And the time after that? Do I risk acting out my nightmares in the waking world to live the life that makes me happy?
To make matters worse, I got a text message. My consultation has once again been pushed back another 3 weeks. I don’t even have the luxury of a third option. I have to choose between going cold turkey or sticking with whatever my “friend” has sent me.
I don’t really know why I even came to this stupid party. It’s not as though I know anyone here particularly well. All old friends from a high school existence I have more or less forgotten. An evening of misremembering people’s names, awkward small talk, and cheap wine.
“FOUR!”
But it isn’t as though I had anything else to do on New Year’s Eve, beyond laying in bed and plugging up my ears against the sound of fireworks and drunken revelry. And it would have been rude not to accept the invitation, wouldn’t it? Though in all honesty I am unsure whether or not my absence would even have been noticed.
“THREE!”
It’s all just so utterly shallow and pointless. A gathering of puppets jerking along on their strings and making meaningless noises to one another. It makes me sick to realize I’m one of them, to have my stupid, superficial existence revealed for the facade it is. I can’t even revel in the perverse schadenfreude of knowing I’m somehow superior to this gaggle of vapid not-things, deep down I know that I’m just like the rest of them. Empty. Hollow. Useless.
“TWO!”
After the party I’ll have to go stumble home, drunk and feeling worse than if I had simply slept through the whole thing. Reminded of the pitiful life I lead and how wholly and completely unremarkable I am, how totally indistinguishable I am from the other idiotic inhabitants of this rotten, befouled planet. I’ll sleep through most of tomorrow, the poison of the previous night’s alcoholism painfully draining away as I steel myself for the rest of the week’s torturous return to the office and the monotonous clockwork repetition it represents.
“ONE!”
I close my eyes and brace myself for the cheers, the fireworks, the noisemakers, and all the other obnoxious irritations typical of the holiday. And what an especially stupid and nonsensical holiday it is; an arbitrarily decided date by which the Earth’s rotation around dear old Sol is measured. The fundamentally meaningless passage of time being celebrated as some sort of achievement. It’s pathetic. Insects cheering into the void out of a sense of pride over their continued existence.
But there is no cheering. No fireworks. No noisemakers. All is quiet. It is the purest silence I have ever experienced. There is not so much as tinnitus to interrupt the smooth nothingness. For a moment, I fear I have gone deaf.
I open my eyes. I look around the room slowly, my conscious mind taking a moment to process what I am seeing. Everyone and everything is still, perfectly still, there is more movement from the inmates of an abandoned wax museum than there is from the inhabitants of this room. I observe one party goer, a young woman by the name of Dongmei, seeming to float a foot above the ground, eyes closed and mouth open in a noiseless cheer, her legs tucked up slightly as though she were jumping. But the verb “float” implies at least some degree of motion, some level of activity, which feels wholly inaccurate. Despite her elevation off the ground, Dongmei appears as solidly immobile as a beetle trapped in amber.
All of the other attendees seem similarly frozen, wholly and completely still to such an extent that it feels impossible that they ever could have moved in the first place. It feels as though such motion would be incompatible with their very existence, a violation of the natural order as preposterous as expecting a dropped object to fly upwards into the sky.
Despite the surreality of my situation, I do not feel panicked. In fact, I do not feel much at all. My emotions are almost completely dulled to what is happening. I feel nothing but the psychological equivalent to the same sort of numbness one experiences with a local anesthetic, a faint pressure like a ghost of sensation as the doctor fiddles about with your deadened limb.
I am still able to move, and I do so. The faint clacking of my high heels against the tile floor is the only sound that penetrates the all pervading silence. I walk out of the living room, past the totally motionless objects that feel now more like abstract sculptures than living human beings, and move to the lobby. I open the door and step out into the night.
The motionlessness and silence is not limited just to the house. The entire world seems shrouded in a thick stillness that suffuses everything. No wind rustles the fallen leaves. The moths hang in the air, unmoving, around the bulbs of the streetlamps. I look up at the sky, but there is no moon, no stars. Just inky, endless black.
I walk through the streets beneath the overhanging nothingness, my own footsteps seeming somehow profane in the sacred quiet that has engulfed the entire world. I do not know where I am going, I simply walk forwards, one step at a time, observing my surroundings passively as my feet carry me to some unknown destination. I am dimly aware that I am not simply wandering. I have a goal, but whatever it is has been occluded from my conscious mind.
My legs robotically continue their automatic motions as I peer through the lit windows of houses and apartment buildings. Inside, the forms of human beings, frozen stiff as though victims of a gorgon, stand in poses of celebration, milliseconds away from the completion of the midnight countdown. But time has stopped, the countdown is interrupted, and they exist now between the moments, caught betwixt one year and the next by the gap of a single heartbeat. It’s impossible, I know, but deep down I can feel that the world has ceased to spin upon its axis. Even the tireless rotation of the Earth has been stopped dead in its tracks.
I do not know how long it is before I reach the river. I do not think it would be possible to measure time in a world where it no longer exists. I look out across the still, mirror-like surface of the water, reflecting back the lights of the city and a black canvas devoid of stars. It is the most perfect thing I have ever seen.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?”
I am startled out of my reverie by the sound of another person, a fellow violator of the pristine silence. The voice is clear, smooth, and tinged with a faint accent which is impossible to place. Somewhere Scandinavian perhaps? Their sex is similarly indeterminable. I turn my head to the left to see who had spoken.
They stand not 6 feet away, looking out towards the river. I realize that I had noticed them previously, but their silence and stillness had led me to believe they were just as inanimate as the other inhabitants of this lifeless city. They are wearing a long, hooded coat, their hands tucked into their pockets. Their face is obscured beneath a mask of some sort. As they turn to look at me, I recognize it as a porcelain comedy mask. I cannot see their eyes. They begin to speak again.
“At the end of time, everything will be as it is now. Silent. Beautiful. Dead. Not that life was anything but a triviality anyway.”
Despite the mask obscuring their face, the stranger’s voice is not muffled in the slightest. It rings out clearly, each word enunciated perfectly in the still air. I nod politely at their observation. They continue to speak.
“There is no real, appreciable difference between that which is dead and that which has not lived. The emphasis on death as an especially noteworthy or in some way profound occurrence is simply due to the exaggerated importance that the living place upon their own transitory state of being. Life is a mere abnormality, the briefest of blips disrupting an otherwise uninterrupted eternity of everlasting silence. For every single meaningless speck of vitality cavorting about, proclaiming its own greatness, it is surrounded by a trillion uncaring corpses. The speck can make as much of a fuss as it likes, parading around its unnatural animation as though such a coincidence of chemistry is some sort of achievement. But in the end, everything stops. Everything dies. And the speck rejoins the corpses once again.”
The emotional numbness is beginning to wear off, a sense of creeping dread sending shivers down my spine, but in its place is a very tangible, physical paralysis. I want to flee from this stranger with their smiling, pallid mask, but my limbs are locked in place. I am trapped in my own body, an increasingly terrified mind screaming for freedom in a prison of petrified meat.
“You think you understand what I am telling you, but you don’t. There is no possible chance of you having the slightest knowledge of the absolute truth. These words, they’re just abstractions, imperfect analogies. To truly comprehend, you must see.”
With that, the stranger takes a blackened, rotten hand from their coat pocket and lifts it to their face. They begin to pull off the grinning porcelain mask.
“HAPPY NEW YEAR!”
My screams of terror mix with the enthusiastic cheering of my fellow party goers as the noisemakers and fireworks go off with the conclusion of the countdown. I look around in wide eyed confusion as I realize I am back in the house, back at the party. I unconvincingly try to masquerade my frightened sobs as some exaltation of happiness and excitement before slipping out the door and making my way home. Nobody follows me, and I hope that the others were too distracted to notice the look of distress on my face. I look up to the sky and laugh at the twinkling stars over head, practically weeping with joy as my ears detect the distant sounds of fireworks and laughter.
My route home takes me past the river, and I shudder involuntarily at the sight of a dark clad figure, but breathe a sigh of relief as I realize it is only a drunken reveler, slurring the words to “Auld Lang Syne” as he staggers his own way home. I wish the man a “Happy New Year” and he flashes me a comical salute as he stumbles past.
As the man’s mumbled singing recedes behind me, I hear a crunch underfoot as the toe of my shoe collides with something brittle.
I look down to see the shattered visage of a porcelain comedy mask, smiling up at me from the pavement.
I grew up in a small town called Pinewood Grove. It’s a tiny little community, its population couldn’t have exceeded more than a couple thousand souls at the most, and it’s surrounded on all sides by untold miles of dense forest. I remember it as a beautiful place, with trees as far as the eye could see, a veritable sea of greenery stretching out to the horizon. The air was cleaner there than it is in the city, and the sun seemed the shine brighter in the clear blue sky. But something has forever tainted that town for me, and I fear that until I die I shall be unable to look back upon my otherwise pleasant childhood without feeling a twinge of horror at the tragedy which ended my time living there.
I was always something of a tomboy as a child, feeling more comfortable playing outside with the boys than spending time with the other girls on the awkward playdates my somewhat anxious mother tried to set up for me. It’s really rather silly looking back on it now, how worried she was that I wasn’t going to get a “normal” childhood, but times were different back then. I had much more fun coming home with torn jeans and dirty hands anyway.
I was lucky enough to have many friends, but chief among them were a pair of boys by the names of Myles and Antonio. We first met by a creek in the woods where we had both been hoping to catch crayfish, and from that day forward we were practically inseparable. Despite the long stretch of years, I can still remember them both quite clearly, though I admit that perhaps this is only because of the terrible thing which occurred at the end of our friendship.
Myles was short and blond, with a freckle covered face that I sometimes (perhaps cruelly) joked looked as though it were covered in mosquito bites. In my defense, given how much time we spent near streams and creeks, it very often was. He fancied himself something of an explorer, and I swear that the khaki safari hat he wore may as well have been permanently glued to his head. He never went anywhere without a Swiss army knife and a compass that had been given to him by his grandfather. I must say I was somewhat jealous of the compass, it was quite the fancy piece of kit, perhaps some military surplus, with a shiny metal lid. He took great joy in closing it one handed with a satisfying snap. He often referred to our little woodland excursions as “expeditions”, and sometimes would put on a faux British accent and pretend to twirl a nonexistent mustache in imitation of the two fisted heroes from the pulp adventure novels he read.
Antonio was a bit taller than Myles, with slightly messy black hair and big round spectacles that led Myles to often refer to him as “the professor”. He seemed to take on the moniker with pride, and carried around a pocket guide to insects and arachnids which he used to identify the various creepy crawlies we found during our sylvan ramblings. He would note them down by their scientific names in a little journal, with surprisingly well-drawn sketches alongside them. I wonder if he ever became an entomologist when he grew up, or perhaps an illustrator. He always seemed a little bit shyer than Myles, but in retrospect I think it’s possible he may have just had a crush on me, something that I would have been utterly oblivious to at the time. I was young, and didn’t have time to think about romance, all that existed to me was the forest, my friends, and long summer days that felt as though they would last forever.
We’d often come up with little objectives for our excursions, and Myles would write them down in a small leather bound notebook he carried in his fanny pack. This would range from simple things like “follow the creek till the end” to elaborate fantasies such as “search for the forgotten temple of the forest gods”. We rarely ever actually achieved any of these goals, but it added to the immersion of being globetrotting adventurers, so we played into it. Out of all of the missions we found ourselves embarking upon, however, the one we most frequently repeated was searching as deep in the woods as we could for a very particular cabin.
You see, there was something of a legend in Pinewood Grove, one passed on for as long as anyone could remember, perhaps from the very founding of the town itself. I heard it from my uncle, Antonio from his grandmother, and Myles was told it by his father. The details changed from telling to telling, but the core of the story always stayed the same. They say that deep, deep in the woods, past any sign of civilization, there lives a very old man. Ancient, in fact, older than the forest itself, from when the world was young and nothing was quite finished yet. They say that when he was born, people didn’t yet know how to die, and in all his long years of existence, he still hasn’t managed to figure it out. He could age though, and the cruel years have warped his body almost beyond recognizability as anything that could have once been considered human. In his impossible decrepitude, every movement makes his joints creak and crack with a sound like branches snapping in half. He lives alone, making strange little shapes out of tied together sticks which he litters near his cabin as a warning to keep away. Antonio told me his grandmother actually showed him one of these objects, a strange little figure, like a doll made by someone who didn’t quite understand what humans were supposed to look like, held together with sinew and bits of hair. He said that just looking at it felt wrong.
Nobody knows the old man’s real name, if he ever had one to begin with, but his creaking joints and gaunt, aged figure have earned him a number of nicknames. The Snapstick Man. Old Stickbug. Grandfather Brittleback.
To me though, he will always be Old Man Stickbones. That’s what Myles, Antonio, and I always called him. We joked sometimes about finding the old man and bringing him back to civilization, putting him on display as the 8th wonder of the world and charging admission to see him at 5 dollars a peek. It wasn’t serious of course. I don’t think we actually believed in Old Man Stickbones, but it was a good enough excuse to pass the time in each other’s company, and frankly the story had an air of authentic woodsy horror about it which made the morbid parts of our imagination run wild with delight.
I remember once that the three of us were having a sleepover at Myles’ house, and I managed to sneak away while the others were watching some scary movie that we were all too young for. I hid just outside the light of the television set and began snapping in half some sticks that I’d smuggled in my jacket pockets. It took only a couple snaps before Antonio and Myles paused the movie and started looking around with absolute terror in their eyes. When I jumped out and yelled “Boo”, I swear to God I thought the two of them were going to wet themselves. Antonio actually started to cry, which made me feel a little bad.
There’s no point in beating around the bush any further. As pleasant as it is to remember those bygone days of my youth, all of my recollections invariably end with the same, terrible memory. Perhaps putting it down in words will provide me with some sort of closure. One can only hope.
It was nearing the end of the summer break, and the three of us knew that fairly soon our woodland romps would be once again limited to weekends and the occasional holiday. So, we decided to try and go deeper into the woods than we had ever gone before. “Right up to Old Man Stickbones’ front door!” as Myles put it, something which made Antonio seem slightly nervous. We left earlier than usual, choosing to head off in the late morning rather than the early afternoon, and made sure to bring enough snacks (or “rations” as Myles insisted upon calling them) to last us till the evening.
I don’t remember exactly which route we were taking, but it was somewhat meandering. Myles had the compass so he was the one who led the way. Antonio and I, as always, followed behind, though frankly with our longer legs it was sometimes a tad bit annoying to deal with Myles’ slower pace. Antonio frequently found himself accidentally kicking the back of Myles’ shoes before sheepishly apologizing. This had always been the case, and usually nothing worse came of it than an annoyed comment, but this time, Antonio’s accidental treading of Myles’ heel caused our fearless leader to trip on an exposed tree root, falling to the ground in a heap.
It feels awful in retrospect, but I did laugh. Myles had been in the middle of singing a marching tune, and the song was cut off with a sudden “Aurgh!” followed by a clattering of metal which was frankly comical.
What was less comical was the realization that the loud clattering sound was that of poor Myles’ compass, the one given to him by his grandfather, being dashed to pieces on a protruding rock as it fell.
Though largely unhurt, Myles’ bravado had been deflated once he realized what had happened, and he was beginning to sniffle a bit. I’ve always felt awkward comforting my friends as they cry. I never know quite what to say. Myles adored that compass, and I felt genuinely terrible for laughing when it broke. Antonio apologized profusely, and in a display of maturity that was frankly uncommon for someone of such a young age, Myles told him it was alright, and that he knew Antonio didn’t mean any harm.
“It’s my fault,” he said, “I know I should’ve been in the back of the group, I’m the slowest. I just like being the leader is all.”
We helped Myles up to his feet and gathered up the broken remnants of the compass. I tried to reassure him that we could maybe get it fixed when we got back to town, and that did seem to cheer Myles up a bit. We realized that it was starting to get a little late in the day for exploring anyway, and that we should probably turn around. It was then that Antonio remarked “Um, sorry, but… which way did we come from?”
It was with dawning horror that we realized we had no idea which direction was the way back to Pinewood Grove. We had been relying on Myles and his compass to get back home, and frankly none of us properly had any real sense of direction. For a moment we all stood in silence, trying desperately to think of some way to navigate. We knew that we had headed South initially, and so we needed to find out which way was North in order to reach town.
“We could use the setting sun to figure out which direction to go, maybe?” suggested Antonio.
“That’s a great idea,” I agreed, “it rises in the East and sets in the West, right?”
“No no, it’s the other way around,” insisted Myles, “that’s why they call Japan ‘the land of the setting sun.’”
“I thought it was the ‘land of the rising sun,'” said Antonio, sounding a little unsure of himself.
The discussion went round and round in circles for what must have been at least half an hour, Myles and I arguing over which way the sun rose and set. Antonio, meanwhile, kept switching sides anxiously, desperate just for someone to decide upon something we could use to get home. In the end, we were so worried about getting back before dark that we just decided to set off in a random direction that we all hoped was North and prayed that we could find some recognizable landmarks.
We had successfully managed at least one thing; we had gone deeper into the forest than ever before. As the light grew dimmer, I’m certain that each of us felt that the surrounding woods were becoming less and less recognizable, but none of us said anything. I think we were all secretly hoping that the others knew where they were going.
The trees were taller, the foliage thicker, and the air seemed almost imperceptibly fouler, like the stale smell you get from opening a long-closed cupboard, but tinged with the musty scent of soil and damp leaves. As the minutes turned to hours, eventually it grew so dark that we had to pull out the flashlights we had brought with us in our backpacks, just in case of emergencies. I didn’t know how long the batteries would last, so I insisted upon keeping mine in reserve, letting the boys use theirs for the time being.
It was Antonio who spotted the first one. He had stopped marching and was simply staring upwards at one of the trees, flashlight shining high up at an angle. His mouth was open slightly, and he was trembling.
“What is it?” I asked, looking up at where the beam pointed. I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary at first, even with the flashlight, as it was difficult to see well in the dark. Antonio pointed with one shaking hand, and I looked closer, squinting slightly. When I saw what he was staring at, I immediately understood why Antonio was afraid.
Dangling from a string of some sort, suspended in the air, was a strange bundle of sticks. It was arranged in some sort of star-like pattern, but with too many points, maybe seven or eight in total. It was small, and blended in well among the leaves, so it wasn’t particularly surprising that I hadn’t been able to see it at first. Frankly it was a miracle that Antonio had.
“Guys, c’mon!” shouted Myles from up ahead. He hadn’t stopped his march while Antonio and I were looking at the strange star.
“No, it’s probably just, I dunno, some guy doing a prank or something. Trying to scare people. If anything it probably means we’re closer to town,” I said. Antonio nodded, and we hurried to follow Myles, shouting for him to wait up.
As time went on, both Antonio and I began to notice more and more of the strange shapes crafted from sticks hanging from the trees. They came in a wide variety of shapes and sizes; vaguely humanoid outlines, triangles, crosses, stars, jagged spirals, and even stranger designs which we couldn’t quite find the words for, but made us uncomfortable to look at nonetheless. If Myles noticed them, he didn’t show any sign of it. He simply kept marching on, tired and upset to the extent to which he no longer was paying any attention to his surroundings.
Every so often Antonio would get an odd look and slow his pace for a second or two, looking about nervously. After he had done so four or five times, I asked him in a whisper what he was doing.
“Listening,” he said in reply, “I keep thinking I hear something, like, well…” his voice shrunk to a low mutter, “like sticks snapping.”
I was about to try and come up with some sort of rational explanation when we heard Myles call us from up ahead. We hurried towards him and quickly saw what had gotten his attention. Myles was pointing towards a distant light shining through the trees. It was admittedly quite faint, but decidedly a sign of civilization. We could also smell the faint scent of something burning.
“A campfire maybe?” I asked.
“It’s gotta be”, said Myles, picking up the pace as he headed towards the light. Antonio and I followed, but there was a hesitance to our movements. With every step I took, I began to get increasingly uncomfortable, and I could tell that Antonio felt the same.
After a few minutes we were greeted with the source of the light. It was a rough cabin, built from logs and crudely mortared stone, with a faint wisp of smoke emanating out from its chimney. Despite its relatively simple construction, it seemed quite large, at least the size of a typical suburban home. It seemed oddly crooked, all the angles subtly off, like something out of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Its windows were made from cloudy, cracked glass, very roughly set high in the walls of the building with some sort of rudimentary cement. From behind the translucent glass there came the warm glow of a fire.
“Let’s knock on the door and see if whoever lives here can point us back to Pinewood Grove,” said Myles excitedly.
“I uh, don’t think that’s a good idea Myles,” Antonio whispered, starting to take steps back away from the cabin.
“What are you talking about? This could be our best bet to get out of the forest! Do you want to get eaten by a bear or something? Besides maybe they’ve got a telephone. I’m sure our parents are all worried about us by now, they’ve probably called the police,” replied Myles, a hint of frustration in his voice.
“I think Antonio has a point, Myles, I mean, doesn’t this all seem a little… I don’t know, creepy?” I said, trying to choose my words carefully.
Myles stared at me bleary eyed like I just told him I was from the planet Mars.
“Myles, we didn’t tell you because, y’know, you already seemed kind of upset, but…” Antonio trailed off.
“We’ve been seeing these weird stick sculptures, in the trees. We thought maybe it was someone doing a prank, y’know? But, c’mon, look at this place. Don’t you think it kind of looks like-” I started to say, before Myles cut me off.
“Are you seriously trying to tell me you want to stay out here, in the dark, alone in the woods, because you’re scared of Old Man Stickbones? Come on.” Myles huffed, rolling his eyes.
Antonio and I looked down at the ground, embarrassed a little bit by Myles’ tone. We knew it sounded stupid, being afraid of a campfire story like that, but it didn’t make us any less afraid. Our silence started to make Myles angry.
“Are you serious? Are you both babies? There’s no such thing as Old Man Stickbones, he’s made up, he’s a fairy tale! Are you gonna tell me you believe in Santa Claus next? It’s just a stupid game. Did you think that when we went looking for secret treasure last week that there was actually hidden gold out here too?” Myles was starting to yell, getting angrier and angrier. I understood we were all tired, stressed, and afraid, but I’d never seen him act like this before, and frankly I was starting to get pissed off.
“We wouldn’t even be out here if you didn’t drop your stupid compass,” I muttered, mostly to myself, but just loud enough that Myles could hear.
“Well maybe I wouldn’t have dropped it if this moron,” Myles said, pointing an accusing finger at Antonio, “could watch here he was going! Or maybe, y’know, if you’d just agreed with me about which direction the freaking sun sets.”
Antonio looked like he was about to cry, and my hands tightened into fists. It was then that I said something I will forever regret.
“Well Myles, if you’re so brave, why don’t you go knock on that creepy cabin door yourself.”
To this day, I still cannot forgive myself. I shouldn’t have said it. I don’t know what else I should have said, what I could have done to prevent what happened, but I can’t help but blame myself. I told him to go knock on the door, it’s my fault.
Myles grew slightly pale, and I could tell he was afraid. But he didn’t say anything. He just turned around and started marching towards the front of the cabin. I stood there, watching him go, while Antonio tried to whisper for him to come back, that I didn’t mean it.
Within a few moments, Myles stood before the wooden door of that strange cabin, trembling slightly. I hadn’t been able to tell from a distance earlier, but now with Myles standing next to it the door seemed huge in comparison to his short stature. It was easily 8 or 9 feet tall, and looked heavy. He looked over to us for reassurance, and Antonio kept shaking his head, trying to get him to come back. I just stared. I wish I had done something, but God help me, I just stared.
Myles turned back to the door and raised a shaking fist, before rapping his knuckles against the wood three times.
Knock.
Knock.
Knock.
Everything went quiet. All the faint sounds of chirping crickets, hooting owls, and rustling leaves seemed to die in an instant. For a few seconds, all was terribly, impossibly silent. Then I heard it.
It was a loud, harsh, crack. First just one, as though a single branch being snapped off a dead tree. Then another, and another, a cacophony of cracks as though of a thousand arthritic joints being popped. Myles seemed paralyzed with fear, and Antonio and I gasped as we saw strange shadows move with stuttering, stop-and-start motions behind the clouded glass of the cabin’s high windows. Then the door began to creak open, the hinges rusty and loud. From our vantage point, we couldn’t see inside, we could just see the light from within illuminate Myles when the door was fully ajar.
Myles’ jaw dropped open in horror as he inhaled, preparing to cry out in abject terror at whatever it was he saw inside the cabin. But he didn’t have time to scream before a gaunt, pallid limb reached out from inside, grabbing him by the waist with fingers as thick as broomsticks and pulling him into the cabin, the door slamming shut in an instant.
Antonio and I both ran, screaming and crying as we fled through the woods at top speed. He dropped his flashlight at some point and we both kept tripping through the dark, I was too afraid to stop to pull my own out of my backpack. We couldn’t be sure that the sounds of crunching underfoot came from fallen leaves or the creaking joints of a monstrous pursuer.
Eventually we both collapsed, unable to flee any more with our burning muscles and countless bruises from stumbling about in the dark. As we sat, catching our breath, I could hear the distant sound of cars. We were near the highway. Finally pulling out my flashlight, I led the still crying Antonio by the hand, following the sounds of the automobiles.
Antonio and I made it back alright, mostly unharmed aside from the bruising and shock. Myles had been right; our parents did call the police, and we had to give our statements as to what happened to some rather skeptical officers when we got back to my house before he was allowed to go home and I was able to go to bed. Of course they didn’t believe us, why on Earth would they? They figured we were too scared to properly remember what had really happened, and that maybe some animal or homeless person had frightened us. They sent out search parties the following day.
They didn’t find Myles, nor did they find the cabin that Antonio and I described. Myles’ parents blamed us of course, and accused us of taking their son out into the woods to murder him. Antonio’s family moved away not long after in the wake of Myles’ disappearance, and when school started up again I became a subject of ostracization and bullying, which frankly I felt that I deserved. I blamed myself, and still do, for what happened to poor Myles.
Nevertheless, I tried to persevere, and despite the alternating shunning and taunting from my classmates and teachers alike, I stuck around in Pinewood Grove for about a month after my final expedition into the woods. The straw that broke the camel’s back, however, was the object that was left on the front porch of Myles’ parents’ house. After that, my parents became so concerned for our safety at the hands of small town “vigilante justice” that they decided it would be best to move away.
You see, one morning Myles’ father was getting ready to go to work, when he almost tripped upon something left right at the front door. It was roughly pyramidal in structure, with three sides leading up to a point at the top, constructed from sticks and twigs, tied together with leather cords. There was a little gap, a window of sorts, cut into one of the sides. Dangling in the center, strung up with some knotted hair, was Myles’ broken compass.
Forensic analysis revealed that the leather and hair used in the construction of this object was human tissue.
I grew up in a small town called Pinewood Grove. It’s a tiny little community, its population couldn’t have exceeded more than a couple thousand souls at the most, and it’s surrounded on all sides by untold miles of dense forest. I remember it as a beautiful place, with trees as far as the eye could see, a veritable sea of greenery stretching out to the horizon. The air was cleaner there than it is in the city, and the sun seemed the shine brighter in the clear blue sky. But something has forever tainted that town for me, and I fear that until I die I shall be unable to look back upon my otherwise pleasant childhood without feeling a twinge of horror at the tragedy which ended my time living there.
I was always something of a tomboy as a child, feeling more comfortable playing outside with the boys than spending time with the other girls on the awkward playdates my somewhat anxious mother tried to set up for me. It’s really rather silly looking back on it now, how worried she was that I wasn’t going to get a “normal” childhood, but times were different back then. I had much more fun coming home with torn jeans and dirty hands anyway.
I was lucky enough to have many friends, but chief among them were a pair of boys by the names of Myles and Antonio. We first met by a creek in the woods where we had both been hoping to catch crayfish, and from that day forward we were practically inseparable. Despite the long stretch of years, I can still remember them both quite clearly, though I admit that perhaps this is only because of the terrible thing which occurred at the end of our friendship.
Myles was short and blond, with a freckle covered face that I sometimes (perhaps cruelly) joked looked as though it were covered in mosquito bites. In my defense, given how much time we spent near streams and creeks, it very often was. He fancied himself something of an explorer, and I swear that the khaki safari hat he wore may as well have been permanently glued to his head. He never went anywhere without a Swiss army knife and a compass that had been given to him by his grandfather. I must say I was somewhat jealous of the compass, it was quite the fancy piece of kit, perhaps some military surplus, with a shiny metal lid. He took great joy in closing it one handed with a satisfying snap. He often referred to our little woodland excursions as “expeditions”, and sometimes would put on a faux British accent and pretend to twirl a nonexistent mustache in imitation of the two fisted heroes from the pulp adventure novels he read.
Antonio was a bit taller than Myles, with slightly messy black hair and big round spectacles that led Myles to often refer to him as “the professor”. He seemed to take on the moniker with pride, and carried around a pocket guide to insects and arachnids which he used to identify the various creepy crawlies we found during our sylvan ramblings. He would note them down by their scientific names in a little journal, with surprisingly well-drawn sketches alongside them. I wonder if he ever became an entomologist when he grew up, or perhaps an illustrator. He always seemed a little bit shyer than Myles, but in retrospect I think it’s possible he may have just had a crush on me, something that I would have been utterly oblivious to at the time. I was young, and didn’t have time to think about romance, all that existed to me was the forest, my friends, and long summer days that felt as though they would last forever.
We’d often come up with little objectives for our excursions, and Myles would write them down in a small leather bound notebook he carried in his fanny pack. This would range from simple things like “follow the creek till the end” to elaborate fantasies such as “search for the forgotten temple of the forest gods”. We rarely ever actually achieved any of these goals, but it added to the immersion of being globetrotting adventurers, so we played into it. Out of all of the missions we found ourselves embarking upon, however, the one we most frequently repeated was searching as deep in the woods as we could for a very particular cabin.
You see, there was something of a legend in Pinewood Grove, one passed on for as long as anyone could remember, perhaps from the very founding of the town itself. I heard it from my uncle, Antonio from his grandmother, and Myles was told it by his father. The details changed from telling to telling, but the core of the story always stayed the same. They say that deep, deep in the woods, past any sign of civilization, there lives a very old man. Ancient, in fact, older than the forest itself, from when the world was young and nothing was quite finished yet. They say that when he was born, people didn’t yet know how to die, and in all his long years of existence, he still hasn’t managed to figure it out. He could age though, and the cruel years have warped his body almost beyond recognizability as anything that could have once been considered human. In his impossible decrepitude, every movement makes his joints creak and crack with a sound like branches snapping in half. He lives alone, making strange little shapes out of tied together sticks which he litters near his cabin as a warning to keep away. Antonio told me his grandmother actually showed him one of these objects, a strange little figure, like a doll made by someone who didn’t quite understand what humans were supposed to look like, held together with sinew and bits of hair. He said that just looking at it felt wrong.
Nobody knows the old man’s real name, if he ever had one to begin with, but his creaking joints and gaunt, aged figure have earned him a number of nicknames. The Snapstick Man. Old Stickbug. Grandfather Brittleback.
To me though, he will always be Old Man Stickbones. That’s what Myles, Antonio, and I always called him. We joked sometimes about finding the old man and bringing him back to civilization, putting him on display as the 8th wonder of the world and charging admission to see him at 5 dollars a peek. It wasn’t serious of course. I don’t think we actually believed in Old Man Stickbones, but it was a good enough excuse to pass the time in each other’s company, and frankly the story had an air of authentic woodsy horror about it which made the morbid parts of our imagination run wild with delight.
I remember once that the three of us were having a sleepover at Myles’ house, and I managed to sneak away while the others were watching some scary movie that we were all too young for. I hid just outside the light of the television set and began snapping in half some sticks that I’d smuggled in my jacket pockets. It took only a couple snaps before Antonio and Myles paused the movie and started looking around with absolute terror in their eyes. When I jumped out and yelled “Boo”, I swear to God I thought the two of them were going to wet themselves. Antonio actually started to cry, which made me feel a little bad.
There’s no point in beating around the bush any further. As pleasant as it is to remember those bygone days of my youth, all of my recollections invariably end with the same, terrible memory. Perhaps putting it down in words will provide me with some sort of closure. One can only hope.
It was nearing the end of the summer break, and the three of us knew that fairly soon our woodland romps would be once again limited to weekends and the occasional holiday. So, we decided to try and go deeper into the woods than we had ever gone before. “Right up to Old Man Stickbones’ front door!” as Myles put it, something which made Antonio seem slightly nervous. We left earlier than usual, choosing to head off in the late morning rather than the early afternoon, and made sure to bring enough snacks (or “rations” as Myles insisted upon calling them) to last us till the evening.
I don’t remember exactly which route we were taking, but it was somewhat meandering. Myles had the compass so he was the one who led the way. Antonio and I, as always, followed behind, though frankly with our longer legs it was sometimes a tad bit annoying to deal with Myles’ slower pace. Antonio frequently found himself accidentally kicking the back of Myles’ shoes before sheepishly apologizing. This had always been the case, and usually nothing worse came of it than an annoyed comment, but this time, Antonio’s accidental treading of Myles’ heel caused our fearless leader to trip on an exposed tree root, falling to the ground in a heap.
It feels awful in retrospect, but I did laugh. Myles had been in the middle of singing a marching tune, and the song was cut off with a sudden “Aurgh!” followed by a clattering of metal which was frankly comical.
What was less comical was the realization that the loud clattering sound was that of poor Myles’ compass, the one given to him by his grandfather, being dashed to pieces on a protruding rock as it fell.
Though largely unhurt, Myles’ bravado had been deflated once he realized what had happened, and he was beginning to sniffle a bit. I’ve always felt awkward comforting my friends as they cry. I never know quite what to say. Myles adored that compass, and I felt genuinely terrible for laughing when it broke. Antonio apologized profusely, and in a display of maturity that was frankly uncommon for someone of such a young age, Myles told him it was alright, and that he knew Antonio didn’t mean any harm.
“It’s my fault,” he said, “I know I should’ve been in the back of the group, I’m the slowest. I just like being the leader is all.”
We helped Myles up to his feet and gathered up the broken remnants of the compass. I tried to reassure him that we could maybe get it fixed when we got back to town, and that did seem to cheer Myles up a bit. We realized that it was starting to get a little late in the day for exploring anyway, and that we should probably turn around. It was then that Antonio remarked “Um, sorry, but… which way did we come from?”
It was with dawning horror that we realized we had no idea which direction was the way back to Pinewood Grove. We had been relying on Myles and his compass to get back home, and frankly none of us properly had any real sense of direction. For a moment we all stood in silence, trying desperately to think of some way to navigate. We knew that we had headed South initially, and so we needed to find out which way was North in order to reach town.
“We could use the setting sun to figure out which direction to go, maybe?” suggested Antonio.
“That’s a great idea,” I agreed, “it rises in the East and sets in the West, right?”
“No no, it’s the other way around,” insisted Myles, “that’s why they call Japan ‘the land of the setting sun.’”
“I thought it was the ‘land of the rising sun,'” said Antonio, sounding a little unsure of himself.
The discussion went round and round in circles for what must have been at least half an hour, Myles and I arguing over which way the sun rose and set. Antonio, meanwhile, kept switching sides anxiously, desperate just for someone to decide upon something we could use to get home. In the end, we were so worried about getting back before dark that we just decided to set off in a random direction that we all hoped was North and prayed that we could find some recognizable landmarks.
We had successfully managed at least one thing; we had gone deeper into the forest than ever before. As the light grew dimmer, I’m certain that each of us felt that the surrounding woods were becoming less and less recognizable, but none of us said anything. I think we were all secretly hoping that the others knew where they were going.
The trees were taller, the foliage thicker, and the air seemed almost imperceptibly fouler, like the stale smell you get from opening a long-closed cupboard, but tinged with the musty scent of soil and damp leaves. As the minutes turned to hours, eventually it grew so dark that we had to pull out the flashlights we had brought with us in our backpacks, just in case of emergencies. I didn’t know how long the batteries would last, so I insisted upon keeping mine in reserve, letting the boys use theirs for the time being.
It was Antonio who spotted the first one. He had stopped marching and was simply staring upwards at one of the trees, flashlight shining high up at an angle. His mouth was open slightly, and he was trembling.
“What is it?” I asked, looking up at where the beam pointed. I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary at first, even with the flashlight, as it was difficult to see well in the dark. Antonio pointed with one shaking hand, and I looked closer, squinting slightly. When I saw what he was staring at, I immediately understood why Antonio was afraid.
Dangling from a string of some sort, suspended in the air, was a strange bundle of sticks. It was arranged in some sort of star-like pattern, but with too many points, maybe seven or eight in total. It was small, and blended in well among the leaves, so it wasn’t particularly surprising that I hadn’t been able to see it at first. Frankly it was a miracle that Antonio had.
“Guys, c’mon!” shouted Myles from up ahead. He hadn’t stopped his march while Antonio and I were looking at the strange star.
“No, it’s probably just, I dunno, some guy doing a prank or something. Trying to scare people. If anything it probably means we’re closer to town,” I said. Antonio nodded, and we hurried to follow Myles, shouting for him to wait up.
As time went on, both Antonio and I began to notice more and more of the strange shapes crafted from sticks hanging from the trees. They came in a wide variety of shapes and sizes; vaguely humanoid outlines, triangles, crosses, stars, jagged spirals, and even stranger designs which we couldn’t quite find the words for, but made us uncomfortable to look at nonetheless. If Myles noticed them, he didn’t show any sign of it. He simply kept marching on, tired and upset to the extent to which he no longer was paying any attention to his surroundings.
Every so often Antonio would get an odd look and slow his pace for a second or two, looking about nervously. After he had done so four or five times, I asked him in a whisper what he was doing.
“Listening,” he said in reply, “I keep thinking I hear something, like, well…” his voice shrunk to a low mutter, “like sticks snapping.”
I was about to try and come up with some sort of rational explanation when we heard Myles call us from up ahead. We hurried towards him and quickly saw what had gotten his attention. Myles was pointing towards a distant light shining through the trees. It was admittedly quite faint, but decidedly a sign of civilization. We could also smell the faint scent of something burning.
“A campfire maybe?” I asked.
“It’s gotta be”, said Myles, picking up the pace as he headed towards the light. Antonio and I followed, but there was a hesitance to our movements. With every step I took, I began to get increasingly uncomfortable, and I could tell that Antonio felt the same.
After a few minutes we were greeted with the source of the light. It was a rough cabin, built from logs and crudely mortared stone, with a faint wisp of smoke emanating out from its chimney. Despite its relatively simple construction, it seemed quite large, at least the size of a typical suburban home. It seemed oddly crooked, all the angles subtly off, like something out of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Its windows were made from cloudy, cracked glass, very roughly set high in the walls of the building with some sort of rudimentary cement. From behind the translucent glass there came the warm glow of a fire.
“Let’s knock on the door and see if whoever lives here can point us back to Pinewood Grove,” said Myles excitedly.
“I uh, don’t think that’s a good idea Myles,” Antonio whispered, starting to take steps back away from the cabin.
“What are you talking about? This could be our best bet to get out of the forest! Do you want to get eaten by a bear or something? Besides maybe they’ve got a telephone. I’m sure our parents are all worried about us by now, they’ve probably called the police,” replied Myles, a hint of frustration in his voice.
“I think Antonio has a point, Myles, I mean, doesn’t this all seem a little… I don’t know, creepy?” I said, trying to choose my words carefully.
Myles stared at me bleary eyed like I just told him I was from the planet Mars.
“Myles, we didn’t tell you because, y’know, you already seemed kind of upset, but…” Antonio trailed off.
“We’ve been seeing these weird stick sculptures, in the trees. We thought maybe it was someone doing a prank, y’know? But, c’mon, look at this place. Don’t you think it kind of looks like-” I started to say, before Myles cut me off.
“Are you seriously trying to tell me you want to stay out here, in the dark, alone in the woods, because you’re scared of Old Man Stickbones? Come on.” Myles huffed, rolling his eyes.
Antonio and I looked down at the ground, embarrassed a little bit by Myles’ tone. We knew it sounded stupid, being afraid of a campfire story like that, but it didn’t make us any less afraid. Our silence started to make Myles angry.
“Are you serious? Are you both babies? There’s no such thing as Old Man Stickbones, he’s made up, he’s a fairy tale! Are you gonna tell me you believe in Santa Claus next? It’s just a stupid game. Did you think that when we went looking for secret treasure last week that there was actually hidden gold out here too?” Myles was starting to yell, getting angrier and angrier. I understood we were all tired, stressed, and afraid, but I’d never seen him act like this before, and frankly I was starting to get pissed off.
“We wouldn’t even be out here if you didn’t drop your stupid compass,” I muttered, mostly to myself, but just loud enough that Myles could hear.
“Well maybe I wouldn’t have dropped it if this moron,” Myles said, pointing an accusing finger at Antonio, “could watch here he was going! Or maybe, y’know, if you’d just agreed with me about which direction the freaking sun sets.”
Antonio looked like he was about to cry, and my hands tightened into fists. It was then that I said something I will forever regret.
“Well Myles, if you’re so brave, why don’t you go knock on that creepy cabin door yourself.”
To this day, I still cannot forgive myself. I shouldn’t have said it. I don’t know what else I should have said, what I could have done to prevent what happened, but I can’t help but blame myself. I told him to go knock on the door, it’s my fault.
Myles grew slightly pale, and I could tell he was afraid. But he didn’t say anything. He just turned around and started marching towards the front of the cabin. I stood there, watching him go, while Antonio tried to whisper for him to come back, that I didn’t mean it.
Within a few moments, Myles stood before the wooden door of that strange cabin, trembling slightly. I hadn’t been able to tell from a distance earlier, but now with Myles standing next to it the door seemed huge in comparison to his short stature. It was easily 8 or 9 feet tall, and looked heavy. He looked over to us for reassurance, and Antonio kept shaking his head, trying to get him to come back. I just stared. I wish I had done something, but God help me, I just stared.
Myles turned back to the door and raised a shaking fist, before rapping his knuckles against the wood three times.
Knock.
Knock.
Knock.
Everything went quiet. All the faint sounds of chirping crickets, hooting owls, and rustling leaves seemed to die in an instant. For a few seconds, all was terribly, impossibly silent. Then I heard it.
It was a loud, harsh, crack. First just one, as though a single branch being snapped off a dead tree. Then another, and another, a cacophony of cracks as though of a thousand arthritic joints being popped. Myles seemed paralyzed with fear, and Antonio and I gasped as we saw strange shadows move with stuttering, stop-and-start motions behind the clouded glass of the cabin’s high windows. Then the door began to creak open, the hinges rusty and loud. From our vantage point, we couldn’t see inside, we could just see the light from within illuminate Myles when the door was fully ajar.
Myles’ jaw dropped open in horror as he inhaled, preparing to cry out in abject terror at whatever it was he saw inside the cabin. But he didn’t have time to scream before a gaunt, pallid limb reached out from inside, grabbing him by the waist with fingers as thick as broomsticks and pulling him into the cabin, the door slamming shut in an instant.
Antonio and I both ran, screaming and crying as we fled through the woods at top speed. He dropped his flashlight at some point and we both kept tripping through the dark, I was too afraid to stop to pull my own out of my backpack. We couldn’t be sure that the sounds of crunching underfoot came from fallen leaves or the creaking joints of a monstrous pursuer.
Eventually we both collapsed, unable to flee any more with our burning muscles and countless bruises from stumbling about in the dark. As we sat, catching our breath, I could hear the distant sound of cars. We were near the highway. Finally pulling out my flashlight, I led the still crying Antonio by the hand, following the sounds of the automobiles.
Antonio and I made it back alright, mostly unharmed aside from the bruising and shock. Myles had been right; our parents did call the police, and we had to give our statements as to what happened to some rather skeptical officers when we got back to my house before he was allowed to go home and I was able to go to bed. Of course they didn’t believe us, why on Earth would they? They figured we were too scared to properly remember what had really happened, and that maybe some animal or homeless person had frightened us. They sent out search parties the following day.
They didn’t find Myles, nor did they find the cabin that Antonio and I described. Myles’ parents blamed us of course, and accused us of taking their son out into the woods to murder him. Antonio’s family moved away not long after in the wake of Myles’ disappearance, and when school started up again I became a subject of ostracization and bullying, which frankly I felt that I deserved. I blamed myself, and still do, for what happened to poor Myles.
Nevertheless, I tried to persevere, and despite the alternating shunning and taunting from my classmates and teachers alike, I stuck around in Pinewood Grove for about a month after my final expedition into the woods. The straw that broke the camel’s back, however, was the object that was left on the front porch of Myles’ parents’ house. After that, my parents became so concerned for our safety at the hands of small town “vigilante justice” that they decided it would be best to move away.
You see, one morning Myles’ father was getting ready to go to work, when he almost tripped upon something left right at the front door. It was roughly pyramidal in structure, with three sides leading up to a point at the top, constructed from sticks and twigs, tied together with leather cords. There was a little gap, a window of sorts, cut into one of the sides. Dangling in the center, strung up with some knotted hair, was Myles’ broken compass.
Forensic analysis revealed that the leather and hair used in the construction of this object was human tissue.
In the very slight defense of pop culture Cthulhu depictions, Wilcox's bas-relief is described as "If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful", and the idol recovered from the cultists on the Alert is described as "The crouching image with its cuttlefish head, dragon body, scaly wings, and hieroglyphed pedestal".
So there is some basis for the popular culture understanding of what Cthulhu looks like, BUT, I've always found that depicting him in a traditionally "badass" way is somewhat missing the point. He is also, as you said, described as flabby, corpulent, blob-like. Hell, when Johansen confronts Cthulhu in the Alert, he is given the description of "pursuing jelly". He only happens to look vaguely humanoid, if anything his anatomical structure is more or less completely alien, the vaguely human form a total coincidence. I mean, when he gets rammed by the Alert he pops like a balloon for goodness sake!
Also I do think people tend to take the "octopus" and "cuttlefish" comparisons far too literally, if I see a Cthulhu with only 8 tentacles I'm going to be disappointed. I expect to see dozens at least.
The best on-screen depiction of Cthulhu I have ever seen is in the HP Lovecraft historical society's silent film adaptation, where he is portrayed with stop motion and generally kept more or less to the shadows
In addition, the HPLHS film also had the best depiction of R'lyeh in my opinion, I always loved it being a sort of Caligari-esque abstract landscape.
So you want to hear my story, huh? Straight from the horse’s mouth, as they say. Why not? Maybe you’ll actually listen to me. That’d be a nice change of pace.
I’m sure you’ve already read the version in the papers, the account my erstwhile coworkers gave about my “breakdown”. I’m certain the morons went on and on about how “normal” I seemed, how they couldn’t possibly have imagined what was secretly going on in my head. “Oh that Madeline, I never would have guessed!” Pricks. It’s probably because there isn’t anything wrong with me. I’m perfectly sane, which is quite a remarkable feat, I’d say, given my circumstances. They’ve pumped me so full of drugs I feel higher than a goddamn hot air balloon, but I’m trying my best to stay lucid, trying my best to remember the truth.
Well, I say perfectly sane, but that’s not entirely true. I’ve got to stay honest, I have to be consistent. If I start telling lies, even little ones like that, I’m no better than the gaslighting quacks insisting that I’m a danger to society. Prior to my imprisonment- sorry, my institutionalization, I was diagnosed with a mild form of obsessive compulsive disorder. Nothing too severe, you understand, no intrusive thoughts telling me to kill the president or to peel off my own skin or anything like that. I just have a tendency to be a little fussy about people touching my things and have chronically scaly looking skin from the frequency with which I wash my hands. I was on medication, I was dealing with it. I doubt anybody even noticed.
Now, of course, they’ve been giving me all sorts of wonderful diagnoses, a veritable smorgasbord of neuroses and complexes. All the usual suspects are there; paranoid schizophrenia, antisocial personality disorder, I believe one doctor even suggested dissociative identity disorder, though I’ve never shown even the slightest sign of having some sort of separate personality. But it makes them feel better to give me labels, to categorize me as something that they can understand. The language changes of course, one must accede to the endless demands of the euphemism treadmill, but we all know what they think I am; a madwoman. To them, I’m just a frightful maniac, a slasher out of a bad horror film who tried to cut up some innocent, normal person because the voices in my head told me to. They’re too blinded by their own idiotic dogma to accept the truth; that the world is not as they think it is, and we are not alone.
I’d better start at the beginning shouldn’t I? As you almost certainly already know, I used to work as a bookkeeper for my local grocery store. I basically was in charge of counting the money from the tills to ensure that there weren’t any discrepancies, and consequently spent a lot of time alone in a nice, soundproof little booth, away from the hustle and bustle of the endless parade of idiot customers. Of course, I had to wear gloves, I can’t stand handling money without them, but ever since the pandemic nobody really bothered me about it like they used to when I was younger.
It wasn’t all sunshine and roses though, there were downsides to my job. In addition to being bookkeeper, I was also a customer service representative, which meant that whenever some moron called the store asking if we carried such-and-such brand of cereal or the like, I was the one who had to answer the phone. Besides this, I also had to answer any inquiries at the service desk, and deal with the horde of senile geriatrics for whom the phrase “rewards app” may as well have spoken in Ancient Greek for all the understanding it elicited. I’d also have to deal with the occasional geezer telling me to take off my face mask, insisting that the pandemic was over. In truth, while I did wear it partially out of a desire to keep myself safe from germs, the real reason was that I simply hated having to fake a smile. I’ve been told I have something of a “resting bitch face”.
Nevertheless, as far as jobs go, bookkeeping wasn’t too bad. I managed to tolerate it to the best of my ability, and while I never made any real friendships with my coworkers, we all got along just fine, more or less.
That is, until she arrived.
The elderly store manager, one Aaron Reed, gathered us all up one afternoon for an impromptu store meeting, where he cheerfully announced that he would be retiring in a few weeks, and that we would be welcoming a new manager to our humble little store. Aaron was always one for dramatics, and with a flourish of his hand, out from behind the door to the manager’s office stepped Marie Vasilka.
From the instant I saw her, I hated her. Now, I must make it entirely clear, I’m not prejudiced, the hatred wasn’t born of some irrational bigotry. It wasn’t as though she were ugly in some way either; she had a bland sort of beauty to her, the sort of prettiness that appeals to the widest possible audience, the lowest common denominator of aesthetic preference. She wore a full face of makeup, her light brown hair was set up perfectly in some trendy but modest style, and she wore well tailored slacks and a perfectly fit black turtleneck. Everything about her was almost unnaturally perfect, like a digital camera filter was permanently applied to her so she always appeared in just the right light.
I’ll admit that all these details didn’t jump out at first. Instead, what affected me the most, ensuring immediately that I would not get along with her, was her smile. There is a certain expression, unique to the field of customer service, that denotes someone who feels perfectly fulfilled in that most degrading line of work. A grin representing such infinite shallowness that the mind boggles trying to conceptualize it. Marie Vasilka had the unmistakable, hollow smirk of someone who genuinely tried their absolute best to live her company’s values, who really did believe in the timeless maxim “the customer is always right.”
When she introduced herself to us, my suspicions of her soulless devotion to her career were instantly confirmed. She had a perfect customer service voice, that slightly too high pitched tone of polite concern that could immediately soothe even the most cantankerous of coupon clipping grandmothers. Her every motion was like that of an actress playing a role in a cruddy B-movie, stiff and wooden. She represented everything I hated about this job, all the worst aspects of the service industry rolled into one smiling, polite package.
Still, in spite of my immediate revulsion upon interacting with her, I tried my best to be as cordial as I could stomach, and made an effort not to roll my eyes when she remarked upon how I had “such a lovely name.” I’m not an asshole, after all, I understand that the universe doesn’t revolve around me and that it takes all sorts to make up this world we live in, regardless of whether or not I like them.
As it turned out, my first impression of Ms. Vasilka being a chronically happy workaholic proved to be entirely correct. As Aaron went about training her, she always had that same blandly polite smile upon her face. The worst part of it all though was her insistence that every single one of the other employees should share in her peppy, optimistic view of life. Even while Aaron was still guiding her around the store, getting her acquainted with the various departments and the like, she couldn’t help but comment on things that might be improved.
She’d point out when cashiers were standing about with nothing to do, waiting for customers, and tell them to work on cleaning up the check stands. She would always notice when a shelf could use a bit of tidying up, or some item needed restocking. She seemed to get some sort of perverse joy from efficiency, as though she had no higher aspiration in life than to be a beautifully gleaming cog in some vast, perfectly calibrated machine.
Eventually Aaron did good on his word with regards to his retirement, and we had a little going away party for him, complete with cake, balloons, and the like. Marie was there of course, and I took note of the fact that she didn’t partake in any of the refreshments, instead just making sure to engage everyone she could in some bland small-talk, the exact sort of conversation I always despised. I tried to quietly excuse myself a bit early, insisting that I had some work to do in the booth (a lie). On my way out, however, Marie stopped me, tapping a hand on my shoulder to grab my attention. Her hand felt stiffer than it should have been, as though I were being prodded with a stick rather than human flesh.
I turned to see her smiling face, eyes staring straight at me with uncomfortably direct eye contact. Do you want to know what she said?
“Do remember to smile Maddie; it’s an important part of serving our customers!”
As I believe I mentioned, I wore a face mask to work, for the express purpose of not needing to deal with any of this nonsense. Point blank, I asked how she knew if I was smiling or not, given that my mouth was covered. She replied that “You can always tell if someone is smiling Maddie, even if you can’t see their mouth. Why heck, sometimes people smile with their mouth, but not with their eyes. I think it’s really important for our customers that we smile with our whole face, don’t you?” The whole time she spoke, her face was locked into that perfect, happy grin. She was, as she put it, smiling with her whole face. It made me quite uncomfortable.
I mumbled some sort of generic grunt of agreement, and turned to leave, but she grabbed me by the shoulder and quite forcibly turned me back around to face her. Marie’s hand was hard upon my shoulder, a vice grip in fact. I was baffled, not to mention frightened, but all Marie had to say was “I’m sorry, I don’t quite think I heard what you said. Do make sure to enunciate properly Maddie, it’s only polite!”
I forced a smile and carefully spoke the words “I understand, thank you Marie. May I go to the booth now?” Marie nodded, replied that I may, and then went back to join the party.
The whole affair scared me, more than I at the time thought it should have. By the time I got back to my booth I had myself a short cry, because there was something so utterly terrifying about Marie. I’d described her earlier as moving like an actress in a bad film, but you must understand I don’t mean that as if to say she was faking her persona, it’s just that she genuinely happened to behave in that way. All the shoddiness of bad acting with all the sincerity of real life, a person who was fundamentally wrong on some level.
It was that night after her bizarre order for me to smile that I had the first of the nightmares. I’ve never been much of a dreamer, you understand, so when I do have one I’m inclined to remember it. This particular dream was among the most vivid I’ve ever experienced.
I was all alone in the grocery store, there were no other coworkers or customers about. I was simply walking through the aisles, completely solitary, yet with an intense feeling of being watched. Every security camera seemed to be pointed directly at me, a beady mechanical eye judging my very soul.
After a few minutes of aimless wandering about the store, growing increasingly tense and paranoid, my dream self was startled by an announcement on the intercom.
“Maddie, could you please come to the office? Maddie, to the office please?”
It goes without saying whose voice it was. Nobody else ever calls me Maddie.
I didn’t want to go to the office, the whole idea sent a shiver down my spine, as though someone had poured ice water down the collar of my shirt. But I didn’t have a voice. In that manner unique to dreams, I unwillingly felt myself begin to walk steadily towards Marie’s office, one agonizing step at a time. All the while I could feel her smiling eyes watch my every movement through the myriad cameras.
I finally reached the door to the office, closed, but with a sign attached to it saying “Come right in!” in bold comic sans. Below the tacky letters was a picture of a yellow smiley face. I felt myself push open the door, revealing the office.
It was sparsely decorated, with not so much as a picture of Marie’s family on the desk, though in retrospect I doubt that she has anything we’d be likely to call a family in the normal sense of the word. She simply sat there, smiling, unmoving, like a wax statue. I sat down in the chair opposite her, and we began to stare at one another.
The staring, oh dear God the staring. It went on for what felt like hours, nightmare logic permitting my eyes to remain open despite the impossibly long stretch of time. It didn’t stop them from hurting, though. The whole time I could feel my eyes itching, begging me to let them close, but I couldn’t. All the while, Marie continued to look at me, eyes effortlessly remaining open, the smile fixed upon her face.
She didn’t say anything, no words were spoken between us. She didn’t even seem to breathe as far as I could tell. We just sat, each of us the other’s mirror, locked in some sort of hellish staring contest that I knew I could never win. Even though the nightmare permitted me the strength to avoid blinking for lengths of time that would be unimaginable in the real world, I still knew that I would have to eventually.
Finally, after perhaps 2 or 3 hours, I could feel that I was going to give in, that my eyes would blink. I was terrified, sweating with the fear of what would happen. Wanting to shriek from the painful effort it took to try and keep my eyelids open, but unable to muster even a whimper, I felt my strained, bloodshot eyes begin to close against my will.
I woke up in bed bolt upright, screaming at the top of my lungs.
As I said, that was the first of the nightmares. They began to recur every single night, always the exact same way, never deviating in the slightest of minutiae, save that the demoniac staring contests lasted longer each time. Fairly soon it began to feel as though I was spending more time in those dreams than in the waking world.
The lack of rest began to affect me after only a few days of these terrible dreams. I felt listless, paranoid, and stressed all the time. I was scarcely able to tolerate the customer service portion of my job, having little patience for those idiots with their completely banal problems, and I found myself making frequent errors in my bookkeeping work as well. However, I did my best to perform my duties to a satisfactory extent, as I couldn’t bear the thought of being called up to Marie’s office, to be forced to turn my nocturnal terrors into a waking reality.
As the days turned to weeks and the dreams showed no signs of fading, I’ll admit I found myself acquiring a certain fixation on Marie Vasilka. I suppose it is rather difficult not to focus on someone who makes nightly appearances in your dreams. I took to observing her covertly, peeking glances at her whenever I could, though I never dared to go up to her office if I could help it, at least when I knew she was there.
I began to notice things, things that I never would have realized unless I was paying such close attention. For one thing, I never once observed Marie eat or drink while on the clock. At first I assumed that she merely took her lunch breaks in her office, or perhaps in her car, but it became increasingly obvious that Ms. Vasilka didn’t even take any breaks. She would clock in, work continuously without pause for what seemed to be 9 or 10 hour shifts, and then clock out. She never even took so much as a bathroom break.
Then there were the physical details, things that I hadn’t noticed at first but stuck out plain as day now that I was obsessively observing her. I realized with some confusion one day that despite how much time I’d spent looking at Marie, both in my nightmares and the waking world, I hadn’t the foggiest idea how old she was. Something about her face seemed timeless. I found that I must have drastically underestimated the amount of makeup she wore when I first met her, because increasingly it seemed to me that her face had a frankly unnatural shininess to it. There was something odd about her skin too, an abnormality of texture that more closely reminded me of some sort of rubber than living tissue.
The final revelation, the thing that thoroughly convinced me of the fact that there something supernatural about Marie Vasilka, was her eyes.
I was observing Marie assisting a customer from the comfort of my booth, as it was fortunately equipped with a one way mirror through which I could keep an eye out to see if anyone approached the service desk. I watched her listlessly as she patiently conversed with the middle aged gentleman who had interrupted her walk of the store. As she calmly and politely answered his questions, nodding at the appropriate times, I began to be overcome with a dawning sense of dread.
This interaction went on for nearly 10 minutes, and yet, in all that time, not once did I see Marie blink.
Throughout the rest of that shift, I kept my eye out for Marie, always trying to see if I could catch her blinking. If she blinked at any point, even just once, I could have told myself that I simply was suffering from some sort of mental breakdown. I could have told myself, as the doctors at this fine institution insist, that I was just going crazy. But she never, ever did.
Now, I’ll admit, from an outside perspective, my next decision may sound a touch drastic, but you have to understand my position. I was spending what felt like at least 12 hours each night just staring at Marie’s unblinking, monstrously smiling face, her eyes boring into my own like power drills. Everyday I felt weaker and more tired, the dreams weighing down upon me like a lead weight and sapping away any strength I should be getting from sleep.
I had to kill her.
I knew that if Marie was dead that I wouldn’t have the dreams anymore, I just knew it. I will assert again; I am not insane, I am as healthy and stable as anyone could be given my situation. But I hadn’t gotten any proper rest in weeks. My life was falling apart around me. When I got home from work I simply collapsed in bed and immediately would have the nightmares again, there was no freedom from that woman, that witch. I’d lost over a dozen pounds since I first met Marie, since I never had enough energy to cook proper food anymore, and only barely had the strength to get takeout once a day at the most. If I didn’t kill her, she would kill me, do you understand? It was me or her. Madeline or Marie. The choice was obvious.
I’ll grant that I didn’t have the most elegant plan in the world. She seemed to work 7 days a week, so I decided that I’d simply wait till one of the days I had off, lurk in the parking lot until she clocked out, bash her brains in with a baseball bat, and drag her body into the trunk of my car. I didn’t really have much of an idea for what to do with the corpse beyond simply dumping it in the woods, but at that point I was so desperate to be free that I figured I didn’t have time to plan things out that far ahead.
Luckily, I did know what Marie’s car looked like, and where she tended to park. I’m not much of a car person, and in fairness I was not in an emotional state conducive to thinking very clearly at the time, so I can’t tell you the exact make and model, but it was just as inoffensive and blandly pleasant looking as she was. It was silver little subcompact, the sort of modestly priced vehicle with good gas mileage and such a universal appeal that anybody could have owned it. The only reason I was able to distinguish it from the others of its kind was the custom license plate; “SM1L3(:”.
I lay in wait for hours, slamming down energy drink after energy drink to keep myself awake and alert, keeping a sharp lookout. I got close to nodding off once or twice, but I stayed focused, I had a goal; I was going to take back my dreams from this grinning freak. It was a long, agonizing wait, but eventually my patience paid off, and I saw Marie come walking into the parking garage, still smiling that self-satisfied customer service grin.
Conditions were nothing less than perfect. She hadn’t seemed to notice me, and her path was such that there would be a brief opportunity where her back was facing me. Nobody else was around, and it was late in the evening. There would be no witnesses, no one around to hear if she tried to fight back.
I steadied my breathing and tightened my grip around the baseball bat, readying myself to end the nightmare. Time slowed, the seconds seeming to drip like molasses, and in the silence of the parking garage I could hear my heartbeats loud and clear. Finally, the moment came, and I lunged at her, swinging the bat with all my strength as I let out a strangled cry of rage.
I expected a thud, or perhaps a crunch, something like what they play in the movies when someone is hit with a blunt object, you know? That satisfying, meaty sound that lets you know someone isn’t getting back up. It didn’t sound like that at all though, not even in a little. Instead there was a loud smashing noise, like a vase being dropped upon a tile floor, or a brick being tossed through a window.
Regardless, Marie’s body fell to the floor, limp and lifeless. There was no blood, but at the time I didn’t think about this, I was too giddy with adrenaline to notice. I stuffed the baseball bat down the back of my hoodie so I could have both of my hands free, then started dragging the corpse back to my car. It was lighter than I expected, she couldn’t have weighed more than 80 pounds at the most, which was drastically inconsistent with her height and apparent size. I figured beneath her concealing clothes she must have been completely emaciated.
I tossed the body in the trunk and drove home, cackling to myself as I did so. Again, I’m not crazy, I know how this sounds, but I was just so relieved. I was looking forward to a good night’s sleep, to finally have a chance to rest. All I had to do was dispose of the body and I was set. I would finally be free.
I made it home without incident somehow, a minor miracle between the lack of proper rest and intense mix of emotions I was feeling from killing someone. As justified as it was, I still couldn’t help but feel guilty. Taking a life, even that of some unnatural, idiotically grinning customer service sorceress, doesn’t exactly rest easy upon one’s conscience. As I pulled into the driveway I was beginning to question myself, wondering if I had made the right decision.
Surely she must have people who will miss her, I thought to myself. I began to worry about the police, and started to consider the options I could take to dispose of the body. I came up with the idea of disposing of her clothes separately from the rest of the body in order to throw off the trail, thinking that if investigators found her clothes in the nearby river they’d be unlikely to check the woods.
I had one last task ahead of me before I could finally have a pleasant night’s sleep, and I swallowed down another energy drink in order to keep myself awake. After making sure nobody else was around to see, I carried Marie’s body into my garage and shut the door. I grabbed an old tarp and some duct tape that I planned to use to wrap the body, and then set about removing the clothes.
I started with the shoes, pulling them off with ease (Marie always seemed to wear comfortable but professional looking slip-ons). It was when I removed the socks that I got my first surprise. At first I assumed they must have been some sort of prosthetics; one foot was crudely hacked from wood, and the other seemed to have been taken from a department store mannequin of some sort. Unsettled, I decided to move up to the shirt instead, not wanting to have to deal with Marie’s mismatched feet. I soon discovered, however, that if anything the feet were the least strange part of her.
As I pulled off her turtleneck, I was confronted with an utterly bewildering sight. I don’t quite know how to describe it, not because it was in any way difficult to comprehend, but saying it back now just sounds almost… silly. Her entire body seemed to be composed of nothing but, well, garbage.
The main bulk of the torso was a loose sort of cage made from chicken wire, filled in with various nonsensical objects in the place of internal organs. There were two long, partially deflated balloons, of the sort a clown would use to make balloon animals, in the place of lungs. Where the heart ought to have been was a broken alarm clock, though I can’t be sure if this was always broken or if it was merely damaged in her fall to the ground. The stomach was a translucent, plastic grocery bag, filled with what looked to be the severed limbs of plastic dolls. Her intestines were a number of toy rubber snakes tied together. I could go on, naming the inane, utterly pointless knick knacks that made up the false body of Marie Vasilka, but it doesn’t matter, none of it matters.
My eyes wandered up to her face, that strangely perfect smile still stretched across her lips, eyes still open, staring blankly upwards. I could see now it was a mask of some sort, rubber and clearly fake. I have no idea how it had seemed so lifelike before. I pulled it off, trembling as I did so. Beneath the mask was one of those glass mannequin heads, the sort you use to display hats, the back of it shattered into a hundred pieces from the force of the baseball bat. It was filled with a string of unpowered Christmas lights.
I didn’t bother taking off the rest of the clothes, I just wrapped it up in the tarp, clothes and all, and dumped in about a mile into the woods, around a hundred yards off the side of the highway. I mean, it’s not like it was an actual body. The most I could get in trouble for was littering.
By the time I finished disposing of Ms. Vasilka’s remains, it was nearly 1 in the morning, and I was well overdue for some sleep. My mind was utterly unable to process what I had experienced, and I was completely numbed to the impossible thing I had seen. All I felt was a desire to go to bed and have the whole affair over and done with. Rationalizing what happened was a problem for the next day’s Madeline.
Of course it wasn’t that simple. Why would it be? Whatever powers that be have clearly decided that my life is clearly not one which is meant for happiness.
This time there was no build up, no wandering through the aisles of the grocery store. I simply lay down in bed, closed my eyes, and then I was there in the office, face to face with that thing.
It wasn’t wearing the mask anymore, nor clothes. It just sat there, staring without eyes, a blank, transparent glass head filled with softly shining Christmas lights, atop a body composed of nonsense and garbage. Even without a face, I could tell it was smiling at me. And so I stared at this thing, this mockery of the human form, until my eyes burned with the effort to keep them open, and I once again awoke screaming.
But that wasn’t what got me locked up in this nuthouse as a madwoman. Oh no, not in the slightest. It was what awaited me when I arrived back at work the next day, exhausted and borderline suicidal.
I walked into the break room to clock in, only to find all was adorned with ribbons and balloons, with a big cake on the table, decorated with the words “Happy Birthday Marie!” In the corner of the room sat a punch bowl and a number of glasses. Many of my coworkers were already digging into their own slices of cake, and chatting pleasantly as they drank from glasses of punch.
I stared at the decorations blankly, wondering when they would notice that Marie wasn’t here for her own celebration. Then I felt a familiar, hard tap upon my shoulder.
“Hello Maddie.”
I turned, and saw her smiling, as always. She looked none the worse for wear, despite having been hit with a baseball bat, wrapped in a tarp and dumped in the woods.
“Why aren’t you smiling, Maddie? This is a party after all. Feel free to have some cake and punch!”
From behind me, someone dropped their glass, a loud shattering noise piercing the haze of polite small talk and idle chatter. I was reminded of the sound Marie’s head made when I smashed the back of it with my baseball bat.
What happened next… well, I’m not exactly proud of what I did, but you can hardly blame me, can you? I’d been through so much, and I’ll admit I lost my temper. I can appreciate that without context, seeing your coworker grab a cake knife and try to slash at your manager’s face while screaming “You’re not a real person” does seem somewhat alarming. I’m not surprised that they held me down and called the police. I’m not surprised that they took me here.
What was surprising though, what keeps me from just “getting better” and becoming a functional member of society again, is how many others there are. I’m sure you’ve seen it, haven’t you? The way the receptionist never stops smiling? How effortlessly polite all the orderlies are? How the doctors always seem to maintain eye contact just a bit too long for comfort? I still have those dreams you know. Those terrible, agonizingly long dreams. But Marie isn’t the only one staring now. There are so, so many of them.
- - -
The above statement was given by Madeline Engelhardt, a patient at the ________ Psychiatric Hospital. Her former manager, Marie Vasilka has declined any requests for interviews, beyond stating that she “wishe[s] Maddie the best in her recovery.”
Police did investigate the spot where Ms. Engelhardt claimed to have dumped the “body” described in the above narrative, concerned that perhaps in her delusional state, she did in fact commit a murder, simply hallucinating that the victim was Marie Vasilka. Investigation did not recover any body, though an old tarp was found at the scene, along with a partially shattered glass mannequin head.
Your mommy kisses you goodnight, and you want to ask her to take you with her. You don’t want to be alone. But you’re too old now to sleep in mommy and daddy’s bed, you have to be a big girl. But when He comes at night, every night, you don’t feel like a big girl. You feel very, very small indeed.
He takes His time. He wants to give you a chance to fall asleep first, so that when He wakes you up it will be a surprise.
You manage to keep your eyes open, to avoid lapsing into unconsciousness. You’re not ready for Him, you never are, but at the very least He won’t be catching you off-guard this time. It takes an immense amount of effort to stay awake. You’ve been getting so little sleep ever since you moved here, ever since mommy and daddy stopped letting you sleep in their bed.
You hear His laughter first, like always. It’s a game to Him, you see, a joke, and the way he giggles and guffaws you’d think it the funniest in the whole wide world. He laughs like a creaky door, rusty and harsh and grating against your tired ears, loud and terrible amidst the silence of the night. You always wonder why mommy and daddy don’t hear Him.
You listen carefully, to find where He is coming from this night. Sometimes He comes out from under the bed, and you have to stand on your mattress with the hobby horse and try to keep Him from climbing up to get you. Sometimes His mocking voice comes from the closet, and you must spend all night holding the door shut with all your strength, till the golden rays of dawn send Him back to wherever things like Him go during the day.
Tonight His laughter drips down from the grate on the wall; He is in the ventilation duct. His giggles turn to words, just as rusty and sharp and metallic as His laughs.
“Come and play with me, pretty girl. Come and play with the Tin Man.”
By the faint illumination of the nightlight you can see His face peeking from behind the grate. His sharp razor blade teeth, tarnished and jagged, eyes like dull pennies, barbed wire hair writhing like snakes. He lifts a creaking, oxidized hand and begins to unscrew the grate, working to remove the thin barrier keeping you from Him.
It’s a game to Him. Always a game. You spend the rest of the night frantically tightening and re-tightening the screws, crying as your fingers bleed from the sharp metal, all while He laughs and laughs and laughs. After hours and hours of this panicked, painful game, the sun begins to come up, and the Tin Man scrapes His way back to wherever He goes during the day. And as He crawls away, His creaking voice says “I had so much fun, pretty girl. I can’t wait to play more tomorrow.”
I’ve always been passionate about animals, even when I was a very young girl. I used to beg my parents repeatedly almost every week to take me to the zoo, and the family television was practically always tuned to Animal Planet, much to the chagrin of my video game obsessed older brother. I wanted to go into veterinary medicine as a career, but the cost of schooling, amount of time it would take to get my degree, and frankly grueling work hours eventually made it clear to me that that wouldn’t be an option.
Still, I made the best of the hand I was dealt, choosing to work at various animal shelters, non-profits, and other organizations associated with animals. I even had a short stint working as a janitor at the zoo I used to be so excited to visit as a child, though the commute was Hell. I had to quit that last job because it turned out that behind the scenes the zoo administration was taking far worse care of their animals than I would have liked, and I didn’t feel comfortable being complicit in their mistreatment.
In any event, this path in life eventually led me to work at a small wildlife rescue. It wasn’t an especially glamorous position, and I will freely admit the pay was abysmal, but I had a chance to make a genuine difference in the world, and that made me happy. For every sick deer or injured goose we nursed back to health, I felt like I had a real purpose.
It wasn’t always a particularly pleasant gig, if I'm being entirely honest. Even the most ardent nature lover will soon find that the task of saving wild animals begins to lose its luster after week after week of squirrel bites and diseased bird shit. Nonetheless, I genuinely did enjoy my job. At least until that final night. The night that made me never want to work with animals ever again.
See, while we didn’t have the staff to do this every night, when we had a chance to we would have a skeleton crew run the graveyard shift, since a lot of the time we’d come in the next morning to find a half-dozen missed calls from people who wanted help with some nocturnal critter or another. I was happy for the extra pay, and most of the time things were fairly quiet, so I had a chance to put up my feet and read a book or mess about on my phone in between having frantic callers ask if they could bring in a bat that had flown into their home.
That particular evening I was pacing between social media apps on my phone out of boredom when we got a call from what sounded like a very distressed middle aged man.
“This is the _____ Wildlife Rescue, how can I help you?”
“Hi uh. Well. I don’t know how to put this exactly, I know it sounds crazy, but there’s a wolf in my front yard.”
He was right. It did sound crazy. From what I was aware, there were no wolves in this state outside of zoo animals, and I highly doubted one had managed to escape captivity at my former place of employment and find its way over to this relatively isolated area. The place I lived in was not a large town by any means, little more than a couple streets full of shops surrounded by a vestigial suburb and some farmland.
“Sir, are you absolutely sure it’s a wolf? We don’t really have those around here, it’s significantly more likely it might just be a stray dog, maybe a coyote at worst.”
“I don’t- I don’t know for sure but… it’s big. Real big. If it’s a dog it’s certainly the biggest one I’ve ever seen. And there’s something wrong with how it moves, like it’s got a limp or something, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. I think it might only have three legs.”
I got the man’s address and thanked him for his time before getting up to go grab the other member of the skeleton crew, let’s call him Jake. Jake had been there a little bit longer than me, and we generally got along pretty well. He used to be studying to become a veterinary technician but the stress got to him and he decided to take a job here instead. His experience with at least some veterinary medicine made him a great asset, though he did sometimes make some very stupid decisions. I once had to stop him trying to grab a rattlesnake with his bare hands just because he was so excited for an opportunity to catch a snake. However, the main reason I wanted him to accompany me was that he was quite a large man, and there was something about the whole situation which from the get-go made me very nervous. I felt a lot more comfortable bringing along someone who looked like he could bench press 400 lbs if he had to.
The farmhouse that the man had called from was only a quick drive away, maybe 15 minutes at most. At the time I thought this was quite fortunate. While the full moon was shining bright enough for us to see the road fairly well, I never liked driving long distances on these country roads after dark. I always worried a deer or something might jump out in front of the Wildlife Rescue’s crappy old van or that’d I’d take a wrong turn or something like that.
Unfortunately for Jake and I, we arrived without any difficulties at the farmhouse, and the animal was still there. I can’t quite bring myself to say it was a wolf, not after what I experienced.
It certainly looked like one though, which was quite the shock. Both Jake and I let out a near simultaneous murmur of “Holy shit” as we caught our first glimpse of the thing. Something people often forget is that wolves are big, up to 180 lbs at the largest. For comparison, huskies only get up to about 60 lbs at the most. This thing was enormous.
“That has to be a wolf. No way in Hell is this thing just a stray dog”, mused Jake.
“It might be a wolfdog,” I suggested, “it doesn’t quite look like a wolf does it? There’s something off about the proportions.”
Something about the thing’s physiology bothered me, but I couldn’t put my finger on why. It just wasn’t moving the way it should have. I was reminded of a video I’d seen a couple months ago of an extremely realistic animatronic, something made for an amusement park I think. It was quite well-crafted to be sure, it didn’t even tick off the usual “uncanny valley” alarm bells when I looked at its face, but the movements weren’t quite right. I felt the same way looking at that thing in front of the farmhouse.
The animal was looking at us now, staring towards the van, its eyes glowing in the reflected beam from our headlights. It didn’t run though, it just continued to pace, looking at us. Jake and I were stepping out of the van at this point, not sure what our next course of action would be, but determined to do our best regardless.
I found myself fiddling with my necklace as we approached; a gift from my grandfather. It’s a makeshift medallion fashioned out of an old silver dollar and suspended on a leather cord. He’d had a little hobby of making jewelry from old knick knacks, and at home I had a small collection of earrings, necklaces, bracelets, brooches, and the like, all made from various random objects. He’d unfortunately passed away a few years back, and I tried to wear at least something he’d made every day as a way to keep his memory alive. I recall him telling me after he gave me the medallion, “Now you’ll be safe in a gunfight, so long as you wear this over your heart” with a grandfatherly wink, as if I was at any risk of being a victim of old west banditry in the 21st century.
I was snapped out of my idle remembering by the sound of Jake’s voice, though I didn’t quite catch what he said. “Hm?” I muttered, indicating that he should repeat himself.
“I said it’s gotta be someone’s pet. Some rich guy bought himself a three legged wolfdog and it got out of the house maybe?” he said. Now that we were a little closer, it was clear that the animal was only walking on three legs, though it moved about with quite a degree of dexterity, as though it had long grown used to the condition.
It kept pacing back and forth, back and forth, just looking at us. Its eyes were a brilliant blue, which was a definite tip off that whatever this thing was, it wasn’t a proper wolf. When it comes to canines, blue eyes are strictly a trait of dogs. There was something else I noticed though, its tail wasn’t quite right. It seemed too stiff, and a bit too long. Suddenly it clicked in my brain what was wrong with it.
“It’s not missing a leg. Look,” I said, pointing, “it’s just sticking out one of its hind legs. Maybe it’s wounded or something like that?”
As if in response to my words, the “wolfdog” stopped pacing, looking directly at me specifically. I could feel when it made eye contact with me, those blue eyes boring into my own. I could have sworn I saw its lips turn up slightly at the edges, forming a mischievous grin. It lowered its previously extended hind leg to the ground slowly, deliberately. It didn’t have a tail at all. I doubt that it ever did. Then it began to limp towards us, whimpering softly.
How to describe what it sounded like? It’s a little difficult. I’d heard an anecdote once from an online acquaintance who worked with birds regarding an old crow they were taking care of. Crows are excellent mimics of sounds, and will often repeat noises that they frequently hear. Well, evidently, this particular crow had taken to mockingly “cawing” in a human voice. Someone must have been trying to “talk” to the bird by crudely imitating the crow’s own cries, to which the wily corvid had mirrored back their own mimicry, like a language’s native speaker mocking someone with a foreign accent by repeating a particularly egregious mispronunciation.
The “wolfdog” sounded like something copying a human copying a dog, its whimpers were artificial, stilted, almost campy. It sent shivers up my spine immediately, but Jake didn’t seem to notice.
“You’re right, he’s definitely hurt and judging from how he’s reacting to us, I’d certainly wager he’s somebody’s lost pet. I vote we take him back to the rescue and try and contact a domestic animal shelter in the morning, I’m sure we can find a cage that will fit him just for one night,” said Jake, sounding almost enthusiastic. I noticed how quickly the animal had changed from an “it” to a “he”. Humans will start bonding with anything if it seems pitiful. Jake held out a hand for the thing to sniff.
“Jake, don’t-” I started to say, about to warn him that it was equally likely the thing was so seemingly friendly due to rabies, but before the words could leave my lips, the animal was already licking his hand meekly.
“Come on boy,” Jake said in a playful tone, “let’s get you in the van, then we’ll get you some treats when we get back to the rescue.”
Jake led the animal back to the van, talking to it in a goofy sing-song tone of voice as though it were his beloved childhood dog while it made faux-whines and pretended to limp. I couldn’t understand why he couldn’t tell that something was wrong with it. From behind, I could see very clearly there was no sign of docking or anything else that could have resulted in the “wolfdog’s” tail being removed. It was as though it was born without one. There was something else too, something I couldn’t put my finger on, about its legs. It felt like I was missing something obvious, like when a word is at the tip of your tongue but you can’t remember it. The whole thing was frankly making me sick to my stomach.
The drive back to the rescue was uneventful, aside from Jake gushing about how adorable his newfound friend was. It’s not that I’m not a dog person, I have no issues with them at all, I love animals of all sorts. But this thing wasn’t a dog, nor was it a wolf, nor anything in between. I kept catching the reflection of its eyes in the rear view mirror, staring at me through the caged off back of the van. I didn’t like its eyes, piercing blue like those a human being’s. I could have sworn that once, just once, it winked at me.
One might wonder why I didn’t voice my concerns to Jake, but the simple truth is this; what was I supposed to say? It’s not like there was anything concrete I could point to beyond “bad vibes”, and I could hardly tell him to stop the van and kick the animal out onto the side of the road, could I? So, ultimately, I swallowed down my fear and tried very hard to convince myself there was nothing at all the matter.
We reached the wildlife rescue without incident, and Jake opened the back doors to the van, patting at his legs to direct the “wolfdog” to come out. The thing made a pathetic scene, whimpering as though afraid that jumping down the foot or two out of the van’s back would hurt its supposedly wounded leg, though from what I could see there didn’t look to be any injuries whatsoever. Ultimately Jake wound up assisting the thing out of the van, lifting it gently down while it whined and yelped in that terrible, mocking voice.
Jake begrudgingly put a collar and leash around the animal’s neck only at my insistence, complaining that it was obviously tame and that he was sure it would behave itself, but I wouldn’t hear of it. If he wanted to adopt the damn thing that was his own business, he still needed to follow basic safety precautions.
We guided the thing into the kennels, where we nudged it inside the largest one, a cage usually reserved for injured deer. It whined more at this perceived injustice, staring up in over-the-top performative sadness at Jake as he turned the key to lock it inside.
“Poor thing. I’m gonna get him some water and food, you wait here and keep an eye on him,” Jake said, not giving me time to respond before leaving the kennels to acquire the supplies for our “guest”. As soon as Jake left the room, the animal stopped its whining nearly instantly. I think it could tell I wasn’t falling for its act. It just stared at me, and once again I could see that faint, terrible smile on its face.
The “wolfdog” wasn’t the only occupant of the kennels that evening, there was a raccoon, a bobcat, and a goose. All of them seemed terrified of the thing. The bobcat and goose were hissing, and the raccoon’s tail was waving back and forth wildly. I’d always been told I had more empathy for animals than people, and as I stood there, being stared at by this not-wolf, I wondered if maybe that was why I instinctively was repelled by it in the same way the other patients of the wildlife rescue were. It didn’t feel like an animal.
It felt like ages, just standing there, looking at this smiling, mocking, thing shaped in a parody of a canine. In the bright light of the kennel, I could see it much clearer, and the longer I looked, the more queasy I felt.
I won't go over all of the hideous quirks of proportion that made the thing look so uncanny, because frankly most people wouldn't notice. Dogs come in all shapes and sizes, and it would take someone with a particular eye for this sort of thing to understand what I would even be talking about. To this day I still don't understand how Jake couldn't see it for what it truly was, with his education he ought to have been able to notice.
I will mention one thing though, something which especially made my skin crawl. Beneath the fluorescent light I could finally tell what had been bothering me about its legs. Wolves, dogs, and other canines all have digitigrade legs, that is to say that they walk upon their toes. It basically means that their limbs have an extra joint on which to bend, which is generally more useful for quadrupedal motion. In contrast, humans have plantigrade legs; we walk on the soles of our feet.
This animal's legs were plantigrade.
This can happen sometimes in dogs, it is a deformity which is known to occur, but this thing didn't look deformed. It didn't seem to have any trouble walking, despite its act with Jake. It just moved as though it were a human being crawling about on all fours.
It was around the same time as I had this realization that Jake entered the room with the food and water for our "guest", and I excused myself to go sit at the reception desk and try to convince myself everything was fine. It's just a weird dog, there's nothing to worry about, you're probably just tired, your mind is playing tricks on you, I kept thinking to myself, my internal monologue working overtime to wash away my discomfort while I fiddled with the medallion my grandfather made.
The terrible thing is, it was so close to the end of our shift when it happened. The sun was due to start rising in half an hour, and we would have been replaced by the morning crew. We were almost done, we were almost safe.
Jake and I had been finishing up our last remaining tasks before we had to head off for the morning when we heard an awful racket coming from the kennels. It was a terrible feline yowling, mixed with the frantic honking of a goose, followed shortly afterwards by the smashing of glass. Jake immediately began sprinting towards the sound, while I called out for him to wait.
I grabbed some bite proof gloves and a heavy apron, swearing all the while about having to deal with the stupid bobcat right before the end of my shift. While I was putting them on, I heard an awful, strangled scream. I recognized its owner at once. Something had happened to Jake.
My first instinct was to sigh in annoyance. Obviously the idiot got himself bitten, I thought to myself as I stomped my way to the kennels, grumbling all the while.
"I told you to wait you moro-" I started to say as I opened the door.
It was dark in the kennels. The only illumination came from the window, the pale moonlight glinting against the shattered glass of the fluorescent bulb strewn across the blood soaked floor. Silhouetted against the window was a tall figure, facing away from me. It was holding something. I could hear the terrified chatter of a raccoon.
"Jake?" I asked, timidly, as I walked into the room. My foot collided with something lying on the floor. I looked down to see a human body, face down upon the ground, blood dripping from its torn out throat. Laying next to Jake's corpse were the similarly mangled bodies of a bobcat and a goose.
There was a pained screeching followed by a snap of bones, and then a moment of utter stillness. I stared in petrified horror at the thing standing upright in the moonlight, its dog-like head turning to look at me with an awful smile etched unnaturally across its inhuman face. The silence was interrupted with the wet thump of the raccoon's body joining the other corpses on the gore smeared linoleum.
I don't want to think about its voice. Its real voice, not the wretched, terrible mockery of a wolfdog that it made to gain Jake's trust. Its laughter was vicious, mocking, evil. In all my life I've never heard anything sound so deeply cruel.
The thing began to walk towards me, and I tried to back away, but I slipped on the blood, falling in a heap as I started to hyperventilate. It got closer, close enough that the light from the corridor let me see the look of hunger and contempt in its monstrously human eyes. It reached a gore soaked claw towards me, chuckling darkly as it prepared to reduce me to nothing but meat.
But as the thing was just about to touch me, inches away from tearing into my jugular, it let out a surprised yelp of pain. It recoiled from me, eyeing the medallion around my neck with frustration and hatred. My mind flashed back to when my grandfather gave it to me, and what I said to him in response;
"A gunfight, papa, really? I'll probably get more use out of it fighting off werewolves."
The monster huffed and growled before leaping over me and tearing down the hallway in a blur of bloodstained fur. I heard the smashing of wood and glass when it crashed through the front door of the wildlife rescue, letting out a mocking imitation of a wolf's howl as it fled into the waning darkness of the rapidly fading night.
When my coworkers found me in the kennel, paralyzed with fear and covered in Jake's blood, they immediately called the police. Based on all the evidence they found at the scene, coupled with my admittedly somewhat hysterical account of the thing that did it, the put the whole affair down to being the work of a rabid wolfdog. They informed animal control, but of course nobody ever found anything.
I never bothered showing up to work at the wildlife rescue again after that, and I've been working a shitty retail job ever since. The pay is awful, the hours are lousy, and the work is demeaning, but that doesn't matter. All that's important is that the schedule is flexible enough that I never have to keep working after sunset whenever there is a full moon. I spend those nights at home with the door locked and bolted, clutching my grandfather's silver dollar medallion and praying I don't hear that mocking voice pretending to whimper outside the door to my apartment.
It is late, and you are very, very tired. You are ready for a long night’s sleep, and want nothing more at this exact moment than to simply lay your head on your pillow and drift off into the merciful embrace of unconsciousness. As you close your laptop and rise from your chair to begin the arduous journey to your bedroom, you hear an unpleasantly familiar scratching noise at the sliding glass door to the backyard. Your dog wants to go outside to mark his territory one last time for the evening. You groan, knowing that if you don’t let him out he will simply do his business within the house itself. You open the door to let him out. The dog bounds outside happily, excited for an opportunity to urinate on the same grass he always does, while you stand impatiently waiting for him to come back inside once the whole affair is over and done with.
He doesn’t come back though. It’s been nearly five minutes now, and he’s still out there. What on Earth could be taking him so long? You call out for your dog to come back inside, whistling a few times for good measure. Usually this brings him galloping back in seconds, but after another five minutes of no dog you begin to grumble curses to yourself and stomp your way outside, determined to drag the beast back inside if you have to. You really want to go to bed.
You find your dog standing in front of the shed, staring intently at it. “Come on you stupid-” you start to say, before you notice why the dog is so focused on the shed. The shed door is open.
You begin to realize you’ve never actually used the shed before. Never even stepped foot inside it. It came with the property, and you’ve always been aware it was there, but for some reason you just never felt any need to investigate it. Perhaps I’ve just been too busy you think to yourself, but you know that’s a lie.
You know with absolute certainty you didn’t open the door to the shed. This fills you with a deep, primal fear. The dog is still staring into the darkness within, and you notice only now that his tail is tucked firmly between his legs.
You see something shift in the shadows.
You can’t tell what it is.
It moves like nothing you’ve ever seen. It all happens in a flash.
There is a yelp.
The creaking of rusted hinges.
Then silence.
You’re confused why you’re standing out in your backyard, staring at the closed door of your shed. You shuffle back inside, puzzled. I must have been stargazing you think to yourself. On the way inside, you trip on something. You swear and look down at the offending object, a dog bowl. You wonder where it came from.
(A very special thank you to @arsonsara for feedback and guidance with writing this story)
While it may seem surprising in the age of internet storefronts and online auctions, sometimes you do, in fact, need to physically go somewhere in order to purchase things. There are several auction houses which only host their auctions in person, and sometimes millionaires are just too busy to take time out of their hectic schedules of plastic surgeries and cocaine fueled orgies in order to buy some overpriced trinket themselves. That's where I come in.
My name is Mae, I'm a buyer's agent, think of me as a professional bidder. Something will go up for auction, my client will give me a budget, and I'll go try my very best to acquire the item of their desire and keep it in a secure location for a while until it can be safely shipped off to their McMansion. It's not honest work, but it pays the bills, and I've had a lot of opportunities to see some genuinely weird crap in my line of work.
I received a call from a regular of mine, an A-list actress with a passion for old cartoons. She wanted me to get her an original cel from a short by the name of Howl's well that ends well. Evidently she was away on a cruise trip at the time the auction was being held, and thus needed me to purchase it by proxy. I accepted of course, and like I always do I sat down and did a little bit of research on the item I was to acquire.
The cartoon was made right at the end of the era of black and white cartoons, just before that slightly eerie rubberhose aesthetic fell out of style in favor of the technicolor wonderlands of the 40s and 50s. It was a simple story, as such animations usually are, depicting a wolf attempting to catch and eat a rabbit by any means necessary, with increasingly silly results. The cartoon was animated by the rather short lived Crescent Moon Studios, and was one of only two shorts known to have survived the company's collapse in 1939. The other was a mythological themed cartoon known by the title The Shepherd and the Satyr. Both had fallen into the public domain, but nobody had bothered putting up copies on the internet anywhere, after all, they were pretty obscure.
I was given a maximum budget of fifty grand to purchase the cel, which I honestly thought was a little excessive. Sure, it was a rare find, but in the context of an auction, rarity only matters when it is combined with desirability. Technically every toddler's doodle is a one-of-a-kind original work of art, but nobody is going to shell out a million bucks to put it in the Louvre. Unless there was some massive revival in public interest surrounding failed animation studios from the late 30s, I wasn't anticipating needing to spend the full amount my client had authorized.
The auction house was typical of its kind; an opulent temple to the idle rich who have nothing better to do than spend their hoarded wealth on useless garbage. I've never felt comfortable in those sorts of places. While the cut I get is fairly good, it's not enough for me to feel at home rubbing shoulders with CEOs and movie stars. I have this theory that there is a certain stench exuded by those who only own one house, and I can see the pompous plutocrats wrinkle their noses at me whenever I pass by in my cheaply tailored suit.
I settled into my seat alongside the other auction attendees, fiddling nervously with the ends of my sleeves. The rows of comfortable chairs sat before the stage reminded me of vague memories of attending church as a young girl, not comprehending a single word the man in the funny robe was saying when he read out his sermon. Eventually the auctioneer made her way out onto the stage and the song and dance of acquisition began.
It took a while to get to the cel. There seemed to be no end to the parade of antique junk that was available for purchase by my more financially fortunate companions. Jewelry that would never be worn, paintings that would be used to take up space in otherwise artfully minimalist living rooms, and antique weapons to be drooled over by those who view the statistics of mass murder as fun trivia all graced the auction block, happily snatched up by the horde of the idiot rich.
It was by the time I had almost dozed off following a bidding war over some decrepit old tea set that the auctioneer announced the starting bid for an animation cel from Howl's well that ends well at one thousand dollars. Surprisingly, someone immediately offered to pay the opening bid. I was startled to learn that one of these p-zombie nepo babies even knew what a cel was, much less willing to blow a thousand bucks on it. I raised a counter bid, doubling the offer just to see how badly this other bidder wanted it. In turn, they raised the bid to four thousand dollars.
Thus began one of the most baffling bidding experiences I've ever had. This wasn't supposed to be a difficult item to obtain, it should have been a cakewalk, but this other bidder was fighting tooth and nail to acquire it. It was just a bit of cellulose with eighty year old doodles on it for goodness sake! And it's not like we're talking about Steamboat Willy here, I'd never even heard of Howl's well that ends well before I'd gotten the call from my client. Nevertheless, I had been given quite the budget, and it wasn't like it was my money anyway, so I stuck at it until the bitter end. I didn't get a look at the competing bidder at the time, just heard his voice from somewhere behind me. It was a strange voice, there was something wrong about it, something I couldn't quite place.
Forty seven thousand dollars. That's how much of my client's money I wound up paying for the damned thing. That's more money than some folks make in a year, and here I was blowing it on some picture of a cartoon wolf. I was frankly baffled.
I arranged for the payment with one of the clerks and, after everything went through, picked up the cel and started walking to my car. I planned to drive immediately down the storage unit where I keep the items I am paid to acquire until their rightful owners come calling. Holding the cel in my hands gave me a weird feeling, even though it was protected in a rather fancy looking glass case. The older something is, the creepier it gets. You'll never read a haunted house story about some luxury penthouse suite, for example, they'll always be set somewhere ancient and dilapidated. I don't think we like when things get too old for their own good, it reminds us that there was a time before we existed.
The cel itself depicted just the wolf, walking on comically exaggerated tip-toe. There was no backdrop, obviously, the cel would be overlaid on top of the background in order to save time during the animation process, to keep the overworked artists from needing to render every tree and bush over and over ad nauseum. The wolf itself was a typical example of a cartoon character from that era; impossibly flexible limbs, a somewhat lanky appearance, and large eyes with slices taken out of the pupils. It wouldn't have looked out of place in a Fleischer or Disney short.
I found myself staring into those eyes. There was an odd quality to them that I didn't quite like, a kind of intelligence that felt out of place on the exaggerated features of a cartoon. Normally when one stares at something for long enough, you stop being able to properly process it as a coherent image, like when you say a word too many times and it sounds like gibberish. With the wolf though, it felt as though the longer I stared, the more clarity it possessed, the more defined the edges became, the more-
"Excuse me miss, may I have a word?"
The voice caught me off guard, and I nearly dropped the glass case to the floor. I looked up, finding myself in the indoor parking garage where I'd parked my car. In my distracted state, I had nearly gotten all the way to my car without noticing how far I'd walked. Standing before me was a man dressed all in black, with a long overcoat, a thick scarf wrapped around the lower part of his face, large dark sunglasses, and a wide brimmed fedora. His hands were firmly tucked in his pockets.
"Um, sure, can I help you?" I responded, a tad nervous. Did he follow me here? I found myself wondering.
"My apologies, first allow me to introduce myself, my name is Arnold Harrison, how do you do?" His voice was faintly muffled from his scarf, but even then I could make out that there was something wrong. There was something artificial about it, fake, like the voice a clown puts on when performing for children. Despite all the cordiality he was expressing, I felt almost as though he were mocking me.
It took me a moment, but I did recognize the name Arnold Harrison. He was a collector, a cartoon enthusiast, I'd never been employed by him myself but I'd heard a bit about him. Unlike the horde of hedonistic cretins spending their time wasting daddy's money on expensive toys, I actually had a certain level of respect for Harrison. I was dimly aware that he'd written a book at some point on the history of the early animation industry, and in an instant I knew who I had been competing against in the auction house.
"I'm Mae, a pleasure to meet you Mr. Harrison," I said, extending my arm out for a handshake. Harrison looked down at it for a moment, his hand still pressed firmly in his pockets. He didn't move to accept my handshake, keeping some distance away from me, and so I lowered my arm awkwardly.
After an uncomfortable pause, Harrison broke the silence, stating, "I would like very much to offer you a deal, Mae. As you probably noticed during the auction, I am very interested in getting my hands on that cel of yours. It is of great personal importance to me, you understand. I've been led to believe that you are, in fact, working for a client, are you not?"
I nodded my assent, cocking an eyebrow slightly as I wondered where he was going with this.
"In that case, I would like to present you with a counter offer; if you give me that cel, I shall, within the week, be able to present you with a virtually identical cel, a near exact copy. For all intents and purposes, it would be a perfect duplicate, and your employer need never know the difference. In order to ensure your silence on the matter, I would be more than willing to pay you a sum of forty six thousand dollars, cash, up front."
I blinked. Forty six thousand dollars, and all I had to do was hand this stranger some antique squiggles on a highly flammable bit of transparent plastic. It felt too good to be true. There was a lot I could do with that kind of money. My gut was telling me to say yes.
But it was something about that voice. I didn't trust it, it didn't sound like the voice of someone sincerely telling the truth. It sounded like someone telling the setup to a joke. We put so much value into way words are spoken, rather than the actual words themselves. One would never be able to take a politician seriously if they went on stage having just inhaled a balloon full of helium for example. I felt like I was going to be made a victim of some ridiculous prank.
"'I'm terribly sorry," I said, "but I'm afraid I can't do that. Good day Mr. Harrison." I turned to leave, heading towards my car.
A hand gripped my shoulder abruptly.
I wheeled around, yelping slightly from shock, and the hand was off my shoulder in a flash. Harrison was still standing some distance away from me, much too far away to have grabbed me like that. His arm would have had to have stretched like a rubber band. I caught a glimpse of his hand being stuffed into his coat pocket abruptly as soon as he saw me staring. I could have sworn it only had four fingers.
"I'm sorry, I just-" I heard him start to say, but I was already running full sprint towards my car. I made it there in a flash, slamming the door behind me as I carelessly tossed the cel in the front seat. I fiddled with my keys and turned on the engine, reversing out of the parking space and moving to leave as soon as possible.
As I drove towards the exit, I faintly heard Harrison's voice over the echoing engine, shouting out "Please! You don't know what you're dealing with!"
- - -
I made it to the storage facility right at the end of sunset, the sky a bloody red as night came to silently murder the daylight. I'd spent the entire drive trying to rationalize away what I'd seen. Perhaps Harrison had some birth defect, or had suffered an accident. He was probably much closer than I thought, or maybe he jumped back a little when I turned around. Maybe it all really was some elaborate practical joke. There must be a logical explanation.
By the time I was typing in the combination to the storage unit, I'd mostly convinced myself that everything was fine. The door swung open, and I fully intended to set down the cel within the sealed room and lock it all up again so I could go about the rest of my evening in peace. Instead, I found myself staring at the image of that cartoon wolf again, looking into those drawn-on eyes, gazing steadily into those pupils with the slices taken out of them.
I felt an intense compulsion to take the cel out of its case and hold it. It's not quite so unreasonable a desire as one might think. While I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit it, I'd occasionally carefully taken some of the antiques I'd gotten for my clients "out of the box" so to speak, just so I could touch something someone would spend so much money on. There was no logical reason for me to believe this wasn't just me acting on my own desires.
I clicked open the case gently, sliding open the lid. The faint camphor smell of old film wafted out, and I reached my hand inside, gently running a single finger over the smooth, transparent celluloid. As soon as I did so, a faint chill seemed to trickle down my spine, and I quickly stopped what I was doing and hurriedly put the lid back in place. I set the glass case and the cel within onto the floor and closed the door to the storage unit in a hurry, briskly walking back to my car.
Urban parking being what it is, it was something of a walk to get back to where I had left my car. Night had fully fallen by now, and while the streetlamps still shone their uncomfortably bright glow in a pathetic attempt to keep the shadows at bay, the blackness outside their radiance seemed darker than usual. There was a disturbing feeling of anticipation in the air, and I felt a knot in my stomach like that of an actor who has abruptly realized they were never given a script.
The streets were unusually empty. It is common knowledge that when a city gets large enough, the notion that nighttime is meant for sleep is revealed as a woeful misconception. Drunkards, workers on the graveyard shift, and petty criminals abound as soon as the sun recedes, and yet I found the streets utterly devoid of human life aside from myself. Despite my seeming isolation, it wasn't long before the hairs on the back of my neck were standing on end, and I knew that I was not alone.
It took me a while to notice it, a faint echo to my own footsteps that shouldn't be there. Something was keeping exact pace with me. I altered the rhythm of my stride, abruptly doing a slight skip to switch which leg was coming down, and there was a moment briefly where I heard the sound of someone's own footsteps faltering to try and keep up.
I turned around, shouting out "Alright, come on out Harrison. I know it's you."
I was wrong though. It wasn't Arnold Harrison who was following me.
It stepped into the light of the streetlamp almost sheepishly, hands up in a "you got me" gesture. It stood about six feet tall from head to toe. It was staring at me hungrily with those inky black pupils. Pupils with slices taken out of them.
There's no point in beating around the bush any further, no point in trying to play coy. It was the wolf from the cel. It was a black and white cartoon wolf, standing up on two legs, walking towards me with clearly malicious intent. It wasn't some uncanny abomination, the humorous proportions of the animated world translated with horrific effect upon being brought into this three dimensional existence. It just looked like a goddamn cartoon character had somehow magically stepped out of the screen, and somehow that was more existentially horrifying than if it were some bulging-eyed misbegotten atrocity.
Confronted with this violation of all natural law, this impossible, inherently contradictory being, do you know what I did? I pulled out my pepper spray from my pocket and aimed for its stupid, drooling face.
The damn thing just opened its mouth and stuck out its tongue, tasting the spurt of liquid capsaicin as though I had discharged a can of whipped cream at it. As soon as the spray died down to a dribble, the wolf licked its lips before belching out a burst of monochromatic flame, dabbing its lips with a handkerchief it pulled out from nowhere in particular.
I ran of course. I ran for my goddamn life. I felt myself laughing as I did, a fit of giggles bursting involuntarily from my throat because this whole situation was so stupid. The wolf followed close at my heels, snapping its jaws inches away from me with a sound like a mouse trap closing each time it tried to take a bite.
I took a wrong turn in my haste to escape from my animated pursuer, finding myself in an alleyway blocked off by a chain link fence at the end. I turned around to see the wolf smugly stalking its way towards me, legs like rubber hoses strutting confidently forward. I thought I was going to die an utterly pointless, totally absurd death. I backed up against the fence, looking around for anything that could save me. That's when I spotted it.
A banana peel stuck slightly out of a nearby trash can. It was a stupid idea, it shouldn't have worked, but I grabbed it and tossed it on the ground in front of the rapidly approaching wolf. The instant one of its ink-black feet stepped on the peel, the wolf's legs began spinning like blurry bicycle wheels, its arms stretched out to balance itself as a comical "ooOoOohoohoOOO!" emitted from its slavering jaws. I took my opportunity and ran past the demented cartoon, sprinting as fast as I could towards my car.
Fortunately the alley was quite close to where I had parked, and I managed to hop into the driver's seat and start the ignition fast enough to get out of there. Looking in my rear view mirror, I spotted the wolf hold out its thumb for a taxi cab, but the streets remained empty as ever, and I was luckily saved from the embarrassment of having to indulge in some kind of wacky car chase sequence with my nonsensical pursuer.
I wish that was the end of this story. That my client picked up the cel, I got a good shrink to prescribe me some happy pills, and I got out of this situation with nothing more unpleasant than a lifelong distaste for old cartoons. Unfortunately, the universe is not, despite what some desperate idiots may insist, a kind place. Three things ensured that my life would be far more complicated than I would have otherwise preferred.
Firstly, my client refused to answer my calls. Her voice mail message informed me she was "taking a break from the screens to focus on the important things in life". Good for her I suppose, though I imagine it's rather easy to turn off the screens when you're enjoying a multi-week cruise on a mega yacht the size of Alcatraz.
Secondly, the wolf didn't stop after just one night. No sirree, this was one persistent bastard, and it didn't take long for the canine caricature to figure out where I lived. As for how it discovered my address, I have no idea. Perhaps it checked the yellow pages, that seems to be an appropriately stupid method. Regardless, I rapidly found myself spending each sleepless night fending off the attacks of a cartoon wolf.
The wolf's nocturnal visits were equal parts ridiculous and terrifying. It didn't operate on the same fundamental logic as the universe the rest of us live in, it belonged to a world of falling anvils and comically oversized wooden hammers, a world where the rules of slapstick have more meaning than the laws of physics. The first time it got into the house it hopped down the chimney in a black and white Santa Claus outfit and gestured for me to jump into a similarly colorless leather sack that it held open for me oh-so politely. I fired a taser at it, and I saw its skeleton flash through its unconvincing disguise as the monochromatic menace jolted about spasmodically. Eventually it fell to the ground, inky lines of smoke drifting up from its contorted body, and I ran out the door, hopped into my car, and drove straight down to the police station. I didn't have time to grab my cell phone to dial 911, I didn't want to spend another instant in the house with that stupid wolf.
I didn't tell the police that my home invader was a cartoon character of course, because I'm not a moron and would prefer not to spend the rest of my days in a nice padded room wearing a comfortable straitjacket, thank you very much. Instead I just said there was someone in my house, I thought I had incapacitated them, and I wanted an officer to check it out.
They didn't find the wolf of course, and while they couldn't confirm if anyone had broken into the house, they were at least able to confirm the presence of an intruder by the marks they had left getting out; a cartoon wolf shaped hole in the wall.
I spent two weeks dealing with this wolf. Two. Weeks. Two weeks of desperately trying to contact my client about the cel. Two weeks of fitfully sleeping only during the day. Two weeks of spending my nights in paranoid vigilance against an impossible intruder. I began taking to renting various cheap motels for a single night at a time, out of a desperate hope that maybe it wouldn't be able to find me there. It was a pipe dream of course, it always found me, and I'd always have to find some new ridiculous way to stop it.
The only thing that would even temporarily stop the damn thing was playing by its own rules. Whacking it over the skull with a frying pan would cause it to collapse to the ground with an egg-sized lump on its forehead, chirping birds circling its head as spirals formed in its eyes. Stomping on its toe would make it yowl in exaggerated pain as it hopped up and down on one foot. I once managed to get away from it one night by ducking into a public restroom and pointing at the "Women's" sign on the door, at which the wolf got embarrassed and waited politely for me to finish my business. I stayed there until the sun rose. It never stuck around during the day.
I did say three things changed my life for the worse, and the third is easily the one that has been the most profoundly upsetting. I began to notice... changes. Subtle ones at first. I've always had a faint West Coast accent, but as my encounters with the wolf continued, I found my voice dipping into the tones of stereotypical valley girl more often than not. The pitch changed too, raising from the sightly gravelly vocal fry I was used to into a high pitched squeak.
I used to smoke on occasion, not anything major, maybe a single cigarette a day at the most, but now I was finding myself with one constantly stuck in my mouth. It wasn't a situation of my addiction increasing due to stress, no, I never bought any fresh packs. They would literally seem to appear, already lit, when I wasn't paying attention. My skin began to turn paler too, my hair darker, the dark brown transforming into an inky black.
It was when I looked in the mirror one day and saw my pupils had slices taken out of them that I knew I had to do something drastic. I didn't care if it cost me my damn career, I didn't care if I spent the whole rest of my life flipping burgers on minimum wage, living out of my car; I refused to let myself turn into a goddamn cartoon.
I drove myself down to the storage facility. By this point I had been hopping from hotel to hotel so much that it took me until nightfall to reach it, which meant that the wolf would have a chance to try and stop me. I didn't care, I had a job to do. I wasn't going to let my humanity get stolen just because I was scared of some atrociously abnormal animated asshole.
I parked right in front of the facility next to a red painted curb. They could tow my car away and melt it down for all I cared. All that mattered was getting to that cel. As soon as I began marching towards the front gates, I heard a sharp whistle blow through the nighttime silence, and I turned to see the wolf, dressed in an old fashioned police uniform, writing what looked to be a parking ticket in a notepad. I flipped it the finger and began to run for my storage unit, looking back just in time to see the wolf speeding towards me, the uniform left behind still floating in the air from how quickly it leapt out of it.
But I was faster now, I felt lighter. My every step was bouncier and more energetic, and I found a wild grin growing across my face, perhaps an inch or so wider than it may have been before, a cigarette clenched tight between my pearly white, perfectly straight teeth. I used to have quite the crooked set of chompers, and my dentist always got onto me about how little I flossed, but right now supernaturally enhanced dental hygiene was hardly my biggest concern.
I managed to skid to a stop (with the appropriate sound effect of course) right in front of the storage unit, and rapidly entered the combination. I knew that the wolf was close behind me, because the wolf would always be close behind me. It was in his very nature, as was mine to escape in the very nick of time. Hunter and fox, cat and mouse, wolf and rabbit.
I swung open the heavy steel door and stomped the glass case at my feet to fragments, grabbing the cel with a flourish as the wolf tripped over my extended leg and slid to a stop on the metal floor. Pulling the lit cigarette from my mouth, I touched it to the cellulose image and winked. "That's all folks" I muttered as the translucent image caught fire in an instant.
As soon as the cel began to burn, so too did the wolf, engulfed in white hot flames as it howled in apparent agony. It didn't take long before the howls faded away, and all that was left was a wolf-shaped outline of ash on the floor of the storage unit.
"I'll be honest with ya, I wasn't sure that was going to work!" I said to nobody in particular as I shut the door to the unit once again. I clapped my hands together, partially to clean off the ashes, but more to signify the conclusion of a job well done.
I drove home and collapsed on the couch, exhausted.
And if we lived in a kind and loving universe that is where the story would have ended. But, of course, we do not.
I turned on the TV, desperate to drink in some mindless garbage to distract my brain from the question of how I would explain away the destruction of the cel to my client. Flipping to a random channel, I was greeted with the image of a cartoon wolf sneaking along to a jaunty tune.
Obviously it wasn't the wolf from Howl's well that ends well, that would be ridiculous. No TV channel is broadcasting obscure cartoon shorts from the 30s, not even at that hour. The wolf was in color, the art style was different, it must have been an adaptation of Three Little Pigs or something. But it didn't matter. It reminded me of my wolf, and I felt rage bubble up in my chest. My eyes narrowed, and I felt as though steam was blowing out of my ears. Who knows, maybe it did.
I pulled out a baseball bat and began smashing it into the TV set over and over again, gibbering incoherently and laughing as I did so, sparks flying from the ruined mess of plastic and glass. By the time I finished swinging, the mass of steaming debris was barely recognizable as a television.
As I stood there, hunched over, catching my breath, I looked down at the baseball bat I had used to destroy the TV. I don't own a baseball bat. I never have. Even if I did have one, how could I have gotten it so quickly? It's not like there is room for it in my pockets, and I didn't run off to some closet to grab it, it wasn't leaning against the couch when I came in.
Walking into the bathroom, I confirmed what I already knew.
My skin was still deathly pale, nearly white now, my hair was still black. When I reached up to touch my face, I found that my hand had only four fingers.
As I gazed upon my caricatured reflection in the mirror, a thought clawed at the synapses of my brain, a shock to the system like a firm handshake with a hand-buzzer; I still didn't feel alone. Ever since that freakishly fiendish fleaball had turned my life upside down, I'd felt as though I was being watched, being followed everywhere I went. I just assumed it was the horror of pursuit, the terror of being prey. But I think it's more than that.
The thing about humor is that it's all relative isn't it? If you tell a joke and nobody is around to hear it, well, chances are you aren't going to get any laughs, are you? The whole purpose of a cartoon is to entertain an audience, to make us laugh at the zany antics of those larger than life characters as they go about their impossible, ridiculous existence. Without anyone watching them, they have no purpose, no reason to exist. All of their power comes from the laughs they give their audience.
So I'm asking you now, dear reader; who is watching me, and how do I get them to stop?
I'm a sadist. I figured I'd just get that out in the open first. Without going too much into the details, it feels extremely cathartic to hurt people. It's something about being in control, about someone else experiencing pain for my benefit, that just makes me feel very, very happy, like a weight being lifted off my shoulders. Of course, it also just turns me on, but like I said, I don't want to get too much into the details of that side of things.
I'm not a monster of course. I don't go around beating people up in bar brawls to get off or anything like that. I'm only interested in acting out my fantasies with willing participants, and I care a lot about consent. I understand that the experience of being hurt can be just as pleasant for some people as hurting them is for me, and in the end I really am wanting all parties involved to be as happy and safe as possible. It's an unorthodox pastime, sure, but in the end it's all happening between consenting adults.
Fortunately for me, genetics blessed me with just the right balance of facial symmetry, fat distribution, and skeletal structure to be considered fairly attractive by mainstream standards. You'd be surprised how many people out there want to get the shit beaten out of them by a beautiful woman. As a result of this, I'm reasonably well known in my local BDSM scene, which is one of many reasons why I won't be disclosing that much information that could be traced back to where I live. It wouldn't be especially difficult to find me.
Because of my relative popularity, I have gotten a little used to complete strangers knowing who I am. It's why I wasn't too surprised when I was approached at a kink party and greeted by name by someone who I'd never seen before in my life. I'll be the first to admit I was smitten at first sight, she was truly gorgeous. I can't exactly explain what it was about her that made her so attractive to me, it's difficult to put into words. I can easily describe her of course; short, red hair in a pixie cut, slender limbs, expertly applied makeup, but this doesn't really explain the aura of almost divine beauty that emanated out from her. Unlike many of the other attendees of the party, she wasn't wearing any sort of fetish gear or even particularly revealing clothing. Just jeans, a gray t-shirt, and an unzipped gray hoodie.
While I'm inclined to swing both ways, I've always had a certain preference for women, but that predilection towards sapphism doesn't mean I'm likely to fall head over heels at the first sight of just any pretty girl. She was special, there was something different about her.
She introduced herself as Julia, and then immediately asked me a question which, in retrospect, should have raised more red flags. Speaking in a calm, measured voice, she asked, "I've heard you hurt people if they ask you to, is that correct?"
It wasn't an incorrect thing to say. She was right, and I told her so, but the phrasing of the question should have bothered me more than it did. Nobody phrases things like that in those sorts of spaces, they use jargon, community specific terminology, that sort of thing. Someone might ask something like "You're the sadist who's into impact play, yeah?" perhaps, but the phrasing of "you hurt people if they ask you to" is utterly bizarre. Nobody at that party would have said something like that. It's the sort of question an 80 year old who was just introduced to the concept of BDSM would ask.
It only got weirder from there. After my affirmative response, she nodded her head thoughtfully and told me she would meet me at my home, and asked me when I would be free. I told her I wasn't doing anything the next day, and she nodded again and said she'd be there at 2 o clock. Then she just walked away. She didn't even ask me for my address, or a phone number, or anything. The worst part is, at the time, none of this seemed in any way unusual. A complete stranger had just told me she was going to come to my home the next day, which she evidently already knew the location of, and it felt completely natural. I can chalk up some of it to a bit of giddy excitement at the prospect of indulging in my more unusual interests with a willing and beautiful participant, but that just doesn't explain it. I'm not an idiot, I know you can't just trust complete strangers because they're attractive. It's like the part of my brain that should have been warning me something was wrong had been completely turned off.
The remainder of the party went as expected, though I was somewhat distracted from my encounter. I didn't see Julia at all for the rest of the evening. I imagine she just left after informing me she was going to come to my house the next day. I left early and went home giddy with excitement for the day to come.
At the time, part of me was worried she wouldn't show up. It's funny, looking back on it now, that the thought of Julia not showing would have been a source of fear rather than relief. But she did, of course. The knocks on my door were perfectly in sync with the alarm I had set up on my phone to remind me of her impending arrival.
I opened the door as casually as possible, trying my best to hide my excitement, and found Julia standing there, smiling pleasantly. She didn't seem to have changed her outfit at all since the night before, either that or she simply had multiple sets of the same clothes like Einstein. To be honest I was a little embarrassed, part of me worried I had misread her intentions entirely, and that this was meant purely as a social call.
I showed her inside politely and asked if she wanted anything to drink, and she gently declined the offer, looking around my house methodically like the camera of a Mars rover surveying an alien environment. There was a bit of awkward silence that I attempted to fill with one-sided small talk whilst she wandered about the house, seeming to scan every nook and cranny. I followed behind, feeling increasingly awkward. Finally, she turned to look at me and spoke simply, "You will pierce my skin with needles."
I'll admit I'd never been especially fond of needle play. It had always seemed too gentle, too tame for my specific proclivities, but that's not to say I was inexperienced with it, and I was only too eager to indulge Julia if that was what she wanted. In the end, pain is pain after all.
Now of course, I gave my whole spiel about safety and consent, talking about the whole "traffic light" system, soft limits versus hard limits, etc. Julia nodded along, still smiling pleasantly, maintaining eye contact somewhat uncomfortably throughout my entire monologue. It was only when I got to the concept of safe words and asked what would work for her when she opened her mouth.
"There will be no safe word," she said.
Now I'm familiar with newbies to this sort of thing who get cocky and insist that they can take it, that they don't have any limits, but this felt different. This wasn't a statement of confidence, this wasn't bragging, Hell, this wasn't even someone with self-worth issues who thinks that getting hurt beyond their limits is what they deserve. This was a statement of fact. There would be no safe word. I wouldn't need one.
I wanted to argue of course. I wouldn't be a safe sexual partner if I just did away with important safety techniques because someone told me they weren't necessary, but my words just seemed to die on my lips as I looked at her unsettlingly calm smile. This was around when I started to fully realize something was wrong, but it was as if I couldn't do anything about it. The stage was set, and there was no changing the role I was about to play in the proceedings. Torturer, enter stage right.
She lay face down on the couch, removing her hoodie and shirt to reveal a completely unblemished back, skin smooth and pale as cream. Despite my growing anxiety, I was still, at this point, somewhat excited.
In case you aren't familiar with the subject, needle play is exactly what it sounds like; it's essentially a somewhat sexier version of acupuncture. I have a set of acupuncture needles with jeweled tips at the blunt end for this purpose, a gift from a friend of mine. I removed the needles from their case, making sure to clean them with an alcohol soaked cloth before setting them on a sterile tray for further use. Once I had prepared all of the needles, I began to gently pierce them one by one into the flesh of Julia's back, arranging them into a symmetrical pattern.
You don't go deep during needle play, as with all properly done BDSM the end goal isn't to seriously injure one's partner, but to explore different sensory experiences. When done correctly, one doesn't even leave much in the way of marks or bruising. Ultimately you're far more likely to receive a scar from an upset house cat from someone who has the proper experience with needle play.
Now, usually folks tend to have a fairly noticeable reaction to being pierced with dozens of needles, even if said needles are only inserted gently and to a shallow depth. While it's certainly not the most painful form of sadomasochism I've indulged in, it's far from mild. There is usually a hitching of the breath, a faint shudder, even moaning if one gets really into it. Julia, however, remained totally motionless, and the steady rhythm of her breathing continued uninterrupted.
I'll be entirely honest, I was a little concerned that I was doing a bad job. The whole joy of sadism, to me anyway, is to see the reaction someone gets from what I do to them, to know that they are feeling these sensations because of me. It makes me feel powerful, in control. To receive no response whatsoever was, frankly, a little embarrassing.
I'd finished inserting the last of the needles when Julia finally spoke.
"Push them all the way."
I shouldn't have to tell you that's not how this works. These weren't short needles, they were several inches long each. Pushing each one down to the base wouldn't just be agonizing, it would be incredibly dangerous as well; I could easily perforate her lungs at a minimum.
And yet, I found my hands moving to the last needle I had pierced her with. I felt myself grasp the jeweled head and begin gently pressing downwards, slowly burying the entire length of the needle into the flesh of her back.
It's surreal, not having control over one's own body, to experience taking actions which you do not want to perform. It's not like watching a movie, you can feel yourself doing it the entire time, all the while you're filled with a dawning horror that you're nothing more than a puppet on a string. To feel your own body betray you is the most viscerally upsetting sensation I've ever had.
One by one, each of the needles were pushed to the base into Julia's back by my trembling, sweaty fingers. I'd like to say there was no blood, that it was as though I were simply pressing sticks into wet clay, but that would be too kind to me, wouldn't it? No, I had to watch as deep rivulets of crimson bubbled up from the dozens of puncture wounds I was inflicting upon my still seemingly uncaring victim. She didn't so much as twitch, just continuing to breath methodically even as I saw bubbles of air form in the blood pouring from those wounds which pierced her lungs. My mind was attempting to retreat into itself, horrified at the loss of control I was experiencing, overwhelmed by the total absence of agency. My face was streaked with tears, ruining the makeup I had put on in the hopes of impressing her. God, to think I once worried about how she would think of me. It took me a moment to notice when she got up from the couch, putting back on her shirt, blood soaking through the fabric.
"Thank you for a very pleasant afternoon. I will be stopping by next week on the same day, at the same time. You will meet me then," she said, sliding her hoodie over the stained t-shirt. She reached into her back pocket and pulled out a folded stack of hundred dollar bills, placing it on the coffee table while I sobbed. With that, she left and walked out the door.
Somehow, by the time I managed to pull myself together, I still had the wherewithal to feel self-conscious about the money. I don't do this sort of thing for pay, I've never wanted to do sex work. It isn't that I have any sort of moral qualms with that, but this sort of thing is basically a hobby for me, one that admittedly is a rather an important part of my life, but it's not my job. Being paid for it felt deeply wrong to me. It made me feel dirty, accepting that money, but it was more than enough to keep me financially stable for a week, and there was no way I was going to be able to go to my day job any time soon after what I'd experienced. I called in sick as soon as I was able to speak without crying.
I spent a while processing what happened. It wasn't just traumatic because of the lack of control, though that certainly doesn't help. I've often been self-conscious about my proclivities, worried that I'm somehow predatory, that I'm a bad person. Something that helps is knowing that what I'm doing isn't really that dangerous, that it's just a bit of unusual fun. Even at my most vicious the only lasting damage are a few bruises. To watch someone have needles pierced into their vital organs by my own hands, it's different. It's not just harmless fun anymore.
I came up with all sorts of explanations for what could have happened. Maybe Julia was a master hypnotist, and she had put me into some sort of trance. She could have replaced my regular needles with telescoping ones, like those prop knives they use in theater. Perhaps she was wearing some sort of prosthetic makeup on her back filled with fake blood. Maybe she drugged me. In my heart of hearts though, I knew that none of these rationalizations held any truth.
A week came and went, and I found myself waiting at my home for Julia. I didn't want to, I tried to call up a friend to stay with, but my vocal cords froze up whenever I attempted to ask them. I tried placing a reservation for a hotel room online, but my fingers refused to let me click the mouse. Even when I tried leaving on foot, I found myself steadily walking back to my house as soon as the clock struck noon. My appointment with Julia would be kept.
When she arrived, Julia was still wearing the same outfit as the last week, albeit cleaned of blood. She held a small package wrapped in brown paper and twine in her left hand. She greeted me by name cheerfully enough, and despite the terror I felt at the sight of her, I found my mouth twisting into an involuntary smile as I welcomed her into my home with a tone of similar warmth. Only the tears flowing down my face indicated my true feelings. My mind kept playing back images of me pushing the needles into her back, of the blood bubbling with the rhythm of her breathing.
She got right to the point, informing me that today I would be whipping her. Even now, I'm still not used to the way she phrases her instructions. When you use the proper terminology for these sorts of things, you're reminding yourself that it's not actually harmful, that it's just, in essence, a game. "Impact play" feels so much less cruel than whipping. But Julia doesn't care about what I feel. She just makes me hurt her.
I went to go retrieve one of the various floggers I owned, deciding I would choose whichever one I thought would cause the least damage, when Julia simply said, "Stop."
Instantly I froze in my tracks, not moving a muscle. I heard the rustling of paper from behind me, the sound of her unwrapping the object she had brought with her. "Turn around," she instructed. I did so instantly, without hesitation, despite how strongly I didn't want to see what she would present me with.
It reminded me somewhat of a discipline, a type of scourge used in certain Christian denominations as an instrument of penance, a tool for the mortification of the flesh. It was composed of seven lengths of slightly rusted chain, with three jagged knots of barbed wire sticking out along each one. She held it out to me, and I took it, shaking slightly. I felt like I was going to be sick. Getting a closer look at the discipline, I could tell that the links of the chain were sharpened to a razor's edge.
I must again reiterate; I enjoy hurting people. I like seeing people in pain, I like seeing people submit their bodies to me, to watch them be hurt because they willingly give me the power to inflict suffering upon them for my own pleasure. I know there are probably a lot of people out there like me who would be overjoyed to spend time with Julia, to be with a partner who truly has no limits, for whom you can do whatever you want to her and she'll just take it, wordlessly. They probably wouldn't even need to be controlled in the way that she does to me, or if they were, they may not even notice it. But I'm not one of those people. I enjoy hurting people, not maiming them.
She took off her shirt again, this time kneeling on the floor instead of laying down. By some terrible miracle, her back showed no scars from our last session. I was once again greeted with that same creamy, unblemished skin. She told me to begin, and I did. I felt my hand clench, white knuckled, around the handle of the discipline, and I began to swing it with all my might against her back. The rusted, razor sharp metal tore into her flesh like a knife through butter, leaving terrible gashes from which blood flowed like the tears of weeping saints. I tried to keep track of how many times my body swung that terrible scourge, but I lost count at one hundred lashes. By the time she told me I could stop, her vertebrae and the back of her rib cage were visible, peeking out from the ruined, bloody flesh of her back.
Like before, impossibly calmly given the utter ruination of her body, she stood up, put back on her clothes, and thanked me for my time, informing me once again that I would be seeing her the same time next week. She left me another stack of hundred dollar bills, more than the last time, and left. I curled in the fetal position upon the blood soaked floor and cried until I passed out.
That was months ago. Since then, it's only gotten increasingly worse.
I quit my job. I have long since run out of excuses to explain my continued absence, and the money from Julia more than pays for my expenses, so I just sent in a resignation email and didn't show up for work after that. I wish I could say it was an improvement, not needing to work anymore, but all it means is I have more time to focus on the terrible things I've been made to do against my will.
Every week is different, some new torture she wants me to perform on her. Each time she is completely healed from the previous session, and each time her requests seem to get more extreme, further from anything even vaguely resembling something remotely conventional. I don't want to go into detail as to the specifics, just reliving our first two meetings is traumatic enough, but it has become increasingly rare for me to use any of my own equipment, instead she usually comes in with some new object wrapped in brown paper and string. A potato peeler, a power drill, a nailgun, a branding iron, etc.
Most recently, the package she brought was small, compact. She unwrapped it to reveal a smooth, black, handgun, a Glock I think, with a suppressor already threaded into the end of the barrel. That session was very quick.
Even with the bullet wound clear through her forehead and out the back of her skull, she kept up that polite, gentle smile. I looked through the newly created tunnel of flesh and bone that marred her otherwise beautiful face as she politely thanked me for my hospitality, informing me that she would meet with me again next week at the same time.
It was such an incredible party. Genuinely, if I had to pick out the most happy and wonderful moments of my life, that Halloween party would have been one of them. That's why it hurts so much to remember it. It makes me want to break down crying whenever I think about the terrible, awful thing that happened right under our noses, and how none of us even noticed. It feels so obvious, looking back on it now. Hindsight is 20/20 I suppose.
I wouldn't say I'm a particularly unsocial person, I think I get along with people quite well once I've gotten to know them, but something about making that first step of initial contact just always seemed so difficult. I always felt incredibly awkward being introduced to strangers, and while I can mask that discomfort fairly well, it does mean that I tend to adopt a slightly stilted and formal attitude whenever I'm meeting new people.
As a consequence, and also in part due to the pandemic, much of my socializing for the past few years has been online. The awkwardness is still there of course, but it feels so much less uncomfortable when the people I am being introduced to are just text on a screen. However, this does mean that most of my friends tend to live quite far away. A handful of them do live within about an hour's drive of me, so we tend to hang out whenever possible, at least we used to before the party. Nowadays it just feels wrong.
It was on one such meetup with three friends of mine that we discussed the possibility of a throwing a big party of some sort. We all navigated the same general social circles, and we had considered for a while inviting down the myriad online friends we had acquired over the years, at least the ones we trusted. It was I who suggested we host the party on Halloween. From there the discussion swiftly turned to themes, since what kind of Halloween party wouldn't have a theme?
Jessica suggested that we host something inspired by mythology and ancient history. She had always been quite interested in legends, myths, and classical literature of all kinds, and I recall fondly our discussions of Beowulf, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. As much as I would have liked to indulge her, the others pointed out it could be somewhat of a niche topic, and so the discussion continued.
Sadie, Jessica's girlfriend, suggested something themed off of horror films. Sadie had, partially at my encouragement, been on a bit of a horror movie kick as of late, and we had all enjoyed spending time rewatching some of the old classics together. It seemed like a solid theme, and Jessica and I were almost set to agree on it, but it was then that Jake suggested his idea.
In any given queer friend group, there is typically one straight member who has been deemed "safe" by the others. Jake was that friend. We all considered him trustworthy and never really had to worry about him putting his foot in his mouth whenever the conversation veered towards a rainbow hue. I had half-expected Jake to suggest a historical theme, given his degree in military history, but instead he advised that we go for a traditional sort of Halloween party; bobbing for apples, carving pumpkins, that sort of thing.
The rest of us immediately agreed this would be the best course of action. Not only would it mean that none of the attendees would have to adjust their costumes for the occasion, but also none of us had ever actually attended such an event, and the novelty of something simultaneously nostalgic yet alien was the perfect combination. Instantly there was discussion of activities, decorations, and whether or not we should pool together our funds to get a fog machine.
Now, obviously the four of us didn't plan out the entire party in one night. We still had to figure out who we trusted well enough to give Jessica's address to (it was decided early on that her house would be the most suitable for hosting), send out invitations, and even put up a couple of online fundraisers to try and get plane tickets for some of our more distant friends. Over the months that this process took we soon found that what had started out as mere idle discussion was rapidly taking shape into what seemed would be a rather excellent celebration.
Now, each of us were to contribute some sort of activity that we would watch over and purchase the necessary supplies for. Sadie's medical background gave her the rather ghoulish idea of setting up a pumpkin carving table themed after an autopsy, which while strictly speaking wasn't traditional, fit so well with the whole aesthetic of the party that we all found it delightful. Jessica set about acquiring an old style wooden barrel for the purpose of bobbing for apples, putting her artistic skills to good use with paintings of various Halloween spooks on the sides of it. My idea was somewhat silly but still wound up being put to use. I couldn't find if the game had a real name, or if it was just called "The Mirror Game", but I'd heard it alleged that if you stared at your own face in the mirror for long enough your mind would distort the image in a rather frightful manner, so I was going to set up the bathroom with candles and a chair, the lights turned off.
Jake decided he was going to set up a game of Dead Man's Brains.
If you've ever read Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, you've probably heard of this game. You set up a series of boxes with bits of cloth loosely covering the opening, and place within each box some nasty object that feels like the body part of a dead man. Peeled grapes for eyes, a bowl of diluted ketchup for blood, a mushy tomato for the titular brain, etc. There was a sort of pseudo-poem that was supposed to go along with it, but Jake didn't really care to stick too close to the traditional version, he said he would put his own twist on it. We all thought it was a great idea, and that it fit the theme perfectly. Jake even went about making some custom boxes for the affair, each labeled with the "body part" in question, deciding that his version would consist of eyeballs, guts, heart, fingers, and of course, the titular brains.
The months until the party turned into weeks, then days, until finally it was time for the night itself. I arrived early, along with Sadie, so we could set up our activities in advance of the guests, but Jake was nowhere to be found. We texted him, but received no response, which was a bit worrying, but we tried to work around it, assuming that something had come up that was occupying his attention for a bit.
In terms of costumes, Sadie and Jessica had decided to go as Carmilla and Laura from Carmilla. We had recently watched the film Dracula's Daughter which was loosely inspired by the novella, and while the film itself was so-so, it had inspired the two of them to read the source material, which they quite enjoyed. Given Sadie's relative short stature in comparison to Jessica, it was somewhat amusing to observe a Carmilla who would need a step stool in order to successfully suck out her victim's blood.
As for me, I had chosen to dress as the witch Keziah Mason from Lovecraft's tale Dreams in the Witch House. It was a simple matter of getting some puritan-esque clothes, a ragged gray shawl, and a small toy rat with the bearded face of an action figure swapped for the head. All in all I thought the effect was rather good, though I didn't go to the effort of attempting to age myself with makeup.
Jessica's apple bobbing station and Sadie's pumpkin autopsy table were set up quickly, and I went about preparing all the necessary alterations to the bathroom. At this point, the first guests were expected to arrive, and we were all growing increasingly concerned by Jake's continued absence. We tried calling him, but were directed straight to voice mail. Of the four of us, Jake was usually the most punctual, so this was a very strange change of character. We decided we would have to start without him, not that we had much choice in the matter, as soon as we had said this, our first guests began to pour in.
Our first visitors of the evening were Ashley and Dawn, fresh from their honeymoon in British Columbia. Dawn seemed dressed like something out of a World War 2 propaganda poster, with a plaid shirt and open welding mask. Ashley's costume seemed to be a character out of some cartoon or video game which I wasn't familiar with, pink hair in a punk style with large mechanical boxing gloves of some sort. Regardless of my unfamiliarity with the subject matter, the costume did seem to be quite well made, and despite the lack of matching with regards to their costumes, the two of them made quite the cute couple.
We had only just managed to finish introductions when Sock and his boyfriend arrived next. Sock is quite the artist, with talents in more mediums than I can count, one of those people who is less a jack of all trades and more a master of all trades. It seemed he had turned his artistic skills towards papier mache most recently, as the costume he wore seemed primarily made using the technique. It was some sort of monstrous beast, all fangs, claws, and scaly skin, and though it was quite impressive I couldn't quite discern if it was meant to reference something else or if it was an original creation of Sock's. Sock's boyfriend, whose name I can never recall, simply wore a cheap mad scientist outfit, complete with goggles and long black gloves. He was a rather short, anxious gentleman, a mycologist by trade if I recall correctly, and while he did seem to enjoy himself as the evening progressed, he tended to just hover around his boyfriend nervously.
Next came Carlos and Elizabeth, the two of them sharing a ride to save money. Both had just landed after extremely long flights, Carlos from Brazil and Elizabeth from France, and it was clear from their bleary eyes and occasionally spacey looks that they were jet-lagged to Hell and back. Carlos hadn't really had time to get any sort of costume ready, so simply wore some nice tweeds and a sign hanging from his neck reading "I am a human puppet". Elizabeth meanwhile had managed to put on some clown makeup. In spite of their tiredness, the two of them seemed to perk up quite quickly, as this was the first time any of us had the opportunity to meet up in person with them, and our enthusiasm was infectious.
Second to last arrived Astra, clad in the garb of a Napoleonic soldier, and I knew even without asking that every aspect of the uniform was sure to be as accurate as possible. Within minutes of her arrival, Astra, Carlos, and Elizabeth were instantly locked in conversation regarding the intricacies of lightweight tabletop role playing game design, a topic they continued to discuss for much of the party.
Finally, after every other guest had long since made their way to the party, did Jake show up. There was a knock upon Jessica's thick wooden door, and since everyone else was otherwise occupied in conversation, I went to answer it. I found myself standing face to face with a gas-masked infantryman of the Great War, complete with Brodie helmet and a replica Webley revolver which I lent him. Next to him were a series of wooden boxes. I greeted him with a hug, which he responded with silently and stiffly. Something was wrong, but I didn't know what.
He pressed a piece of folded up paper into my hand, which I read immediately. It said, Sorry for being late. Couldn't find the card for the train. I've got a cold and I've lost my voice. I'll probably have to leave early, but I figured I should at least show up as long as I can. Would have told you earlier but my phone stopped working, I think the battery gave out.
I apologized profusely for the hardships he had experienced and ushered him into the house to the cheers of our friends, carrying the boxes he had brought for him. Each box was made of dark stained wood with an opening covered in black cloth, with a label burned above the openings stating which "body part" was contained within each one. It was really quite impressive, and I complimented Jake on his handywork, to which he simply nodded.
I helped him set up the game of Dead Man's Brains on the table we had set aside for it, and the rest of the party continued as planned, though the distinctive absence of Jake's voice was noticeable.
Everything about the party was perfect. Legitimately, I do not think I have ever had a happier occasion in my entire life. There was laughter, jokes, at some point or another Ashley and Dawn broke out some card games, Elizabeth ran a quick session of a horror TTRPG of her own design, it was a truly magical evening. The theme of the classic Halloween party didn't go unobserved either. Plenty of time was spent bobbing for apples, staring into the mirror by candlelight (though it did admittedly devolve into chanting of "Bloody Mary" rather quickly), carving pumpkins, and everyone in the party adored Jake's rendition of Dead Man's Brains. He accepted each compliment with a polite nod and a tip of his helmet.
There were five boxes, labeled "Eyes", "Guts", "Fingers", "Heart" and finally, "Brain". I've always been somewhat squeamish when it came to rotten fruit, raw meat and other such inedible foodstuffs, and what I felt in those boxes quickly triggered that latent disgust. I only managed to get to guts before I had to dip out, laughingly explaining that I would vomit if I had to undergo the whole thing. There were many jokes about me being a pussy, but I wasn't pressured into doing the rest of it.
We had already planned to make the party into a sleepover, since we didn't expect anyone to shell out the money for a hotel. As the evening wound down, out came the air mattresses and pillows. As soon as it was clear that the more active part of the evening was coming to a close, Jake quietly excused himself, handing a note to Jessica thanking her for hosting the party. We all gave our fondest fairwells to him, each of us hugging him in turn, and he left with a final wave and a cheerful salute.
We all slept soundly that night, happy from the company of friends and tired from a night of childlike, innocent fun. It was such a perfect party, and despite what I know now, I still find myself reliving that night over and over in my head, remembering how happy and content I felt.
Everything changed in the morning. I had woken up earlier than usual, nose wrinkling due to an unfamiliar stench. I got up to investigate, more intent on getting rid of it so I could go back to sleep than getting up for the day proper.
The smell came from the boxes, a rotten, sickly odor. The scent of meat just beginning to spoil. I remember mentally kicking myself for not reminding Jake to take them with him when he left. I put on a pair of rubber gloves and reached inside, trying not to gag. I started with the box labeled "Eyes".
I must have woken up the whole neighborhood with my screaming.
The police were there within 15 minutes to take our testimony. They kept asking everyone for a description of the suspect, what he looked like, and we just had to shake our heads and tell them we didn't know. That we couldn't tell who he was underneath the gas mask. Hell, we didn't even know if "he" was a he. We didn't see their face after all.
They took the eyes, the intestines, the severed fingers, the heart, and the severed head with the top of the skull neatly removed as evidence, but I imagine Jake's family were swiftly given custody of the remains shortly afterwards. It's not like forensics would be able to get any usable fingerprints off of them, given how many of us had touched them.
