This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/CQ-Erickson on 2024-10-15 23:37:29+00:00.
Oak Neck doesn’t show up on maps. Not really. Not GPS maps anyway. But it is there, anyone can find it, if you know what turns to make in Mill Neck and Lattingtown (no I won’t tell you).
Cat Hollow is harder. You need to start in Oak Neck and know the right road, at the right time of day. But you can get there. Pine Island, however, requires a guide.
I’m not rich, but I went to a rich kid college north of NYC. My mom worked in the bursar’s office, so I got a major break on tuition. Enough of a break that I could live in the dorms, even though my parents were ten minutes away in town. That was where I met Per.
Per wasn’t flashy new money rich like the other guys in our suite. His sneakers were beat to shit and if his watch was expensive it was impossible to tell because the case was too scratched to see the manufacturer. His car was definitely expensive when it was new, (in the early 90s), but Per discovered right before winter break that even Bentleys need oil changes or their engines will seize up.
I agreed to give him a ride home. School was only 30 minutes north of the city and he said his parents lived on the north shore of Long Island. Per insisted on a deal: he would buy my books for the spring semester, but I couldn’t tell anyone where his parents lived.
I didn’t know that area particularly well, but I was still weirded out how far north we had to drive from the expressway. It felt like we should be in the middle of the sound by the time we crossed the little road from Oak Neck to Cat Hollow as the sun was setting. Per, usually super laid back, sat up and got really intense, telling me “you need to drive widdershins on the creek road until you see the bridge.”
It turned out that this meant carefully driving counter clockwise on a foggy-ass one lane road around what seemed to be a lake until just as the sun went down a road appeared in the fog on a narrow strip of land that hadn’t been there before.
Pine Island isn’t particularly special; sand dunes and spooky trees, mostly, until you get to the bridge, which seemed impossibly huge and ornate, with what looked like gargoyles carved on the sides
He told me the name of the town as we crossed the bridge. I don’t remember yet but the rest of this came back to me, I’m assuming that will come too. It wasn’t Nurenbegan, but that’s what the people who are looking for it call it. I remember a bustling Main Street with a stave church rising in the mist at the end. The people were dressed different. Not futuristic, but not old timey either. It was like if everyone shopped at an LL bean where the clothes were handmade by witches.
Per directed me down a side street that led to a massive half timbered house that loomed over the water’s edge. It has a thatched roof and seemed to be built against a massive tree. Some sort of chain wrapped around the roof and the tree and wound down towards a huge stone well. The chain glistened gold in the moonlight. An angry looking lady was waiting at the end of the driveway. After Per apologized and left with his suitcases I could still see her pointing at my car and yelling at him as I drove off. It sounded like she was speaking another language, but also kind of like she was talking backwards somehow?
I followed the directions he had carefully written down and got back to the dorms around midnight. When break was over, we both kept our deal. Kinda. Per bought my books, and I didn’t tell anyone about his creepy-ass castle house. At first.
But around February, after I had been dating this girl for a few months, one night we stayed up gossiping about everyone in our friend group. She told me about Danny’s secret boyfriend and Mary Ellen’s creepy crushes. I didn’t have much to share so I tried to tell her about Per’s house. I couldn’t talk. It wasn’t like laryngitis. It was like my voice was paralyzed. The next morning I woke up to what felt like a a hundred mosquito bites on my legs.
When I went in the bathroom I saw that I had dozens of cuts up and down my legs, all in the shape of some symbol. Like a little arrow pointing down with a slash through it. I didn’t show my girlfriend or tell anyone.
I spent the weekend in the school library looking up the school library looking up symbols. I finally found it: an Elder Futhark variation - an inversion of Tiwaz- that was on the grave of a criminal. They called it the Traitor Rune.
So I spent half the spring semester hiding that I had some kind of Viking accusation carved into my legs. I had to change my whole look. I had been the douchebag who wears shorts and a sweatshirt and Timberlands all winter.
Per couldn’t possibly know that I tried to tell, but he iced me out immediately after that and didn’t come back in the fall. They healed and you would think that would be my most memorable college experience. Excerpt that I immediately forgot about the cuts, and Per, and the weird drive. And it stayed forgotten for 20 years.
A while back I got into conspiracy podcasts. Not like the blowhard conservative ones, but like stuff about the Mandela effect, and The Elevator Game, and weird geography. I started to hear the word Nurenbegan and it sent a shiver down my spine.
It all started to come back. A little at first, then all at once. I went into my college keepsakes, and there amongst the ticket stubs and concert fliers was Per’s handwritten notes on how to get back to school.
I don’t know what writing this down and posting it will do to me. I don’t really know if I care. I don’t have much going on these days, and I’m not going to be bullied.
You hear me, north shore snob-town Viking magic spirits? I see so much as a sinister scab and I’m posting these directions to a Paranormal sub and the conspiracy people can all go apple picking in your secret/liminal space/ private town.