Cones:
Yay! An original story from me :) I'm trying out writing something a little spooky, I hope you all like it! (I'll be back with my Batman series soon)
Trigger warnings: spooky content, disturbing imagery, belonnophobia (The fear of slime like substances)
Word count: 2,397
Have you ever wondered why when there’s construction on the street, or any road really, they always leave those cones up?
Day or night, work or rest, those orange cones stand as a glowing barrier with one simple message.
Stay out.
Besides being a bother, they’re mostly not noticed.
I mean, if you ask someone, they’ll probably assume that it’s done for convenience. Or maybe to keep the work site safe?
But I know the truth.
I know that to all of you I might sound insane. Hell, even I wondered if I was imagining all of this at times. But I’m not.
Because now others are starting to see it too.
Before I get ahead of myself, I should start at the beginning.
The first Wednesday of August 2024. Just a normal day, every day was normal back then, boring even. I had a crappy office job, no friends, and no prospects of a relationship. A normal, if not lonely life.
I should have been grateful, really.
My favorite way to work had been blocked off by a downed tree, so I drove on 99, a route I usually avoided due to the traffic.
I was actually on the phone with my sister when I noticed it, that section of 99 that had been cordoned off with cones. It had been that way on and off for years.
I couldn’t recall exactly what was wrong with it that time, maybe a broken water main? Something that sounded serious.
My sister was talking about her husband. After five years of marriage and two children, they were separating. I had offered myself as a sounding board to her frustrations, since our parents had little to no interest.
She was telling me about one of his business trips where he had brought his secretary instead of her, when I saw it.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw movement from behind the cones.
Wyoming has its fair share of earthquakes, but this wasn’t one of them. The cones did not move, the car wasn’t shaking, the trees didn’t so much as rustle their leaves.
But the pavement behind those unmoving cones almost seemed to writhe, lumps under the asphalt shifting and bumping into each other chaotically.
I was jerked back to the present when a semi-truck honked at me for drifting into his lane. My sister paused her story to ask, “Are you okay? I heard that, if I’m distracting you I can go—”
“No, it’s alright… I— I think I just need some more sleep.” I tell her, shrugging off what I saw as a simple trick of the eyes. After all, I had been working strange hours recently, so what I told her wasn’t a stretch.
Later at work though, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The way they had moved, like a dozen cats scurrying around under a blanket.
I tried asking some of my co-workers if they’d taken the same route, and if so had they seen anything? But their answers were mostly the same.
“What? You mean the construction on 99? Of course I saw it, it’s been there forever.”
Everyone was generally aware of the construction, but no one noticed anything strange behind the cones. Someone even asked me what was there, like I was trying out a new joke.
Eventually, I tried googling it. I got some results back on water lines and sewage leaks, but none of them looked at all like what I had seen.
So, despite the way my thoughts kept circling back around to earlier that day, I stopped investigating. I drove a different way home that night, and decided a good night's sleep would clear my mind.
It worked. For three weeks, my life went back to normal. In fact it got better! A promotion at work, a few guys and I went out for drinks, and my sister had won custody of the kids with my moral support.
But then, one day, some construction started up on my new route.
Back then I wasn't paranoid enough to think anything about it. I mean, a construction site moving just to make sure that I saw it? I would have written it off as crazy, but now my perspective has changed.
It was my fifth day of driving past it when I noticed small lumps forming inside the circle of cones. The construction workers avoided them, breaking up the ground around them in a pattern that seemed almost random.
Once again, it began to nag at me.
And once again, after the lumps reached a certain size they started to move. Not as much as the ones I’d seen on 99 that one day, but still, the sluggish movements only raised more questions.
So one day, when I was feeling particularly brave, I stopped by the cones. After a moment I decided to wave over one of the construction workers.
He wasn’t who’d you expect to see working construction, he was short and thin, and reminded me more of a kid than a guy who operated heavy machinery daily.
“Sorry, but I have to ask, what’s the problem?”
His eyebrows furrowed, and I elaborated, “With the road.”
He hummed and hawed a bit before telling me it was just normal road maintenance, talking about how roads just wear down over time and need some work done.
“Alright, so what are the lumps? Are you guys pumping something under the ground?”
After I said it the guy seemed to freeze, stammering on unintelligible words before claiming he needed to talk to his boss.
So I waited despite the nervousness that was causing me to constantly shift in my seat. Finally, some time later, a big burly guy came out with a hard hat on.
“Hey mister, you ever think about a job in construction?” He had grinned in a knowing sort of way that put me on edge.
Of course I told him no, and tried to excuse myself, but before I could drive off he simply handed me a business card. “If things ever get out of hand, give me a call.”
As I was driving off, I wanted to forget about it even as my curiosity only grew. It wasn’t my problem, and I wasn’t the type of guy to screw around with things that didn’t involve me. Especially when they were this weird.
But something kept drawing me back to that place, kept me from changing routes again.
I’m at a place now where I can tell you my obsession was not something normal, it was an itch inside my brain that never quite seemed to go away. It persisted despite all of my efforts to purge it from my mind.
Even though it was the last thing I wanted to do, I headed back the next day, this time in the dead of night.
You’d think if it was something dangerous there would be explicit warnings, guards maybe? But there was nothing except for those reflective, orange cones. Maybe for most that was enough warning.
I parked at the edge of the highway and grabbed my flashlight before stepping into the chilly darkness of the night. It was strange for there not to be any traffic, even this late.
Shaking off my nerves, I started forward, keeping a healthy distance away while I looked for any movement.
When I didn’t spot any, I foolishly assumed that whatever was moving was gone, or at least dormant.
I moved further in, anxiously holding my breath as I made my way past the cones, only a few yards away from the unmoving lumps.
Shining a light on them, they didn’t look like anything special. Some of them were cracked open, some paved over, and some still untouched.
I explored the site first, and after spotting a work station I headed over. I looked for anything that would explain, but all of the papers were unreadable. The construction jargon was too difficult to decipher for any layman.
So, that left one last thing to look into.
I was careful as I approached one of the open lumps, wondering if I’d find some sort of animal or broken up pipe.
Instead I was shocked and disgusted to see it was filled with some sort of black sludge. It resembled tar but smelled like a mixture of rotten eggs and some other disgusting odor I couldn’t place.
Though, nothing was moving.
I let out a sigh of relief, thinking now that since I had seen the thing up close I could finally let this silly obsession go. After all, it was obviously some sort of leak, despite the previous weird actions of the construction crew.
When I turned to leave, I wasn’t watching the ground underneath my feet.
I let out a disgusted sound as I felt the wet mush squish under my foot, then break. The inside contained some sort of thick ooze that gooshed up and around my leg, clinging to my pant leg and sinking inside my boot.
Before I could even think about pulling my leg out I felt something thin and spindly scratch at my pant leg, causing me to freeze.
If I had pulled out my leg then, maybe I could have convinced myself it had been some sort of debris, or maybe a phantom sensation.
But then I felt those thin, scratchy fingers wrap around my leg, one at a time, until it felt like maybe a hundred fingers, groping and clawing at my flesh.
Then it tugged.
To anyone else it would have looked comical as I suddenly threw myself back, falling to the ground and scrambling back.
I ran from the construction site as fast as possible, deciding no matter what urges or curiosity I felt, I’d never go back. For sure, I’d never drive down that road again. Jesus.
It took a few weeks before I felt a semblance of normalcy again. I thought, I prayed, I could forget the events of that night, like how a bad dream fades away in the daylight.
That was, until my street needed some construction work done.
At first I convinced myself I was being paranoid, roads needed to be repaired all the time! Just because it was only the section of road in front of my house didn’t mean anything.
Shortly after I started hearing nails against my windows at night, finding dead animals outside my front door, and it only progressed from there.
Sometimes I’d wake up with my windows open, even after locking them. I’ve now nailed them shut but even that hasn’t worked. I’ve felt something grabbing at me in my sleep, only to find nothing there once I opened my eyes.
Worst of all, I had started sleepwalking. One time I had made my way outside, walking toward the cones before a neighbor spotted me and woke me up. After that I put padlocks on my doors to prevent future attempts.
Then, of course, the lumps showed up.
Behind those damned cones I saw movement every day. I tried asking my neighbors about it, but they claimed not to see anything. I went as far as to bring them over, but found that when we got there, nothing was moving.
Fearing all this was a product of insanity, I invited my newly divorced sister and her children to live with me, hoping to find some sort of respite from the madness.
I bent over backwards to make sure they stayed, at one point I told her I’d even pay her. She thought I was joking.
And for a while, it worked. The strange occurrences dwindled and I managed to ignore the strange construction. After all, it wasn’t bothering me anymore right? Maybe it would just go away.
That was until my sister mentioned the construction and asked me if I noticed anything strange.
So now we’ve sent the children away, both of us taking shifts at the window to watch the lumps move, watching the construction crew slowly excavate them. Sometimes the workers would stop to stare up at our window for periods of time before going back to work.
Some of the other neighbors have noticed it too, so we've started a sort of club. I told them about the construction worker I talked to, and they asked for his card.
Slowly, people have been leaving to work with them, cutting off contact from us and leaving us in the dark.
All I know is that I can’t keep waiting for those lumps to crack open, so I finally contacted that construction worker. My sister and I are going to see him tomorrow, but I don’t know if it will be enough.
That’s why I’m posting this, because I lack options, and honestly I don’t know what the hell to do.
So please, if anyone knows—
What the hell is behind the cones?
Afterword:
Sorry it’s been so long, but I thought I’d finally update this.
Five years now of working in the construction industry and my life is fantastic.
All the other construction guys took a shine to me, teaching me the ropes and inviting me to their sports team. I have a beautiful spouse and a little boy who’s currently chewing on his letter blocks as I write this.
My sister found out she had a knack for management and moved up the ranks, married this nice little timid guy named Gene. They come by for dinner and play dates at least twice a week.
Now, I know you’re all probably wondering what the hell I was going on about five years ago but seriously, don’t worry about it.
There are no lumps underneath the ground, there never were.
I’ll tell you what’s funny though, I had gone outside for a break with the guys when this car pulled over and a woman stepped out, looking nervous.
I waved her over and put down my drink, listening as she carefully asked about what we were doing. I explained that this bit of road was getting some new guard rails, but she still seemed uneasy.
I couldn’t help but smirk as she asked about the lumps, telling her to hold on a second while I grabbed something.
When I turned back around, I simply handed her a business card and said,
“You’ll be needing this.”