nosleep

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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/MuttLoverMommy01 on 2024-10-11 22:12:41+00:00.

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I need help, but honestly, I don’t even know if that’s possible. Right now, it feels like there’s no hope for me, and I’m struggling to share this without sounding like a rambling old man.

This problem has haunted me for as long as I can remember. The first time it struck, was when I was just seven years old. It was a hot summer day, and my older brother, my twin sister, and I were playing hide-and-seek with a couple of our friends. I snuck into my mom's room, careful not to make a sound, and opened the bottom drawer of her massive dresser. Being a scrawny little kid—just a tiny pipsqueak—I knew I would fit snugly into that small space.

Once I crawled in, I found a wooden support beam for the drawer above and pulled it shut, stifling a giggle as I heard my brother yell, “Here I come!” He started his search under the bed, rifling through the closet, and peeking behind the door, blissfully unaware that I was hiding right there. I could hear him finding our friends one by one, their laughter echoing through the house.

But as the seconds turned into minutes, that cozy hideout began to feel like a coffin. The clothes around me felt suffocating, each breath drawing in the stale air and amplifying my growing panic. I pushed against the sides of the drawer, trying to pull on the beam above me, but it wouldn’t budge. I could hear my brother’s voice getting more frustrated as he called out, “Where is he?” Then one of the kids piped up, “He probably broke the rules… he’s outside, I just know it.”

That’s when dread crept in. “Please! Somebody help! I’m in Mom's room! I’m in the dresser!” I shouted, but the sound only felt muffled and distant. I could hear the kids racing out the back door, and for the first time, a chilling thought crossed my mind: “I’m going to die here.”

My breathing turned frantic, each inhale feeling tighter than the last. The more I panicked, the harder it became to breathe. I was just a scared little kid, trapped in the most humiliating way. Tears streamed down my cheeks as I cried out, “Please… Please… Help me. Mommy, I don’t want to die. I didn’t mean to…” My voice broke as I sobbed, and it felt like the air was being sucked out of me.

I sat there, helpless, for what felt like hours, the frantic search outside growing increasingly desperate. I could hear my family calling, “It’s not funny anymore! Seriously, where are you?” 

Time dragged on, and my panicked cries turned into soft whimpers, each plea growing weaker. Exhaustion washed over me, and as the minutes slipped by, I felt myself drifting into a numbness, like a slow, painful fade into nothingness. Alone at seven, I let go of everything.

Then suddenly, I jolted awake, gasping and choking, the reality of panic flooding back in. My lungs felt like they were on fire, and it seemed impossible to catch my breath. My mother rushed into my bedroom, her eyes wide with concern as I incoherently screamed about suffocating to death. I cried harder than ever as she wrapped her arms around me, murmuring, “Shhh… Shhh... I know, baby. You’re okay, it was all a bad dream.” She stroked my hair gently, rocking me back and forth, and sent my twin sister to fetch a glass of ice water to help me breathe again.

Eventually, I started to calm down, though the remnants of terror clung to me. I tried to explain, my voice shaky. “Mom, I died. I was stuck in your dresser, and Jesse couldn’t find me.” Before I could say more, I noticed the look of confusion on her face. “Jesse?” she asked, concern etched in her brow.

Frustration bubbled up inside me. “Mom, that’s not funny! Why are you saying that?” I shot her a look, bewildered. This wasn’t the time for jokes; as far as I was concerned, I had just died. I glanced at my sister, hoping for solidarity, but she looked just as perplexed as our mother. My anger shifted to fear.

“Mom… Maddie…” I looked between them, feeling trapped in a nightmare of confusion. Instead of trying to explain something that seemed pointless to two people who had known Jesse their entire lives, I slipped out of bed and headed down the hall to my brother's room.

As I turned the corner, ready to knock on his door, I nearly crashed into the wall.

“W-what?” I stammered, barely above a whisper. My mother and sister were right behind me, and as I stared at the empty wall, a wave of anguish crashed over me. I couldn’t even process their worried voices as they called my name, my mind consumed by shock and confusion. My mother scooped me up and placed me in the back seat of the car.

They say I was nearly catatonic, staring straight ahead the whole ride to the ER. Everything felt like a blur, memories flickering in and out like snapshots from a movie. The doctors ran tests, and the on-call therapist fired questions at me that I struggled to answer.

“Who is Jesse?” 

“My brother.” 

“How old is he?” 

“Thirteen.” 

“What happened before you woke up?” 

“I died.” 

“How did you die?” 

“I-I…”

And then I froze again. They kept me under observation for a few days, insisting that Jesse wasn’t real, that everything I had known before waking up was just a dream. Once I finally agreed to their explanation, they sent me home. I quickly learned to grieve in silence; the thought of returning to the hospital terrified me.

But I knew Jesse was real. At least, he had been real to me. Memories flooded my mind: him teaching me how to ride a bike, tying my shoes, standing up to the bigger kids. All of it felt like it had been ripped away in an instant.

I didn’t have a father—not really. Everyone has a father, but mine was a ghost. I knew nothing about him; I didn’t know if he was dead or just absent. My mother never spoke of him, and when I once dared to ask, her expression shifted into something I couldn’t quite place—neither sadness nor anger, but a look that seemed to echo dissociation. I dropped the subject then and there… forever.

Jesse had gladly taken on the role of my protective figure. He wasn’t an adult, but he had always seemed wise beyond his years. An old soul, my mother would say. Now, in his absence, I felt lost, a void where his presence had once been.

Over time, I began to believe that it had all been a vivid night terror. I mean, how could someone just blip out of existence? They say that time heals all wounds, and as I began to grow older, I slowly forgot about Jesse. 

It was still a sensitive topic. My sister tried to joke about it a couple of years down the road, but it caused a huge argument. I felt like I still had to defend the existence of someone I once loved. Regardless of his existence, I had loved him deeply. Just as deeply as my sister and mother. It became a secret fear of mine to lose someone close to me again. It was hard to sleep most nights because I feared I would dream up another life.

When I was fourteen years old, I asked my mom if I could go swimming with a few friends at a local lake. She told me no, and I was pissed. All the other kids were going, and I was the only one that had a loser mom. So I thought… 

That night, I snuck out my bedroom window after stuffing my bed with pillows to make it look like I was sleeping. I walked a few blocks away to one of the kid's houses and they gave me a ride after deciding to join. 

It was a fun night. We had some stolen beers that some kids brought from their parents or asked their older friends and siblings to buy. This was only the second time I had ever had alcohol. We were all swimming and throwing mud at each other when one of the girls shouted over everyone. “We should jump off that cliff!” as she pointed over everyone's heads to the cliff that stood about fifteen feet above the water. “I ain’t doing it,” one guy said with a scoff. 

I had had a few drinks at this point, and I probably would have gone skydiving if someone asked me to. “I’ll do it,” I said loudly as I slurred my words. A few of the kids cheered as I climbed out of the muddy lake water and began trudging up the hillside. I stumbled and tripped a few times before reaching the top of the cliff. 

I looked down at everyone and threw my fists up in the air like a champion. I screamed, “Wooooo!” before looking down at the water. It looked like it was miles away from where I stood. I took a deep breath and mumbled “Fuck it…” Before jumping off into the dark water. 

The fall felt so long, and somehow, I ended up flipping and I landed head-first into… something. I only remember the sound of my skull shattering before I felt every vertebra in my neck crunch before the lights went out. 

I don’t know how long it was black, but it felt like a deep, sharp sleep—an experience that’s hard to put into words for anyone who hasn’t been through it. It was as if time had folded in on itself, and I was lost in a void, weightless and serene.

When I finally woke up, I found myself lying on cold, dewy grass, the chill biting through my wet trunks. The world around me was quiet, almost eerily still. I sat up abruptly, gasping for air, my fingers instinctively reaching for the back of my neck. I frantically felt for any wounds, heart racing in panic, expecting to find something—anything—that signaled I was injured. But I was fine. Just freezing and disoriented, but alive.

As I looked around the empty field, my gaze settled on the remnants of a wild night—beer cans crumpled and empty bottles scattered like forgotten memories. I stood up slowly, my legs trembling from the cold and the shock of what had just ...

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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/TheDarkerMatters on 2024-10-13 04:32:04+00:00.

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The undergrowth and soil crunched with each step, as I took a deep breath and soaked in the natural beauty around me. It was a moderate 67 degrees Fahrenheit, birds were singing, and the sun was shining down as I walked along the Strawberry Creek Trail. In about a half mile, I'd go off the trail to the designated backwoods camping area. The bubbling of the stream and the whisper of wind in the branches all sounded like an old friend welcoming me home.

I had always considered Great Basin to be a hidden gem, it's the least visited National Park in the states. In a few hours of hiking, I had only encountered 2 other people and 1 dog. And when I started into the wilderness to camp, I knew for sure I would be alone for the whole week. Working as a high school teacher, I got my fill of people every damn week.

Don't get me wrong, I love my kids, but sometimes, between them, my coworkers, supervisors, and angry parents, I could just feel like receding into a shell of jaded mistrust. Coming out here and enjoying the silence and peace of nature always made me feel better. I saw the familiar bend in the trail and started my way off the side and towards Blue Ridge.

It was always my favorite spot to set up camp. A beautiful, peaceful meadow right under the shadow of Wheeler Peak. It was a strenuous hike, taking at least 2 days of nonstop marching from the parking area at the trailhead. But it was perfect, and it was always there for me, no matter what had happened in the 358 days leading up to this, I knew this week would be perfect.

As I crested the ridge, I looked down at the field of small, flowering bushes. It was exactly as I remembered, always even more beautiful as the setting sun painted it in beautiful red hues. That's when I saw a tent, parked exactly where I planned on setting up. It looked like a small, one-person tent, green canvas, with a cold fire pit in front. I felt frustrated, then sad, then frustrated at myself for these immature feelings.

It's not like you own the park, you can always find a different spot.

I knew that rationally, I should not be upset by this. But emotionally, it felt like I had been betrayed by a family member. I sighed, and trudged my way down to the field, setting down my pack at a spot about a thousand feet away.

Who knows, maybe this could be good for you, one person with a shared interest instead of the usual crowd at work.

I started making camp, trying my best to stay optimistic as I set up my tent and began to arrange a campfire. The sun had set completely by the time the fire was merrily crackling away. I ate a quick meal, just some canned soup I had brought. I'd be going fishing in the morning, but I always packed enough food just in case. I glanced over at the other tent as I chewed slowly. It was almost invisible in the waning moonlight.

I hadn't seen anyone enter or exit the tent for the whole 2 hours I'd been there. And the strangest part was there was no fire or even the glow of a lantern.

It must be on some all-day hike.

I tried to rationalize it, but something about the old, weathered tapestry hung in a sloppy triangle shape made me uneasy. I was being ridiculous, I knew. It was probably just a leftover from being bitter about having a neighbor in the first place. It made me think about back when I got ripped from my position in the middle school since they had fired a high-school English teacher. In a day, my workload and class size doubled. It was the same feeling of something familiar being changed suddenly.

I chuckled at myself, for being so emotionally brittle.

I need to relax and stop overthinking everything.

I turned my thoughts to the rest of my week's plans as I slipped into my sleeping bag, letting the gentle breeze lull me asleep. The moon was shining coldly when I woke up with a jolt. I tried to stay still, listening carefully as I heard another twig snap just a yard from my tent. I could make out a dark silhouette, the figure of a man, projected on the nylon of my shelter.

He seemed to be pacing like he was looking for something he had misplaced in the night. My heart began to pound as he slowly, quietly approached. As stealthy as I could manage with my heart bursting from my chest, I reached towards my pack, scared to death but still planning for the worst. Inside, I knew my Colt 1911 sat fully loaded, just in case. Call me paranoid, but with the amount of mountain lions out here in the Basin, I always came prepared.

"Hello."

The voice came from the figure, which now stood in arm's reach of my tent flap. It sounded tentative, stuttering, almost nervous. Like a child going to wake his mother when he had a stomachache. I held my breath, my trembling hand gripping the cold metal of my firearm.

"Are you ok?"

The voice came again, definitely masculine, but it sounded more confident now. Paternal in the way it expressed almost genuine concern. I don't know what possessed me to respond. I think it was reflexive, some innate Midwestern politeness.

"I'm fine, just leave me alone," I croaked, a hoarse reply barely quieter than a shout.

We sat there in silence for a few more seconds, then the figure slowly walked away. He stalked off in an almost dejected manner, his head downcast. I shuddered, the interaction surreal and terrifying. But as much as I would have loved to write it off as a dream, I knew I was awake, feeling the indent left on my palm from the vice grip on my pistol. When the sun rose a few hours later, I felt no relief.

I knew, deep down in my gut, the mysterious visitor was from the tent nearby. I resolved then and there to go and introduce myself. I was still trying to rationalize what had happened as perfectly normal. Maybe he was just socially awkward; maybe he was sleepwalking. Either way, I felt dread tie a knot in my stomach even tighter with each step as I approached.

The campsite was even more dilapidated than I initially thought. The tent was torn, with ragged holes in the side, and a small, black backpack lay haphazardly by the fire. Looking at the state of the charcoal, I'd estimate no one had used the fire for at least a few months. I hesitated, a few feet from the lean-to. I could see a lumpy, human shape in the sleeping bag inside through the torn patches on the side.

"He-hello?" I called out, my voice quaking with fear.

I sat in silence. Nothing budged, and it felt like even the birdsong of the waking world faded away. It was just me, and the sleeping form in front of me. His breathing seemed slow, the relaxed inhaling and exhaling rhythmic. With sudden concern for the well-being of my fellow camper, I resolved to try once more.

"Hey, are you ok?"

The moment the words left my lips, the figure sat up straight. His eyes stared forward, dark hair falling loosely in front of them. He was shirtless, his frame skeletal and pale. He smiled a vacant smile and began to nod slowly. I suddenly felt the way a mouse must feel right before the trap sprung and snapped its neck. I backed away slowly, then turned and walked back to my tent briskly.

I had made up my mind. I was moving camp, packing everything up, and heading another half-day south. It wasn't just fear, I also knew I wouldn't be able to relax and enjoy my vacation if I was watching over my shoulder the whole time. But things would need to be significantly worse than a slightly strange, emaciated night owl for me to give up the hard-earned trip.

I didn't even bother looking back at the stranger's camp as I made my way down towards Stella Lake. I wanted to take a break and get a quick swim in the ice-cold, snow-fed water. I was stiff after spending the whole night crouched, fondling my 1911. I made it to the lake by noon, dropped my pack on the rocky shore, and set my clothes inside it. I brought swim trunks for this exact reason, and I gasped as I settled into the gently lapping, frosty waves.

I saw a party of hikers on the opposite shore and gave a friendly wave. It made me feel safer, knowing that it wasn't just me and the freak I'd seen earlier. I swam a few laps until I began to shiver uncontrollably. I waded back to the shore where I had left my belongings, I grabbed the towel I set out and dried off.

It was just after 1 PM, so if I left now, I could make it to Spring Creek, where I planned to stay the rest of the trip. I opened my backpack and immediately noticed the absence of the clothes I had just put in. I dug through the pack frantically, laying every article out in a line on the ground. Everything else was exactly as it should be, I was especially relieved to find my gun, but my dirty laundry was gone. In the few minutes I spent in the lake, someone grabbed my shirt, pants, and underwear and ran off into the forest without me noticing.

And I bet I know exactly who did it.

The stranger from earlier must have followed me. Whatever fucked up reason he came to my tent, stole my clothes, I didn't want to know. At this point, I changed my plans completely. I'd work my way back towards the trailhead I had parked at. I'd cut around the base of Buck Mountain through the woods. There was a community trail there, not on any maps but well-worn.

I knew that it meant spending one more night in the park since it was a steep hike, but it was the most direct route back. I threw on my extra change of clothes and started a double-time pace up the gentle rocky slope into the forest. The whole time I was frantically looking at all ...

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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/MoeWanders on 2024-10-13 03:20:56+00:00.

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There's something I need to get off of my chest. A decade-old memory. One that’s always scratching at the back of my mind, like the twisted branches of a dead tree.

It’s a tale so harrowing that I’ve never told anyone about it.

This story is set in a distant, desolate place called the Weeping Woods.

You’ll first need to understand why I was in that unspeakable place, so far from proper civilization, with three of my friends.

We were social science students, all four of us. Obsessed with culture, history, myth, religion – the works. We were looking to take on an honors research project, and naturally, we wanted it to be something big, something original.

It was Jack, my closest friend, who suggested it. He was from Pennsylvania originally; specifically a town some fifty miles from the forest. He told us about the Weeping Woods.

He told us about the Woodwick Walker. 

Of the four of us, Tina was the folklore junkie, so naturally she snapped at the suggestion. “C’mon, guys,” she insisted, “we’d get to do a road trip, camping, and our project all in one. And I’d bet good money that none of the other groups are going to research anything as creepy or as intriguing as what Jack just told us about.”

I couldn’t argue with that, and I had no better suggestion. Marcus, our other friend, wasn’t as eager; spooky stuff really wasn’t his thing. But he saw the rest of us agreeing and sighed, “All right. Fine.”

So we packed Jack’s truck with everything we’d need to drive out of state for up to two weeks. Luckily for us, his Silverado was built like a goddamn dumptruck. It could fit the four of us, all our clothes, food, additional supplies, and – most importantly – our recording equipment.

Jack and I took turns driving, so the trek all the way up to Pennsylvania went by quick enough. We only stopped if we needed gas or the bathroom.

Along the way, Jack told us more about the legend. “The Weeping Woods are named as they are supposedly because those who escaped them were always in tears.”

“According to who?” I asked.

Jack shrugged. “That’s just the legend. As unlikely as it sounds, the tale took hold enough that no one from my town liked to go there.” He nudged his head at the rearview mirror. “The reason we brought the saws and towing cables are in case the road is stopped up. The dingy old track that leads to the woods is used so little that it often ends up blocked by fallen trees.”

Marcus’s breath hissed through his teeth. “We had to choose the scariest, most backwater place in the world, didn’t we?”

“Hell yes,” Tina replied. “You’re damn right we did.”

“So,” I asked, “why were people crying? I guess it had to do with the Woodwick Walker?”

“Sort of,” Jack said. “They were crying because they’d been forced to leave people behind. When asked about what had happened, they’d always have a hard time talking about it. A few gave vague descriptions of a man in the woods who was . . . part of the forest.”

“Oh,” Tina sighed, “I love this shit. Please, go on.”

Jack nodded. “The one bit of info that solidified over the decades as the rule of the woods is this: Do not look at his face. If – when – you encounter him . . . Do. Not. Look. Up.” His voice grew stiff as he explained. “Close your eyes. If you can’t do that, then stare at your feet. Nothing else.”

“Jack,” Marcus murmured, “you got awfully serious just now.”

Jack cleared his throat, eyes fixed on the road. “Did I?”

“You definitely did,” I agreed. 

“Sorry. I still bug out over it a little, even all these years later.”

“Have you been to the Weeping Woods?” I asked him.

“I’ve only been to their edge. To tell you the truth, this legend scared the living shit out of me as a kid. The area around the house I grew up in was forested, too, and I’d always imagine seeing him between the trees.”

I lifted an eyebrow. “If you’re damn-well traumatized by this thing, why’d you suggest it for the project?”

“The only way to overcome a fear is to face it,” he said.

“True enough,” Tina agreed.

I have to admit, the way Jack talked about it during that ride got to me. Even Tina was a little more reverent about it all after that. And Marcus was so spooked we were worried he’d jump ship and hitchhike back south.

But the four of us pressed on. The road meandered, rose, and fell until eventually the rainy, autumnal woodland of Pennsylvania appeared on the horizon. It was late autumn, so the pretty colors had given way for the most part to barren trees with only a smattering of rusty brown leaves left on them.

We drove through Jack’s town, which in itself was so backwoods that it was hard to imagine any place more far flung. There was one diner in the whole of the place, a local spot offering breakfast on the overcast morning we’d arrived. We knew we’d be living off our camp food for the next while, so we popped in there.

When we told the friendly waitress what we were up to, she stopped being nearly as nice. “You kids promise me one thing,” she said in low tones. “You keep your eyes to the ground in them woods.”

We laughed a little at that. She didn’t. 

I finished my food quickly, eager to get out of there. As we walked back to the truck, Jack said, “See? It’s a whole thing out here.”

“And you thought this was a good idea?” Marcus groaned.

“Relax, guys,” Jack went on. “It’s just a legend. A story.”

Tina said, “We should stop by here again when we’re done camping. A recorded interview with that waitress – or any other locals who might have something to say – would be great for the project.”

“Hell,” I said, “we ought to record an interview with Jack. He’s got plenty to say, too.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Jack sighed as he thumped his door shut. “Get in. We’re losing daylight.”

“Just how far do we have to go?” I asked.

“Twenty, maybe thirty miles,” Jack explained. “No one actually knows how far the Weeping Woods are. The road there is kinda . . .”

“‘Kinda’ what?” Marcus prodded.

“It’s kinda weird. You’ll see.”

He wasn’t kidding. Even the turn onto the road was decrepit: the pavement of the highway gave way to mulchy dirt, so littered with branches and fallen leaves that only Jack’s trained eye could have spotted it.

The road itself was derelict, a vestige of some bygone era. The way it veered and twisted was illogical; oftentimes we felt like we were turned all the way around and going back towards the highway. And the whole way, the only real indication that we were still on the road was the tall, gnarled trees lining the track.

After a few minutes of winding through, I pointed at the compass on the Silverado’s dashboard display. “We’ve turned this way and that, yet the compass has read northwest the whole time.”

Jack gave a tentative nod. “The road leads northwest, into the Weeping Woods. No matter what.”

Tina said, “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“I told you it’d be weird, didn’t I?” Jack had an edge of irritability to him now – in his voice, in the knit of his brow.

“You good, bro?” I gently said.

“Sorry,” he sighed. “My bad, guys. This road gives me the creeps, is all. I’ll chill.”

It was just then that we rounded a dense thicket of trees and saw a massive fallen log blocking the road.

“Perfect,” Marcus groaned.

Jack cursed under his breath, his eyes darting left and right, peering through the trees.

I raised my hands. “Hey now. We’ve got the tools to deal with this. No biggie. I’ll take care of it.”

Tina shuffled about before raising her DSLR camera. “Marcus and I will take a few pictures while you deal with it. And maybe a video or two.” She rolled down her window.

“Sounds good!” I unbuckled my seatbelt, opened my door, and jumped out. The ground I fell onto would have been soft and inviting if not for the thick tree root that jabbed into the sole of my foot. 

As Jack clicked the ignition and shut the Silverado’s engine down, the first thing I noticed in the chilly autumn evening was the silence.

A deep, encompassing quiet lay over the road, broken only by the hissing of the wind as it bothered the dark leaves that had yet to fall. “Damn,” I whispered to myself, not entirely certain why I felt the need to keep my voice down. A dense fog had descended on the woodland; I supposed that was dampening the forest’s sounds.

As I walked to the back of the truck, Jack stepped out and joined me. I told him, “I don’t mind handling this on my own, you know.”

He shook his head. “Nah. I’ll help you. It’s all good.”

I nodded, though with how shifty he was being, I almost wished he’d have just stayed in the damn truck. In any case, we grabbed a couple saws and walked over to the log.

It was the corpse of a huge tree, and several of its thickest limbs were tangled with other still-living trees at the edge of the road. I gestured toward those limbs, then looked at Jack. “What do you think?”

“Yeah. We saw off the big arms. The jammed ones. Then we tow the log once it’s loose.”

Nodding, I got started. Both Jack and I went hard; the sky was dimming, though it wasn’t even late into the afternoon. The grinding and zipping of our saws seemed to violate the serenity of the forest, its near-perfect silence spoiled by the sounds of men. It was awfully uncomfortable, both because of the disturbance, and because getting through those limbs was a ton of work.

“We should have brought a friggin’ chainsaw,” I chuckled.

“Heh,” Jack murmured in reply.

“It’s weird,” I called over the scraping of our saws, “the way it feels like it’s almost evening. It’s overc...

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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/BlairDaniels on 2024-10-13 03:04:51+00:00.

---

We’d given up our dream of ever owning a house long ago.

We’d been priced out post-covid, plain and simple. I’d accepted our fate—we’d be renting a three-bedroom ranch from some old guy named Leonard that measured the nicks in the wall with a micrometer. We’d keep forking over cash every month, year after year, always treading water, in danger of drowning at any time.

But then we found 27 Hillside Lane, and all of that changed.

It was priced way below market value. I should’ve known then there was something wrong with it—water damage. Fire damage. Wasps in the walls. Maybe even a ghost or two. But the house passed inspection, and it was now or never.

We bought the house.

It was the biggest mistake of our lives.

*******

I first noticed it when I was cooking dinner on Day 4 in the new house.

As I lay breaded chicken into the oil, cursing out my picky kids who would only eat the most time-intensive of meals, I felt a soft breeze on my arm.

I dismissed it—until I turned around felt it a second time, across the middle of my back. Like someone was reaching out and caressing me.

I held my hands out and closed my eyes, focusing on the feeling. But there was no denying it—there was definitely a breeze.

I checked the vent-hood-thing—something our previous kitchen didn’t have, something that was still utterly perplexing to me. “Eric! Did you turn the vent on?”

“I don’t think so. Why?”

“I feel a breeze.”

It couldn’t be the heating system—it was an old house, with baseboard heat and unit air conditioners, built around the 1930s. The real estate agent never told us the exact year, and the Trulia listing played that nasty trick where someone had entered the year it was renovated as the year it was built.

“Looks like it’s off,” Eric said, checking the hood.

“Do you feel it, though?”

He stood still in front of me, concentrating. “Yeah, I guess I do,” he said, finally.

So that was it, then. We’d bought a drafty old house with shit insulation. Of course, there had to be somethingwrong. We’d bought the house in September, when it was still warm; now, well into October, we were getting those bone-cold nights where the air just pulls the warmth out of your skin.

We were going to be in for a terrible winter—and terrible heating bills—if this was really how drafty the house was.

Except.

Except the breeze didn’t feel cold.

It almost felt… warm?

The chicken was starting to burn. I ran over and grabbed it out of the oil with tongs. “Ava! Hayden! Dinner!”

As I picked off the burnt pieces of breading, I forgot all about it.

***

That night I couldn’t sleep, because I went down what I call the “OCD spiral of death.”

When I find that one thing wrong, and convince myself someone’s going to die, or we’re all going to die, or the world’s going to implode.

Here’s how mine started: I googled random breeze in house, and one of the results talked about a gas leak.

I had replayed Ava and Hayden’s funerals in my head three times before I picked up the phone and called the gas company. The kids were already asleep, and it was after hours, but I didn’t care.

I would not be sleeping until I was sure the house was safe.

***

The guy that rang the doorbell was a young, spindly guy of maybe 22. He wandered in, carrying a heavy toolbox. Eric had already gone back to bed, thoroughly annoyed that I’d called anyone in the first place. You’re overreacting. We’re not going to die. Do it in the morning. Normally, I’d snipe back at him, but in the interest of time I simply ignored him.

“So where do you feel the wind?” the young guy asked, getting set up.

“The kitchen.”

He pulled out some sort of meter. It let out a beep. He roamed around the room, then went upstairs, and down. Pulled out another meter and did the same thing. “No gas leak,” he told me, as he set down the meter, pulled out his phone, and shot off a text to someone.

I hope he knows what he’s talking about.

“But everything else looks normal?” I pressed.

“Uh, oh yeah, your CO2 levels are a little high. How many people you got living here?”

“Four.”

“Really? Just four? Any pets?”

“No.”

“I guess it’s poor ventilation, or something. Everything else is normal though. Radon, natural gas, VOCs…”

He started telling me how I could buy an air quality meter on Amazon, but I wasn’t listening. Because I felt it again. The breeze. It was against the nape of my neck, against my ears and my cheeks. Fluttering all the little flyaways that had escaped my ponytail.

And I realized something.

The breeze was changing direction.

The little hairs on the nape of my neck fluttered one way. Then, a few seconds later, they fluttered the otherway.

What the hell?

“Do you feel it? Right now? The breeze?”

“Uh… yeah, I do feel it, actually.”

“Does it seem to be going… opposite directions? Like in, out, in, out…” I trailed off, swallowing. “Like someone’s right here, breathing?”

He stared at me.

Then he lowered his voice. “Did the real estate agent tell you what happened in this house?”

My throat went dry. “No.”

“The family that lived here before you,” he said, taking in a breath. “Found dead. All four of them. Hanging from that tree outside.” He pointed towards the backyard.

My stomach fell through the floor.

“No one would buy the house, because everyone thought it was haunted. That’s why it was so cheap.”

I opened my mouth, but I couldn’t say a word. I choked on air.

And then—

The guy let out a wheezing laugh.

“I’m just playing with you!”

I felt the heat rise to my cheeks.

“Sorry. Wait, really, I’m sorry. You’re not going to report me to my boss or something, are you?”

I forced a smile. “No. It’s fine.”

Damn kids.

“Okay. Thanks, thanks so much.” He packed up. “So you’re all good, right?”

I nodded. “Thanks for coming out so late.”

He stepped out into the darkness.

I slammed the door, my whole body shaking.

***

Breathing.

That’s really what it felt like.

It wasn’t all the time. Sometimes I couldn’t feel it. Sometimes I could feel it, powerfully.

I ended up taking the guys’ suggestion and buying an air quality meter. He was right—the CO2 levels werereally high. So I opened some windows. To ventilate, and because it was a lot less disturbing when the windows were open.

As it turned out, however—the breeze was far from the only thing wrong with this house.

On Tuesday afternoon, I decided to do some unpacking while Eric was at work and the kids were at school. I was feeling frustrated, both with my work (I was editing photos after one of my family photo sessions) and because it seemed like I’d misplaced my engagement ring for the umpteenth time.

Besides—the house was really bothering me. Everything felt too blank, too sterile. It wasn’t ours yet, without the ceramic red chicken in the kitchen, or the collage of family photos on the wall, or my photo of an autumn forest hanging in the foyer.

So I got out the studfinder, some nails, and got to work.

The studfinder was one of those magnetic ones that you hang from a string, to find the nails in the studs, so I’d be nailing into wood rather than flimsy drywall. So there I stood, swinging the studfinder back and forth on a piece of tye-dyed yarn in front of the wall, like some kind of weirdo.

I waited to feel a tug, waited for it to catch.

Nothing happened.

I stood there for fifteen minutes, repositioning the studfinder, walking closer and further away, holding it at an angle, swinging it fast and slow.

The studfinder never found a nail.

Am I using it wrong? But I’d hung up stuff a few times before. I never had this much trouble.

I tried different rooms, but it never caught on anything. I finally gave up. Instead, I went to get the mail, before the kids got home and everything descended into chaos.

When I turned around, I looked at the house—really looked at it. It was an odd-looking house, that much was true: a small Victorian, scalloped shingles painted robin’s-egg blue, with stark white trim. A porch with engraved support columns, bare except for an old rocking chair the previous owners had left. A turret in the west corner, with a little spire that poked into the deep blue September sky.

The turret was just a façade, sort of. It was just a small outpocketing in the living room, like a bay window, almost. All of the turret that extended taller than the height of the house was just part of the attic. People always picture some sort of medieval tower with spiraling stairs—I know I did—but it isn’t true.

I headed back inside, sifting through the mail as I went. But when I got to the front door, I stopped dead.

I was locked out.

“For fuck’s sake,” I said under my breath.

I tried the door a few more times. Then I went around the back, but that door was locked, too. I sighed and stared up at the old house.

Eric wouldn’t be home for a few hours. Even if he could leave work early, I couldn’t text him—I didn’t have my phone.

As I paced around the house a second time, I noticed one of the windows was open in the living room. Of course. I’d left them open to ventilate! I started popping the screen out. The yard sloped gently back, though, so the opening was actually a few feet higher than a normal first story window.

Which would make getting in a challenge.

I set the screen against the side of the house and started to pull myself up. Making a complete fool of myself, I hung on for dear life and scrabbled to swing a leg over the windowsill.

I slipped and fell into t...

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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Prudent-Dig-9812 on 2024-10-12 22:38:09+00:00.

---

Hey guys. Brennan here again - here to update you all on the roommate situation. 

If you haven't read my first post, you can find it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/1fyk2qj/i\_found\_something\_really\_weird\_in\_my\_roommates/.

It’s been a long few days, and a lot has happened. I needed some time to process it all before I wrote this up, so sorry for the delay. I know I was rambling a little last time, but I tried to get my thoughts more in order before posting tonight.

First of all, I appreciated the advice on what I should do next. The consensus was that I needed to talk to Aldous directly about the symbol and what started happening after I saw it. Honestly, I didn’t love the idea. I still worried I was somehow imagining it all, and that he’d think I was absolutely insane if I told him everything. 

But in the end, after a second day of stress and random bouts of nausea, I decided to go for it. What the hell, maybe he really needed the place to stay too and wouldn’t mind living with a possible “paranoid schizophrenic,” as some in the comments of my last post suggested. On Wednesday night, when Aldous came out of his room to grab an apple and a cup of ramen, I stopped him and said I needed to ask him something.

The whole day, I had tried to come up with the best way of phrasing things to sound as sane as possible. But in the end I chickened out and barely managed to say, “Hey, I saw a drawing in your room, and now I feel sick whenever I remember it. Do you know anything about that?”

He looked at me strangely. “That’s odd,” he said. “What was it?”

“I don’t know,” I told him. “It’s a lot worse if I intentionally think about it. Am I losing my mind or is something weird going on here?”

“I don’t think you’re losing your mind,” Aldous said. “But I wouldn’t worry about it too much - I’m sure it’s just a passing thing. I’ll be sure not to leave anything lying around that might bother you in the future.” He went to stand up. “I’m very sorry you haven’t been feeling well. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.” He picked up his food and was about to go back to his room. 

“There’s one more thing, actually,” I put in quickly. He stopped and looked back at me. “Ever since I saw the symbol, I’ve also had this really weird feeling. Like someone’s watching me. It comes and goes, but when I feel it, it’s really strong. It’s freaking me out.”

Aldous’s face took on an expression I had never seen on it before. He looked pale, way beyond his normal fair skin tone. He was so obviously alarmed that I immediately started feeling panicked as well. 

“Oh,” was all he said. He sat back down, leaving the food on the table. 

“So you do know what’s causing all this!” I said nervously, but getting a little angry, too. 

“Not exactly,” Aldous said. “But I have an idea.” He sighed, his hands fidgeting in his lap. “I never thought for a second you could get involved in this,” he said, almost to himself.

“Involved in what?” I demanded. “What are you actually doing in there all day and night?”

“Mostly research,” he said. “Like I told you. And it is related to school, in a way. I’ve been conferring with one of my professors for recommendations on how to find the right books. He just doesn’t know what I’m using them for.”

“Which is…?”

“Alchemy,” he said. In the last few days, I had actually looked up and been reading about alchemy, so now I had a better idea of what he might be talking about. 

“But that stuff is fake,” I said. “People didn’t know much about chemistry, but they tried mixing things together to see what they could make. Plus all the magic stuff about turning things into gold and potions of immortality. You can’t actually be trying something like that.”

“You’re not wrong,” Aldous agreed. “Alchemy, as it is known to the world at large, is mostly nonsense. But you can use certain arcane methods to create substances with anomalous properties, some of which are very desirable.”

What does that even mean? I wanted to ask. But for some reason I found myself asking, “Such as…?”

“Follow me,” he said, walking toward his room. 

I stood up but didn’t follow. “I’m not going back in there again.” I shuddered at the thought of seeing the paper with the symbol again.

“I think I know which symbol you saw,” he said quietly. “It’s put away now.”

“Fine,” I said, “but this had better explain everything.” By now, I was starting to think I really wasn’t the crazy one here, but I couldn’t resist hearing the full story.

He nodded. Upon stepping into his room, I found it mostly unchanged. But I did notice that in the bulb at the far right of the chemistry set, there was a thin layer of watery, gold-tinted liquid on the bottom. I also noticed that, in one corner of the room, all the plants seemed to be dying, as if Aldous had been forgetting to water them. He tapped me on the shoulder to direct my gaze back to the chemistry… alchemy… set.

“Here,” he said, picking up the bulb with the golden water, “is what I have to show for my work so far.”

“What is that?” I asked. “Some kind of potion?”

“Elixir,” he corrected, giving it a swirl. I watched a couple of minuscule goldish flecks dissolve into the liquid as it spun against the walls of the bottle.

“What does it- What does it supposedly do?” I asked skeptically.

“Well,” he sighed. “I was going to wait until this weekend, when I’d have enough to give it a proper trial, but if you must know…” He walked over to the sickly plants and picked up one of the pots. The plant was drooping all over, and most of the leaves had started to turn brown at the edges. “It’ll have to be absorbed to do anything,” he said, picking up a watering can. “Ideally, I’d just mix in a few drops with the water, to see how it works and figure out a rough ‘dose.’ But now that you’re in this too, you at least deserve to see some proof of what I’m working toward.” 

He took an eyedropper from a stand near the makeshift lab. Very carefully, he drew up a bit of the “elixir” from the bulb and put a single drop onto the still-green end of one of the browned, curling leaves. After a few seconds, the liquid seemed to start seeping down into the leaf.

“What’s it doing?” I asked.

“Give it a moment. It’s not instantaneous.” 

I obeyed, watching with bated breath. The liquid disappeared completely into the leaf. For a few seconds, nothing happened. But then I could see that very slowly, the leaf was turning green again. The green, healthy color seemed to be moving up through the brown and replacing it, or maybe something was flowing into the brown part that made it plump up with life and substance again. Before my eyes, the whole leaf became completely restored.

I looked at Aldous in shock. “How is that even possible?”

“It’s too complicated to explain it all right now.” He set the plant back with the others. He picked up what looked like a small glass watering can and poured water into it from a jug before putting three drops of the elixir into it. “What’s important to know is that there is more out there than pure science can currently explain. Certain icons and symbols exert effects on the environment around them. Certain properties can be transferred from one object to another or created using particular symbols and materials. What I’m trying to do here is create a substance with the ability to heal illness and wounds.”

“And it works?” I asked, barely able to believe what I had seen.

“It’s too soon to say,” he answered. “I’ve only tested it on plants so far. Before, I poured it directly into the dirt, and in a few days the plant had not only healed but also grown rapidly.” He pointed to another plant in the room, this one vibrant and lush with new shoots. “But that used up all of the elixir I had managed to distill so far. It’s difficult and time-consuming to make, so I don’t want to waste it. Hopefully I’ll be able to find out how much is actually needed at a time for simple restoration of usual health.” He gestured to the watering can, which was now tinted a very pale yellow.

I thought it all over for a minute. “But what does this have to do with what’s happening to me?” I finally asked.

The hopeful look disappeared from Aldous’s eyes. “This particular alchemical process requires fuel. Not like heat or oil, but a sort of… metaphysical kind.” His eyes darted over to his desk, toward a particular large book in a stack on the corner. “The symbol you saw - if it’s the one I think it is, and I feel pretty sure of that - allows one to tap into a current of this power. But it’s not a totally safe method. At least, not for the person who uses it.” 

He looked back at me now. “I’m not a hundred percent sure why the symbol has made you so nauseous. If I had to guess, it’s because you were a virgin when you first saw it.”

“A WHAT?” I demanded.

Aldous laughed nervously. “My apologies. That’s the term that was used in the old days for those who had never looked into a symbol of power before. They really should have chosen a better word. But people still say it nowadays, unfortunately.”

“Who? What ‘people’?”

“Listen,” he said, a bit sternly, “that’s not important right now. What matters is that I used this particular symbol to tap into a fuel supply, so to speak. And it’s working, it is. But in the process,” he said, slowly, “the sou...

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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Coney-IslandQueen on 2024-10-12 22:02:24+00:00.

---

It was early August in Marren, and the town was still half asleep, but I was awake, and as usual, I was thinking about the dead. I lay belly up in front of a rusting fan doing its decrepit best to fight off the heat. The fan turned painfully slowly, a rickety side to side, like a geriatric old woman crossing the road one agonising, shuffling, step at a time. The creak of the blades rotating cut through all the dead faces crawling around in my head. I thought about throwing it out of the window, ending its suffering, but it was too hot to sacrifice even the tiny breeze it was giving me. I had my legs kicked above my head, resting on the wall that was covered from top to bottom in time-stained polaroids, like a wallpaper print of all the people I loved the most. I slept each night with them watching over me. My celluloid guardian angels, forever watching so I wouldn’t forget their faces. Sweat pooled in my collar bones, and even though the blinds were closed, the sun was relentless as it fought its way through the gaps. 

Chrissy came in, footsteps loud and so familiar I didn’t need to look to see if it was her because I knew her from the soles up. From sole to soul, was the way it felt. She threw herself down onto my bed like she had so many times before, shape familiar as my own on the blankets. Her bright pink hair fanned out from her temples like a sunset in late June, a soft and beautiful chemical smear, carrying the whole summer sky on her head. 

“Fuck me up the ass and call me Jesus, but it’s hot” she said, throwing her legs up to join mine. Her dusty combat boots hovered against the polaroid wall. Her right boot came to rest in front of a photo of us on the first day of high school. Eyes bright, middle fingers in matching chipped purple polish flipped up at the camera, arms slung around each other. Her left boot fell against a polaroid of me doing a handstand she’d taken at the beach, the year her brother Travis got his license. We spent all Spring just driving out of town as fast as Travis’s truck would go, Chrissy screaming at him to go faster, shaking his headrest, all of us pretending we’d never heard of shitty little place called Marren as the streets disappeared behind the tires in a cloud of dust. 

“Well then Jesus, did you bring any lube?” I said. Chrissy grinned and stuck out her tongue as a reply, too lazy in the heat to think of a comeback. We lolled our heads and let them hang off the mattress. The room was now upside down, but Chrissy was still the right way up. That was how things often seemed these days. 

“It’s gonna happen again Sadie.” She said, with her eyes closed. The heat pressed in, and outside I could hear a sprinkler starting up. Summer lazed on through the morning, but I was now wide awake, and the dead were loud in my head. Again, again, again.

“Ok.” I sat up. That was all there was to say. No point in questioning the inevitable. “When and where?” 

“Don’t know that yet. Don’t even know his name yet. He’s getting hungry.” Her forehead creased. “He’s been dreaming about her.” She shook her head. “Dreamin’ real bad dreams.”

“Just tell me what to do. Where to be. We’ll stop him.” I said. I looked down at her, still the only right thing up in the room. “We always do.” I lay back down. 

“I know.” She said, our legs side by side above our heads almost touching, like we were joined at the hip, grown from the same bones. “But I think you’ll have to kill him.” 

I side-eyed her, taking her in as she swore at the fan, panting like a dog in the summer heat. I looked at the constellation of freckles across the bridge of her nose, and the small silver bar through her right eyebrow that flashed like a star when it caught the light. Her eyeshadow was dark, smudged like she’d slept in it, and though right now her eyes were closed, I knew them so well that I knew when they opened, they would be deep green like the trees in spring, right before they burst with flower blooms. 

I looked at the gaping hole where her jawbone should be on the left side of her face. I could see the rips through the layers of sinew and skin to her cracked teeth, a jagged half moon slicing across her cheek, putting her face in eclipse. The soft curve of her eye socket hung just below her forest green eye. There was loose cartilage hanging round the crush of her brow bone, poking through sharp and white. I looked at the blood that floats gently in small looping tendrils just above the surface of where her skull is caved in. Chrissy is my best friend, and I never get tired of looking at her face. 

I guess I should also mention that Chrissy is dead. 

To be specific, Chrissy is dead because when we were sixteen years old, a man hunted her down through the woods, bashed her head in with a rock and left her to die after he was done with her body. Chrissy has been dead for 5 years 11 months and 22 days if we’re being really specific. 

I started seeing her two weeks after she died. At first, I thought the psych ward was calling my name, grief finally pulling me all the way under. But I’m not crazy, I swear. I’m not lying either. The things I’ve done are very, very real. 

Chrissy may be dead, but I can’t imagine life without her. But let me go back a little, to before that sweltering morning in my room in August, before I had to hunt down and kill a hungry man I would later find out was named Amos Everett. Before all the bad, I want to talk about all the good. All the love. There’s always love, and I forget about it sometimes, but it was there, and it’s still here. I carry it. 

When we met, I was five, and Chrissy was five. I had blue eyes like a crayola sky and she had green, like apples and grass and four leaf lucky clovers. We loved playing tag in the woods, and daisy chains and ghost stories and glitter. We loved the horses that lived in the field behind the trailer park, would spend hours chasing after them behind the chain link fences, wishing we could keep up, kicking up clouds of dust and grass with our battered sneakers. We loved stealing gummy worms from the gas station and hiding out in the magnolia trees to share our stolen goods, sun-melted sugar on our hands the only evidence left behind. When I fell down, Chrissy would be there, to swipe one curious finger through the bloody scrape on my knee before carefully pressing a pink bandaid on top, pulling me back up with both hands, wiping my eyes and spinning us in circles over and over until I stopped crying and started laughing instead. 

When I was seven, Chrissy was seven. We got the training wheels on our bikes off on the same day, out in the yard practicing with her older siblings and her cousins, getting rides to school with them while my mom was in and our of the hospital. Chrissy’s bike was hand-me-down blue with flames painted up the sides by her Dad, and she rode so fast it was like like she was burning up the sidewalks when she pedalled past in a blur of sugar and blonde hair. My bike was the colour of dirt, with butterfly stickers covering up the rust on the handlebars, slapped on with careful application by Chrissy after the other kids laughed at me for my run down ride.

When Chrissy was eight, I was eight. She could run faster than any of the boys in our grade, and I was never far behind, always following on her heels, kicking up dust like a shadow. Sometimes she’d slow her pace a little so we could run side by side in the sun in our white tube socks, matching our strides like we were twins made of muscle and bone. But sometimes there was something in her that just needed to run, and I grew used to the sight of her back as she left me behind, left everything behind, like if she just ran fast enough she would grow wings from her shoulder blades and fly away. She would braid my hair for me on the playground just like her sister Luanna taught her, so we could match, her with blue ribbons and mine with red. We’d listen to anything on her older sister’s busted CD player as long as it was loud, Britney Spears and Sum 41, Tupac and the Backstreet Boys, Avril Lavigne and Willie Nelson, eating peach rings while her mama painted our nails sat on the carpet with us cross-legged, playing we were grown up at the salon. I still slept with a nightlight at home, but whenever I stayed over at Chrissy’s when my mom was getting really bad, the dark in her room didn’t bother me so bad. 

When Chrissy was 10, I was 10. I was taller now, and she was mad about it. Chrissy loved beanie babies, and firing her Travis’s BB gun at Bud cans on their back porch while I watched and screamed and cheered her on like a little animal. I loved shiny purple eyeshadow and pretending we were mermaids at the community pool in the summer, and learning dance routines off MTV, which we would practice for hours in my room. We would stay up all night watching the scariest horror movies her Daddy had on VHS, and scream our lungs out at every jump scare and then laugh so hard at each other for being scared we almost pissed our pants. But I was never really scared, when I was with her. On Chrissy’s tenth birthday we stole two of her mama’s Newports and smoked them in secret like we were lighting birthday candles, giggling and choking on the spearmint smoke, side by side crouched in the long grass with our knees touching. We felt like we were fully grown in our denim cutoffs underneath that yawning sky, studded with stars like spilled glitter. 

When I was thirteen, Chrissy was th...

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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/NotJustSomeNumbers on 2024-10-12 21:22:25+00:00.

---

It all started with a small nip at my ankle in the middle of the night.

I was half asleep when the pain came. I jumped at the small sting but didn’t stop moving. I needed to go to the washroom. Nothing else mattered at the moment. After finishing my task, I paused in the well-lit room to glance at my ankle. I wet down a cloth to clean away a small bit of blood. At the time I assumed my ankle had caught on the edge of my bed, or the lid of a storage bin under it. I never would have guessed what actually happened that night or how much danger I was in.

I work three jobs at the moment: one full-time job, one part-time, and another, which I only get three hours on Sunday. I barely have enough time to get from one job to another, let alone relax. My main goal is to save up, buy a house, and retire early. It’s depressing that this simple dream is nearly impossible for people my age.

I’m currently renting a room in a small three-floor condo. There were three of us, but the one roommate moved out. Our landlord wants to redo the basement to turn it into another space to rent. I need to find a new place before that happens. I’m barely sleeping as is. I don’t think I could handle more people in this place if they were all like Ryan.

I’ve had a suspicion that Ryan pays his rent by less than legal means. In this economy, you need to do what you need to cover your bills. I disliked him because he committed every bad roommate sin.

He was loud at night. Smoked in his room. Ate food that wasn’t his. Brought friends over on the weekends and let them stay for days. And sometimes didn’t flush. That was what bothered me the most. I hated going all day downstairs at night to use the small washroom to avoid the mess Ryan left behind. Of course, I told my landlord all this, but he hasn’t done anything about it aside from bothering Ryan to not smoke in the house.

I was exhausted from dealing with too many hours at work and a terrible roommate. Even so, I should have taken some events more seriously.

It was two in the morning I got home from work. Collapsing in bed I was ready to pass out before I got ready for another shift.

Some scratching kept me awake. What was Ryan doing? Did he get a pet while I was gone? Raising my tired head, I carefully listened. The scratching sound wasn’t coming from his room but nearby. I realized it came from under my bed.

Did we have mice? That would be annoying. I got out of bed and grabbed my phone for a flashlight. An odd sound came as if something large bumped into the bottom of the bed frame. My heart jumped as I glanced around expecting to see a wild animal.

Nothing. There was a lack of dust bunnies even though I haven’t cleaned recently. One of my storage bins had been slightly moved. I didn’t see any other traces of an animal or the cause of the scratching noise. I did hear Ryan start blasting God-awful music in his room.

Sighing, I got up to go down the hallway. His bedroom door was right across from mine. When our doors were open, you could see our beds from the hallway. I pounded on his door asking him to keep it down.

The music was lowered but not turned off. His excuse was he didn’t know I was home. He was still making some noise but I was able to fall asleep. I wasn’t expecting to see Ryan that morning because he normally crawled out of bed after I left for work. I saw him pacing the kitchen waiting for me agitated.

“Dude, I know you don’t like me but you can’t take my stuff.” He said sounding annoyed.

He looked like he didn’t sleep. That was the only way he would be up around this time.

“What are you talking about?” I said wondering if I used the last of his condiments by accident.

“Come on, don’t be like that. All of my socks are missing and three bags of my product are gone.”

I raised an eyebrow. Who would want his disgusting unwashed socks? I shook my head figuring he just misplaced them.

“Have you checked your entire room? Maybe it’s-” I started but he cut me off.

“I know you need the money but I have customers waiting on that stuff.” He was getting angry which was not how I wanted to start my day.

“Who would I sell your weed to? And it’s legal now. Why would anyone get it from me? I don’t have the connections you do to start with. And I don’t even want to look at your dirty laundry let alone touch it.” I shrugged.

He narrowed his eyes at me letting the thought run through his head. He saw me as too much of a nerd to have friends who did cool things like smoking his product. I had been the only person in the house since he noticed it was missing. Unless it was in his room somewhere, he didn’t understand where his things went off to.

“I don’t want to accuse your friends, but would any of them copy your key and take this stuff as a prank?”

I didn’t know how often Ryan left the house. Then again, he slept like the dead so someone could walk right into his room and take anything while he was passed out. This answer made more sense to him than his roommate suddenly stealing from him.

“Maybe. But if I find out it’s you there will be hell to pay.” He threatened.

I didn’t take him seriously. After all, I wasn’t stealing his stuff. We requested to get our locks changed and I hoped that would put an end to all of this.

A few days later Ryan’s product appeared in the middle of the hallway the bags ripped open. I saw it the moment he was coming out of his room to use the washroom. I just got home. He saw me in my uniform and didn’t see any traces of his premium weed on my clothing. So, I was in the clear. We spent the next hour making sure there wasn’t an animal living in the condo and all the entrances were sealed. If we heard noises, we would need to call a pest control company to deal with it.

I really thought we had figured it out. It was either an animal we hadn’t seen or one of his friends. Another week went by. Every day Ryan seemed to get more and more agitated. None of my things went missing or were tampered with. I didn’t own much. The few storage bins kept winter clothing because I didn’t have a dresser. All my dirty laundry went into a basket and I kept my clean stuff in another basket. Aside from some important papers and books, I didn’t have anything of importance in my room for someone to mess with. No wonder they went to Ryan’s room first. It was cluttered with useless high-end items. Countless never worn shoes. So many LED lights and a layer of clothing collecting dust on his floor. How did he even notice his socks were missing in that mess?

I had been hearing scratches at night, but when I turned on the lights it stopped. I thought I was just hearing things because we found no traces of our mystery animal.

It all came to a head during one of my rare nights off and when a storm hit. I couldn’t work even if I had a shift. Powerful winds with heavy rain kept most people off the road. Thunder rumbled outside. The power went out leaving the only light the constant flashes of the storm. I was worried about the food in the fridge. For once I was glad Ryan had eaten most of it. I made a sandwich before the lunch meat got too warm and headed upstairs only to be confronted by my roommate.

He was standing in the middle of the hallway holding his phone to use as a flashlight. I had gotten a battery-powered lantern in case the power went out like tonight.

“What’s up?” I asked him.

A pressure started behind my eyes. My body knew this encounter would end in a migraine.

“Where is all my stuff?? My phone cords are gone. More socks. Sheets, blankets. I had a bunch of gold chains. I put a camera in my room but I don’t know how you messed that up too.”

That was odd. He hadn’t had any friends over since the locks were changed. I wasn’t taking his stuff, so where was it going?

“You’ve cleaned your room?” I suggested.

He slapped my food out of my hand which I wasn’t pleased by. He stomped a foot and gestured towards his door.

“It’s a small ass room! Where do you think it’s hiding?!” He shot back.

This time I put my foot down as well.

“I can smell your mess from here! You don’t clean at all! Your room is a biohazard and I have no IDEA how you live in that. God, when was the last time you even showered?”

On top of all my hours, I was the only person who cleaned the common areas. Ryan created a mess, and never help with chores. He only cleaned out the fridge. He never stole my body wash though because he never baths. He must be misplacing his stuff because no one would want it because of the smell.

“That has nothing to do with anything! I pay for my room and I can do whatever I want with it! My friends aren’t taking my shit, and if you claim you’re not, then what? Some little gremlin shows up in the middle of the night to take it?”

His face was red from anger and he raised his cellphone blinding me for a second.

“Christ, and can you get rid of that tacky Halloween decoration under your bed? It scares the shit out of me every time I go piss in the middle of the night.”

I frowned. What was he talking about? I turned my head to follow his eyes. My adjusting to the darkness. I normally kept my bedroom door open when I wasn’t at home or sleeping. An unfamiliar white shape was under my bed squished between it and the floor. It must be what Ryan had been seeing the past few weeks. My heart started to race in fear and I found myself taking a few steps backwards until Ryan was in front of me.

“That’...

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This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/CallMeStarr on 2024-10-12 12:00:32+00:00.

---

Mara was cute when we first got her. She still is. But damn. There are things about her I wish weren’t true. She was six months old when we got her, and cute as a button. She’s a black cat, with bright yellow eyes and a pouty little face. Mostly, she’s friendly. She’ll sit on your lap and demand chin scratches or food. Sometimes both. We called her Mara. Not sure why, but the name stuck.

The trouble started the night before Halloween. Devil's Night. I was eleven. For my costume, I wanted to be Catgirl, so Mom set about making an elaborate costume. I looked adorable, wearing that black and white maid dress, long winding whiskers and fuzzy little ears. I loved it so much that I wore it to school the day before Halloween, to try it out. Kids teased, but I didn't care. When I got home from school, my cat was going crazy, which was odd. Mara was generally well-behaved.

“What is it, Mara?” I asked, still wearing my costume.

When I reached down to pick her up, Mara hissed, and swiped at me. Her eyes, tiny slits of rage, scared me good. I dropped my backpack and ran upstairs, crying. Mother wasn’t home yet, but my older sister Bailey was. She told me to stop sulking. Then she saw my arm.

“The cat did that?”

My arm was glistening red. Puss was spewing from where the cat clawed me. Poison filled my veins, or so it felt. Bailey rushed me to the washroom and, to her credit, cleaned up my wounds. It stung badly, and I made a fuss, but I got through it. When Mom got home, I showed her, still sulking about the stupid cat. Mom was too tired to deal with me, but I could see the alarm in her eyes. My arm looked bad. Really bad.

“Somebody let the cat out!” Mom hollered, later that evening, as we prepared for bed.

The cat wouldn’t shut up, moaning and scratching at the door. By now, it’s full-dark. And cold. As instructed, I let the cat outside, then I scooted upstairs to watch TV before bed. One more sleep until Halloween, I reminded myself, anticipating the thrill of trick-or-treating in my Catgirl costume.

I slept. At some point that night, I was woken by a disturbing sound. It sounded like an alarm. My mind scrambled as I stirred from under the blankets.

RRREEEEEEEEEEEKK.

“What’s making that noise?” I asked my sister, who was sleeping in her own bed, next to mine.

“Go find out!” she snapped.

“Nuh, uh.”

Bailey was throwing a fit. “Why won’t Mom do anything?”

But we both knew the answer. Mom can sleep through anything. And no wonder, she works six, sometimes seven days a week. Bailey flung herself off the bed, and stood over me.

“Come with me,” she said.

I did. Sleepy-eyed, scared and confused, I held her hand as we descended downstairs toward the front door. My heart was threatening to explode, my palms sweaty and gross. I knew something bad was about to happen. I could sense it. This was no ordinary sound. Not even close.

RRREEEEEEEEEEEKK.

“I wonder what it is,” Bailey muttered under her breath. Her voice quivered with fear. If my older sister was scared, it MUST be bad. For a moment, we simply stood at the front door, trembling. The sound was close, right outside the door. Bailey took a deep breath.

“Ready?”

I wasn’t. Not even close.

RRREEEEEEEEEEEKK.

The door opened. We both jumped.

“AAAAAAAHHH!”

The cat darted inside like a jack-in-the-box. Mara was crazy-eyed, zooming around the living room like a bouncy ball on speed. Her claws were crimson-red.

“Bobbie, look.”

I followed my sister’s gaze, and gulped. I was petrified. But I couldn’t look away, no matter how hard I tried. Lying dead at the doorway, like some sickly offering, was a rat. The rat was torn to shreds.

Bailey kicked it, but not too hard, and its eyeball rolled down the steps leading to the driveway. The empty socket exploded, leaking a tremendous amount of blood. Honestly, I didn’t think rats could bleed so much. My sister pulled me inside and slammed the door.

“Mara!” she shouted. “Baaaaad kitty!”

Mara could care less. She was stretched across the couch, triumphantly licking her paws, dripping blood everywhere. She was purring. Truth be told, I was more scared of Mom’s reaction. She loved the couch, it was very expensive (as she often told us). If she saw those bloodstains, there would be hell to pay.

“Go fetch some soap and water, and clean up the mess.”

I did, while Bailey scooped up the dead rat and buried it somewhere in the yard. I don’t remember much of what happened after that, except that we managed to keep this a secret. The first of many.

…

Devil’s Night was gloomy the following year, I remember, and rained day and night. Before going to bed, Mara was acting bizarre, scratching at the door, wanting outside. So, I let her out. Had to, otherwise she’d never shut up. Then I went to bed. At 3 AM, there came a terrible noise:

RRREEEEEEEEEEEKK.

My eyes snapped open. Bailey was sitting on the bed, crying. I was stunned. Seeing her cry was the worst thing in the world. She was in high school, and high school kids never cried.

The moment our eyes met, I remembered. Last year, this very same thing happened. I’d long forgotten. Hand in hand, we tip-toed downstairs. By now the sound was at a terrifying volume, like an air raid siren. How anyone could sleep through the racket was beyond me.

Bailey reached for the handle; the door violently opened. The cold hit me like a sucker punch. I shivered. It was like stepping inside a giant refrigerator, the ones they use at restaurants. In a frenzy, Mara dashed inside, while torrents of rain splashed our feet.

“What’s that?” I managed to ask. Whatever it was, I couldn’t keep my eyes off it.

“A possum.”

I looked at Bailey, confused. “Possum?” I’d never heard of such a thing. But whatever it was, it was dead. Its head was dangling vicariously from its water-soaked body. Maggots were crawling out of its neck and mouth. At least the rain washed away the blood. Bailey handed me a shovel. Before I could complain, she held open a green garbage bag, so I scooped up the disparaged possum. THUD it went, then WOOSH, the bag closed. Just then, lightning flashed, and we both jumped.

“Is that?”

Bailey didn’t need to finish. We both saw it. Just beyond the rim of the porch was a line of carcasses leading to the road. Rats. Six in total. Bailey dropped the bag and ran inside the house. I followed.

We didn’t go outside again. Nor did we dispense of the dead rats. Or the possum, for that matter. Instead, Bailey prepared some hot chocolate, and we retreated to our bedrooms, giggling and pretending to be brave. Which we clearly weren’t. We even cracked some jokes; “That’s what you get for having a black cat,” or “The Devil called, he wants his cat back.” Stuff like that.

Although we joked, we were scared. REALLY scared. Stuff like this doesn’t happen in real life. Then Bailey turned off the bedroom light, and we screamed.

“AAAHHHH!”

A pair of yellow eyes, blinking in the darkness.

“Mara!” Bailey shouted. “GET OUT!”

But Mara didn’t move. She was perched on my sister’s dresser, staring. Her eyes were lasers, never blinking. Nobody spoke. You could hear a pin drop. I rolled over and pretended to sleep, exasperated with worry. What if Mara tries to kill me in my sleep? What if she’s hiding more dead animals? What if she brings them into the bedroom? Morning couldn’t come soon enough.

The next day, the dead animals were gone. Probably washed away by the rain, or scavenged by coyotes. We didn’t dare tell Mom.

…

The following two Devils’ Nights were similar, except each year the killings got more severe: raccoons, bunnies, hawks, even bats. Always six in total. Or seven, if you include the offering laying at the foot of the door. The bats scared me most. What if Mara got rabies? Could this get any worse?

We were perplexed. Mara was completely normal the rest of the year. Yes, she’s a cat, so normal isn’t the best choice of words – cats are anything but normal (as any cat owner can attest), – but she never left a trail of dead bodies. Nor did she make strange noises. If she’d go outside, it was only to sunbathe on the front porch or climb the neighbor's tree. And she never went far.

Last year was different. Mara upped her game. I knew we were in serious trouble. By now, she’s five: a fully grown feline, and a force to be reckoned with. Bailey too, was older, and had little time for her younger sibling. Honestly, I’m surprised she stayed home that night. Maybe she wanted to protect me. Or maybe she was curious, and wanted to see what happens next. I don’t know, I never asked. Besides, this was our Big Secret: Every Devil’s Night, our cat goes on a killing spree.

Neither of us slept. How could we? The cat kept us awake, clawing at the door. “Go let her out,” Bailey ordered. I did as told. Like the previous two years, we stayed up late watching cheesy horror movies from the 80’s. Last year we watched Pet Cemetery, the original. This year, Cat's Eye seemed appropriate. At some point, I must’ve fallen asleep because I was startled awake by a terrible noise.

RRREEEEEEEEEEEKK.

Oh, how I hated that sound. It was like a thousand fingernails scratching inside my skull. The sound cut right to the bone. Bailey flicked on the bedroom lights, then shot me a look that said, Let’s get this over with, shall we?

We went. The stairs creaked like nuclear bombs, each footfall more severe. We needed to keep quiet. Our mother was sick, and taking time off work. Lately, her sleep was ...

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This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/ShoggothDontTell on 2024-10-12 11:38:13+00:00.

---

DISCLAIMER: I’m fucking terrified, and honestly having this laptop open and an internet connection is all that’s keeping me from a full blown panic attack. With that in mind I apologize if this story is kind of frantic, I’m doing my best to relate everything as accurately and clearly as I can. Me and my girlfriend Kiera have tried Googling answers to what’s going on, but we can’t find anything helpful. It’s admittedly desperate coming on here with our story, but I am becoming increasingly convinced something paranormal or unnatural is taking place and figured perhaps someone in this community could have some obscure knowledge that could help us or at least give us some insight as to what’s happening. Thank you in advance.

Alright, so all of this started what I suppose was a few hours ago. After a glorious night of too much pizza and too much Netflix, me and Kiera made our way to bed. She got in bed first like she always does while I went and topped up our cat’s (Zelda and Pickles) food and water bowls. When I got to the bedroom Kiera was already under the covers waiting for me and scrolling on her phone. I joined her and no sooner had my head hit the pillow than a loud knocking sound echoed through the house. It was knuckles against glass, the glass of our back window. “Did you hear that?” I asked Kiera.

She nodded. Then the noise came again. It was oddly rhythmic, sort of like those knocks you and your friends would make up as a kid in order to be allowed into each other’s treehouses or forts. I don’t know what’s relevant information or if the knocking sound will even translate to text, but I’ll do my best below to transcribe the pattern. It went:

Knock Knock. Knock, Knock. Knock, Knock, Knock. Knock, Knock, Knock, Knock. Knock. Knock, Knock, Knock, Knock.

When the knocking started up again Zelda and Pickles both bolted down the hallway, into our room, and under our bed. No amount of coaxing has been able to get them out since they went under. It’s been nearly four hours since the knocking and they refuse to move, both me and Kiera have stuck our heads under there a few times and they don’t seem to be hurt in any way, just really scared, I get it, I’m scared too.

The pattern was strange, but at the time both Kiera and I assumed burglars. Before we started dating, I lived in a shitty apartment that got broken into all the time, so I was prepared for such a situation. I grabbed the bat I keep by my side of the bed, kissed my girlfriend, then started making my way through the house.

As I moved down the sleepy hallway to the back window, I embarrassingly started pounding a fist against my chest like Matthew McConaughey in Wolf of Wallstreet and mumbling old Mike Tyson fight quotes to myself in an attempt to be hyped up for the possible confrontation that awaited me. All that psyching myself up though, proved to be for nothing.

I got to the back of the house, flicked on the outside lights, and saw that nothing was out of place. Everything was as I’d left it and there were no signs of any intruders, not even from an animal. I double checked the other rooms in the house, then made my way back to bed.

“I don’t know what it was,” I said as I walked back into the room, “Can’t see…”

I trailed off when I saw Kiera pacing back and forth beside the bed, she was holding her phone up to her ear and sobbing uncontrollably. We’ve been together for five years, I’ve seen this girl go through a lot, but I’ve never seen her cry this much.

“What’s happened?” I asked, assuming there’s been an accident, or someone’s just died.

Kiera turns around, her mouth drops, and her eyes bulge out like a bugs, she looks like she’s seen a ghost. I move in to give her a hug. As I get close she hits me in the arm with her phone, I think she’s mad at me for a second, but she quickly embraces me. Through her sobbing I hear her say, “I thought you were gone…”

“Where’d I go?” I say, not yet understanding the situation.

Through the phone I hear the muffled voice of Kiera’s father, “Is that him? Is that him?” He asks over and over, “He’s alright?”

After a minute of the tightest hug, she’s ever given me, Kiera pulls herself away, resumes the call with her father, telling him that I’m fine now and there’s nothing to worry about. I’m confused as fuck at this point and after she hangs up the phone, I sit her down on the edge of the bed and ask what’s going on. She wants to know the same thing.

“I don’t understand,” I tell her.

She puts her phone up in front of my face and shows me the time. “You were gone an hour,” she says, “I thought you’d been kidnapped or killed.”

If it wasn’t for the amount of tears I’d have assumed she was fucking with me. I was gone barely two minutes, but sure enough the time on the phone showed that an hour had passed. I grabbed my phone off the bedside table, my time matched her phone too, an hour had passed.

“Did we go to bed later than I thought?” I ask.

“No,” Kiera insists.

“Daylight savings?”

“No.”

“It was two minutes,” I tell her, “This doesn’t make any sense… We must’ve got the time wrong.”

“We didn’t,” Kiera insists, “I’ve been checking my phone ever five seconds. You were gone an hour. Where did you go?”

I explain to her that all I did was go look outside, then check the rest of the house on my way back to bed. “I don’t think you’re lying,” she tells me, “But that can’t be true.”

Kiera then tells me what happened once I left the room. After a couple of minutes of hearing nothing from me she started shouting out for me, I should note that I didn’t hear her once while I was out of the room. After a few more minutes she gets up out of bed and starts looking for me, apparently, she was speaking aloud this whole time, convinced I was pranking her and begging me not to scare her; again, I heard none of this.

She didn’t just go to the back window, but also out into the backyard, she saw nothing out of place outside either. She then tries to call me, but quickly realizes I left my phone on the bedside table. She goes back to bedroom, at this point about fifteen minutes have passed and she is freaking out. Due to some of her family history Kiera is reluctant to call the police, and she’s also worried about what to say and still somewhat unsure if this is all just some prank I’m pulling, so she instead calls her father.

He's woken up by the call. Kiera frantically tells him what’s going on, apparently this is the point she thought something really terrible had happened because she thought that if I was still nearby, I’d jump out and say something before I let her wake her father. They talk for a while and eventually her father decides to drive over to our place. He was halfway here when I walked back into the room, and it took us quite a bit of convincing to get him to turn back and go home to his place. I don’t love my in-laws, but in hindsight I kind of wish we’d just let him come over.

After telling me her side Kiera showed me the call log in her phone, and I could in fact see that she’d been on a call with her father for over half an hour. Apart from the minute it took me to feed the cats and the two minutes I took to check the back window we’ve been beside each other all night, there’s no way she could’ve made a call this long without me noticing, so even if we somehow mixed up the times, we were apart for drastically different lengths of time.

This doesn’t even include the fact that we were apparently both at the back of the house and she was even outside without either of us seeing or noticing each other. At this point we’re both freaking out and we start Googling for answers to what could’ve happened. We found nothing helpful, though to be honest it was hard to even know what to search for.

What we did next was admittedly very stupid, but in my defense, I was stressing out and knew sleep wasn’t an option until I got some kind of closure. “I wonder if it’ll happen again,” I said.

Kiera was no amused by the thought and didn’t want to talk about it, but like an asshole I pushed the subject forward and eventually managed to convince her to try an experiment. The idea was that I would slowly walk out of the room to the back of the house and back to the bedroom, stopping after each step and yelling out to Kiera, she’d yell back and that way we’d know if something unusual was happening. I’d also take my phone with me this time as well as an added safety precaution.   

I took a large step across the threshold and out of the bedroom, I could still see Kiera but called out anyway. I don’t know why, but the word that came out of my mouth was, “Marco!”

Kiera looked confused, but cracked a small smile, “Pollo.”

Another step, “Marco.”

“Pollo.”

I took another step; all I could see of Kiera now was her feet poking up underneath the blankets. “Marco!”

“Pollo!”

Another step and she was gone from my sight. I took a deep breath, my stomach started to curdle, and I felt my skin turn to gooseflesh. “Marco…” I said.

Silence. I felt my heart hammer against my chest. For half a dozen beats there was nothing. Just as I was about to sprint back to the room, a noise broke the silence. Knock, Knock.

A knocking came at the back window. Same rhythm, same pattern. I should’ve just went back to bed, back to Kiera, but reflexively I turned and ran to the back window. The pattern ended just as the window came into sight and I swear on my life I saw something move across the glass. A wide lum...

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This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Twhylight on 2024-10-12 09:58:49+00:00.

---

This is a collection of posts from the forum [REDACTED], from the user [REDACTED]. Names of persons and locations have been either changed or [REDACTED] for safety. All hyperlinks have also been disabled.-

Post 1: Found an old H.A.M. radio – what are the basics I should know?

Date: 17/6/2023

First-time poster on [REDACTED]. Hopefully, you guys are friendly. I just have some basic questions when it comes to maintenance and care for old H.A.M. radio transmitters.

I got my hands on a set from my uncle, who sadly passed away recently. While we were clearing his house, I managed to snag the beauty from his attic. He was never in the army or anything, but he liked collecting old stuff. I guess I take after him, lol.

So, I was able to get this thing working. Took me a few days of painstaking research to figure out how much power this thing needs and what parts are likely to break. I was able to Google the really basic stuff easily enough, but I’m sure there are things only you guys would know about.

So, here I am: a H.A.M. radio virgin. What are the basic tips and tricks I should know if I want to use it properly and maintain it?

Signed,

James

***

Post 2: Re – Found an old H.A.M. radio – what are the basics I should know?

Date: 18/6/2023

Wow, thanks guys! Awesome ideas and suggestions.

I was able to source parts from the website [REDACTED] recommended. Really cheap prices for such old-school stuff. Great find!

I’ve ordered a bunch of replacement parts as suggested. I’ve got it hooked up safely, and I’ve been browsing the channels. Haven’t found anything super interesting yet, but you guys suggested getting a repeater to increase the range? How far can this thing receive?

I did get one funny interaction with an angry truck driver though. I live near a highway, and a lot of big rigs pass by. I didn’t know truckers still use these, lol.

Here’s the recording I made: [Hyperlink Deleted]

—

-A transcript of the conversation from the audio-

James: OK, I just found a channel with people talking on it. Gonna prank them.

**James tunes into the frequency. A dog barks in the distance.**

Trucker 1: Any accidents heading southbound on the M4?

Trucker 2: Negative, the sirens were going up the M4 and turning off, you should be good.

James: Uh, Charlie Foxtrot, this is [REDACTED]. Can I take your order?

**James laughs**

James: Charlie Foxtrot, do you want fries with that?

Trucker 2: Get the fuck off this radio, kid!

**James laughs loudly**

James: Got ‘em. Anyway, that’s it for now.

—

So yeah, hopefully after I replace some of these parts, I’ll be able to get a better signal. Even with the highway so close, the audio quality was pretty bad.

Thanks again!

Signed,

James

***

Post 3: My parts are here, and the range has increased – picking up so much more!

Date: 25/6/2023

First off, I have to apologise for the prank I pulled earlier. I should’ve realised that enthusiasts like you lot don’t mess around like that and are here to document more serious things on the waves.

In other news, after some trial and error, I’ve managed to replace most of the decaying parts with brand-new ones! I didn’t even know they made these components brand new anymore. I even managed to get my hands on a repeater.

The sound quality has exceeded my expectations, and now the dials I replaced actually move properly, with the needle matching the frequency. For a beginner at airwave surfing, I think I’ve done pretty well.

So, here are a few things I’ve picked up over the radio.

I’ve tuned into my local radio broadcast, but unfortunately, I can’t transmit anything back—not that I would, but it’s a shame. There’s been a lot of trucker talk about accidents and stuff, and I think I might’ve stumbled upon one of those pirate radio stations you all talk about.

I live in [REDACTED], and it’s a very mountainous region. Radio signals struggle to make it past the massive stone monoliths, and the infrastructure around here is pretty weak. I guess with the rise of Wi-Fi and all, there hasn’t been much need for improvement.

Anyway, there’s a station on frequency [REDACTED] if anyone in the same region wants to tune in. It’d be cool if someone could corroborate what I’ve been hearing. It’s exactly what you’d expect from a pirate station—loads of conspiracies and wild theories about mind control and the like, total nut jobs.

Here’s a link to what they were talking about: [Hyperlink Deleted]

—

-Transcript-

**A dog barks in the distance as James places his phone**

James: Alright, I’ve found a pirate signal. It’s [REDACTED], if you’re nearby and want to listen. Let me just tune in.

**Static fluctuates, then a clear male voice comes through.**

Conspiracy Host: …and they’ve got them. And now, with the addition of ANOTHER tower in the area, I’m telling you, the signal it produces is going to fry our brains.

**James snickers**

Conspiracy Host: That’s why Yours Truly keeps it analog. You won’t catch me on the internet or using their phone plans.

**The Conspiracy Host continues rambling as James speaks**

James: He’s been ranting about 5G all day. It’s a new theory every day, at least for the past two days I’ve been listening. Interesting times, I guess. Thanks for tuning in.

—

So, what do you guys think? Have I stumbled onto something cool yet? I’m not sure if this is the right place on the forum for discoveries—maybe someone can point me in the right direction? Maybe I could track down the crazy guy’s signal and pay him a visit at his cabin in the woods.

Please don’t take that seriously—I’m not that stupid.

Thanks!

Signed,

James

***

Post 4: Getting Dead Signals Every Now and Again—Is This Normal?

Date: 26/6/2023

Hi again,

Just checking in with you guys to see if this is normal. Best to ask the experts.

It hasn’t happened a lot, but occasionally I pick up a signal where it’s just… well, dead. As in, there’s nothing. No static, no tone shifts. Just silence. It’s eerie as hell.

I looked it up, and generally, ‘dead air’ refers to the silence between broadcasts. What I don’t like is that this silence seems to pop up randomly while I’m tuning. If I’m picking up absolute silence, that means something is there, right?

It’s only happened a few times, but now that I’ve noticed it, I swear it’s happening more often. I’ll let you guys decide.

Here’s the audio: [Hyperlink Deleted]

—

-Transcript-

James: Let me just tune in. It’s really specific with its frequency, like I have to be exact to find it.

**Static and scrambling before it goes silent**

James: There! Right there!

**Silence**

James: What’s up with that? No feedback or anything. The weirdest part is that if I nudge it just a little…

**Static resumes**

James: Strange. Hopefully, you guys can figure this out. Is this a faulty part? Thanks again.

—

Like I said in the audio, have I accidentally fried a part? Everything looks fine, so I don’t think so. Maybe I installed something incorrectly?

Thanks!

Signed,

James

***

Post 5: Re—Getting Dead Signals Every Now and Again—Is This Normal?

Date: 27/6/2023

There’s something strange about these channels.

I don’t really know how to describe it, but… I’ve been noticing them a lot more. I’ll be tuning in, listening to some trucker chatter, and then suddenly it just cuts out, mid-sentence, and that eerie silence is back. It’s not like they stop talking, it’s more like the signal itself just gets snatched away.

People on here have said to be mindful of channels like that. They say you never know who might be listening in. Honestly, I doubt that’s the case. I’ve been unplugging the H.A.M. set whenever I finish using it and I’m always really careful when I come across these dead air broadcasts. I never talk about anything private or incriminating.

Still, I appreciate the concern.

Signed,

James

EDIT: Just as I was about to post this, something happened.

I was typing up this post when I heard the radio start tuning by itself. There was flickering static and that high-pitched whine before it went completely quiet. To be honest, I’m scared. I still am.

Just to put my mind at ease, I’m going to leave my phone recording in the room while I’m at school. I’ll post what I find tomorrow when I get back. I’m really hoping it’s just a fault or something.

Please tell me this is an easy fix.

***

Post 6: You Need to Hear This

Date: 28/6/2023

I don’t even know what to title this post.

If you’ve been keeping up, you know something strange is going on with my set. This morning I left for school and decided to leave my phone recording next to the H.A.M. radio.

I’ll just let the audio speak for itself. I’ve edited it down to the relevant part.

[Hyperlink Deleted]

—

Transcript:

**There’s silence, occasionally broken by a dog barking and the muffled sounds of cars or trucks passing by. After a while,  the distinct click of a switch being flicked.**

**The frequency starts tuning, eventually landing on the silent tone. This holds for about two minutes before the switch clicks again.**

—

Now, some of you might think I’m messing with you, but I’m really not. A few people also suggested I might have installed an automatic tuner.

I didn’t.

So how the hell do you explain the switch turning on by itself?

And that tone… it’s not silent anymor...

---

Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/1g1wsym/dead_air/

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/EmmaWatsonButDumber on 2024-10-12 18:01:06+00:00.

---

It started with an innocent enough warning from the old man next door. He was a reclusive figure, always dressed in faded flannel and worn-out boots, with gray stubble that covered most of his face like a second layer of skin. Nobody in the neighborhood ever spoke to him much, but when he saw me locking my door one evening, he shuffled over with a strange urgency in his eyes.

“You live alone now, don’t ya?” His voice was raspy, like he hadn’t spoken to another human in days.

“Yeah,” I replied, a bit uneasy but polite. “Why?”

He leaned in close, his breath hot with the scent of whiskey. “You better count your windows twice every night before bed,” he said, his eyes narrowing. “Make sure they’re all closed, all locked. If you don’t—well, let’s just say it ain’t good.”

I chuckled awkwardly, unsure if he was joking or just drunk. “Sure, I’ll do that.”

The old man’s expression didn’t change. “I’m serious, kid. Count them. Twice. Or they’ll come in.”

I watched as he shuffled back to his house, a creeping unease settling in my gut. "They’ll come in"? What did that even mean? But I shook it off as the ramblings of a lonely, old man with a little too much time and liquor on his hands.

That night, as I wandered around my house before bed, I found myself thinking about his strange warning. I stood in front of the first window in my bedroom and closed it tightly, then the one in the kitchen. After a second of hesitation, I moved through the house, checking each window carefully, just as he had suggested. One in the bathroom, two in the living room—each of them shut and locked. When I reached the last one in the hallway, I counted again in my head. Five windows. All sealed.

It felt ridiculous, but I did it anyway. Twice, just like he’d said.

Nothing happened that night, of course. But over the next few days, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off. I noticed subtle things—a draft even though the windows were closed, strange sounds late at night, and, most unsettling, a growing sense of being watched.

The next week, I came home late from work, exhausted, and forgot about the old man’s warning. I went straight to bed, my body too heavy with fatigue to bother checking the windows. I didn’t even think about it until the middle of the night, when I woke to a soft tapping sound.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

At first, I thought it was rain, but the night was dry. The tapping grew louder, more insistent. My heart began to race as I sat up in bed, listening. It was coming from the hallway window, the last one I’d always check.

I hesitated, fear gripping me, but curiosity pulled me out of bed. As I approached the hallway, the tapping stopped abruptly, leaving behind an eerie silence. My pulse pounded in my ears. The window was closed—of course, it was. But as I reached for the lock, I saw it.

A handprint on the glass. Not mine. Something else, something that shouldn’t be there.

I stumbled back, my breath catching in my throat. The handprint was too large, too… distorted. It pressed against the glass from the outside, as though something had been watching me.

Frantic, I ran through the house, checking every window, counting them twice, just like the old man had warned. But the windows were all closed, all locked. Yet the feeling that something was wrong persisted, stronger than ever.

The next night, I made sure to check the windows before bed, counting each one meticulously. Five windows. Twice. Then I slept.

But the tapping came again. This time louder, faster. It wasn’t just one window, either. It was all of them. A frantic, rhythmic tapping from every room, surrounding me. I leapt out of bed, my body trembling with fear. The windows—they were all shut, yet the tapping wouldn’t stop.

I backed into the center of the living room, cold sweat trickling down my spine. And that’s when I saw it—the shadow moving just outside the glass. A figure, tall and lanky, with impossibly long limbs and a face that seemed to shift and warp under the dim moonlight.

It pressed against the window, its grotesque face turning slowly toward me. Eyes—if you could call them that—met mine, hollow and hungry. The tapping stopped, but the window began to creak.

I don’t know how long I stood there, frozen in terror, but eventually, the figure melted back into the darkness, leaving me shaken and breathless. I didn’t sleep for the rest of the night.

The next morning, I rushed to the old man’s house, desperate for answers. But when I knocked, there was no response. The neighbor told me he’d passed away—three days ago. Right around the time the tapping started.

Now I count my windows twice every night. I don’t forget anymore. Because I know they’re still out there, waiting. And if I slip up again, they’ll come in.

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Orphanology on 2024-10-12 14:16:02+00:00.

---

When you grow up on the internet the internet grows up in you too. You can't escape it. Codes get in your head, binary whistles at the edge of your hearing. You see forum posts in raindrops on dead leaves. People drive to work and then back again, every day the same thing, like they were long GIFs spiraling in and out of the frame. The web is inside all of us, spreading out in our neurons, mirroring the fiber optic cables spawning across the ocean floor.

They say there are server farms in Utah that when you see them from above they look like human silhouettes. They say that wasn’t the way they were built.

I keep thinking about this because of 0rw3ll.

I’m watching one of his videos now. He used to be my favorite YouTuber. I had watched him for over a decade, back when he started as a dumb prank channel. I had that that strange closeness with him, like we were friends even though only I knew him. A parasocial relationship, although that word always makes me think of infections, of parasites, of something living inside a body that shouldn’t be there.

He uploaded the video I’m watching right now two days ago. There are almost a million views, 148 comments. He’s updating his relationship status which is, as it historically always has been for him, very complicated.

I’m staring at his eyes as he talks. They’re blue, ocean colored, like they’ve always been. Nothing’s changed. Everything is the same in the ocean, but every wave is new.

I look on his discord. No one is talking about this upload, or at least they aren’t talking about what I’m looking for. I respond to some DMs while I’m reading comments. I used to just lurk, never post. That was my whole thing. Sharing too much info online weirded me out. The more you put on the Internet the more it feels like you’re making another version of yourself. There’s irl you and then online you. Both can feel separate, distorted mirrors of each other.

It was a few months ago, back when I still wasn’t commenting, when I noticed people on the server using a running phrase: the hidden videos. I didn’t know what it was and no one ever elaborated. I assumed it was just an inside joke, but there was something off about it. A lingering weirdness.

Then I started to see it in other places. Comments on YouTube videos, hashtags on the hellsite. Eventually, I started asking in the chat what it meant. No one ever responded and googling got me nowhere. Every site online that seemed to have any information was log in restricted, which led me to revive my nearly dead social media accounts. That was when things changed. I guess I got so used to logging in and responding to messages I started posting other stuff about me too. Small things at first, stuff like complaints about not finding things I was looking for, then links to articles I found interesting or depressing, talking about my day, pics of my dog. At some point I remember uploading a selfie, watching a little accumulation of hearts grow under the picture. The petite endorphin shot companies talk about that keep us posting, keep us on their platforms, keep us online.

A this point I had started to assumed I would never find out I what the hidden videos were. Everything was a dead end. I had decided to write it off as another univalve Internet mystery, like who buys the most glitter. Bedsides, I had convinced myself this whole thing was a dumb joke, an elaborate troll no one talked about. I felt like I had spent two months asking what updog is while everyone tried to not laugh.

Which is when I got the DM.

It was just a link, nothing else. The kind of thing you’d guess was spam and delete, but it wasn’t spam. The hyperlink test read: here are the hidden videos.

I went to the person’s profile who sent it but there was nothing there. Completely blank. No comment history. No links in their bio. Their user name was just a jumble of letters and numbers and when I searched the combination I got no hits in response. I messaged them but they didn’t respond.

How long did I spend looking at the link? It felt like hours, the text glowing blue the way fires do in ghost stories when the devil is near. Then, finally, I clicked it.

There was barely any text on the site. I was so used to the overabundance of information on most sites the staggering amount of empty space seemed almost sinister. No menu, no links to anything, no about button to click. Just six embedded videos with dates under them and “the hidden videos” written at the top of the page.

They videos were 0rw3ll posts, all from three years ago. Two were from two separate days. The final four all from the same day. I bit my lip and learned forward to study the images in the thumbnail. All stills of his face, but I didn’t think I had ever seen any of them.

My heart racing, I clicked play on the first video.

It seemed totally normal, just him talking about his day. Uninteresting, kind of boring. Then he said, oh one weird thing did happen.

He went out late to the burrito place across the street from his apartment, the one he always went to. The main burrito guy, Adam, laughed when he saw him. Back already, man?

Adam the burrito guy was a reoccurring character in 0rw3ll’s videos. He had a thick Massachusetts accent and frequently told 0rw3ll stories about accidents in his workplace.

Orw3ll said he asked Adam the burrito guy what he was talking about. Adam said, dude you were here an hour ago. Orw3ll explained he just got there and Adam said holy shit you have a twin. Do you want to watch the CCTV?

“I told him that hell yeah I want to watch the CCTV footage,” 0rw3ll said. He cracked his knuckles. “I thought that would be fucking baller. So we go in the back and he fires it up. I felt pretty cool. Like I was on some surveillance shit. We fast forwarded through some customers and then, bang, there was the dude. Guys, he looked EXACTLY like me. Like clone level. Adam was helping somebody else, so we watched Jai make his burrito. Oh and Jai, if you’re watching this, Adam said you gave him too much guac. Just thought you should hear it from me, bro. Anyway, he gets his burrito and pays and then looks up at the camera, like he was watching the camera, watching us instead of us watching him. Total weird shit. But dude, if you see this or someone knows you, I want to meet up, all right? I would love to chill with you. Clone club style. Ok, I’m out, smash like and subscribe, prescribe, face reveal.” Hs turned the camera off.

That was the end. Frowning, I clicked on the next video.

It was from a few weeks later. He looked a little ragged, his hair messier than usual. After a long pause he began to start talking, apologizing, saying he had tried to film the video twice, but it hadn’t worked.

“A few days ago I posted a video about some guy who looks like me,” he said. “But that video is gone. Which — dude, I don’t understand. I didn’t delete it.”

He looks away from the camera and when he looks back he said, I think someone is messing with me.

“Sadie and I — we’re sort of back together — went to the grocery store tonight and I saw him. The guy who looks like me. We were in the cereal aisle. Sadie’s getting cereal, by the way. Not me. I’m still doing the all toast breakfast challenge! Rise up toast family!” He raised his arms up and made what seemed to be a “bread” symbol with outstretched hands. Them he lowered his arms and the enthusiasm vanished from his face, replaced by indecision and concern.

“But yeah, this dude. He was at the end of the aisle. No cart. Nothing. Just standing there, staring at me. And this is the weird thing. Sadie was looking at ingredients on some package and when I said, hey look at this and she turned, he was gone. She thinks I’m crazy, I think,” he said and laughed. But he didn’t look like he thought it was funny.

“I’m going to find that old video, and reupload it. If anybody knows that guy, tell him I still want to hang but I’m going to need him to be at least fifteen percent less creepy. Maybe twenty percent.”

He turned off the camera.

The next three videos were short, each under a minute. He was filming outside, taking footage of a crowd. You could hear him whispering, but it was unintelligible. I watched them each again, but I couldn’t make anything out, then I saw him at the far edge of a frame. Someone who looked exactly like Omrw3ll, staring at the camera.

The final video. I hesitated and then clicked.

He seemed frantic, panicky. He was in his house, the living room where he always filmed, talking about how none of his videos were posting. How everyone thinks he’s going crazy. But he’s not. There was someone with his face following him, he said. He’s seen him. He’s filmed him. He didn’t understand what was happening, but he needed help.

Then he froze, his eyes wide. He was whispering no, no, no and then he got up, his knee hitting his camera, sending it flying. The picture went sideways, upside down, tilted, and then stabilized, pointing to the couch where he had been filming. I could see an area of the room leading to the kitchen. I could see only the bottom edge of the room, his legs, his shoes.

And then someone else walked into the him walked into the frame.

They stopped a few feet away from 0r3ell. The sound must have gotten screwed up when the camera fell because everything was a hard buzzing. It sounded like a swarm of wasps.

Their shoes and legs — they were the same as 0rw3ll.

The video...

---

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This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Vally-Gal on 2024-10-11 19:27:24+00:00.

---

Hi, I'm not gonna reveal my name as I don't want people to trace to this damn town again so I'm just gonna come up with fake names for all individuals involved. Either way, I'm now sure that this has happened to plenty of kids before and since then anyways, if I don't reveal a name, I'm sure as hell they can't track me… I hope.

For now, I will call myself Em, and my friend in the story Jay.

Jay was one of my best friends growing up. We would do everything together. He and I grew up on the same street, went to the same school, and tried to do as much together as possible. He was one of the sweetest people I’ve ever known. The events of that night still fill me with so much rage… and sadness.

It was Halloween night, and I remember the whole day like it was yesterday, although I wish I didn't. I was 12 and Jay was 13 at the time, both of our birthdays were in October so we’d always be excited about going up in number and feeling more mature and on our own on Halloween nights. This was finally the first night that both of our parents let us go trick-or-treating on our own. I know why now, but to us then it was a new sense of freedom that I felt, a freedom I wouldn't feel again for many years.

“We finally are on our own now aren't we Em?” Jay said in a leadership tone. 

“I suppose so,” I responded quietly. I had always been sorta scared of being on my own, but like I said before the sense of freedom did feel good, so I wasn't gonna complain.

We went around the decorated streets with the lit-up orange and yellow hues blinding us with spooky wonder, These streets were decorated like hell most years, it is the most festive town for Halloween I know of, and honestly, it was confusing to me as a child when Christmas time would come around and not nearly as many places were decorated for that holiday spirit. It was almost as if Halloween was some kinda sacred holiday in this town.

As Jay and I walked down the streets, I started noticing things not feeling exactly right. Any adults who were outside seemed to be staring directly at us, but they would always quickly look down at their feet as soon as our gazes would meet. Some of them had the most uncanny of looks on their faces, like something was severely wrong, and it was.

I noticed lights start to go out as soon as we approached to knock on the doors for candy. Even then I thought to myself what kinda assholes would see kids approaching and turning their lights off on Halloween night?

I adjusted my glasses to my face and looked down the street tho and did see one house all the way at the end of it. It seemed to be the most decorated house on the entire block, and the brightest, surely they wouldn't ignore and deny us candy like these other houses had begun doing. 

I looked at the watch and noticed it was 11:30, This would have to be our last stop for the night before headed back home, we had gotten a pretty good haul of sweets so I wasn't upset, but this house called to us, with how festive it was for the season, they might have even been selling full chocolate bars or something.

As we approached the house though I started hearing strange sounds. Sobbing? From inside some houses, not every house, but lots of them, the air felt still and tingles went down my spine. 

I turned to Jay “Jay? I’m actually not so sure about this house t-t-this street is starting to freak me out a little,” my young childhood stutter would always come back with a vengeance whenever I got scared. “I-I-I am n-not so sure about -it,” I repeated. Tears started to form in my eyes a little, I was nothing but a kid so hearing others crying and feeling out in the open and vulnerable like this made me tear up. 

Jay laid his hand on my shoulder, “It’s okay Em,” he reassured me. “It's one more house where we're gonna get our candy and get home.” 

Jay’s reassurance always worked on me, he was a persistent one but he’d always know what to say to me to make me ‘woman up’ as he would say. Although looking back on it, I almost feel angry at him, angry that he led us into the situation that we were about to enter, 

but… I can't be, I wasn't even the one who was most hurt.

We finally arrived up the long centered sidewalks that lead to the vertical home and knocked on the door. The back wood door started to slowly open.

“Trick or treat!”

“Trick or tr-”

We tried to speak in unison but my speech was stopped. Looking at this man who answered, he didn't look right, and not in a Halloween costume kinda way. His skin was pale and his black tuxedo didn't help contrast the skin even more. He seemed to be sweating bullets. He stared blankly at us through his emerald green eyes, those damn eyes. I still remember exactly how they looked to this day, the pupil incredibly dilated, and his eyes bloodshot. 

I pulled back my candy bag in slight apprehension and tears started to well up in my eyes again. The man notices my scared state and finally speaks in a jittery rhythm, “Ss-so kids… how was your H-H-Halloweennn?” 

“Um… sir, can you please just give us our candy?” Jay responded, noticing my fear and trying to get us out of the situation.

The man seemed to be growing impatient, tapping his feet on the ground, and saying with gritted teeth, “Just trying to make some small talk with you kids,” He pulled on his tux collar, sweating profusely. Then, I noticed around his collarbone area a patch of dried? Rotten? Frayed flesh. Whatever was wrong with it, it was sure wrong with it.

At that thought though, I felt a sting on the back of my neck, at first I slapped the back of my neck, thinking it to be some sort of insect, but I also heard a slap from Jay. Had we both gotten bit? That's when I looked behind me and saw two men towering over us. 

A tear was already down my face and I slowly started to lose all power in my muscles and fell to the ground slowly, fully knocked out.

When I awoke my glasses were off my face, everything was blurred, and I couldn't move, couldn't tell if it was some sort of drugging or pure fear. In front of me was another body on the floor, it was my friend, Jay, I could recognize his dark hair and dark skin, but other than that things were blurred beyond my comprehension. 

As I started to awake slightly more, I heard yelling coming from around me. 

“We told you to only grab one you damn idiot!” A man yelled.

“They both came to my door, what was I supposed to do k-k-k-kick one away!?” The voice was recognizable, it was the man we had just met in the doorway.

“You're about to die anyways, why don't we just put you in the sacrifice with them?” The man threatened. 

Sacrifice? What's happening? I wanted to cry, I wanted to speak, but I could barely move a millimeter. I was stuck on the ground seeing the burred silhouettes of the two men standing slightly behind my friend. 

“Just get the job done you damn idiot,” The man said.

At that moment the man seemed to put something in his hand up to my friend's face. My friend awoke in a loud gasp. I had only noticed now that Jay was shackled by chains as the man from the door picked them off the ground, his tall lengthy figure barely holding them up.

“Wh-Wha-” Jay questioned, “What happened!?” Jay yelled with desperation in his voice. The man stayed silent, completely unphased and ignoring his question.

“Sir please!” Jay pleaded, “I'm sorry! Did we do something? We're very very sorry!” 

The desperation in Jay’s voice, every word he was yelling rings back in my head every damn day. I couldn't see well enough to see if he was crying, but just from his voice, I could tell he was.

I tried my best to speak, but all I could muster up were mutters too quiet to hear Jay’s yelling. My friend was being pulled away from me, I couldn't tell exactly where we were. Some kinda forest from what I could hear and tell. 

Jay’s screams became louder, but further away, and I could see the man dragging him by the chains he had him tied to into the darkness ahead of me. 

“Sir! PLEASE! I'M SORRY! I'M SORRY! IM SORR-” The screams stopped, did something happen? I heard the rustling of chains in the distance, it was so quiet, and all I could hear was the sight of wildlife around me.

Then, I heard footsteps fastly approaching, closer and closer, the dirt was being trampled. I saw dirt start to kick up near me when I saw the man from the door run right past me without my friend and heard a scream that still haunts me every day.

“AHHHHHHHHHHHHH!” It was Jay, I couldn't see him but I could hear him, his voice trembling and breaking as his scream grew louder, but it wasn't the only sound I heard. 

A guttural roar was let out, whatever had just made that noise was surely no human.  The roar grew in power before I heard a large crunch, and a scream, whipping in the air, more screaming. I couldn't see a thing but I could hear the horror beyond the darkness. That was until…

SLAM

A couple of meters ahead of me I could see a blurry red pile of mush in front of me, followed by something, slowly walking up into the moonlight. To this day I can't describe it, not only could I not see it clearly in the first place, but even then, it seemed… indescribable. 

It was something furry and had almost the physique and look of a wolf it seemed, but much larger. Its eyes were glowing red, and its teeth were also red, probably not naturally looking back on it. It seemed to have patches of fur that weren't all there showing what seemed like thin veiny skin on the insi...

---

Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/1g1hxeg/my_hometown_has_a_sinister_secret_about_halloween/

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/JamesCaligo on 2024-10-12 04:17:47+00:00.

---

I was trudging through the snow, approaching the edges of the ice. Today would be like any other day, except this one was significant to me.

I live in Siberia, and I'm a fisherman of frozen lakes. It can reach temperatures of - 51° F for those who are American, but that's never an issue for us natives of this supposed wasteland. I call it that because it's not as desolate as you might think.

On this particular day, I would go to a specific lake called The Child's Call.

There are old legends about this lake, namely the fact that it was used to scare children away from it. A lot of my neighbors tend to avoid this place, but I was going to break the mold. I was not one to believe in meaningless superstitions, thinking that the lake was nothing more than a fairy tale that parents would warn their children about. All to keep them from falling through the ice. An intelligent means of teaching kids, but I always found it a joke that the adults warned other adults to avoid it during the winter. Ice fishing was banned here.

After growing up for 22 years in this hostile environment, I wwasn’t going to miss out on the plentiful fish hiding beneath the ice. I took my first step out on the slippery surface, almost feeling a hint of guilt.

"This isn't so bad, I guess," I tried to convince myself. It would be a test to erase years of scare tactics.

I kept walking out, with courage and greed, to make a bountiful amount of money from the sheer number of fish that one could get from out here.

And when I was about to reach the center, I was reminded of the old folk tale.

"Children may play in the woods, may play in the town, and may play in the berry bushes. But the man of bright eyes seeks for your soul young children. Stay far away from the creaking ice. The frigid waters will be your grave, and the bright-eyed man will snack on your soul."

My mom would tell me this and give me over a decade's worth of fear for something that was nothing more than a lesson to not play on the ice.

No matter, I came to my spot and began drilling my hole; my excitement about the plentiful amount of fish hiding in the safety of their icy shield was in for a rude awakening. I had everything set up and dropped my line. I could feel the nipping of the biting cold on my fingertips. Thankfully, I brought a hand warmer, which I could hide in my sleeves.

Even though I had not caught any fish yet, I felt accomplished. The rest of the town was fearful of the lake for generations. Who knows how long it will go on while I bring in excellent scores of fish while they all keep trying to go for the other lakes in the area. It didn't make sense why this one in particular was singled out as dangerous, and I don't care.

_______________________

Two hours had passed, and I was in for some great disappointment. I had yet to catch a single fish, even though you can fish here in the summer and get somewhere around ten a day. It made no sense that I was getting nothing now. Frustrated, I peeked into the hole I had drilled, trying to see what was the deal?

Nothing but deep, grave darkness stared back at me. I wondered why it was such a grim view.

The sun was already setting, and I thought it best to pack up and leave. The nighttime can get so much colder, and it becomes more challenging to see the town.

It still puzzled me about the nature of why there was no fish.

Still, I was compelled to pack up and return to my comfy home a little ways off. That would be about a 40-minute walk. It's best not to get caught out here in the dark when it reaches - 70° C or - 94° F. Then it would be lights out for me.

Before I could begin my trek to land, the last vestiges of sunlight were suddenly obscured by a passing cloud, a thick plume that stripped away the needed light to provide a few more precious minutes of warmth.

But there was a sudden change in the environment. It got really dark all of a sudden. And I mean, it was nighttime instantaneously. And then, the pine trees began to glow with harsh blue lighting despite being covered in their blanket of snow. No, instead, their needle-like leaves burst into cyan-blue flames.

I was not expecting this change of scenery, and I thought I was hallucinating from the cold. But I soon learned that what I saw was more real than I'd like to admit.

Generally, the ice is full of air bubbles in this environment, so it's impossible to see through it. But for some inexplicable reason, I looked down towards my feet and saw that the snow-covered top had blown away, and the ice was as clear as liquid water.

"I don't understand," I believed were the only words I could get out.

Down below, I could see the lake floor. Floating up were the bodies of distorted-faced children. They were tied up by their ankles, a rock holding them down. Their hands were free, clawing at the waters, trying to swim back to the surface. How could they still be alive? One boy, the closest to where I was standing, was looking at me. They could all see me as I looked down at them with my petrified expression. I felt my heart aching, and my stomach churned from the disorienting sight.

I'd say there were well over twenty kids of various ages. And they were still alive, trapped in the frigid waters and forced to endure the torturous temperatures.

But then I peered closer and saw someone else amongst them. A man was dressed in a black, formal suit and tie, but his head and beard were as white as the frost around my eyelashes.

But not too much longer, his head whipped up, and we locked eyes. His pupils had a deathly, white glow to them. The rest of his eyes were as dark as night. His skin was cracked all over, with white light escaping through the veiny spread of his brittle flesh.

"Come join the children. Come join the children," he kept repeating.

I instinctively shook my head, taking a few steps back and ready to run, but I was so stricken with fear that I couldn't move fast.

"Selfish adults. Never want to join the children. But at least we have each other," he said again, his voice getting deeper.

I was able to snap out of whatever trance this thing had me under and ran. Despite the biting cold entering my lungs, I kept running, wanting to put as much distance between me and whatever that was. I didn't care if I exhausted myself and gave myself frostbite. No, death would be preferable to whatever that thing had in store for me.

_______________________

Surprisingly I made it back home, and upon entering my cabin, I didn't even bother to light the fireplace. I went straight to my room and collapsed in my bed.

When I awoke the following day, I slept for ten hours. It was still early morning, so I tried my best to go about my day. But I couldn't stop thinking about what I had seen. That little childhood folktale couldn't have been true.

Just as I was dumping a block of ice into the water container, three sharp knocks made me flinch hard, and my heart was beating at a thousand miles per hour.

I went to the door but hesitated. I don't know why; I already knew who it was. My brother always came to visit me during the early hours.

I opened the door, and there he was. It was such a relief.

"Ah, you look like you stayed out in the cold too long," he bellowed, quickly coming inside and shutting the door behind him.

I was so happy that he came because I needed reassurance that what I saw was a hallucination. After getting past the usual small talk, I brought it up. "Do you know about 'The Child's Call?'"

"That creepy lake that no one ever wants to fish in?"

"Yeah."

"Well, I mean, doesn't everyone know about it. It's only a lake," he remarked.

"Is it?" I questioned.

"Why?” he asked before getting what I meant, “did you go fishing there yesterday?"

My breathing grew heavier as I remembered what I saw. "Yes, and I'm a little scared."

"Baby," he instantly started to tease.

I slammed my foot down. "I'm serious. It's not a good place."

His face was one of concern now. He could tell that I wasn't being a wimp about the situation.

"Okay, tell me what you saw?" he sat on my dining room chair.

I told him everything. All the things that had frightened me, and how even when I close my eyes, I still see those scared children. Only the safety of sleep was enough to keep me from thinking about such nightmarish visuals.

"That's so weird. I'm going to go there and find out for myself tonight.

"No, don't do it!"

"I am," he smirked at me, "I'm going to prove to you that it's not real. It's just a silly story to keep kids from falling through the ice, even though in this temperature, I don't see that happening to begin with during this time of the month."

I knew I shouldn't have brought it up. I wish I had remembered this sooner, but my brother has always been like this. He likes to prove that he's the man, braver than me, stronger, and always looking for ways to outdo me. I don't know why? I'm not in a competition with him. It's well established he's the older brother, and I wonder if he's harboring some sort of superiority or, perhaps more accurately, inferiority complex. But I was so desperate to get this off my chest, I didn’t even consider as to who it was I was talking to.

He got up and began gearing up to leave, we still had the whole day ahead of us, and I had to do my best to convince him not to go. But I also wanted to stay in the house.

I would watch from my window as he walked back to his house, which...

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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/unimagine97 on 2024-10-11 22:13:28+00:00.

---

I was helping my mom move house the other day and I found a small leather journal in the attic. I asked her about it and she said it belonged to her grandfather who was an archaeologist. Apparently he had a few of these from different digs he'd been on though she had never read that one in particular. She said I could take it home and read it but warned me that they could be pretty dry. Seems like my great grandfather wasn't known for his creativity. 

I took it home that afternoon and forgot about it for a while. I was reminded of it by, strangely enough, a dream. I was sitting in a field on a rock outcropping reading the journal. I remember, in the dream, being overwhelmed by a sense of serenity, like I was floating, like the grass, swaying gently in the breeze wasn’t grass at all but a vast ocean.

Anyway, the next day I made sure to set some time aside for reading.

It started out normal and was mostly just logistical things, supplies and such. But then about half way through the entries took a turn. The only way I can describe them is unsettling. I've been trying to convince myself that he just randomly decided to take up creative writing. Gunna write up some of the weirder entries here, hoping that by sharing them it'll take the edge off a bit. Hopefully we can all laugh at how dumb I'm being.

August 24th 1932

The dig has been nothing short of a disaster. We've found nothing and the money is running out. I knew it was a gamble and it took more than enough convincing from the committee to secure the grant. The books that led me to this location were entirely suspect, a queer leather bound tome barely held together by ancient bindings. Strange glyphs covered the front and back in its entirety, scrawled things that had been scarred into the leather itself. The text, if it could be called such, inside was entirely incomprehensible, much of it similar to the scrawl on the cover. Luckily, or perhaps unluckily, there was a map on one of the pages. It took months to decipher possible locations. It was a risk, a massive one. I just had a feeling. An inexplicable feeling. It wasn't a particularly good feeling mind you, but it demanded an answer. It was my decades of work at the college that enabled this trip and it will be my head if it fails. 

It pains me to think that if this dig turns out a failure, my so far immaculate career will be tarnished, an ugly, writhing blemish on an otherwise perfect legacy. Is it conceited of me to think about such things? Perhaps but when one's field is history you can't help but think about how you will be remembered, what you'll leave behind. Will anyone know my name in 80 years? I like to hope so.

We have two weeks of dig time left and I've little hope.

August 27th 1932

A fight broke out between Moore and Thompson today. The strangest thing. Moore is one of the most sensible men I know. Likes to keep to himself, never causes trouble. But at tonight's meal he just lunged at Thompson. Thankfully they were broken apart before anything could happen. Thompson says he did nothing that knowingly could've drawn the man's ire, didn't even know he had ire he said. I spoke with Moore a bit later, after giving him a moment to himself. He didn't say much. Just kept saying that he didn't know what came over him and that he was sorry. It must be the stress of the dig weighing on him. He has another one on the way. I tried to reassure him but he seemed despondent so I left him alone. 

I just hope there will be no further incidents. This dig is teetering on the edge of a cliff as it is.

August 29th 1932

Things have just gone from bad to worse. There has been a plague- that is the only way to describe it- going through the camp. People have been vomiting all through the night. We've considered perhaps that the rations had gone bad but only a few men have come down with this mysterious illness. It is terrible to witness. Violent and disturbing. The substance they expel from their stomachs is- there is no word for it. I have never seen anything like it in my fifty seven years. Like tar, thick and black and shone an odd mixture of green and purple. It seemed to move on its own accord but thats-. Maybe it was a trick of the light. It must've been that, a simple trick of the light. Or I've been out here too long.

September 4th 1932

It's hopeless.

September 9th 1932

We found something. It's just a glimpse of something. We uncovered an opening and after lowering a lantern down we saw some odd stone. Definitely not natural. From the look of it it was impossibly smooth and the light bounced off it like nothing I've ever seen. The news has reinvigorated the men and I couldn't be more relieved of it. I could see they were starting to slip and the failure of the dig was starting to get to them. We've been out here for three months after all with no sight of anything remotely interesting and after… the sickness the men needed this morale boost. I've got a good feeling. This will be the find of the century, I know it.

September 22nd

We've continued excavation of 'the structure', as it has become known.

September 24th 

I have been examining the book that led us to this location, desperate for any sort of clues as to the nature of this ungodly structure and it remains as endlessly vexing as it was before. I have studied the book, cover to cover, hoping to gain some insight, and each time proves fruitless, the odd runes seeming more and more a jumbled mess each time. I have found something that I seemingly have overlooked in my previous study of the book. A sketch, of what I can now discern is our current location with a strange monolith-like structure reaching impossibly into the sky. Obviously there is nothing of the sort here. There are some phrases in the book, long rambling paragraphs that have the cadence of a sermon. A rambling preaching by a man so lost in his faith it has consumed him, unfortunately they make little to no sense at the best of times. The passage “and we shall indulge in one another and become the ouroboros of eternity given flesh” seems to be repeated many times throughout. 

My current theory is that this structure is a place of worship, though to what deity I haven’t the foggiest, a cathedral to the forgotten. I don’t want to imagine the sort of twisted divinity that would demand such a place.

~~September 34th~~

~~The dreams, they haunt my sleep and i can’t escape no matter how much I run~~

Disregard this entry. Lack of sleep.

October 4th

It's colossal. Two weeks of straight digging and we haven't fully uncovered the structure. The walls reveal nothing. They are blank. Working near the stone is odd. You can see your reflection perfectly. But only that. Not the lanterns, not other people, it is truly odd. It has my stomach in knots. Looking into that mirror, you stand truly alone.

October 9th

More and more questions and no answers.

October 15th

I received a letter from my wife today and the pain of my family's absence has hit me in a way that I didn’t expect. The letter details my daughter's eighth birthday which I have unfortunately missed due to this dig. Just as I regretfully missed her first, fourth and fifth birthdays. The letter details her delight over my present, a small archaeology set that I put together, complete with brush and her own hat similar to the one I sport when I go on digs. My wife noted that she has refused to take off the hat for five days now. It pains me dearly that I can’t spend these days with my family but my career is something I hold very dear as well.

November 6th

The excavation is almost complete. It has been an enormous undertaking, much more than any of us had anticipated. The area we are uncovering seems to be the "front" of the structure, having seemingly more "decoration" though perhaps that isn't the best word for the odd patterns and curious carvings that line the wall. Queer swirling patterns that wind in on themselves and get lost and tangled. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to them and my best men cannot make heads or tails of it. No idea of any possible time period or known civilization they could have come from. I can get lost in them for hours, the intricate detail, every inch I follow reveals new details and patterns only for it to abruptly end and for me to realize it had seemingly led me nowhere. While the patterns inspire a sense of wonder and vastness that simply cannot be put into words, the carvings inspire something much darker. Faceless heads have been carved into the rock, again, seemingly at random. Due to the previously stated reflective nature of the rock, looking into this blank visages you would find yourself staring out from the infinite void within, as if you yourself had been carved into the rock. It inspired an odd feeling of fate, or destiny, a silly notion that somehow I had been selected by something higher than my understanding to find this structure. A feeling slithered inside me, while staring into my own, seemingly black, eyes, that everything in my life, every choice and look and breath had been guided by an invisible hand.

I am rambling. We estimate the size of the structure to be around one hundred and twenty meters by one hundred and ninety five meters.

November 17th.

People are starting to talk about going home for the winter and while it is disappointing it is also understandable, the pain of missing my own family is starting to weigh heavy on me. The only two who seem to share my vision...

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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Saturdead on 2024-10-12 02:40:31+00:00.

---

[1] – [2] – [3]

I stayed at Nick’s far longer than I ought to. The guy was rarely ever home anyway, spending most of his time either working overtime or helping at his brother’s garage. Nick didn’t talk much about his brother, but he seemed to be a hard-working red-blooded kind of guy. Nick would only talk about him in ways that would start with ‘this one time, Tommy did the craziest shit’.

I crashed on the couch. My place needed some serious renovation, and the only one able to do the work was this carpenter from the Babin apartment complex. I only saw him in passing. He had the look of a hunched-over vulture in human form. Nick advised me not to set foot near my place until the guy was done through and through.

“You don’t wanna meet Roy,” he said. “Guy’s a freak.”

 

One night as I lay awake on the couch, Nick tip-toed past me to get a midnight beer. I waved an arm at him.

“I ain’t sleeping,” I said. “No need to sneak.”

“I’m just light on my feet,” Nick said, wandering over. “You want one?”

“What the hell.”

He handed me a beer and slumped down on the lazy boy chair next to me. We looked at the TV. It was still on, but there was a countdown warning us about it shutting down in about a minute after prolonged inactivity. Some kind of power saving thing.

“I still can’t believe this shit,” I muttered. “There are, like, actual unreal things out there.”

“Yeah,” Nick sighed. “Takes some time to wrap your head around.”

“How far does it go? Like… demons? Angels? That kinda thing?”

“I dunno. Maybe.”

Nick shrugged the question off, downing two big gulps of beer in one go. He sighed, leaning back in his chair; suddenly looking a lot more tired. He wasn’t gonna make it back to bed.

“I guess it’s just one of those things.”

“Just one of those things, huh?”

He shot me a final tired look, cracking a coffee-stained yellow smile.

“Don’t pretend like you knew how the world worked before you got here, rookie. You had no idea.”

I mean, he wasn’t wrong. Nick was out like a light, leaving his beer dangling from his hand. I plucked it from him, keeping it from spilling all over the carpet.

 

Looking back at those early days, any normal person would’ve left town long ago. But it wasn’t that easy. I got the impression that making too much noise might get you in trouble. And not just ‘a little note on your personal record’ kind of trouble, but the kind of trouble where you’re pushed into a van and never seen again. Nick was one of the most relaxed people I’d ever met, and even he spoke of the DUC like they were boogeymen. The Department of Unknown Crises. What the hell kind of name is that?

The good thing about being far down the chain of command is that you’re rarely involved in big picture-stuff. The sheriff and his coordinators spent days on their own, leaving ordinary officers like Nick and I to deal with the day-to-day issues. We caught a guy speeding, checked out a couple of broken windows, helped a drunk guy get home… nothing out of the ordinary. And for most of January, and the start of February, that was it.

That is, until we got a call about the Rosemills.

 

The Rosemills worked at the local middle school. They were a husband and wife of about 50 years old. You could spot them sometimes sitting together at the local café, talking away for hours. It was kinda sweet to see two people so in love, even after more than two decades together, reportedly. I didn’t know them personally, but still, I’d hate for something to happen to them. They seemed like decent people.

We got a call that the Rosemills hadn’t been seen for a while, and we were asked to do a wellness check. Nothing out of the ordinary; we’d done a couple of those at that time. So off we went.

 

It was the last thing Nick and I were supposed to do that day. It was late afternoon, and the sun was already setting. We rolled up to the Rosemills’ home, parked our car, and stepped out. Having a quick look around, I could tell something was off. Nick stopped when he realized I wasn’t following him.

“No tracks,” I said. “No one’s been around for days.”

I could tell what Nick was thinking pretty well by now. He was thinking that maybe they’d skipped town. Without saying a word, I shook my head and pointed a flashlight to the side of the house. Their car was still parked there, covered in snow.

“Alright,” Nick sighed. “You go out back, I’ll check the shed. Roll back in five.”

 

There was a broken window out back, and a couple of snowed-over tracks leading down a hill. Signs of a struggle. Possibly a second set of tracks, but it was hard to tell. It kinda looked like someone had either jumped out or been thrown out a window. I called it in to Nick with my radio and followed the tracks.

As I peeked over the edge of the hill, my heart dropped.

The lady of the home, Lacey Rosemill, lay dead about 20 feet further down; impaled by what looked like a long steel rod. I yelled at Nick to hurry on over. I was already on my way down the hill, calling it in to dispatch. I spoke out my last name, badge number, address, victim, and reported is as a suspected one-eighty-seven. Seconds later, I heard Nick following me down the hill. As soon as he saw the body, he also called it in.

“Cancel that, dispatch,” he added. “Patrick’s out.”

 

Lacey Rosemill was dead in the snow. Face down, with a frozen pool of blood spread out underneath. She’d done her best to get away. Signs of struggle on her arms. Buried in her back was what looked like a piece of sharpened rebar; the tail end of it was longer than my arm. I looked at Nick, dumbfounded. He rolled his eyes.

“This happens sometimes,” he said. “Didn’t I mention Patrick?”

“You got a killer on the loose?” I snapped back. “And you’re not doing anything?”

“It’s not like that. Come on.”

 

He brought me back up to the house. The front door was open, and the hinges were barely holding on to the stale wood. The house was covered in this cheap peeling paint, leaving flakes of green and white across the porch. As we stepped inside the house, flashlights at the ready, Nick explained.

“Patrick isn’t really his name, it’s just what we call him. Patrick. Like Bateman. American Psycho, you know?”

“And you’re not putting him away? Not even after this?”

“There’s no point,” Nick continued. “The guy just kinda comes and goes. I saw him get hit by a truck once, and a couple of days later he walked out of Lake Attabat like nothing’d happened.”

“People don’t work like that, Nick. People don’t come back.”

“Who said he’s people?”

 

As we moved through the house, I got the impression that Nick was looking for something. He kept checking for trap doors and hidden compartments.

“Thing with Patrick is that he doesn’t just kill anyone, right? He kills just the right kind of people.”

“What’s the right kind of people?”

“The kind of people that’ll end up hurting a whole bunch of other people in the long run.”

I helped Nick flip over a dinner table, checking a storage compartment connected to the kitchen floor. Nothing but old booze and a couple of valuables. Nick didn’t seem interested.

“A couple of years ago, there was a guy who lived out by Saint Gall, right? And he had this, uh… let’s call it unhealthy interest, in some of the locals. Now, the guy hadn’t done anything yet, but we all got the creeps from him, and we didn’t really know what he was up to.”

Nick turned to me, making a finger gun. I could see my reflection in his pink sunglasses.

“Pow. Out comes Patrick, taking the guy out with a piece of rebar fired from a homemade crossbow. Whole thing’s made from an old Volkswagen spring leaf. That thing could behead a goddamn rhinoceros.”

“But the guy hadn’t done anything.”

“True, true,” nodded Nick. “But the sick shit we found in that old-timer’s hippy-hut sure indicated that he was about to. And that’s the thing with Patrick. It’s like he just knows when shit’s about to go down.”

 

I was starting to get the idea. Nick was looking for whatever had caused Patrick to attack these people. In his mind, there had to be some kind of reason behind the violence. A justification. We searched for about half an hour before we ended up in their bedroom, going through their clothes.

“I don’t even know what we’re looking for,” I admitted. “Like… guns?”

“Sometimes it doesn’t show,” said Nick. “But Patrick never fails. Not once. If you end up killin’ people, indirect or otherwise, he might have something to say about it.”

“Doesn’t that mean that him not killing this Digman guy means… Digman’s off the hook?”

“I said killin’ people, rookie. Digman and his kin ain’t people.”

 

Finally, something white reflected back at me. A box of something in the back of Lacey Rosemills’ wardrobe. I brought it out for Nick to see.

It wasn’t anything incriminating. It looked like a box of unpainted Halloween masks. Plain white, with black straps. Some of them had an air filter, others had black felt to hide your eyes. They looked pretty expensive, but I’d never seen anything quite like it before. They weren’t factory-made. There were too many imperfections; like the faces had been carved out by hand with a fine tool. There was a shipping stamp on the side of the box, indicating they’d ordered it from somewhere about a week prior.

I picked a mask up, looking it over. It had a strong j...

---

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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Theeaglestrikes on 2024-10-12 01:47:14+00:00.

---

Other than me.

On the day of the property viewing, that wasn’t the case. These streets were bustling with men, women, boys, and girls. It felt like any ordinary town. Cul-de-sacs branched off from the main strip. Cosy pockets of red-bricked homes and cobblestone streets. There was a local drinking hole named after some animal or monarch — amusing that it’s often one or the other, though I’m not calling the two things synonymous. It had every ingredient of a quintessentially-British settlement.

One month later, however, I returned to a very different place. Moving day — ‘Moving Monday’ as I called it — was overwhelming for exactly thirty-seven reasons, and the emptiness of the town didn’t make the list. My ever-growing list of things to remember.

What a waste of a day off, I thought.

Anyway, I wasn’t concerned by the lack of women. In fact, I hardly noticed the lifelessness at first. After all, I arrived a little after lunchtime on a weekday, so I assumed most people were at work.

In place of its true name, I’ll call the town ‘Propagate’. That word was written with blue paint in large, uneven capitals on a low-level wall. Several truant schoolboys sat atop that bricked partition, which separated a small, detached house from the main road. A dozen legs swinging back and forth like a row of pistons. They had an odd energy, given they were rule-breakers. An energy neither giddy nor intimidating. But the blank-eyed boys did keenly watch my car as it drove by.

That sighting was only the first oddity. There was also the young man walking the cocker spaniel. The five elderly gentlemen at the bus stop. The neighbour standing with both arms around his two sons — they watched from the front lawn as I pulled into the driveway of my new home.

As I said, I noticed the quietness, but it didn’t concern me. The lack of women might’ve triggered warning sirens in normal brains. Brains with a little common sense. But I was completely oblivious. An awe-stricken, first-time homeowner with a bulky moving van in tow.

Don’t judge me yet. I’m not, by any means, the bluntest blade in the knife block — just the least even. I was hardly surprised by the autism diagnosis in high school, as I’d always been a little rusty when it came to, as my dad called it, the ‘real world’. People and politics. The fuzziness of social science. My mind has always belonged to rigid sciences.

Let me put it this way: I have a PhD in Chemical Engineering, but I once let a tittering teenager and his pack of hooded friends ‘borrow’ my phone.

“Oh dear! Of course I’ll let you ring your mother to pick you up,” I obliviously said.

That was how I waved goodbye to my brand-new iPhone.

I’m smart-dumb or dumb-smart. Take your pick. Stephen Gawking, the trio of school bullies used to call me. It took their one collective brain cell to come up with it, but it was a good one. I’m surprised they even knew what ‘gawking’ meant.

Anyway, moving to Propagate was supposed to be a turning point. I was determined to prove everybody wrong. My friends in the city. My family back home. I wanted to show them that I wasn’t a socially-stunted egghead. I had the stuff, whatever the stuff might be. The independence and street smarts of my peers, I suppose. I turned 27 this year, so I knew it was time to make something of myself.

And that certainly happened in Propagate.

After only half an hour, the two movers had unloaded all of my belongings, and they left me alone. I heard one of them mutter about a strange look from a neighbour. Given what would follow, they were right to flee.

I spent the next few hours sorting through my belongings, but my mind soon started to wander. I needed something less mind-numbing to do, so I decided to spend the rest of my day exploring Propagate.

I took a stroll to the nearest convenience store, hoping to familiarise myself with the layout of my new hometown. And as I left suburbia behind, Propagate’s true nature revealed itself to me.

I entered a main street littered with dozens upon dozens of townsmen. Far more than there had been on my street. And there came a twisted feeling in my belly. Even an atypical mind like mine knows when it’s outnumbered.

It was an infestation of suited business types, schoolboy clusters, and dog-walkers. There was no longer any avoiding it. The fear. The feeling of eyes dancing across my flesh. And once I realised that heads were swivelling to track my movements, I scurried across the road to enter a store on my right.

Things were worse inside.

On the street, there had been options. Routes of escape. Even as an autistic woman, I’ve acquired the social skills necessary to detect when the male gaze tips from icky to sticky. When it glues so industrially to your skin that you sense impending, inescapable danger. When you realise that the watching man or men might want to do more than look.

That early evening, mere minutes before the sun merged with the horizon, I felt utterly and entirely alone. I had only an inch of daylight on my side. I didn’t feel safe.

I wasn’t safe.

And, as I said, I had hoped things would be better inside the convenience store, but they weren’t. I’d only thrust myself into a more claustrophobic arena of prowling eyes.

What terrified me so greatly was that the eyes hardly looked like eyes at all. Eyes can’t hurt you. But the town’s many sets of spheres were alive. Hundreds of spheres connected to one unified horror. And whatever thing followed me, disguised as countless pairs of pupils, it promised a nightmare.

Would you rather be alone in the woods with a bear or a man?

That question rang in my head, and I thought about a third option. Something neither man nor beast. Whatever that thing might’ve been, I was already alone with it.

A supermarket worker, name-tag reading ‘Mike’, eyed me from a few yards away*.* He looked sick. Not sick with lust. Not even sick with a common cold. His eyes were swollen, appearing too large for the sockets in which they lived. And his skin bore stretch marks, as if bulging from the pressure of something. A terrible thing below Mike’s flesh, settling alongside his skeleton and organs.

Now, I’ve been stalked and even manhandled before. I wasn’t new to the fear of strange men. But this was something else. A scenario above the pay-grade of my primitive fear response.

Strangers were stopping in their tracks. That was what unsettled me. It was if they had been skewered by poles protruding from the ground. As if each man had been forced, by something beyond his control, to endlessly pivot. To follow me with a cutting gaze.

“Nadia?” a static female voice called.

Relief and fright simultaneously seized my body. Relief at having heard the voice of another woman, but fright at the mystery of its origin. My eyes eventually slid downwards, and I realised that I had, half-consciously, heard my phone ring several seconds earlier. Realised that I’d answered the call with a shaking thumb, though I’d barely been aware of doing so.

I was relieved to see that my screen read ‘Chloe’.

“Nadia?” my friend repeated. “Did you answer by accident? Let me talk a little louder… Nadia, I’m trapped in your pocket! Help!”

I smiled, thankful tears collecting in my eyes. With Chloe’s colourful voice to accompany me, I wasn’t alone.

Still quivering, I lifted the phone up to my ear. I didn’t want my friend to worry about me. Didn’t want her to know that I’d stumbled at the first hurdle of independence. Like nearly every other adult in the world, I had to feign normality. Putting on a brave voice took significant masking, but it was a skill that I’d mastered over the years.

“I’m here,” I said, before uttering a faux laugh. “Sorry. It must’ve been my gyatt that answered.”

Chloe snorted. “Where are you, bitch? You stood me up.”

Ah, I thought.

I’d invited my oldest, dearest friend to visit my new home after work. That was one of the thirty-seven things I was supposed to remember, but I’d entirely forgotten, as is typical of me. The serotonin overload of becoming a homeowner had wiped my brain. Happiness and fear frazzle my thoughts equally.

“You forgot, didn’t you?” asked Chloe.

“No…” I lied. “I just nipped to the supermarket to get us food and drinks.”

“A likely story,” she replied in a chipper tone. “It’s okay, Nads. I forgive you. Just bring some vino back for your dear friend, okay? She’s shivering on the porch. Talking about herself in the third-person.”

I grinned, making my way down the liquor aisle. Chloe’s distracting voice enveloped me like a warm blanket. She helped me to temporarily forget about the many watching eyes. And I soothed the remaining ache in my chest with a little sensory stimulation. Let my fingers brush against the bottles of Sauvignon blanc on the middle shelf. Let my gaze brush against the price labels beneath.

“I hear you, girl,” my friend said. “You’re drooling over the dirt-cheap brands.”

“It just seems unnecessary to buy an expensive bottle,” I pointed out. “They’re all the same, really.”

Chloe groaned and replied, “They are not all the same. Do I need to come down there and pick for us?”

No, I inwardly pleaded, tuning into my environment once more.

As much as I craved her company, I didn’t fancy the idea of doubly-hungry eyes salivating at the only signs of female life.

“I’ll buy a good one,” I promised. “See you in ten minutes or so.”

“Okay,” Chloe said. “See ya.”

I wanted t...

---

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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/NotJustSomeNumbers on 2024-10-11 21:09:29+00:00.

---

It all started while we were walking to the bus stop. I've never bothered getting a car because of how cheap and mostly reliable public transport was here. A friend of mine worked close to my office so we often took the same bus home.

Lately, I’ve noticed an increase in pigeons downtown and near where we waited for the bus. Personally, I liked the birds. I thought they were a bit goofy and aside from all the poop they left, I didn’t think they were a problem. My friend, Mat, hated them. He often had a new insult for the birds. That day was no different. At least twenty pecked around at the sidewalk in our path. He rat at them to startled them causing the flock to move further down. I frowned at him for being so cruel.

I think any city with a pigeon problem also has a pigeon person. Someone who appeared homeless took care of the birds or treated them as if they were friends. Our local pigeon man was between us and the bus stop. He was dressed in a long black coat regardless of the weather. He fed and petted the birds as he talked with them. He had a beard, but it didn’t appear unkempt. I wondered if he had a home and pigeons were just a hobby. He also had a sign made of cardboard asking for donations. He listed how much money it would cost to feed the pigeons he was so fond of. 1.50 for a loaf of bread to 25$ for a month's worth of croutons. Mat nodded towards the man ready to mock him, but I gave him a look to shut him up.

We started to walk by them while dodging birds at our feet. The man tore off pieces from a freshly baked loaf of bread. There wouldn’t be nearly enough for all the birds. I felt bad for them.

I made it three steps past them as I sighed and turned around. Mat expected this. I have always been a bit of a pushover. He waited as I went over to the man and read over his sign again.

“They’ll repay the favor.” The man said not looking away from his birds.

“They will?” I asked while still trying to decide how much to donate.

“These birds are better than people. They’re special. They don’t accept anything for free, so they’ll repay you.”

I felt a hundred eyes on me. It appeared as if all the birds were watching as I pulled two bills from my wallet. I had recently snagged some overtime at work so I could afford to pay for a month's worth of croutons for the birds. The man accepted the money and nodded a small thanks. A few birds flapped their wings as Mat tapped his foot showing a sign he wanted to keep moving.

“Don’t forget to take care of yourself.” I told him and joined my friend.

“He’s probably just going to buy some drugs.” Mat said even though we weren’t out of earshot just yet.

“Good for him either way.” I shrugged.

We could still see the man and the flock of pigeons from our bus stop. True to his word, he went inside the small store he had been standing in front of and came outside with a bag of croutons. At least someone was taking care of the poor birds. But wasn’t bread bad for them? It made them happy so that was something.

Our bus arrived and I had forgotten all about the exchange. It was only until a small incident happened a week later, that I was reminded of the pigeon man.

I had been about to cross the street and had stepped off the curb when a pigeon flew in front of my face scaring the hell out of me. Thankfully it did because a car turned when it shouldn’t have. If I didn’t step back, I would have been hit. I stood stunned over what happened, my heart racing a mile a minute. Looking up I spotted the bird that saved my life sitting on a power line. I could have sworn it nodded at me.

The day after I nearly died, I was walking to the bus stop but without Mat. The pigeon man was sitting on the ground looking after his birds again. I walked over to him and got down low so we could talk.

“I only have this much on me today.” I said offering a five-dollar bill.

“You still have three weeks left.” He said and didn’t reach out to take the offered cash.

I was confused. Glancing over I saw so many of those birds staring in my direction. Their eyes appeared as if they understood what was going on.

“A pigeon helped me out the other day. I wanted to repay it. Here.”

He finally took the bill, and I stood back up. It would be nice if I could feed the bird that saved my life regardless of whether it meant to or not. But who knew what one it was. And I also hoped this man was taking care of himself and not just the birds. I noticed my bus drive by us. I darted down the street hoping to catch it in time. I scared a few birds as I ran down the street expecting the bus to drive away at any second. When I reached the stop, I noticed the reason why it hadn’t moved. A bunch of pigeons were sitting in the road blocking the bus and other traffic. They flew off after I got on.

To be honest, I didn’t give the man expecting favors from the pigeons. At first, I didn’t even believe they were smart enough to do anything for a person and thought the man had some sort of harmless illness. For a moment, I wasn’t sure what I believed. Even if they were helping me out in some way because I bought their services, they were birds. What else could they even do?

In the back of mind my I was counting down the days until my so-called pigeon contract ended. On the final night, I came home very late because of some final project crunch at work. My girlfriend also had been working nonstop to finish a big project. She was an artist who did massive paintings that a local gallery sold. She would spend a few months creating new pieces and living off the pay from the last batch. We were both suddenly hurting for cash because the gallery ordered three more large pieces and that meant she needed to pay for materials she hadn’t budgeted for. Once they were finished it would be worth it.

“You’re late.” She commented stretching and greeting me by the door. “I heard Mat was going out tonight. Did you go with him?”

The apartment smelled of paint even though she had all the windows open. She was covered with all sorts of colors and needed a shower. I bet that's just what she had been about to do before I walked in the door.

“No, I was at work. I wanted to finish some stuff so I could have tomorrow off.”

Faintly I heard a podcast in her painting room. Since she worked for long hours, she needed something to listen to. But I didn’t fully approve of her listening to so many true crime podcasts. She got pretty freaked out after so many hours of them.

“You need to shower. So, do I. Let’s save some water.” I offered with a smile.

I really wanted to hug her but didn’t want to get paint on my work clothes.

“Can you take a rain check? I’m sore from working today.” She suggested.

She expected me to be disappointed, I was a little and I snapped my fingers as if I had just lost a bet.

“Darn it. Ok, next time. And how did you hear Mat was going out tonight?”

“His girlfriend told me. But if you’re not with him that means he’s going out drinking alone.” She said while crossing her arms.

Mat liked to drink at a bar about a ten-minute walk from my place. For lack of a better way to put it, Mat had a drinking problem. Unless someone was with him to keep him in line, he always got in trouble while on a night out. I knew what was even going to be said before the words came out of her mouth.

“Maybe you should see if he’s at the bar and get him home.” She suggested.

I groaned and rolled my eyes. I was thinking of excuses when she raised paint-stained hands in a threat. I raised my own in defeat.

“Fine. I wanted to buy something from the store either way. Let me get changed first. And you need to stop listening to those podcasts.” I told her.

“I like Mat’s girlfriend. He might get wasted and cheat on her and she doesn’t deserve that.”

“Mat is dumb but not dumb enough to cheat. Even if he tried, he’s such a messy drunk no one would take him. You just think he’s going to be nabbed by those Smiley Face Killers. Who aren’t real by the way.” I said with arms crossed.

She narrowed her eyes over just how easily I saw through her and how I refused to believe a conspiracy she did.

“If you keep that up, they’ll get you next. They also target boyfriends who don’t buy their loving girlfriends Cheetos.” She said while backing up towards the bathroom.

I guess she wanted Cheetos while I was out. I let her get into the shower as I left to get my friend into a cab back home before he caused any trouble.

I should never second-guess my girlfriend. She was smarter than me because somehow, she knew Mat needed help. I sent a few texts asking if he was at the bar. It wasn’t a very popular one so I could easily find him inside if he was there. I was a block away when I saw someone stumble out of the bar. Two people followed behind him. My hand tightened over my phone ready to dial the police if needed. I quickened my pace to try and catch up to the three of them.

The pair closed the distance between the first man, and I heard my friend yell. They dragged him into a small alleyway as Mat drunkenly shouted for them to let him go. I turned the corner to see one man keeping a hand on Mat’s jacket and was in his face over something.

“Do you always go around talking to other people’s girls? Huh? Do you really think she would give you the time of day?” The larger man accused.

I suddenly felt exhausted. Why couldn’t Mat just behave? He made things worse by not understanding how much tro...

---

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This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/camwalker22 on 2024-10-11 13:35:35+00:00.

---

Part 1

I dragged myself down to the cellar and tossed the blanket back over Carl’s chest. Part of me wanted to open it, to stamp the jawbone to pieces for what it had done to Evie. But I was scared. Did I have the bravery to deal with it alone? If it was to be trusted, the bone had my stepdad begging on his knees for forgiveness every night. It made the big, stubborn man beg, for God’s sake. If it could do that to him, what could it do to a weakling like me? I gave the chest a petty little kick and trudged back up the stairs.

A couple of weeks have passed now and I’m really noticing Carl’s trips to the basement. He mainly consults the bone before he goes to sleep, but not always. I opened the front door one morning to go to school and stepped out into the cold, my breath fogging. Turning to lock the door behind me, I saw the blurred shape of him through the frosted glass pane, emerging from below. Does he spend full nights down there?

There’s another problem too: someone else is going down to convene with the jawbone. In the small hours, I hear a slight scratching from Evie’s bedroom. Then footsteps. Tiny creaks that disappear down the stairs ever so slowly. Evie’s eyes are perpetually sunken and distant, her arm bound in a sling. She whispers to herself, and avoids me.

“She’s on a cocktail of painkillers, Matt. Best to leave her alone.” My mom said when I raised the change in behaviour one night. 

“Mom, that’s not the reason. You don’t understand–” 

Then Carl stepped over the threshold, returning from work.

“What have you been doing today? Hm? Using my water, my electricity, my heating, I suppose?”

“Nothing, really.” I replied sullenly.

He swiped a finger over the wooden sideboard in the hallway and showed me the tip of his index finger, now grey with dust.

“Sorry.” I said.

“If you were sorry, I wouldn’t be walking into my house all dusty like this. Not good enough.”

I stood with lips pursed, my face an artificial mask of contemplation as he took off his shoes and strode past. The routine was hateful, but necessary. For some reason, Carl needed this saga to be played on repeat. To fight with him was to start World War Three, and all the shouting, tears and pleading that came with it. It’d be my mom who suffered the most if I took that course of action and forced her to side with one of us. She’d be torn apart by it.

Knowing that he’d be monitoring the depth of my repentance for the dusty sideboard from the corner of his eye, I remained frozen while my mom fussed over Carl. Eventually, I slunk up to my bedroom and settled in for an early night, but sleep felt far away. I kept seeing, and hearing, the chest snap shut on Evie’s arm. Her shock. Her terror. Her pain. I lied in bed reading, my eyes scanning whole paragraphs, before I realised I hadn’t taken in any information. All I could visualise was what had happened when me and Evie went down to the basement that night.

Yesterday morning, I found my mom fussing over Evie at the dining table.

“Are you sure your arm doesn’t hurt, Evie, darling?” 

“No, honestly, it’s OK.”

I raised an eyebrow and went to grab the cereal. I’d fractured my elbow at soccer practice last year and knew full well that it hurt in these early stages. Hurt like a bitch. The injury to Evie’s arm was ten times as bad as what had happened to me.

“Well, if you need me to spoon feed you, that’s no trouble. Oh, I remember doing that for you when you were a baby, Matt, just like it was yesterday.”

“Sleep well, Evie?” I asked knowingly.

She scowled, face still paler than it usually was. 

“On and off.”

After breakfast, I saw Evie brushing her teeth with her broken arm in the bathroom. She bent over the sink to spit and started brushing with the other one.

“Don’t think I didn’t see that.” I said.

“I already said it doesn't hurt.”

I considered her for a moment, standing there, obstinate. “What’s the deal? I know you’ve been creeping down to the basement. What has that thing in your dad’s chest asked for to heal your arm? Or is it a freebie? A generous gift? Out with it!”

Evie’s eyes were glassy as she came close, skin so white it was almost translucent. 

“Why did you do this to me?” She asked.

“Do what?”

“Slam the lid on my arm! I know you did it!”

“Evie, no, I pulled you out of there. You fainted. You went to touch the jawbone, and it slammed shut.”

“Lids don’t slam shut on their own! Get out of my way!”

“Wait.” I said, before her bloodshot eyes widened and she bit down on my arm. I shrieked and Evie pushed past me, closing the bedroom door behind her. I examined the raw, red bite mark and pressed myself up against the door.  

“I’ve known you ten years, Evie. We’re family. That jawbone has known you for two weeks. Don’t let it do to you what it’s done to your dad. I’m going to talk with it.” I said.

Any faint-heartedness from the day before had vanished. My heart burned with a solid ferocity, like iron at the core of the earth. That fucker in the chest was corrupting the relationship between me and my little stepsister. I marched into the basement while my mom was talking on the phone, flexing my hands into fists. No need to turn on the light this time as daylight seeped in from the small windows on ground level. I ripped the picnic blanket away and forced the lid up. The jawbone sat on its black cushion contentedly.

Boy.

“So, that’s the deal, huh? You turn Evie against me and in exchange, you heal her arm? What exactly is your game here?”

Bone knows bone. I merely repaired what was broken. Would you prefer to have the girl suffer?

“It was never that though, was it? Evie gets her arm fixed, while you get your…your fix.”

She asked if it was true. If her father was a murderer. Do you know what I told her?

“Whatever you said, it was a lie.”

A pause. The jawbone looked pallid, pathetic almost. Small and nesting, alone in the dark. The voice resumed.

I was a general from an old family who progressed beyond the age of battle. I toured military bases to give advice on strategy. At night, I liked to wander the grounds. To see bright lights shining down on flat buildings and parade grounds from afar, in the quiet, with the breeze. 

One night, I found myself strolling around the perimeter when I happened upon a small unit of men conducting a nighttime firing drill. The men lifted up their night vision goggles and saluted. I bade them continue. 

A soldier in the leftmost firing lane was struggling to hit anything, so I approached, but his aim only worsened. I put a hand on his shoulder in between shots and against all protocol, he swivelled, pointing the barrel of his rifle at my midriff. A shot rang out, and I fell onto my back. The world was spinning, but I recognised the face above me as darkness closed in. A face you and the girl know well. 

A family as ancient and prestigious as mine cannot just be snuffed out, heirless. So the one who was my ultimate undoing was called to the gravesite some years later. Cursed to dig me up with bare hands and become my thrall. He only had the heart to linger long enough to grab the jawbone out of the coffin, the craven. At last, however, I could return to find a spiritual heir to my family. To find you.

You can have that inheritance, boy. I see potential in you. The others can go to rot. Reach out and take it. Take it!

I reached towards the jawbone. Dipping under the lid, I found the air to be stale and rank. A few rotten teeth were still lodged in the bone. Brown, yet sharp. Memories flashed into my mind’s eye that weren’t my own. A large house under a heavy night sky. An aristocratic woman lying crushed under a marble dining table. A room full of riches. Chalices. Ornate swords. Antique rifles. It was dizzying. Intoxicating. The tip of my finger drifted towards a molar.

“Matt? Matt, are you down there?”

I frowned. Recoiled. Banged my head on the upper lip of the chest and fell backwards onto my haunches, paralysed with fear over what I was about to do. 

“Y-yeah. I’m OK, mom.”

Feet pounded down the basement stairs and I turned to see Carl standing there, cold fury in his eyes. My mom followed, confusion written across her face. Then Evie, higher still up the stairwell, and wary. Without ceremony, Carl strode over to me and drew back his fist. 

“Dad! Stop!” Evie cried.

Carl hesitated.

“The things that bone says about you...don’t prove it right.” She said.

His fist dropped to his side.

“I’m not a murderer, Evie. Don’t believe it,” Carl said. His shoulders slumped and a pleading, whimpering tone entered his voice. I found this more disturbing than the raw anger it had replaced. A hollow laugh echoed out from the depths of the chest.

Yes you are.

“I didn’t mean it!” Carl snapped, half turning.

That’s not good enough.

“You disturbed me halfway through the drill! I was acquitted!”

Carl stepped toward the chest and I scrabbled to my feet, back against the wall.

I’m just as dead. You craven, murderous thrall. Shame on you! Beggar eternal! Bow to me!

“I hate you!” Carl screamed, before striding over to the chest and shattering the jawbone into pieces with the sole of his foot. The lid slammed shut on his kneecap once, twice, three times. It snapped open and closed piranha-like all the...

---

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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Decent-Technology959 on 2024-10-11 18:09:37+00:00.

---

When I was nineteen, I was diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). By that time, the disease had already carved its mark into the skin of my hands, and left the scars along my back. It had marred my shins and knees, and overall left me with a terrible secret. Some things, I fear, are not meant to be shared. I wonder how much of this story will fall into that category. It is worth saying to those of you who complain about the arrangement of pens on your desk, saying "I am so OCD!" take a moment to consider my words.

What I have to relate begins when I was around eight years old. I will leave the sob story out of it for now, and say only that I lived in a neglectful, addicted home, where I (an only child), could do practically anything I wanted. If you're privy to the matter, I had all of the pre-existing conditions to allow this illness to take hold. My home life was unstructured, unpredictable, and marred by a fear of rare, but imminent violence. Strange men, drugs, alcohol, you get it. 

The disease first appeared to me as a general nervousness creeped into the recesses of bright and early childhood. I was anxious about people in particular. From the time I was able to talk, my mother has recalled hearing me say

"No mommy, say..." followed by whatever it was I was so anxious to hear. This is not a clear indicator of OCD, but it seems to track with the tendencies that followed me to the present. My mother had no way of knowing what drove me to make these odd requests. She thought (I believe) that I was just trying to get what I wanted.  Sometimes she was right. It was the times that I needed her to say "no," to me, or to say something a second or third time, that she should have caught on. I wasn't interested in getting things from mommy. I was afraid. This is what differentiates OCD from a general orderliness, or a desire to be "in control." If mommy didn't say "yes," or "no," at the right time, I was certain that she was going to die.

I want you to let that sink in for a bit. Suspend disbelief just for long enough to form the picture. I had a very vivid imagination. To my little six. seven, eight-year-old mind, if mommy didnt do what I wanted her to do, her face would swell and turn purple. Her eyes would darken and lose focus, and her breath was that gurgling rattle that even a child calls death. The truth is that I had seen her in a state not unlike this more than once due to her drug usage, and that image appeared in my mind every time the desire occurred. I was sure and still am, to be frank, that the consequences for one failure could be the death of someone that I loved. This is what motivated me to drag myself down beneath the earth, and in no figurative way, to experience the hell that was our odd, secret underworld.

OCD is one unlikely element that contributed to this story. Oddly enough, that is the rational part. The other lies in the fact that our little trailer park existed on the outer fringes of what are likely to be countless miles of unexplored tunnels in the Mammoth Cave system. This is where OCD and unfortunate circumstances meet in my life.

Imagine an eight  year old girl, thin and wiry with dirty blonde hair crawling through the woods on her hands and knees. She is humming a song, dragging a naked barbie along with her in her left hand, and pulling back the thick weeds with her other to follow a thin little creek.  I wasn't concerned about the dirt, nor the germs, nor the messy arrangement of my hair. My jean shorts and t-shirt would be no more stained coming out of these woods than they were going in. That's when, suddenly, the creek disappears. The melodious trickle of water stops abruptly, leaving my song to the wind as this curious stream drops into a hole in the ground.

The hole was at the base of a hill, and it was only about five feet deep. Three of the walls of that hole were dirt, and the fourth was a stone curtain on the side facing me. The creek flowed discretely into an opening just under the stone curtain.  I was a curious child. To me, that cave could have been the entrance to a magical fairy kingdom, or a buried treasure, or any measure of wonderful things. It was also a gaping mouth at the bottom of a stone face. When I crawled to it, I realized it was breathing. Where I sat, legs crossed and Barbie in my lap, I could feel air being sucked into the hole.

Something about it unnerved me. It was the same feeling you get when you look into a storm drain, like even entertaining the thought could drag you in. I don’t exactly remember what happened next, but only that I left in a hurry. Either my mother called me, or I heard something, but nonetheless I scrambled out of that hole and ran the way back home. This is where the memory kindof picks back up. I was lying in bed, and it hit me. I had left my barbie in that hole in the woods. To a normal child, this would be a problem, and perhaps even a big one. They might cry or become anxious. Not me. 

I knew, as if it were the verdict of a judge, that if I did not go and get my barbie, my mother was going to die. This is strange even for me. My OCD doesn't usually work this way. Usually its compelling me towards a task that is right in front of me. Challenge plus consequence equals compulsion. This was more like a sense of unrightness. Something was missing, it needed to be replaced, and now. I knew what I had to do, and I knew why I was going to do it, so that tracks, but something about it calling me out into those woods just doesn't make sense even to me. 

So, little me and my pajamas made my way to the trailer door, stopping only when I saw the moonlight through the crack of the blinds. My mother’s room was just down the hall. I could check on her, and go to bed for a bit. Standing there, my hand idly on the door handle, I pictured myself returning to her room once, twice, three times. I knew she would be fine. I also believed she wouldn’t be. I knew she would be okay in the morning. I also believed from the bottom of my heart that she would be dead right now unless I went. I hope this is as confusing for you as it has been for me.

You’re reading this, so that means I went. The path was not hard to find. Once I reached the creek, it was just a matter of following it to the hole. I should mention the pale street light outside of our trailer. It was bright and ugly, but I  thought to myself that it would be a good way to get home if I got lost out there. It was the first of a few odd things which just so happened to save my life that night. The woods were much larger, and much noisier now than they ever were during the day. I thought for sure that I had passed the hole, stopping to turn back at least twice. Anyone who grew up in or around wilderness has felt this effect. The woods stretch at night.

The hole snuck up on me. I had stopped for a third time, sure I needed to turn back now, when I realized that I was standing at its edge. The thing was much wider, much deeper to me now than it had been just hours before. I lowered myself in, and felt around for Barbie. To my dismay, Barbie wasn’t there. I searched once, twice, again. The more I fumbled around, the more vivid the image became. Her face was pale, slightly purple around the eyes and lips. Her eyes were shut this time, filled with shadow. Her mouth was slightly open, and from her lips a gurgling, rattling breath escaped her. It was her last. 

That is when I felt the air sucking into the mouth of that stone face again. My stomach twisted at the realization. This thing had sucked Barbie in. I was sure of it. And even more sure was I that I had to go in and get her. The deterministic thought was so forceful that it served to alleviate some of my fear. When I approached the opening, crawling on my belly to see, the fear returned in full. It was black. There was no way that I would see there. Thankfully, I had come prepared. In my back pocket, I had brought my Cinderella flashlight. 

Cinderella’s crown was semi transparent plastic, and I remember changing its AA battery only once from the time I was four. Now, she shined just brightly enough for me to see the four or five foot drop to the cave floor. I was a very skinny child, and the opening to the cave was just large enough for me to slide through. Here is the next odd thing which saved my life: I slid in feet first on my belly. The upper lip of the opening caught my shirt, and caused me to brace with my elbow. The lower lip carved a fairly deep cut under my right elbow, and it pissed blood. I remember landing on the floor of the cave and just squatting there, crying and bleeding until I convinced myself to look around.

No Barbie. That was for sure. The cave went on far beyond the reach of Cinderella’s light. I was crouched in a little room with two openings. To my left, the stream turned and trickled down further into the earth. To my right, the room slanted down like an attic, leaving a sliver of a tunnel in the back right of it. I shined my light around once more, making as sure as I could that I wasn’t leaving Barbie behind, and I prepared myself to go home. 

This is my last coherent memory of that night. I’m sure that may be unsatisfying to you. I spent much of my teen-age years hamming the story up for people. A man would come up from the cave, or a demon, or maybe once or twice I explained it as a giant spider. Either way, I spent so much of my life explai...

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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Weird-Suggestion-152 on 2024-10-11 16:01:42+00:00.

---

I was working the closing shift at FootWorks, the shoe store crammed into the far corner of the Chapel Hills Mall. Halloween was supposed to be a night of fun, but instead, I was stuck stocking sneakers for minimum wage.

I only had a half hour left on my shift, and I could feel the seconds crawling by. The clock on my phone felt frozen at 7:30 pm. I drummed my fingers on the counter, trying to stay awake. My manager, who was supposed to help close, had ducked out for an early smoke break and never came back. Most of the customers had already thinned out, but there were still a few stragglers wandering around the mall.

My phone buzzed in my pocket. A text from my friend Ben.

Ben: Yo, you coming tonight or what?

I sighed. I’d been dodging the question all day. Ben’s Halloween party was supposed to be the big event of the night. Half of the school was going, including all of my friends. But I hadn’t planned on going. After my shift was over, all I really wanted to do was just crash in my bed. I started typing “probably not” when another text popped up.

Ben: Don’t be lame man, it’s Halloween!

I stared at the screen, my finger hovering over the keyboard. It had been a while since I’d done anything fun, and even though I didn’t have a costume, I could probably grab something cheap from the Halloween store on the way. I wasn’t exactly Mr. Social, but maybe it wouldn’t hurt to get out of the house for once.

“Yo!” a voice called from the store entrance, breaking my introspection.

I looked up and saw Ben and Derek walking into the store like they owned the place. Ben flashed a grin, his hands stuffed in his pockets.

“C’mon, bro. You’re not getting out of this one. You’re coming tonight,” Ben said, leaning against the counter.

Derek nodded, smirking. “Yeah, man, you never come to anything. You didn’t show up last year either.”

“Look,” I started, “I’m just tired, and I don’t even have a costume, and I don’t even have time to-”

“You’ve got time,” Ben interrupted. “The party doesn’t start until ten. Grab something cheap and just show up. It’s not like you have anything better to do.”

I sighed. They weren’t wrong. As much as I wanted to protest, I started to give in to the pressure. Ben raised an eyebrow, a smirk growing on his face, anticipating my answer.

“Fine,” I muttered. “I’ll come. But I probably won’t stay long.”

“Yes! There he is,” Ben grinned, patting me on the shoulder. “You’re gonna have a good time bud, trust me.”

Derek glanced at his watch. “Alright, well we’re heading out. See you there.”

I watched them leave, their laughter fading as they disappeared out of the mall. I wasn’t sure I believed Ben about having a good time, but I was locked in now. I just had to make it through the last stretch of my shift, grab a costume, and then down a few drinks to make the night more tolerable.

The mall was basically empty now. Most of the other stores were now closed, and the place began to get a little darker as more and more lights were turned off. I started mentally checking off the closing tasks, sweep the floor, cash out the register. Routine stuff.

As I was counting the minutes to clock out, something caught my eye near the entrance.

A person stood there, just outside the store, facing me. They were in a Halloween costume. A creepy red latex devil mask, which had a large pointy nose and a cartoonish wide smile which reached ear to ear. Small black horns protruded from the top of the mask. It looked pretty realistic, like one of those expensive movie quality masks. Had it not been so startling, it would’ve actually been pretty impressive. The mask was paired with a mismatched black and red suit that looks like it was put together from pieces found at a thrift store.

At first, I assumed it was just a last-minute shopper, or someone probably killing time before heading to a party. But they stood completely still, facing me, not moving. Not browsing. Not shopping. Just standing there.

I felt my chest tighten. There was no reason to be freaked out by some weirdo in a Halloween costume, but something about them made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. The way they were just standing still, watching me, began to eat away at my nerves.

I was about to tell him, "we’re closed", when he turned, slowly, deliberately, and walked away. I just stared, frozen in place. His steps were slow, measured, almost robotic as he disappeared out of sight.

I exhaled, realizing I’d been holding my breath the entire time. What the hell was that about? I thought. Just some creep messing around, probably. It was Halloween, after all.

I shook it off, trying to refocus on closing the store and getting out of there. But every few seconds, I found myself glancing toward the entrance, half-expecting to see that creepy guy in a devil mask there again, watching me.

By the time I finally clocked out, I was beat, and my nerves were shot. I made my way out of the now empty mall toward my car, checking behind my shoulder every few seconds. I safely made it to my car, now fully convinced that the person, whoever it was, was simply messing around with me. I brushed off the feeling and headed to the Halloween store to pick up a costume for the party.

The Halloween store was one of those pop-up stores that showed up every year, taking over abandoned sporting goods stores and the like. I pushed open the door and stepped inside, a chime sounding ringing loudly in the nearly empty store. The place was a mess. Shelves were mostly empty now, and decorations were scattered all the floor, with a few straggling shoppers picking over the scraps. The sound of Halloween music played faintly through the speakers.

I wandered aimlessly, searching for any scraps of a costume. The aisles were nearly bare, but I kept looking, feeling the pressure of time build. Suddenly, the music cut off, leaving the store in an uncomfortable silence. I knew I didn’t have much time before they closed, so I hurried, eyes darting over the shelves. The door chimed again. Someone else had come in, but I didn’t bother to look, I was too focused.

At the end of one aisle, I found a small rack with cheap knock-off masks of famous movie killers. I grabbed a plastic "Jason" style mask headed for the register, rushing to get out.

As I turned the corner, my heart lurched. There he was. The man in the devil mask. He stood at the far end of the aisle, illuminated by the dim, flickering light. He didn’t move, didn’t speak, just watched me. My stomach twisted, and my throat went dry. No fucking way, I thought, feeling my pulse hammer in my ears. He stood perfectly still, just staring.

For a split second, I considered throwing the mask down and bolting. But something kept me rooted. Maybe it was disbelief, maybe shock. I told myself it was a coincidence, forcing my legs to carry me to the front. The cashier barely looked up from his phone as I approached, too busy scrolling through his phone. My skin crawled as I sensed the man in the devil mask moving closer, his eyes locked on me. I could feel it, the weight of his stare boring into me.

“Just this,” I muttered, tossing the cheap mask onto the counter. It felt so pointless, but at least I wouldn’t show up to Ben’s party without something.

The cashier rang it up slowly, the beeps of the register cutting through the heavy silence. I kept my head down, resisting the urge to look back, but I knew he was still thee, watching me.

“That’ll be $10.53,” the cashier said, snapping his gum, finally glancing up at me.

I handed him the crumpled bills, my hand shaking slightly as I grabbed the change and shoved the mask into a bag. Without another word, I made a quick escape toward the exit. The bell chimed again as I pushed through the door, and the cold night air hit me like a splash of water. I exhaled sharply, tension easing from my shoulders.

Instinctively, I glanced over my shoulder, half-expecting to see him, the man in the devil mask, standing at the entrance, following me still. But there was nothing. Just the empty store and a couple of people loitering on the sidewalk. He was gone. Again.

I shook my head and got in my car. I kept reminding myself, it’s Halloween. Creepiness was just part of it. And besides, I had bigger things to worry about, like not making an idiot of myself at Ben’s party.

By the time I got to Ben’s place, the party was already in full swing. Cars were parked up and down the block, and I could hear the bass from the music thumping before I even stepped out of my car. The house was decorated to the nines, fake cobwebs hanging from the trees, jack-o'-lanterns lining the walkway, and orange lights flickering in the windows. I could hear Rob Zombie’s “Dragula” blasting from inside the house.

I pulled the plastic hockey mask out of the bag and slipped it over my face. It wasn’t much, but it would do. I didn’t feel like going all out for this party anyway. I just wanted to blend in, have a few drinks, and hopefully avoid any awkward moments with people.

The front door was wide open, and people were spilling out into the yard, already tipsy and laughing too loud. I stepped inside, and the smell of beer and sweat hitting me immediately. Ben’s living room was packed; people in costumes, some elaborate and some as half-assed as mine, dancing, drinking, and yelling over the blaring music.

“Hey! You actually came!” Ben appeared out of nowhere, clapping me on the back hard e...

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This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/mclarke77 on 2024-10-10 21:22:04+00:00.

---

I was fetching myself a glass of water in the middle of the night when whatever had eviscerated my roommate attacked me. It chased me through the flat. Fear, like liquid fire, coursed through my veins. It was gibbering. Shrieking. I’d been so desperate to escape I’d leapt through my living room window. Luckily, in the aftermath I was found by a neighbor and soon ended up in the hospital. 

 

When I’d first returned to my senses all I could see were those dark claws slashing. That wriggling, monstrous torso. That human face. An insectoid body. Human limbs and arthropod claws fused together into some horrendous amalgam. 

 

I felt nausea boil in my stomach. 

 

I thrashed and yelled. 

 

I was blind to the doctors and nurses around me. They held me down and sedated me. When I woke up again I was calmer. A doctor was by my bedside and pulled up a chair next to me. He looked like he was in his fifties and his hair was black and speckled with grey. “Good afternoon, Mr. Anthony Wyndthorn. My name is Dr. Joshua Stern.” He paused. He seemed to be in the middle of picking the correct words. “Well, there’s no easy way to say this so I’ll just say it. Sometime last night you and your roommate” he glanced down at his clipboard, “Benjamin Harper were attacked by some kind of wild animal. What species is, of course, not yet known. Unfortunately, Ben did not survive. At least that’s what I heard from the cops before they left.

You were unconscious until earlier this afternoon. You were very lucky you didn’t break any bones. We gave you the standard shots and course of antibiotics. Your wounds have been washed and stitched. We’re going to keep you overnight just to make sure everything’s in order.” He then suddenly added, “You understand?” Then he eyed me for a long moment. “How’re you feeling?” I stared back at him hotly. My gaze betraying my annoyance. “Well I feel just fucking great, don’t I? Don’t I look great? What do you think?” My voice was croaky but it echoed through the room. Dr Stern looked back at me. “No need to be snippy. I just want to gauge the extent of your injuries. You’ve suffered a major trauma. Not just physically, but mentally.” His gaze softened. Suddenly I broke eye contact with him. The memory of seeing Ben’s corpse flashed through my brain. 

 

The blood. The viscera. 

 

I couldn’t even tell what parts of him were left over. He’d been skinned. And eaten mostly to the bone. Then that thing. It had come out of the shadows of his room. Leapt at me. My breathing quickened. I felt my limbs shake from terror. I winced in pain. I was covered in bruises and scratches and moving, even slightly, caused me great discomfort.

Dr Stern continued to eye me. “We have therapists you could chat with before you leave. I’d highly recommend it actually. It will help you to heal faster psychologically.” I looked back up at him. My annoyance gone. All I could feel was terror and sadness. Ben had not been my favorite person but he’d not deserved to die like that.  “Maybe I will. But not right now. I think I should just rest. Could you give me something to help me sleep?” Dr Stern agreed and left me the details of a local therapist he recommended. Before he left my room he turned to tell me, “and the cops want to interview you tomorrow morning. Just so you now. It’s just to get your side of things.” Then he smiled. I couldn’t help but smile back, his was so genuine. “Okay, well I’m off home to the missus. Take that pill there if you need help sleeping. Hope you feel better.” Then he was gone. 

 

I was alone in my room for the first time since I had awoken. My brain was still groggy from all the sedatives and I finally got a good look at my room. It was relatively nice for what must have been a public hospital. I had an ensuite bathroom but the room was small and the door to my room was within arms-reach of my bed. I turned my head and tried to sit up slightly. I yelled in pain as my stitches pulled in my side. “Ahhgh” I grunted.  

I then realized they’d tied some kind of gauze and brace around my stomach. I guess it was meant to hold me together or stop me from messing with my stitches? I rolled onto my side with great effort and with many more grunts of pain managed to get to my feet. I hobbled over to the bathroom and peed. I tried for a number two but it was a no go. Too painful. Oh well. I limped slowly back to my bed and slumped back down. I felt like I’d been sliced all over my stomach and chest.

As I lay in bed I realized that’s probably exactly what happened. I drank a bunch of water and nibbled on some cheese biscuits they’d left me for my tea. Then I took my blue sleeping pill and got myself as comfy as one could get in those scratchy hospital linens. As I lay in the dark of my room I felt an anxious sweat bead my forehead as I played the events of the last twenty-four hours over and over in my brain.

 

I had awoken in the early hours of that fateful morning. It had been a Sunday. I felt that horrendous sticky heat one gets from drinking way too much alcohol. I had hot coals in my throat from all the shots and cigarettes I’d chocked down the previous night. Ben and I had gone out with some friends. It had been pretty wild. 

 

I don’t remember how I got home. All I remember is waking up with an unendurable thirst. With eyes half-open, I groped and shambled my way through our dark flat to the kitchen. I noticed something was wrong when my barefoot stepped on something cold and slimy. I heard a loud squelch. “What the hell is that?” I mumbled. I groped for the lights but couldn’t find them. I was still too asleep and half-drunk, so I did not understand what was happening. I pulled out my phone and turned on the flashlight.

There on the floor, just beneath the fridge, was some kind of goo. It was translucent but had a slight blue tint. It smelled sweet like honey but not quite.  My forehead was a knot of confusion. Then I noticed the fridge was slightly ajar. It was an old fridge, one of those models with rounded edges from the 1950s that just never stops running. It was dark blue with a silver outline. I saw traces of the same goo on the sides of the fridge door as I pulled it open. 

 

When I saw what was on the other side I simply gaped. 

 

My mouth hung open in disbelief. 

 

My eyes stared unblinking. Within the fridge. Well, there was no fridge. The inside of the fridge was completely gone. No light. No  half rotten veggies. No left-over Chinese food. No. In place of all these things was a worn stone staircase. Cut from a shiny, black stone; I believe it resembled obsidian. The maw of the doorway yawned as cold as the arctic. I felt an icy wind blow softly from within the doorway. Small icicles had formed on the circular roof which sat above the darkened staircase. I gaped still and slowly studied the impossible staircase. The light of my phone cast long shadows. The stairs were coated with a thin film of that same slime and seemed to go on forever down and deeper until darkness swallowed them up below. “No fucking way. Nope. Not today.” I said stupidly and slammed the fridge door shut. 

 

My heart was beating hard. I felt confused and sick. I spun around when suddenly I heard something scuttle in the corridor. I then noticed, using my phone’s flashlight, that a line of that goo ran from the fridge all the way through the kitchen into  Ben’s room. I saw through the kitchen doorway that his bedroom door was open. 

 

I should have just run at that moment. I should have run and never looked back. 

 

But I looked through the doorway. Transfixed, I stumbled forward. In the blue glow of the moon I saw Ben lying on his bed, spread-eagle. But when I looked closer I saw that it was not him. It was what was left of him. And I saw the thing that did it come scuttling out of the dark. I heard a horrible clicking noise. A click-click-click of giant pincers. I heard a loud trilling sound.

Then I saw the thing come out of the dark. It was humanoid but only slightly and I only say this because it’s the one word I can think of. Imagine a person except every limb is twisted the wrong way so that this thing was forced to run on all fours, with limbs bent all backwards. It had two heads. One faced me and it was a human mask stretched across something else; the mask was all out of shape. The other face was at the end of a hideously long neck that was held in the dark. Its body was a wriggling mass of human flesh and some kind of carapace, like that of a crab or arachnid. It had ten segmented limbs that ended in large claws.

Those claws lashed out at me. What felt like hot blades sliced through my chest and stomach. I screamed in pain, nearly fell over. I just managed to back away. The creature stepped back too. I felt something sticky cover my wounds. It was that slime. I looked up again. That whole creeping creature was covered in blue slime. I felt bile rise in my throat as I sprinted away screaming a primal scream of pain and terror. It didn’t sound human. 

 

The thing chased me. It came scuttling on its arthropod legs, slashing at me; clipping my ankles once or twice. My panting and its trilling filled the darkened flat. I wondered if perhaps a neighbor had heard the noise? Could the police be coming? 

 

The way the thing moved toward me reminded of a giant spider. As I entered the living room I realized there was no way I was going to have time to unlock and leave my flat through the front door. 

 ...

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This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/HeatConfident4673 on 2024-10-11 08:39:34+00:00.

---

We were untouchable back then—Emma, Lila, Jess, Brianna, and me, Clara. Five girls who ruled our little town, perfect on the outside but rotten beneath the surface. We took what we wanted, did what we wanted, without a second thought. And then there was him—Simon.

Simon was easy prey. Limping, stuttering, always avoiding eye contact like he was afraid of his own shadow. We hated him for how pitiful he was, hated him even more because he dared to exist in our world. It was a joke at first, something to pass the time after one too many drinks. Just scare him a little, make him run, watch him trip over his own feet. But it spiraled, like things do when you’ve got cruelty running through your veins.

He begged us to stop. I remember his voice, trembling as he stumbled through the trees, his breath coming in ragged gasps. We didn’t stop. Not until he fell—hard.

That sound. The crunch of bone hitting rock. The way his body just crumpled, limp and broken. I swear, for a moment, everything was silent, except for the crackle of leaves underfoot. We just stood there, staring down at him, frozen in horror. His eyes… they were still open, still wide, but he wasn’t seeing us anymore.

We ran.

We swore we’d never talk about it again, and we didn’t. We let the silence swallow the memory. We moved on, or at least tried to. But Simon didn’t.

It started with Brianna. She drowned in her own pool, which was strange enough. But the scratches on her neck told a different story. It was like someone had held her under, someone who wasn’t there. At her funeral, we didn’t even have to say it—we knew.

Then came Lila. She fell down the stairs, except her parents said they heard her laughing before she screamed. Laughing. The kind of laugh that makes your skin crawl, like something inside her snapped. They found her at the bottom, her neck twisted, her eyes wide and glassy, just like Simon’s.

Jess didn’t last much longer. She drove off a cliff late one night. Witnesses said they saw a man standing by the edge, limping, just watching as her car went over. No one believed it, but we did. We knew.

One by one, he came for them, and I watched, helpless, knowing my turn was next. I tried to run, to change, to hide. I dyed my hair, cut it short, dressed differently, even lost weight. I became a stranger to myself, thinking I could escape him. But there was one thing I couldn’t change.

The birthmark.

A small, crescent-shaped scar just under my collarbone. Ugly. Stupid. I’d always hated it, but now… now it’s the thing that will doom me. Because I know—Simon remembers.

Emma was the last to go before me. She started seeing him everywhere: in the corners of mirrors, in the shadows of empty rooms. She called me, frantic, saying he was inside her house. The next day, her parents found her, twisted in her sheets, eyes bulging, her face frozen in a mask of terror.

And now it’s just me.

I feel him, you know. In the walls, in the whispers that creep through my empty apartment at night. He’s always there, just out of sight, just close enough to remind me that I can’t escape. I try to stay awake, try to keep the lights on, but it doesn’t matter. Every time I close my eyes, I feel his breath on the back of my neck. I hear that dragging limp, the sound of his twisted leg scraping across the floor.

Last night, I woke up to laughter. Not my own—his. He was standing at the foot of my bed, his face a pale, bloated echo of the boy we left behind. His eyes... empty, like they’d never seen light. He didn’t say anything, didn’t move. He just looked at me, his gaze sliding down to the birthmark on my chest, that cursed crescent shape that gives me away.

And then he smiled.

He’s not here to kill me quickly like the others. No, that would be too easy. He wants me to suffer, to feel the weight of what we did pressing down on my chest, suffocating me day by day. He’s going to torment me, just like we tormented him, until there’s nothing left but the sound of my own screams.

I can’t run. I can’t hide. He’s always watching, always waiting. I know he’ll never leave me. Not until I’ve paid for what we did, piece by piece. Every breath I take, every flicker of light in the corner of my eye—he’s there, reminding me that it’s not over. It will never be over.

I can’t escape. He’s coming for me, just like he came for the others. And when he does, I’ll hear that limp dragging across the floor, I’ll hear his voice whispering my name, and I’ll know that this time, there’s nowhere left to run.

Because Simon always gets the last laugh.

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/TheDarkerMatters on 2024-10-11 05:55:02+00:00.

---

I reset the cruise control and took a second to stretch my aching legs in the confines of our cramped Saturn sedan. The gentle glow from the dashboard clock read 2:21, AM. That means I’d been driving for 3 hours nonstop now. It was hypnotizing, watching the endless line of reflective gold stripes pass one by one under the tires. I was in no danger of falling asleep, the slightly questionable, most likely toxic energy drink purchased at a gas station in Des Moines made sure of that. But I still found myself astonished at how I had been unaware of time passing around me. It was as if I had dozed off, and the car had been held in control by some benevolent spirit that inhabited Interstate 80.

I heard Keith stirring in the passenger seat, he let out a small groan of discomfort, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

“You need a break yet?” Keith asked in a groggy tone, barely above a whisper.

“No, I’m fine,” It came out sharper than I had intended.

The move had been his idea. He thought it could be good for us, starting over in a new, small town, away from our shared past. Not to mention him being fired from every reputable law firm in Chicago. The fact that the Cass County Public Defender would even look at a resume like that did not inspire confidence.

“Alright, wake me when you need me.”

I smiled wryly at this, wondering how the sleep-deprived, hungover, and short-tempered man next to me would be trustworthy to drive at highway speeds. Despite the repetitive fields, flat and unending on both sides of the car, I found myself enjoying the drive. There were so few other cars out here this late, it made the drive almost meditative. Not that I really wanted to be alone with my thoughts anymore. The years spent since marrying Keith had gone by in a blur, and with every passing day, I grew to resent him.

I was pulled out of my reflection when a sudden flash of blue and red lights blazed off my rear view mirror. I began to curse loudly, as the shrill chirp of a siren further confirmed the fact that I was being pulled over. I knew that I had been speeding, a modest 10 miles over, but the lack of cars on the road must have made me easy prey for some trooper. I flicked on my hazard lights and pulled onto the shoulder as Keith began to join my litany of swear words.

“How fast were you going?” Keith yelled, spit flying from his mouth with the words.

“Just 90,” I said restraining a scream of frustration, “Maybe we have a broken taillight or something.”

I tried to compose myself, hoping that this would be a simple slap on the wrist. I rolled down my window and waited, the gentle, warm breeze stirring my hair. The emergency lights kept flashing; the effect was dizzying. I sat there, drumming my fingers impatiently on the steering wheel. I waited expectantly for the crunch of boots on gravel as the patrolman would be approaching my window, but nothing came. I heard only the sound of wind rustling the corn stalks, it sounded like whispers being exchanged hurriedly. Keith began to sigh, as he twisted in his seat to look behind.

“Hey, settle down,” I muttered, “We don’t need to look suspicious.”

“At this point, I don’t care how we look, it’s 2 fucking AM, and every second we spend here is time we should be heading to our new home.”

I almost laughed at his use of the word home, but instead, I just reserved myself to sitting, staring straight ahead as we waited in silence. I glanced at the clock on the dashboard again, 2:50 AM. We had been sitting here for 10 minutes, and aside from the blinking lights that cast flickering, ghoulish shadows across the road in front of us, there was no sign of life from behind. I felt my stress level rising, trying to imagine what was taking so long. Was he running our plate? Was he just procrastinating because he could?

“Don’t worry Barbs,” Keith said with a grin as he leaned his seat back, “He has less than 50 minutes to detain us, then we can go.”

I tried to force a chuckle, imagining the absurdity of that happening. But I became increasingly worried as time ticked past. It was 3:15 now, and silence covered the whole scene like a sheet. Keith had gone from nervous, to smug, to irate. He continued his fiery rants on our rights, case law, and how unfair this was, I nodded and tried to play along, trying to stifle the fear that had been creeping up on me as we sat on the side of the road. I hadn’t seen another car pass for at least 20 minutes, and I began to wonder if this was all an elaborate ambush. Maybe some cult of inbred cannibals stalked this stretch of open country, luring unsuspecting middle-aged couples to their untimely doom.

I had been so preoccupied with my fantasies of the true-crime podcast our lives would most certainly become when the click of the passenger door pulled me back to reality. Keith was unbuckling his seatbelt and swinging his leg out the open door.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

“This clown is violating our rights,” He said, bleary eyes filled with righteous fury, “I want his name and badge number.”

“Please, just sit back down,” I said, sudden fear over the possibility that my angry husband brandishing his phone as he recorded could be mistaken for something else in the darkness.

Keith just shook his head in disgust, and turned, the strobing lights distorting his face into a gruesome, ghostly imitation. He opened his mouth, surely about to name some case law that was being violated, when he froze. He didn’t even scream as the long, dark tendril shot through his heart. It looked almost like the branch of a tree in winter, all jagged edges and brittle-looking twigs splintering off in different directions. I felt the hot, sticky blood splash over my cheek as I watched in terror as a second, third, and then more than I could count began to drive into him like needles. In seconds, Keith was reduced to an unrecognizable, bloody pincushion, and then he was gone. Dragged silently into the night by those hideous tentacles.

I didn’t even realize I had been screaming until I stopped, gulping in the air desperately as I shifted the car back into drive. I didn’t have time to process my husband’s gruesome fate, I needed to focus all my attention on escaping this thing. The lights and sirens were gone, but I somehow knew it was still behind me, leaping from shadow to shadow in between the sporadic streetlights. The road stretched ahead,

I desperately looked at the navigation on my phone screen, trying to see the nearest human civilization was. It looked like I was 10 minutes away from the town of Stuart, barely a dot on the map, but as long as there were people, I knew I would be safer. I pressed harder on the gas pedal, watching the scenery blurring around me as I began to exceed 100 miles per hour.

I sobbed quietly, despair and horror clouding my mind. It was terrible, watching someone, a human being, so casually reduced to a pile of unthinking meat in seconds. I could only pray that he died instantly, that he didn’t feel those wickedly barbed thorns reaching through his skin, pulling him away to be devoured by something unimaginable. When I saw the distant glow of the Chevron gas station at the edge of town, I began laughing in relief. It wasn’t that I thought the minimum wage gas station worker would be able to fight off this demon, but at least I wouldn’t have to face it alone.

I threw the car in park and sprinted to the double glass doors, trying to outrun the slithering noise that seemed to come from every direction at once in the darkness. I ran in, seeing the attendant standing behind a small counter. He saw me and immediately smiled, raising his right hand in a friendly wave. I slowed to a brisk walk as I approached the counter, words tumbling from my mouth in an incoherent ramble. Despite my desperation to get help and find some haven from this monster, I noticed the strangeness of the employee. Through my breathless account, he continued to just sit there, smiling, waving his right hand seemingly oblivious.

My words started to trail off, as I stared at the figure, unsure of what to make of his odd behavior, when I noticed something that froze me in utter fear and disbelief. The man’s arm, still waving slowly back and forth, was suspended on a wire-thin, coal-black string of tissue. It was the same sort of black tentacle that had pulled Keith to his death. I started to back away, noticing that his whole frame was held from the ceiling by a myriad of these dark tendons. Even the corners of his wide, static smile, were held up by the two pinpricks of shadow in his cheeks.

My backpedaling turned into an all-out sprint as more of these things began to whip down from the ceiling at me. I held my hands over my head protectively, feeling the sharp burn as my skin was flayed. I barely made it out the front doors, stumbling back to the still-glowing headlights of my car. I yanked the door open, jumping into the driver seat as I watched the glass at the front of the gas station shatter apart.

As I sat there, I began to feel a wet, warm stickiness spread along my back and upper legs on the seat. I wondered if I had been cut more severely than I thought when I looked down to see a yellow, viscous substance oozing out of the cushions. I gasped, feeling the stinging burn on my finger as I touched it. Then I noticed that the whole interior of the sedan was just wrong. The dashboard and steering wheel looked to be carved out of some sort of dark wood-...

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This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/YeetManXD69 on 2024-10-10 05:15:54+00:00.

---

Standing short at five foot one at the ripe age of twenty, I often longed for days when I could reach the top shelf. Daily reminders of my shortcomings existed all around every corner.

Going to the local gym with my acquaintances, I cannot help but feel envy. I watched in horror as Chow dunked a basketball into the hoop with ferocious force. That piano playing twat! Why is he so talented at everything?!

“Hey Bo, come join us! We could really use one more. The teams are uneven right now,” Chow said, motioning towards the ball, grinning.

I panicked. He’s just trying to embarrass me. What a jerk. He’s always done that, faking kindness just to show off how awesome he is. Ever since we were kids, he’s always been inviting me to play sports he knew I wasn’t good at. My stomach roiled as I brushed him off and went about my business.

When I arrived home, still upset over Chow’s rudeness, I sprawled out in bed and scrolled through Facebook as per usual. That’s when I saw it.

A small little ad in the bottom right corner of my screen, barely noticeable. It had a crude gif of legs growing taller. Of course. These targeted ads were becoming ridiculous.

“We’ll Make You Taller.” It read, followed by a ton of thumbs up emojis. Ok, weird.

It must be like one of those boner pill ads, I thought. Unfortunately I was intrigued, I clicked it. It took me to the most rudimentary webpage I had seen in a long time. It reminded me of the stuff I’d make in my HTML class that same year.

I lay there staring at my glowing laptop screen in the darkness of my bedroom. The website only had one feature: to make an appointment. Fuck it. What have I got to lose? Well, a lot more than you’d think. The funny thing is, it didn’t have payment options. Or even a time and place. All I did was click yes. I never expected anything to actually happen.

Two days passed, and I had almost forgotten about the whole ordeal. Until I picked up the mail. Well, now I had my time and place. Funny, I don’t remember giving them my address. This all, of course, felt like a horrible idea, but, I was desperate. I longed to dunk a basketball, for people to like me.

After thirty five minutes of driving I ended up in a part of town I’d never been in before. I didn’t even know this street existed. It was right next to a trailer park. I waltzed into the sterile grey building with no signage posted outside. Met with an empty waiting room, I headed for the front desk. No one was there, but I saw a bell, like the ones you find in hotels.

I dinged it and waited. Soon after, a very short woman meandered towards the counter. Huh, that’s funny. She must not have used the services here.

“Hi, I have an appointment with Doctor Okanavić at eleven A.M.” I totally butchered the pronunciation of his name, but I guess she knew who I meant. “Do you guys take insurance?” I asked. “Yes, we already have yours on file.” Alright then, that’s weird. I never gave them that information. But, I mean, my insurance surely wouldn’t let anything bad happen to me. If they’re covering it, it must be safe. Right?

“Okay great.” I said hesitantly.

“If you’d fill out this paperwork for me, please.” She said without even glancing up at me. I took the clipboard and sat down in one of the many empty chairs. It was your standard medical information, list of medications, allergies, all that boring stuff.

I was eager to get this procedure done. I skimmed through it all, my head swimming. I stepped back up to the counter and slid the clipboard to the woman.

“Follow me through that door on the left.” I followed the woman through the desolate halls. Did anyone else even work here? The woman must have been four feet tall. Wow, finally, someone shorter than me. She probably makes more money than me though.

The lady led me to an empty room and sat me down on the table. That white paper material they used to cover the seat crinkled as I sat on the chair.

“The doctor will be with you shortly.” I sat there shaking my leg. I fidgeted with my phone when I heard a knock on the door.

He was a normal sized man with glasses and balding grey hair. I thought he looked like your typical doctor, almost too typical. That’s the last thing I remember.

It’s strange, usually in surgery, you’ll at least remember them putting you to sleep. Not this time. All I remember is the doctor walking into the room. And then I woke up. I already felt different, of course I probably still had the drugs in my system.

I squinted my eyes, looking up at the doctor. It looked like there were four people in front of me. The drugs definitely hadn’t quite worn off yet.

“How tall am I now?” I managed to say.

“Seven foot one,” the doctor said confidently.

“What?!” Is this real? I’m actually that tall now?

I stood up. Sure enough, I towered over the doctor, who, before, was a pretty tall man. I felt great. This was everything I had ever wanted. I was so ready to show off.

"Don't I need to wait around awhile for the drugs to wear off or something?"

"No." Alright then.

The following day, I went back to my normal life. Well, normal as it could be. I arrived at work and immediately caught everyone's attention.They couldn’t wrap their heads around it. Their responses disheartened me. Wishing to be praised, instead I was met with countless befuddled faces and even more questions.

After work, I went to the gym again. This time with the goal to accept Chow’s offer to play basketball.

“Bo? How are you so tall? Is that really you?”

“Yeah, it’s me. I got surgery. Isn’t it great?”

“What, seriously? That’s a thing?” He said blinking rapidly.

“Yean man, I’m finally tall.” I said with a grin.

“I don’t even know what to say. Are you sure that's a good idea? I mean, what are the side effects?"

I played two on two basketball with Chow but quickly ran into a problem. I may be tall now, but I still suck at basketball. Also, I am out of shape. I got so out of breath from running up and down that court; I had to take a breather on several occasions. This was a low blow. I thought being tall would fix everything. Desperate to get out of there, my stomach fluttered as I left the gym.

It was not going as planned. Most people were freaked out by my newfound height. I expected to be congratulated, but all I got were strange looks and so many questions.

But it got worse, not only was my mental state affected, soon my body was too. One night, as I was brushing my teeth, a sudden sharp pain entered my molars. I spit my toothpaste out and rinsed out my mouth. The pain was so bad it gave me a splitting headache. It felt like a million tiny razors were chipping away at my teeth.

Then I huddled over the sink in pain as my teeth fell out of my mouth, clinking into the sink. What happened? Was this a side effect of the surgery? My mouth was wide open, unable to close. I looked up slowly at my reflection in the mirror. Where each tooth once was, a long dangling red ligament protruded from the tooth hole in my gums. My bathroom sink was a bloody mess.

Stumbling backwards, I tripped and landed on the hardwood flooring. The pain in my mouth still remained. For an unknown reason, I had the strongest urge to rid my mouth of those disgusting ligaments. So I did. I got back to my feet, stood in front of the mirror and pulled them out, one by one. The pain finally ceased.

The next day I awoke to even more complications. When I went to cut my nails, they grew back tenfold. What was wrong with me? Why was this happening? I should’ve never agreed to that godforsaken surgery. I didn’t know it was possible for the human body to change in ways like this.

I stared back at myself in the mirror one final time. All my pores had enlarged to a disgusting degree. I had lost weight rapidly overnight, so much so that my ribs were visible. My skin turned as grey as the paint on my walls and my pupils had completely blackened. I didn’t even feel human anymore.