/r/TerrorMill

Photograph via //r/TerrorMill

Terror Mill is a roleplaying sub for sharing all your creepy stories.

Consider everything posted on this sub to be true, comment, have fun and get involved!


Where's The Downvote?

Downvotes have been disabled on this sub and will only be available during active contests.


Sub Rules


Rules Of Posting:

-No TL;DR, it ruins the suspension of disbelief.

  • No Plagiarism, No Exceptions! Violators will be outed and banned!

  • Be Original. You can post any style of story you wish so long as you are the original author. You can post CreepyPasta, true stories, ghost stories, anything you consider to fall into the creepy or horror genre.

  • No posting from beyond the grave. If posting in first-person, the story can not end with you being dead.

  • Graphic Content Must Be Marked NSFW. This is a sub for CreepyPasta and scary stories, all stories should be considered somewhat mature, but those that contain a trigger warning must be marked with NSFW.

  • Don't Spam. You may only post once every 24 hours Rule in place once we hit 500+ subscribers.

  • If you want to post your stories more than once, you may only post the same story once every 7 days.

  • HAVE FUN!

Rules Of Commenting

  • Although this is a roleplaying subreddit, you are not required to roleplay in the comments, though we find it to be more fun if you do!

  • If roleplaying, you are to comment on stories as if they are true.

  • No trying to debunk a story or saying/assuming it's not true, always comment as if you know and believe the story is true.

  • Be respectful of other members of this sub. No hate, homophobia, racist or otherwise derogatory comments.

  • No one-word comments, if you've got something to say, join in, otherwise, jog on.

  • HAVE FUN!


Flair Use Policy


Please label all your posts with flairs as follows:

  1. Micro: Anything from 0-500 words in length.

  2. Short: Anything from 501-1500 words in length.

  3. Midi: Anything from 1501-3000 words in length.

  4. Long: Anything over 3000 words in length.

  5. Series: Self-explanatory, tag your series' with this flair and remember to link your stories with previous parts at the start of your post.

  6. Horror Story: Anything about surfing the deep web, Reddit, 4Chan, Craigslist etc. Also includes anything not directly about yourself, or anything not directly told in a "true story" or "creepypasta" format.

  7. True Story: Anything like "LetsNotMeet" or the "Search & Rescue" series, creepy goings on in "your" workplace, paranormal experiences, ghost stories etc.

  8. Creepypasta: For stories that don't feel quite like traditional horror stories, but rather more like stories told around a campfire; Stories like 'Slender', 'Jeff the killer', 'The Rake'.

  9. Poetry: Got an eerie poem you have written? Use this flair.


If you're unsure how long your story is, please use this word counter to be sure you use the correct flair. If you are unsure what 'genre' flair to use, 'message the moderators' asking to review it for you after posting.


Other Subs To Follow


/r/WriteWorld - Want help with your writing? Want to meet likeminded authors, playwriters and screen writers? This is the sub for you!

/r/Scaries - More CreepyPasta!


/r/TerrorMill

390 Subscribers

1

A Blood Spear and A Bleaker Sun

Nothing in the story I am about to tell is going to be supernatural or unexplainable. There is no great mystery to gleam out of my telling. There won’t be any surprises or revelations made here. I am merely making my way through the fog of amnesia. I am, literally speaking, retracing the steps I had lost many years ago.

I am writing this to the cold auditory landscape of Maníi’s In The Depths of Darkness album. If any of this comes out as more depressive, or colder than it should, I apologize in advance. For me, this process is a way to get rid of the intrusive thoughts that keep up at night. Strange mental pictures sneaking up on me in the quiet hours of the day from within the boundless darkness of the night. Bizarre images of the dead and the dying circling me in their uninterrupted, eternal rest.

This specific battle with unreasonable fears and anxiety started after a funeral. One of many such battles with an incurable enemy, but I’ll get to that later. My long-time friend, George. He passed away from cancer recently. It ate at him like a starved animal. He was gone almost in an instant. Between the time he told me about his diagnosis and his passing, five months had passed. In that timeframe, life had bled from out of his body. Five months is what it took for the malignancy to reduce him from a giant of a man to a mummified husk, barely able to keep his massive skeletal frame upright. George could’ve been a strongman if he wanted to. He certainly had the size for it. He was a gentle giant, though.

The last time we spoke, he asked me if I remember the films we used to make together as kids. I remembered something about it. Didn’t remember the details at all, however. He told me all about it, bringing back a flood of pleasant memories. When I was a kid, I wanted to get into cinematography. A bunch of friends of mine and I did. We all aspired to be a film-making crew together, so during our days in middle school in the early aughts, we made a bunch of short films and sketches. None of it panned out, as I’m sure is clear by now.  

George reminded me of the compact discs I was supposed to have with all these projects of ours. He said he watched a bunch of them recently and that it was a shame we never got to make anything professionally. I scoffed at the idea when we spoke, thinking we must’ve been incredibly amateurish about our craft.

Only after his passing did I find the will and the CDs to revisit this old passion of mine. One I had forgotten I even had. Upon a second viewing of the material, I can proudly say that we were too good for a bunch of teens doing amateur short films.

There were a bunch of sketches and movies there; ranging from slapstick comedy with toilet humor to action-style flicks riddled with parkour sequences. There’s also a hype video someone made of my swimming. I used to be a competitive swimmer in my youth, that is until an injury forced me out of the sport.

Then there was this one film whose title had an aura to it. The Rasp. For a reason I couldn’t understand back then, I couldn’t get myself to play the video for what seemed like an hour. Something about that thing felt off. Granted, there was nothing off about the film. It took me a moment, but I finally played the file. It took about fifteen seconds of the dry, labored breathing we used as the score at the beginning of the video to take me decades back. Pausing the video, I took a moment to soak in my returning memories.

The Rasp was supposed to be our big break. That’s what we saw it as, our so-called big break. The memories came back flooding. This was the first time we treated it like real cinematography. There were a bunch of kids from school and the neighborhood I didn’t even know involved in this thing. We had them as extras in the film. We made the whole thing with utmost realism in mind. It seemed as real as we could afford to make it on a non-budget.

A twelve-minute motion picture exploring the unmatched beauty of human mortality in all of its oppressive glory. I was playing the role of a dead person, along with dozens of other kids. We were all covered in grayish body paint to make ourselves look as close to real corpses as possible.

I started remembering how we covered the walls of the building we filmed in with drawings made by the elder sister of one of my friends, Kathrine Monserrate. She was one of the few cool adults around. We’re still in touch to this day. I remember she used to mix her dye with her blood. I know she’s making a living as an artist and an art teacher, but I’m not sure if she’s still doing the blood thing. When her brother, Mark, convinced her to work on the creepy art for our project, she ended up showing me her process. You’d never believe someone who is the epitome of sanity would just cut open their hand and then shove a paintbrush into the wound, but that’s how she did it. She’s the one who introduced all of us into “cool adult” music too. She kept saying that Nu Metal and Grunge, which were the mainstream heavy music, back then, were boring and for losers.

Ah, these were simpler times…

Anyway, once the euphoria of finding something I couldn’t find for so long finally subsided, I pressed play and let my eyes get lost in the gloomy atmosphere of George’s camera, slowly exploring a poorly lit concrete structure. The erratic breathing in the background seemed to crawl out of my speakers and into my room, almost engulfing me.

He panned the camera onto a series of purposefully poorly drawn images hanging on the wall, some hanging loosely on the wall. As he passed drawing after drawing, a clear picture emerged. It was a tale of great sorrow and pain boiling into pure hatred.

It was a story of a strange man and his little dog, much like the artist who drew that man’s life. The man was a painter. He kept painting his little four-legged friend over and over. He seemed happy in the first drawings shown. Deeper into the corridor there was a drawing hanging of the two walking down the street, the backdrop of the story growing increasingly dark.

As George went deeper into the corridor, the drawings turned darker; a group of hooded figures showed up from the darkness, first mocking the man and his dog, then pulling out bats and knives to attack the man. It was horrible, the awful breathing noise, the grimy drawing style. The camera slightly shook as George attempted the emotional weight of the story unfolding before my eyes.

A couple of feet deeper and the man is being beaten up, the next drawing has the little animal attempting to defend its owner.

In the next, it’s struck down.

Further, they’re both on the floor, beaten and bloodied.

The dog ends up gravely injured.

It doesn’t make it.

The following drawing is of the man weeping over his dog.

Followed by one where he is about to bury his deceased companion.

My heart was in shambles watching this, the breathing in the background slowly turned into heaving pounding in my ears as the drawings shifted from a depiction of a physical tragedy to the mental anguish of a man who had lost his everything.

If pain and anguish were monsters, Katie’s amorphous, shadowy demonic design crawling out of a defeated man’s shape would probably be an accurate depiction. When George passed the final drawing on the wall, I could feel the cold air of the recorded space tightening its grip on me. It was a grotesque, misshapen apparition of a man metamorphosed into an abyssal monstrosity.

The camera made a sharp turn to face a door with a peeling paint job. It was an old. Ancient, even. No one was in that building for years before we got there, I reckon. The heaving in the background has morphed into a throaty clicking noise that won’t stop trying to crack my skull open.

George’s hand pushed the door open. It creaked through the clicking noises, grating against my eardrums, and an imagined scent of dust assaulted my nostrils. I am completely immersed in the film. The silhouettes of people lying in neatly arrayed beds were visible from the edge of the room where George was filming.

A single lightbulb, barely working, hung overhead, swinging softly. It was hardly illuminating anything in that room. Producing just enough light to make out the details clearly, while adding to the sinister feeling of the film.

With slow and deliberate steps, he entered the room. My heart began racing as my mind was expecting some kind of catch. A jump scare, a loud shriek bouncing against the walls, something. Logic and experience told me something had to happen, but my memory wasn't complete yet to tell me what was supposed to happen. George approached the first bed, capturing a human silhouette covered with sheets. Cautiously placing his hand on the sheet, he slowly pulled it down, and I turned anxious watching him do that. I was expecting something, bloody, rats, a roar, a real monster lurking beneath the sheet, a head rolling onto the floor to scare the life out of the camera-carrying boy.

Instead, all I got is another kid, pale and motionless, his eyes closed, imitating death.

The revelation didn’t put me at ease. Instead, my anxiety kept getting worse with each passing second I was viewing the film.

George continued walking around the room, approaching every bed, removing each sheet, and allowing me to stare at the faux corpse beneath. Some of whom are familiar, while others are strangers.

And as that process unfolded, I kept thinking something’s got to happen.

Something had to happen.

Something would happen.

Someone would bite him with force.

Someone wouldn’t wake up after the camera stops rolling.

There would be a real dead body under one sheet.

A knife-swinging man was going to emerge from the darkness.

Nothing, nothing happened. It was a mock corpse after a mock corpse after a mock corpse. I couldn’t shake off the feeling that something was wrong. My appearance in the film didn’t make me feel any better. It made my dread worse. By the time George had reached the bed I was lying in, I completely forgot I was one of those corpses, too. When he finally pulled the sheet from my past self’s head, we both screamed at what awaited beneath. Me and film-George. A dead, empty stare. My dead, empty stare. I wore contact lenses to make it seem as if the fog of the moribund had completely veiled my open eyes. A perverted version of my past yet simultaneously future self stared at me from the screen. There was something disturbingly uncanny in the corpse-me, and while the movie continued with George continuing his documentation of the mock corpses, I couldn’t keep watching the film.

The visual of my mortality remained burned into my retinas, and for a few heart-wrenching moments, I saw it everywhere I turned my gaze.

A sudden feeling that I can only describe as a fire alarm without sound going off in my head forced me to pause the video. The floodgates of my subconsciousness broke down, allowing lost memories to resurface. Perhaps it wasn’t the loss of memory as much as it was the suppression of unpleasant memories. Staring at a poorly lit silhouette on a bed on my screen, I remember how a week after we finished working on this thing, Seth, an older friend of ours who already had a driver’s license, was driving us home after classes; Chris, George, and I. Someone flew from the opposite direction into our lane, slamming headfirst into us.

I found all of this in hindsight. My head and neck got messed up, the impact scrambled my brain, and I had lost recollection of a long timeframe. George ended up hospitalized too. He had a bunch of broken ribs and a ruptured lung, and Chris never made it.

Seth was virtually unharmed, barring a few scratches and bruises from the windshield shattering on top of him.

I sat there, staring at the screen. Film George was about to approach Chris. My insides twisted in knots and my head turned unbearably heavy. I felt sick with my vision shifting between the frozen picture on the screen and the memory of that day.

The screeching of wheels and a brief flash of burning pain coursing along my body before everything vanished… I felt ill. As if my body had developed a fever. Shaking, I turned the video off. There’s no way I’m going to watch that thing ever again. I don’t know what else I had forgotten, but I don’t even want to know at this point. I was so shaken by the sudden recollection that I ended up getting sick.

It’s been a while since I’ve watched The Rasp, but the images from the film are still lingering in my mind. I haven’t slept right since because of a relapsing insomnia. The visual of this morgue containing my childhood friends and acquaintances is trapping me inside my mind.

It’s as if something inside of me wants to see the film’s ending. My mental innards cling to the hope that there’s some catharsis at the end of it all, but there is none. I know how it ends. There is nothing there. Only different shades of death. A painful memory of an inevitable future.l

I ended up talking to Katie about the film. She said she remembers working on it fondly. She still has the original paintings somewhere in her collection. Out of morbid curiosity, I asked her how the film ends.

She said that George uncovers all the bodies in the building, and leaves the same way he came. However, instead of panning his camera on the right wall of the corridor, he pans it on the left one. Revealing a continuation of her story. In these drawings, the man has finally lost his sanity to hatred. He plans on killing those who killed his dog but always ends up finding them dead, murdered brutally. This continues, along with his spiral further into madness. Katie depicted his loss of humanity with purposefully inhumanly shaped screams and grimaces.

The story reaches its climax when he finally reaches the last person he set out to kill, but he ends up finding out what had killed them all. A vile dog monster that mauls its last victim in front of its eyes. The beast reveals itself to be the man’s old dog, turned into a vengeful spirit. There’s a rather heartwarming drawing of the beast wagging its tail at the sight of its previous owner. This is where Katie’s grim brilliance shines brightest. With the last five drawings, she snatches all hope away from the observer. The man doesn’t recognize the beast as his old friend and ends up running away in fear.

In the penultimate drawing shown in the film, the man is dying in a pool of his blood, after being run over in incoming traffic. The beast looks on dejected at its dying master as its form slowly disintegrates in the last picture of the film and the screen turns black.

Katie sent me scans of the drawings and hell; it looks far worse than it sounds. Features lose cohesion as the story progresses. Katie probably used a lot of blood to draw the final few scenes of that story. She made the last few drawings entirely rusty red.

I started feeling better again. Until today, when I received the news that Seth ended his life. He had never been the same after the accident; he became depressed and withdrawn. Even though it wasn’t his fault, he still blamed himself for Chris’s death and George’s and mine’s injuries. We drifted apart after the fact, but I never blamed him for any of this. Neither did George. As far as I know, the Moores, Chris’s family, never blamed him either.

As I was reading the text message about Seth’s death, the demons in my head twisted Katie’s voice into a low, hoarse drawl echoing against the wall of my skull.

“Seth Novak, remember him? He played the final dead guy in The Rasp. I gave him a nasty makeup contusion around the neck for his part in the film.” Boomed in the back of my mind.

Jesus Christ… Seth hanged himself.

0 Comments
2024/03/22
14:42 UTC

2

Nothing But Pure Horror

The cold and merciless kiss of a hammer pounding against my skull. A ruthless expression of love from a malignant force. An act of violence I can’t recall or pinpoint. It left me diseased, broken, and injured.

Wave after wave of red flashes blasted the right side of my head. There was heat, and there was pressure and there was pain. The ache came and went like the waves of the ocean. An ocean of molten lava, that is.

Expanding and retracting.

I was in a void of pure darkness. My brain; the poor rattled thing, it begged me to stay asleep, but the repeated concussive blows traveling from underneath my eye wouldn’t let me stay asleep.

My entire body screamed at me to wake up, screamed at me to open my eyes and face the music. Every organ of mine cried out in pure agony, begging for me to shake off the Sandman’s dust from my eyes. My left arm cried the loudest.

My left arm was on fire, with every fiber of its slowly being reduced to nothing but soot. Necrosis born because of the buildup of a byproduct of flawed human design; lactic acid.

The aching of my form finally pried my eyes open…

Everything seemed so… dark and foreign… alien, almost… Strange features were dancing around my tunneled field of vision. The fabric of reality was melting right before my eyes. Different shades of gray and black flowed into each other.

A mixture of bizarre goo shaping my perception.

Without a warning, another flash of light exploded right behind my eyes. A volcanic eruption inside my head. The pain was unbearable. I could feel an icepick digging into the back of my skull. Everything started spinning to the sound of a million flies buzzing somewhere in the distance.

The digestive track began working backwards, and I felt the esophageal muscles spasming. My heart burned, my brain was falling part inside the cranium and everything else was torn to pieces.

In an attempt to ease the suffering, I shifted my head backwards.

My blood ran cold, the sensations of pins and needles traveling against my skin overtook every other feeling in that moment. The drumming of my heartbeat grew louder by the moment.

I was hanging by one hang from the window bars of a fourth store building…

My left hand was barely holding on anymore. It began shaking from the strain. Fear kept my other muscles locked in place. Fighting through it was harder than I could ever imagine. The mere act of pulling my right arm upward was excruciating. The bones were broken and covered in blood.

I didn’t want to die…

With every ounce of remaining strength, I pushed my mangled arm upward before grabbing onto the window bars. The cold breeze barely grazing my skin felt like smoldering knives were being shoved into my flesh.

Nearly lost my grip.

Swinging to the side, I slammed myself into the wall and thought I was going to die from the pain. Wasn’t much of an impact. Hand slipped from exhaustion.

Fear, mortal fear. Survival instincts took over and forced my abused form to claw at the window ledge with all of its might. I kept falling into those four stores in my head, over and over and over as my body pulled itself into an unfamiliar apartment.

Finding myself lying on steady ground didn’t make the imaginary cycle of demise leave my mind. Only made it worse, more graphic, more detailed. I wasn’t falling to my death anymore.

I was being ripped in half.

Beheaded.

Compressed into a pile of human waste matter.

Obliterated by projectiles.

Electrified into dust.

My throat slit.

My limbs cut off.

My face peeled off.

Bleeding out.

Skull caved in.

Crawling alone in an unfamiliar place. Crawling in a pool of blood. Surrounded by corpses.

Mutilated corpses, unidentifiable human remains, pieces of meat.

Riddled with bullets, cut open, bones exposed, organs harvested, hanging from entrails, splattered on a wall, spine extracted, bones mixed with the wood in the fireplace.

The stench of death was violating me as I crawled through the corridors of hell. It forced its way down my throat, threatening to choke me as I crossed a bodiless head with a heart in its mouth.

I screamed myself hoarse with fear.

A lightning bolt flashed outside.

Darkness…

Everything stood still…

Another lightning bolt flashed, illuminating the room.

A flayed figure was right next to me.

A bloody hand reached for my face.

There was a murmur…

Thunder cracked directly above me…

A muffled cry for help...

Raspy and low...

I could feel it grabbing me, its wet fingers digging into my leg…

A lightning bolt exploded right in front of my eyes… and silence…

Darkness

There was nothing but darkness…

An empty void…

The light came back on as suddenly as it vanished.

I was in a pristine apartment… Dizzy with stress and blood loss. My blood staining some fancy-looking rag. Everything was so slow and unfocused. My ears ringing, my body aching, my right arm barely hanging on by a thread of muscle. A layer of red covering my right eye. Breathing hurt. Everything hurt.

Death was near….

Death came as a high pitched cackling.

My gaze shifted, pushing through volley after volley of stingers coursing through my neck.

It just sat there…

Chewing on a piece of meat…

A Hyena-muzzled naked man…

The unnatural shape of this thing. A grotesque and malignant amalgamation of features. Impure, senseless and leprous design.

Nothing but pure invasive and unrelenting horror.

Every fiber in my body moved while my brain remained fixated on the indescribable picture burned into recollection.

I ran, I don’t know how I far I ran. I have no idea how I got out of there and I don’t know where I ended up collapsing. When I woke up, I was at the hospital.

My injuries were consistent with a bear mauling. I pretended to have lost my memory, not wanting to remember. I wish I couldn’t remember that thing. Unfortunately, that’s the only thing I seem to remember these days…

Every now and again, it invades my mind and everything else becomes blurry and distant.

Every now and again, I can see it standing right across the room from me.

Simply staring, and smiling its blood-stained smile.

Cackling that hideous high-pitched laughter.

Every time I see it, it’s getting closer….

I can already feel its fetid breath on the back of my neck…

0 Comments
2024/02/10
23:24 UTC

1

Birthday Party (Ft. Lady Spookaria) by MissShadowLovely | CreepyPasta Poem

0 Comments
2024/01/31
01:04 UTC

2

A Review of Cursed Tinder (Part 1)

I made the fateful decision to first start using tinder a couple years ago.

It had seemed like a simple and convenient dating option. Me and my friend Francis both set up our tinder accounts at the same time, part of a mutual challenge to ‘break out of our shells’, since we’d long shared in common our struggles to find a relationship.

Neither of us was exactly… Great with women, you see. I was shy and a bit awkward, having the kind of personality most women didn’t find very attractive. Plus, with the majority of my time occupied by repairing and selling items at the antique shop I owned, most of the people I ever interacted with were families and people over the age of at least seventy: not, exactly, relationship material. I thought tinder might be the ideal solution for both of us, a time efficient way to find women in our local area.

The only other idea I could come up with for us was hanging out at a bar and trying our luck there again. Every time I’d previously tried to approach a girl at a bar, they’d either ignored or walked away from me. Francis was the same.

What I didn’t know about tinder at the time I signed up for it was that there were about eight other guys for every one woman using the website. Eight predominantly other attractive, funny and confident guys with pets and lots of friends and great personalities. And I, of course having to compete against all of them, didn’t stand a chance.

I’d get a match every once or so few weeks. About one in five of these matches would actually respond to my first message. And of those, I managed to keep the attention and interest of a couple a year past a few simple conversations and mutual introductions between us.

In three years of using tinder, I managed to go on exactly two dates, both which were fairly uninspired, and neither of which turned into the night I’d hoped they would.

Francis, unsurprisingly, hadn’t initially had much more success than I did. He was even more awkward than I was, being quiet, overly serious, and possessing a terrible sense of humour. His job was at some dodgy IT firm and spent most of his day alone at his apartment working from home.

This all changed a couple months ago, though.

One day he’d surprised me with a visit, where he had immediately brought up the whole online dating thing.

‘I met someone,’ he declared to me proudly. ‘On tinder, I mean.’

‘Seriously? How’d it go?’ I’d asked immediately, leaning forward from where I was sitting.

‘Believe it or not, it went kinda great,’ he responded. ‘We got pretty serious, actually.’

‘Like, you went out on a date, serious?’ I queried.

‘More like, she went over to my place after serious.’ He grinned meaningfully.

It took him actually showing me the match on tinder and scrolling briefly through one of their conversations before I fully believed him.

I didn’t have time to comment about any of this, though. He’d continued talking before I had the chance.

‘Ralph, I gotta tell you, I didn’t meet the girl on normal tinder. There’s this special add-on I downloaded for it. Some guy I met on a forum sent it to me. It gives you access to this whole other side of tinder I didn’t even know existed!’

‘Slow down,’ I said. ‘I want to hear more about the date first. What was she like?’

He waved dismissively. ‘She was… Great. Different. A bit terrifying.’

I pushed him for more information, but Francis was oddly vague about his experience, saying they had gone on a picnic and then gone swimming together, and she was an incredible swimmer. That was about all I could get out of him. It was very weird, considering how much we usually discussed these things with one another. I found myself starting to have doubts about his story for a second time.

I pushed him for more information at first. But his obvious keenness to discuss the app itself ended up winning me over, so I eventually asked him about it.

‘I was talking to this pal of mine about how frustrating tinder was and he asked if I ever heard about cursed tinder. He wouldn’t say too much about it, just told me I should check it out for myself. So I did.’

‘It took me a while, but I came across a download link for the program on some dodgy forum on the deep web,’ he said casually. ‘Wouldn’t really recommend you going there. I’d most likely send the download file directly on a USB for you to take a look at instead. Yeah, that’s definitely better, I think.’

Not knowing what the deep web even was, but being aware of how my friend liked to browse around many questionable and creepy websites and chatrooms across various parts of the internet, I agreed to this and assured him I would download it and try it out for myself.

‘Listen, there is more I need to tell you about the program before you can use it.’

He turned down to eyeball his feet, searching for words. ‘I mean, you could say there is one catch to using the, uh, addon.’

I raised my eyebrows. That made sense. The catch, I expected, had to be monetary. ‘Oohhh,’ I responded knowingly.

But Francis definitely didn’t follow up by saying what I thought he might.

Instead, he told me, ‘I know what you’re thinking. And it’s not any of those things. The women on this site, they can be sometimes - kind of - dangerous.’

I chuckled. ‘What, are they into weird fetishes or something?’

He laughed a little bit, too, but shook his head. ‘No, really. I mean some of them can be, like, actually psychotic.’

‘Psychotic,’ I repeated doubtfully. ‘You mean they are going to try to murder me or something?’

He seemed to trip over his words a little as he tried to explain himself better.

‘Well, probably not. But yes, the idea is not all the women you’ll encounter are friendly. The women on this site, you see, they... They aren’t quite human.’

Seeing the look coming across my face, he added, ‘Again, not what you’re thinking. They’re not animals - well - not most of them.’ He frowned. ‘I’d say they’re - supernatural, I guess? They’re not from this world. I don’t even think they’re from this universe.’

‘Francis,’ I’d said in a slightly discomforted voice, ‘you’re sounding kinda out there. Out there even for you.’

I had always known Francis to be a bit of a horror buff. I was too, though to a much lesser degree than him. He’d forever been fascinated by cult-like stuff and urban legends and creepypastas and that stuff. I also knew he took some of it quite seriously.

‘I know, I know, you think I’m crazy. I don’t know how much I believed it myself, in the beginning. Just try the app and follow the rules, okay? That’s all I’m asking. The danger, the freaky shit, it only gets bad if you’re not careful or don’t follow the rules. You’ll be fine, trust me.’

It took a bit more persuasion, but I eventually, grudgingly, agreed to try the app out once he sent it to me. I have to admit, I was a little curious to see this tinder addon. Francis sure did come across some very fascinating things on the internet. I sometimes enjoyed having him show me weird websites or pieces of obscure software he had downloaded. So I was looking forward to seeing what strange corner of the internet my friend had stumbled into this time - a place where, apparently, he found himself a date.

Francis had a USB to give me a few days later, making me promise to read the rules which came with it, and then, for a second time, to be careful when I used it. He handed it to me while repeating simple instructions on how to install the program onto my computer. He said he couldn’t wait to hear about my experience and mentioned looking forward to telling me more about his own before leaving.

‘You won’t regret it, trust me,’ he promised. ‘You have even more of an adventurous streak than I do.’

It wasn’t until a couple of days after that, over the weekend, that I found the spare time to have a look at the USB for myself.

I’ll admit I completely forgot Francis’ advice and installed the program - which Francis had explained was supposed to function like a browser addon - before even remembering to have a look at the attached document. I only thought of it at all when I spotted the document file named RULES beneath the one I had just installed.

This is somewhat a summary of what it read:

The Tinder Ritual

Do not try this if you’re not prepared for, or not willing to appreciate, the possible consequences involved.

Cursed Tinder (abbreviated as CT for simplicity) allows various entities from different worlds to temporarily enter our own through their relationships and interactions with humans. Don’t ask me exactly how it’s supposed to work. I don’t know.

What you need to understand is that not all of these entities are friendly and very few have wholesome intentions.

The rules are there to protect you, but they aren’t fool proof. I’ve known people whose matches on CT ended up trying to kill them, eat them, kidnap them, harvest their organs - among other things. And that was after they followed these rules to the letter and took all reasonable precautions.

Using CT is a game of chance, where you are putting your own life on the line. If you’re not prepared for that, you are better off deleting this file.

RULES:

While searching for matches on CT:

1. Follow your instincts. If you get a bad feeling about a potential match, swipe left.

2. If you see something - anything - on a person’s profile moving in non-repeating animations, even subtly, swipe left.

3. If you come across anything that isn’t humanoid, swipe left.

4. If you cannot swipe left on an individual in any situation, close your browser. If that doesn’t work, shut off your computer and wait a couple of minutes before turning it on again.

5. If you see ‘flesh sowing’, ‘harvesting’, ‘feeding games’, ‘synchronized consumption,’ or ‘blood rituals’ as interests, swipe left. If, during a conversation, any individual mentions one of these interests, politely say you are not interested and then unmatch with them.

6. If you feel someone watching you from your surroundings, close CT and don’t reopen tinder for at least a couple of hours.

7. If you feel a match or prospective match watching you from the other side of the screen, unmatch (if you are matched with them) and report the profile immediately before following the precautions laid out in rule 6.

Note: Such profiles most often belong to individuals previously banned from the website for their unwholesome behaviour - and whoever moderates CT are perfectly fine with murder, assault, abduction, and various forms of torture, so you really, really don’t want to get involved with someone - or something - whose actions are enough draw ire from these people.

Strong advice to follow during a date with an individual from CT:

1. Your matches on tinder come from different worlds, with different customs, cultures, and beliefs. Be polite and respectful. Don’t laugh if your date does or says something strange or odd. No matter how strange or odd - or disturbing - this may be. Just act like what they are doing is normal and be non judgemental. You don’t want to offend them. Really.

2. Never leave prematurely for any reason. Stay with your date until a time which is appropriate and acceptable for you to say goodbye to one another e.g. when you are leaving dinner with her.

3. Do not let your date take you back to their home, under any circumstances. This is most likely an attempt from them to lure you into their world. It is acceptable to take your date back to your own home or apartment.

4. Be sure to bring some form or method of self defence, just in case. There is a chance you might need it. (Crucifixes / other holy objects or blessed weapons are recommended. Conventional weapons may not always be effective.)

5. Be prepared for anything. Watch out for warning signs your date may have sinister intentions beyond just having a fun time.

Now you’ve read the rules, and understand the risks, following are simple steps to access CT from your device using the program:

1. Download and install the file. Follow the prompts and installation instructions. It should work on any device that normally allows tinder to run on the internet.

2. Open tinder. This may take a bit longer than usual.

3. Make the following changes to your profile:

- Add interest ‘Otherworldly fascination’ (if interest does not appear, reload page until it does)

- At the end of your ‘about me’ bio, include the following: ‘On the lookout for something out there and unconventional!’

4. Navigate to the ‘explore’ button on the tinder menu

5. Continue reloading this page until you find the ‘preternatural matches’ option (it will usually be located at the bottom of the page)

6. Clicking ‘preternatural matches’ will take you to CT. You may now begin searching for a suitable partner.

To uninstall: follow uninstallation instructions and then delete ALL TRACES of CT off your device, including these rules. In rare cases, a complete memory wipe of device may be necessary, if installation is unsuccessful.

NOTE: Uninstallation will not protect you from anything which has already taken notice of you from CT. Such entities may still attempt to establish contact with you even after you have deleted all traces of CT off your computer.

Good luck.

I read this document several times over just to make sure I’d read all of it right. I had.

I honestly didn’t know what to make of it. The writer of these rules, I thought, they couldn’t possibly be serious. Francis most likely wrote them himself. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought this was all part of some kind of elaborate joke Francis was trying to pull on me.

Whatever the case, my interest was piqued, even if I thought the whole thing was a bit stupid. I decided it couldn’t hurt to open up tinder and see what happened.

Tinder did, actually, take a little longer than usual to open up on my browser. When it finally did, though, it appeared completely normal.

I went along with the instructions. I added the interest ‘otherworldly rituals’ to my profile, as surprised - and amused - as I was to discover it.

After changing my profile description, I went to the explore option, and then started reloading my browser, feeling a little more stupid every subsequent time I did it. Each time, I saw no visible changes to the website.

I think I must have reloaded the page at least twenty times - enough to be on the verge of giving up - before it appeared near the bottom of the webpage. A picture which hadn’t been there before was fuzzy and flickering before me. It looked as if there were something hiding within the darkness of the frame, defined with the outline of what might have been eyes and a gaping open mouth. The text at the lower left was too glitchy to be legible, but I could clearly see a red-pink label in the middle of the picture reading ‘preternatural matches’.

I shook my head as I clicked on it. I was really starting to wonder how far Francis, or whoever the creator was, had gone to design this. It felt like too much work to be all for a joke, like I’d previously suspected. They, I thought, were more likely testing out or promoting a horror themed ARG, or something along those lines.

I was both impressed and somewhat creeped out.

Whatever this was, Francis - or whoever was responsible for designing the experience - had sure worked hard to change the tinder’s appearance. The background was now dark red and I swore I could see the screen pulsing faintly. Every now and again parts of the screen would flicker or fully glitch out for a few seconds. This, combined with the appearance of some of the matches themselves, made the experience of browsing tinder feel definitively eerie.

The matches - most of them were normal, but about one in four would turn out somewhere between disturbing and outright harrowing.

Other profiles I encountered included one which appeared to depict an old looking van with the words ‘Free ice cream’ scrawled unevenly across the front in dirty white letters, and a haunted looking, gaunt and naked man standing in a hellish, fiery red landscape under a burning sun. Some of these more disturbing profiles, I noticed, contained interests including the ones the rules warned about.

I did remember apprehensively liking a couple of the safer, more normal looking profiles, but for the majority, I swiped right. I’d started to notice even a lot of the normal ones possessed strange and off putting descriptions or interests.

To be honest, the longer I spent on that website, the more unsettled I felt. I couldn’t shake the feeling I was doing something I shouldn’t be doing, and it seemed like the more I swiped, the more intensely disturbing the profiles became, to the point where I was genuinely apprehensive about what I’d see next.

I’ll add that few of the profiles I came across were not only disturbing, they were just plain fucked up. I’m talking realistic looking depictions of blood, gore, abuse and cannibalism. I clicked off most of them before I glimpsed too much detail, but many still managed to burn themselves into my mind.

About twenty minutes into my browsing, another one of these more disturbing profiles appeared. It depicted a white faced creature with no eyes and long, stringy grey hair, its face caked with a thin film of red. It was crouched over a limp, pale human body of a young man, his wide eyes staring sightlessly into the screen. Flickering in and out of view at the bottom of the profile were listed almost every one of the interests the rules had warned about.

I tried to swipe right. When I did, the profile appeared again, the creature's eyeless face at the centre of the same photo, posed over the same body of the dead man.

I tried several more times. I could have sworn the face looked subtly different every time it reappeared as the last image of it fell to the left, like it was moving an inch closer to the camera each time. I had also at this time begun to notice an unsettling sensation of the thing observing me from its position within the screen.

I tried exiting tinder, and when that didn’t work, I powered off my computer, increasingly desperate to get the view of that horrific, eyeless creature off the screen. To be honest, I was slightly relieved when the power button of my computer even responded, and the screen turned black.

I didn’t return to cursed tinder after that. Or tinder at all, for that matter.

I couldn’t get that final tinder profile I’d seen out of my head. The entity’s face filled my nightmares that night and the sensation of someone watching me from my computer didn’t fully fade until the morning after the experience.

I called Francis and argued with him for a while about all of it. I expected him to be apologetic and possibly hoped he might be unaware of how disgusting some of the content on the website was.

Francis didn’t offer anywhere close to the response I hoped he would. My friend continued to insist on all of it being real. When I eventually got through to him about how truly horrific my experience was, he started going on about how I couldn’t handle the website and that he’d made a mistake sending me the program. According to him, all of the CT profiles I saw originated from another universe. And what went on in those worlds, what abhorrent scenes the profiles displayed, was not our place to judge.

I refused to acknowledge there was a chance any of what I’d seen was real, whatever the explanation. I knew Francis wasn’t sick enough send me to actual depictions of torture and abuse. At least, I hoped he wasn’t.

I got fed up after a while at his attitude, and told him I was over it and I didn’t know what he was playing at. I didn’t plan on speaking with him again until after he decided to apologize.

Following my confrontation with Francis, I uninstalled cursed tinder, following the instructions and removing all traces of the file from my computer.

I thought that would be the end of my experience. I'd delete it, I thought, and try my best to forget about cursed tinder.

If it really was some kind of joke or elaborate horror experience, I wanted no more part of it.

If not, well, I didn’t want to think about what kind of sick and disturbed individual was behind it.

0 Comments
2023/12/24
05:34 UTC

2

"Letters to Santa: Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer"

Dear Santa,

I want my grandparents back for Christmas; it’s not Christmas without them. I can’t remember the last time I was happy. You ran my grandmother over last year! There were hoof and sleigh marks all over Grandma’s body; were you drinking eggnog? I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in months, but I’m sure you slept just fine. I hardly ate or bathed for months; bed sores and grime covered my body. I didn’t have the strength to get out of bed and face the world. I hated everyone and everything. You destroyed my family; you destroyed my life! Grandma was the glue that held us together; without her there were no holidays. My family doesn’t get along. My grandfather blamed himself for being too drunk to drive Grandma home. Grandpa got drunk everyday until he died.

Grandpa shot himself; he didn’t leave a note. After Grandpa died Dad started drinking heavily. Several nights I washed vomit off him and put him in the recovery position. Dad was always angry; he’d hit Mom and I every night. I dropped a glass in the kitchen and Dad broke my nose. The beatings stopped two weeks ago when Dad died; he shot himself just like my grandfather did. Mom found Dad’s headless corpse in the cellar; she hasn’t said a word since. Mom and I were the only family to attend the funeral. I can’t do this anymore! This is a suicide note, but after seeing my brains plastered to the ceiling you’ve probably gathered that by now. I’m sorry, Mom.

1 Comment
2023/12/13
01:53 UTC

2

If They Have A Heart

Caleb and I used to come to this place nearly every day. He loved running along the river’s shore when he was younger. When he got older, we’d walk on this bridge and he’d joyfully watch the waters flowing below us. Now I am watching the waters on my own. The last time I came here with him, he was resting peacefully beside me.

Just admitting this out loud makes my eyes well up, even now.

This is goodbye, my friend… Rest in peace buddy, I love you.

No, this isn’t goodbye yet... You’re still not resting easy…

God, I'm so sorry, boy, I'm so sorry…

Caleb never got to rest peacefully.

After he had passed away, I thought it would be only appropriate to send him off to dog heaven on the waters of the river he loved so much. I brought him here on a cloudy day, just like today, in the early hours of the morning. It’s usually dead silent here in the early hours of the morning, but that day a low hum and a tapping sound resembling a funeral march echoed somewhere below.

How fitting it seemed at that moment…

I carried him here wrapped in his favorite blanket and once we stood overlooking the waters below; I unwrapped his face to catch one last glimpse of his peaceful expression before saying my last goodbyes. With tears flowing down my face, I covered his face and released my hold on his body, watching as it gracefully fell into the water with a splash reminiscent of the ones he used to make when he was at the height of his life.

I watched his body float into the distance until the currents appeared to have rejected him and his body ended up on the shore.

At that moment, I didn’t pay it any mind.

Slowly making my way down the bridge, I strolled, lost in my memories. I didn’t even notice the strangely melancholic melody that accompanied me seemed to disintegrate into a deafening silence.

I took too long to get to him and by the time I reached the spot his body had drifted to; it was nowhere to be found. The disappearance of his remains drove me over the edge. Emotions overflowing, I broke down. I let myself lose balance and fall onto the ground before I began crying, and I wept as I hadn’t wept since I was a little kid.

The sound of soft splashing in the water made me think the river pulled him back in. I forced myself to look at the water. I wanted to watch Caleb drift away into the sunset. Instead, an overwhelming feeling of dread grasped my arm once I realized it wasn’t the water that had taken him.

A heartless pair of bulbous black eyes bulging out of a massive slimy head stared at me. A long bush of algae crowning the grotesque cranium spread in the middle, revealing an abyss of a maw laced with a sea of jagged teeth sucked in air. The pisciform demon was staring at me with malicious intent. Darkness from the deepest depths of the unexplored oceans danced in its eyes. A sinister intelligence lurked in the back of its gaze. It threatened to devour me whole if I dared get closer to the creature.

And by God, I wanted to get closer…

Had my sense of self-preservation not kept me at bay by chaining me to the damp sand with a chain made from pure fear, I would’ve.

A pair of eerily primate pallid gray hands held onto Caleb’s body.

The creature was taunting me, mocking… I could hear its chuckling-like rumbles as we stared at each other.

It lingered a while longer before finally submerging its disgusting form in its entirety and disappearing into the depths.

Caleb’s blanket was the only thing that remained above the surface, floating aimlessly into the distance as I watched it disappear, wiping the cold sweat from my brow while still wrestling with the crawling sensation of unease.

The horror might’ve all but disappeared, but the wounds it left still ache.

I doubt time will heal these wounds. That’s why I’ve been coming here nearly every day ever since. As much as it hurts to come here without Caleb. As much as it pains me to relive that awful morning in my mind again and again, I return to this same spot over and over.

I’ve seen these things lurking around here. There is more than one of those things hiding in these waters. Sometimes they’ll reach out of the water with their pallid gray hands to tap on the stones and hum; creating these ironic somber melodies. I’ll be returning until the day I can finally unload a bullet into what took my friend and hopefully leave one of its kind with a gaping hole in its chest like the one who took Caleb from me.

If these things even have a heart.

0 Comments
2023/11/30
23:14 UTC

3

Human Fabric

High-pitched screams pierced through my window, waking me up. The rude awakening pushed me into high alert as I peeled myself from my bed, anxiously facing the window. A small crowd was gathering around the source of the almost inhuman noise. At its center stood Jack Smith, screaming bloody murder.

His body; deeply sunburnt red, flailed about in a mad dance as he shrieked until his voice cracked. Flaps of clothing bloodied, fell from his body onto the ground with a sickening, wet slap.

A crowd around him stood paralyzed, gasping in simultaneous awe and disgust.

His body; deeply sunburnt red, flailed about in a mad dance as he shrieked until his voice cracked. Flaps of clothing bloodied, fell from his body onto the ground with a sickening, wet slap. a red thread from a crimson mask. Seeing poor Jack’s body dissolve into a pile of wailing mucus and flesh forced yesterday’s dinner upward.

I threw up all over the carpet, and while I was emptying my stomach, the screaming magnified, intensified, and multiplied…

Looking up again, I saw a crowd of bystanders consumed by the remains of Jack’s body. Clothes, skin, muscles, tendons, and bone – liquifying and slipping from downward into a soup of human matter.

A cacophony of agonized cries was the soundtrack to the scenery of inhuman body horror that forced me to hide under my blanket like a child once again. While waiting for the demise of the almost alien noises, I nearly pissed myself with fear.

Once it was quiet again, it was eerily silent all around. In that moment of dead silence, I dared peek my head from below the covers, drenched and on the cusp of hyperventilating with dread.

A dark red liquid stared at me from every inch of my room.

Its eyeless gaze - predatory and longing.

I pulled my blanket over my head again instinctually.

The moment I covered my head, a rain of fire fell on me.

A rain I couldn’t escape.

A rain of unrelenting pain.

The pain fried every neuron in my body, every cell, every atom.

Burning until there was nothing but a sea of heat, nothing but acidic phlegm in the throat of a fallen god.

The pain was so intense it turned into an orgasmic, out-of-body experience.

I had lost all sensation within my agony until I fell in love with it.

I lost myself in ego death to find my place in the universe; a piece of a carcinogenic mass.

Strangers, acquaintances, neighbors, friends, lovers, and relatives we are all together now.

United as one forever.

Without boundaries or barriers.

Entangled in an orgy of molten yet living humanity.

A singular living human fabric.

We are the flesh that loves, and soon we will flood the entire world.

0 Comments
2023/11/25
19:54 UTC

1

Cruise to Nowhere - Chapter 3

Chapter 3

I am still not in the clear, I still need to get to deck 6 and find the cat lady, but now I find my way blocked by the twins, this time they both seem to be wearing their red and white dresses, but now it is more like revealing cloaks and they have their hoods up, I immediately think back to the rules and I try to make eye contact, I can see out of the corner of my eye that their breasts are slightly revealed, not in a pornographic or sexual manner, but in an attractive sensual manner, and their cloaks are high cut, almost right up to their groins, but I don't have time for this, they walk towards me slowly without speaking, but before they could get close to me I turn in the other direction and make my way down the other stairs on the other side. I can hear them calling to me, but this time in a calm almost hypnotic manner, but no time to even pay attention to them. I eventually get to deck 6, I know that the rules said that the cat lady is always in one of the lounges in the evenings, so all I need to do is go through them and find her, not that it is going to be easy as this ship seems to be larger then I thought, or maybe there is no end to any of the decks. So I immediately start to scan the room, luckily for me I found her in the first lounge I entered, she is sitting alone at a table, once again dressed in her long slender black dress with her cat sitting on her lap this time as she is sipping from a glass of red wine.

I make my way over to her table and as I get there I am out of breath, she just looks up at me while sipping her wine, I am trying my best to catch my breath as she looks at me in anticipation, that is when I notice it, her eyes has changed, they look just like her cats eyes, the same eyes, she just looks at me as if she is waiting for me to say something, but the moment I try to speak she puts her finger on her lips to show me to keep quiet, then her cat comes closer and sniffs me, after a few seconds her cat starts to purr and goes back to her and sits back on her lap. Then she finally gestures for me to take a sear across from her, as I take my seat she offers me a glass of red wine, but just like the rules said I must, I decline politely, that is when she smiles at me.

Che, “So you finally read the rules.”

Zoe, “Yes I have, I wish I read them earlier.”

Che, looking me deep in the eyes, “Well atleast you are still human and they haven't fed on you yet. So No harm done.”

Zoe, “wait, who? What? Fed on me?”

Che, “I take it that you have noticed by now that the twins are inhumanly beautiful and seductive, that is because they are not human, they are succubus, and they are looking for two things, a third to complete their circle, and young men and woman to feed on, that is why you cannot afford to break eye contact, if you do then you will fall under their spell and they will have their way with you, and every time they feed on you, you will age a couple of years. “

Zoe, “Wait, even if this is all true, which I think it is not because this all sounds like bullshit to me, how do you even know all of this?”

Che, “because when I came here I was your age, they tried to make me the third, but I wasn't compatible because I was not a virgin any more, so it backfired, this infuriated them, but I managed to avoid their wrath, but after a while they cooled down and I thought we could at least be friends, but that is when they started to use their powers on me, I would hang out with them at the pool or in a lounge, and then the next moment I would be tempted to look at their exposed breasts or look further down when they uncrossed their legs, and the next moment I would find myself either kissing one of them and then wake up naked in my bed the next morning feeling extremely tired, or I would wake up naked on the deck somewhere, and each time I would notice that I look a little bit older, that is until one night the same thing happened and Nemesis here, “pointing at the black cat, “appeared as if out of nowhere and saved me. But even that came at a price, but at least they can't come near Nemesis.”

I look at her in shock, “But how long have you been on this ship?”

Che, “Time doesn't exist here, a day can pass here and it would be years in the real world. Or a year can pass here and it would be a day in the real world, it all depends on how the ship feels at the time.”

Zoe, “You are talking about the ship as if it is alive.”

Che, “It is alive, and we are its blood, its soul and its food.”

That is when I remembered the real reason I came looking for her, “I need your help, please, my friend, she was...”

Che, “If you are going to tell me she went to deck 13 then it is already to late for her.”

Zoe, “Please don't say that, please... I am begging you...”

Che, “Was she taken against her will? Or did they invite her there?”

Zoe, “She was invited.”

Che, “that means that she isn't a virgin, but why would they invite her? Wait...” She then looks at me an narrows her eyes. “You? You are a virgin?”

Zoe, “Yes I am, is that a problem?”

Che, “normally no, but in this case yes, you are in serious danger, that explains why the twins are after you and why the Pastor would have invited our friend to deck 13, you were with the twins when the Pastor invited her, right?”

Zoe, “That is correct, and why do you call him the pastor?”

Che, “Because he is a pastor, him and his family were religious fanatics and when they first ended up on this ship they tried to force their religion down every ones throats, that is when he had a run in with the twins, he thought attacking them with his religious texts would help him, but they then got fed up with him and banished him and his unlimited followers to deck 13, most of them cannot leave, but the pastor seems to be able to leave once every few days for about an hour, but once his hour is up he has to return.

Zoe, “So was that the pastor who approached my friend on the adult deck?”

Che, “If he invited her to deck 13 then yes, it could only be him.”

Zoe, “But why didn't the twins stop him?”

Che, “That question could have many answers, but if your friend wasn't a virgin then they would have no interest in her, nor would they bother to interfere or intervene to help her, they are only interested in finding a 3rd to complete their circle. “

Zoe, “No she wasn't a virgin, and she was trans gender.”

Che, “My apologies, what is trans gender?”

Zoe, “Wait, you don't know about trans gender? How long have you been here?”

Che, “I think I arrived here just after the first world war, I won a ticket to leave Europe and move to the new world.”

Zoe, “Wait, if this ship has existed that long then how is it that it looks like the newest and largest ships we currently have in the world?”

Che, “What year is it where you come from?”

Zoe, “2022, but you didn't answer my question.”

Che, “This ship is alive, it changes to mimic the latest and the greatest, there are people here who has been on this ship since the days of the vikings. 2022 you say. Wow, okay, it feels like I just arrived a few days ago.”

Zoe, “You wrote the rules that was in my cabin, so does that mean you stayed in my cabin?”

Che, “No, I wrote the rules and gave them to another guest to try and get them into as many cabins as possible. I live in the upper decks and so does the twins. “

Zoe, “Upper decks?”

Che, “We have been here for a very long time, they have been here even much longer then I have been, I got a platinum card, and they got black cards, once you go beyond a gold card you can never leave the ship.”

Zoe, looking at my card, “mine is still blue, but how long am I going to be stuck here before I can go home?”

Che, “That all depends on you, you got the rules and you know what to do.”

Zoe, “What about my family?”

Che, “If you are lucky they might make it out of here as well, but don't count on it, I have seen your family and they are not exactly cruising in moderation, and the more they indulge the faster their cruise cards will change colours.”

Zoe, “can you please help me warn them?”

Che, “I am sorry, if they didn't find the rules or follow them, then there is nothing I can do to help them, but I can help you and try my best to keep you safe.”

Zoe, “And what about Chloe, do you think there is anyway to safe her?”

Che, “from what you told me about her, no, they took her to try and lure you, they need virgins and will have no interest in her, but you can't take the bait, if you even figure out how to get to deck 13 then you will never leave.”

Zoe, “Why do you say that?”

Che, “The pastor needs 13 virgins in order to complete whatever it is he is doing there, and from what I gather he already has 12, so you cannot allow yourself to walk into his trap, not only will you put yourself in danger, but you will allow him to bring on the end of the world.”

Zoe, “But what about my friend? Do you think she is still alive.”

Then I heard a male voice next to us, “They wont kill her as long as they think they have a chance of drawing you to them.” I immediately look up to see a guy standing there, he has shoulder length long hair and is wearing some sort of strange outfit and has a samurai sword on his back.

Che, “Nice to see you again, where have you been?”

Sin. “Keeping the flock at bay so they can't take anyone else.”

Zoe, “The flock?”

Che, “Followers of the pastor who hasn't been trapped on deck 13 yet, there are a few new fanatics that arrives every now and again. “ Then she looks at the clock on the wall and she looks at me, “You need to get to your cabin fast.”

I look at her almost in shock, she was so friendly and talkative and now she is telling me to go to my cabin, but then I look at the clock behind me on the wall and I notice that it is 11:53pm, that is when I remember rule number 4. I immediately thank her for all of her help and I excuse myself.

Sin gives the cat lady a nod and he assures her that he will walk me to my cabin to make sure that I get to my cabin safely without any issues or interruptions. We immediately make our way towards the elevator, but he stops me before I can press the button and leads me up the stairs, explaining to me that the elevators has a tendency to take people to deck 13 after 11pm at night, I look at his Cruise Card and I notice that he has a Gold card. So I look at him in shock, “You got a Gold card, so does that mean that you can still go home?”

Sin just smiles at me and explains to me that he had a few opportunities to go home, but he decided to stay to help other new comers and stop the Church from reaching their goal and destroying the world, I wanted to ask him if he doesn't miss his family, but even before I could utter the words we arrived at my cabin door and he told me to go inside and make sure that I do not open the door until morning, no matter what I hear or who I hear at my door. He then excused himself explaining to me that he has 2 minutes left to get to his cabin and that he is a few decks up, and even with his sword he doesn't want to run into the cat lady between midnight and 3:33am. I immediately pushed my door shut and I made sure to lock it with the additional locks attached on the inside.

It wasn't long after I locked my door that I heard a banging on my door, and then I heard Chloe's voice begging to b let in, I know what the Cat Lady and Sin told me, but this was my friend and I could hear that she was in distress and needed my help, she was crying and she kept knocking at my door begging me to open the door for her, but something felt off about the whole thing, she never uses my name, she always calls me girl, or girl friend or sister, but now she was calling me by name. That in itself immediately gave me the chills, but the more I ignored her the louder she banged on my door and the louder she shouted, that is when it occurred to me, it was her voice, but it wasn't her voice, it was almost distorted, and there was a hint of a male voice behind her voice, but she was crying now, telling me that she was hurt and needed my help, that she was bleeding badly and if I don't help her that she was going to bleed out and die. I eventually got to the point where I couldn't take it any more and as I slowly started to approach the door to open it and see what was going on I heard it, at first it was faint, but then it grew louder, a faint scratching at the door, so I turned my lights in my room off and decided to look through the peep hole in the door just to fall back screaming, right there in the peep hole I saw it, a cats eye looking back at me, but not the eye of a cat, the eye of a demonic cat looking right through the peep hole into my soul, and that was my biggest mistake, looking into that eye, because then the growling and hissing started, and an unearthly meowing sound.

I know the rules said to stay in my cabin right now, and I am sure that I should be safe as long as the door remains closed, but I could feel the fear overtaking me, I could feel the walls closing in on me and see shadows forming all over the room, I crawled back towards my bed and eventually into my bed, I didn't even bother to take my clothes off, I just pulled my shoes off and I crawled in under the blankets and pulled them over my head, I could still hear the scratching at my door and I could hear the meowing continuing, I don't know how long I was laying there under my blanket before I eventually fell asleep, but I woke up wit the sun shining right in my face, I yawned and stretched for a moment before I realized what happened, I immediately got out of bed just to find that I am now just wearing my underwear, I know I had my dress on when I crawled into bed and I cannot remember taking it off, unless if I took it off during the night, but then it would be laying somewhere in the room, but it is nowhere to be found, I started to panic, did someone get into my room and taken my dress off? What else could have happened if I didn't even realise my dress was been removed, so I immediately check my closet to see if maybe I didn't take it off and hang it back in there, but no sign of it, so after a few minutes of looking everywhere in my cabin and not finding it I resigned myself and decided to calm down, so I made myself a cup of coffee and went to sit on the balcony and have my coffee and a smoke, yes I do smoke from time to time, it is mostly something Chloe and I would do in secret, but now I don't care any more, and anyway, I am an adult, why should I sneak around when I want to smoke. So after I finished my coffee and my smoke I got up and went to shower, as I got out of the shower and into my room I found another bikini waiting on my bed with a clean pair of shorts, oh well I guess the ship has already decided what I should wear today, so I put them on and I make my way out of my cabin, almost forgetting my cruise card in the process, luckily I remembered just in time before my cabin door could slam behind me. So I grabbed my cruise card and throw the lanyard around my neck, I was going to go knock on my mothers door, but I doubt that would be of any use, she would either be passed out from partying to much the previous evening, or she will already be out and about, my brother, well he has the tendency to get up early and go and train, so he would most likely be in the on board gym or be having breakfast, or at the worst be on the deck checking out all the woman laying in the sun trying to catch a tan.

So I decide to go for breakfast, and hopefully if I am lucky I might find the cat lady or the twins and get some more answers, I know the rules said not to try and find Sin as he will find me when he is needed. So as I take the elevator the first thing I do is to make sure there is no button for deck 13 in there, and luckily for me there is no button for deck 13, so I press the button for deck 9 and up I went, as I exit the elevator I notice that it is very bright outside and I make my way outside and once again my day gets ruined, there is it, the dreaded two suns, so I turn around and get inside immediately, but on my way inside I notice that there is a man just standing there staring at the two suns, I try to get his attention to get him inside when someone grabs my arm and pulls me inside, it is a young girl, just a few years older then me, she has short brown hair and is wearing black clothes with spikes and a lot of black make up, she pulls me inside and down the stairs until we are on deck 8, then she looks at me and starts to talk. “Hi, that was very dangerous, what were you thinking?”

Zoe, “I was trying to help that man.”

Cleo, “My apologies, I am Cleo, and no you can't help him, he has been entranced by the second sun, and if you touched him you would be dead right now, he is burning up, I have seen people touch him and catch fire and burn to ashes within minutes, that is how I lost my boyfriend, he tried to help that man. “

Zoe, “I am Zoe. “ I then notice that she has a Red Cruise card around her neck. “Your card is red, how long have you been here?”

Cleo, “2 years, give or take, but honestly I can't really keep track of time any more, after my boyfriend died I just go through the motions everyday of been here. “

She then guides me through deck 8 towards the back of the ship where we will follow another staircase up towards the Lido deck for breakfast.

As we are walking she starts to explain to me how ships works and how to find my way around the ship, “So if you want to know where you are or if you are heading towards the bow or the stern of the ship then just look at the numbers on the cabin doors, the numbers are lower towards the bow or front of the ship and the higher the numbers get the closer you are towards the stern of the ship, but also don't be fooled, this ship has a tendency to make you walk in circles, if you are heading towards the bow or the front of the ship and you notice that the numbers are suddenly getting higher again or you are hitting a high number then just close your eyes for 3 minutes and open then and you will find that you are standing in front of your cabin door, and if you are heading for the stern or towards the back of the ship and you notice that the numbers are suddenly getting smaller or you suddenly hit a small number then do the same, when you open your eyes you should find yourself in front of your cabin door, then just go into your cabin and have another cup of coffee, when you are done you can leave again and everything should be back to normal, it usually happens when the ship goes through the void or hits an anomaly and then it tries to get all its passengers back to their cabins to prevent the void walkers from getting to them.

Zoe, “Void walkers?”

Cleo, “Shadow people, demons, ghosts, honestly nobody knows what they are or what they want, but everyone who has run into any of them has vanished and never been seen again.

We finally arrive at the last staircase on the deck and we make our way up to the Lido deck where we grab some food and coffee and we eventually find a table in the corner, we keep chatting as we are eating and she explains to me how her boyfriend won this cruise and she was hoping that he would propose to her during this cruise and then it happened that he died, and unfortunately she lost her parents at a young age, so she has no family left in the outside world, that is when I realised that I am the same, besides my mother and my brother, I have no family left, and Chloe was living with her grand mother who has some decease that she can't tell the difference between reality and fantasy, she is basically completely dependent on the nurses that comes in during the day to look after her, but besides that, Chloe also has no other family, and since Chloe is always at my place none of the nurses has ever met her, it seems the ship is collecting people who will not be missed. That is when I took my phone out and realise that I have no signal, but after a few minutes of trying I eventually managed to find WiFi on the ship, so after a few Google searches I found our house and realise that all the articles state that the house has been debilitated and abandoned years ago, it shows photographs of our property completely run down and states that nobody knows who the legal owners of the property is, that is when I do more research and go through my university acceptance paperwork and I realise that it is suddenly as if we never existed.

0 Comments
2023/11/23
06:33 UTC

1

Cruise to nowhere - part 2

Chapter 2

As I am sitting in my cabin preparing for bed I just can't stop thinking about the lady with the cat, something about her just drew me in, it is just as if I wanted to go over and talk to her, but I guess I will have plenty of time for that as this seems to be going to be a very long cruise after all. Then there is the other two girls, they look to be my age, but something was strange about them, the moment I looked at them I could feel some sort of energy come over me, almost as if I became attracted to them, but why? I have never been attracted to a woman in my life, well I like guys, but I have never even dated a guy in my life, I have always been so busy with my school work and then running the house that I just never had time to even have friends, I guess the only friend I always had was Chloe, we kind of grew up together and I was the first one that she told when she realized that she was a trans girl. I was also the one who went with her when she started her treatment and when she finally told her parents, so we have always been very good friends.

I must say that this is a nice cabin, I actually got a balcony cabin, the rest of my family weren't as lucky, but I guess it doesn't bother any of them as they are all very social and they just love to be out and about and be at the centre of the party. I myself prefer to be alone and spend most of my time reading, so this was a nice surprise, now I can relax on my balcony and just read my books and enjoy the fresh sea air. But as the tiredness starts to take a hold of me I decide to see what clothing they provided us with as I would really like to take a shower and clean up and crawl into my bed, not that clothing really bothers me as I always preferred to just sleep in my underwear instead because it gets so hot where I live. So as I open my closet I am in awe at the beautiful clothes I find, sure this must be a mistake, all my dream clothing, boutique clothing, the kind of clothes that I could never afford, well not until one day when I make it as a doctor, but even then my plan is to take my mother in to come and live with me, she has worked so hard since my father died that my dream would be to give her an easier life, but back to the clothing, there are evening dresses, all really expensive evening wear body fitting dresses, then there is casual clothing, swim wear, as in the type that you see models wear in magazines, all 2 piece bikinis, and then finally when I open the underwear drawer I am in shock, the most beautiful underwear, all lacy stuff, but also once again the kind that models wear in magazines, as I go through everything and I start day dreaming there is a knock at my door which pulls me out of my trance.

Zoe, “coming...”

As I open the door I find Chloe standing there dressed in one of her evening dresses, she twirls around, she looks just like one of those ramp models you see on TV, but that has always been a benefit to her that she is slender and a bit taller then me, where even though I am also slender, I am a bit shorter then she is, she has long blonde hair and piercing blue eyes, where I have long straight black hair, I am a bit shorter then her and I have almost pitch black eyes, even my parents use to joke saying I was switched in the hospital as I am the only one in my family with dark hair and dark eyes.

Chloe, “Earth to Zoe, So what do you think?”

Zoe, “wow, you look amazing, are you going somewhere?”

Chloe, “We are on a cruise silly. There is so much to do, so many lounges with life music to visit, night clubs with DJ's where we can go dancing, bars and heck have you even looked at the activities guide in your cabin yet?”

Zoe, “Not yet.”

Chloe, “What have you been doing all this time girl?”

Zoe, “I was reading a book for a bit and then planning to go to bed.”

Chloe, “Wait, we are on a cruise, and you want to go to bed?”

Zoe, “I am a bit tired, anyway, we don't have to do everything in one day, I think I am going to get some sleep, so why don't you go ahead and have some fun and I will see you in the morning.”

Chloe, “Um girl, it is almost morning.”

Zoe, “I know, but I really need to get some sleep, why don't we meet up after breakfast and then we can go hang out by the pools for a bit?

Chloe, “Okay, I can see I am not going to get anywhere with you right now, but I am still going to go around and explore for a bit. Catch you for breakfast?”

Zoe, “I will see you just before breakfast, that is if you are awake.”

Chloe, “Oh I will be awake, I would never miss the opportunity to go and hang out at the pools and perve over some hot half naked men.” Winking at me.

Zoe, “Good night Chloe. “

And before she can say anything I close the door, “Now where was I? Oh yes...” So I go back to my closet and take out a clean pair of underwear and I go into the bathroom, as I take my clothes off I feel almost out of place looking at my own underwear as I throw it into the washing basket provided. Nothing feels as good as a nice hot shower, and wow, did I enjoy my shower. I must have taken the longest shower I have ever taken, but I also took the time to shave my legs and under my arms and of course my female parts, and really wash myself multiple times. After a good long shower I turn off the water and I take the provided towel and I start to dry myself off, after a good dry off I put on the new underwear and that is when I notice the bathrobe hanging behind the bathroom door, I could swear it wasn't there when I got into the shower, but I was so tired that I might have missed it. So I finish brushing my teeth and then I hang my towel back up and make my way to the bedroom where I find my bed has been pulled open for me and there is a chocolate on my pillow, I frown as I look around the room, once again I can't recall my bed been folded open for me when I entered my room of the small piece of chocolate on my pillow, but then again, I am so tired it is easy to miss things. So I just take off the bathrobe and throw it over the couch in my room and I crawl into my bed and pull the white sheets over myself. It didn't take long before I drifted off.

I find myself standing in a huge room filled with candles everywhere, in the middle of the room there is a circle with a pentagram drawn in the middle of the circle with a candle on each point of the pentagram, and there they are, standing in the middle of the pentagram the two girls from the lobby, the one with the blonde hair and the one with the red hair, both wearing some sort of cloaks, but very revealing cloaks, their hood cover their faces and the cloaks got long sleeves, but I can see their breasts and female parts clearly, they got beautiful bodies, both similar builds to me, I can see that they are busy with some sort of ritual, but there is someone laying on the floor, a woman, wait, let me get a closer look, as I walk closer I can see that the woman laying on the floor is completely naked with with symbols drawn on her body, but I still can't get a clear view of her face, I can see that she has long black hair, so I walk around the circle carefully, until I get to the opposite side where I can get a clear look at her, wait, it can't be... The woman laying in the circle is me, but I am standing right here, what is going on here? And what are they doing to my body? I can still not make out what they are doing or hear a word they are saying, and then they look at each other and they each take a sip from some sort of wine glass and then they bend down and they make me take a sip, after taking a sip from the cup they gently let my head down to the floor and then they both take a step back in unison, that is when my body starts to convulse, my body is shaking and I can see myself sweating, but after a few minutes the convulsions stops and then I open my eyes, they are now pitch black, even darker then before, I can see myself standing up and I smile at them, that is when they each come up to me and give me a passionate kiss... But before I can see anything else I hear a loud banging and someone calling my name, I wake up to find that it is daylight and the sun is piercing into my cabin as I never closed my curtains. There it is again, it is not a banging, but a knocking at my door, then I hear her voice, it is Chloe, she is calling me. I am still breathing rapidly and my body is soaking wet from the sweating. I drag myself out of bed and I look around for where I dropped my bathrobe, not that it really matters, I have undressed in front of Chloe so many times that I think we know each others bodies better then our own, but I eventually find my bathrobe and throw it on and I drag my feet as I make my way to open the door for her.

As soon as I open the door she burst in without a word, already dressed for the pool, well she is wearing her bikini top and a short,very short pair of shorts, it covers just enough so you can see that she is wearing a bikini bottoms underneath.

Zoe, “Good morning to you too, please come in.” I close the door behind her and walk back and take a seat on my bed.

Chloe, “Good morning, Geez girl, what happened to you? You look like you saw a ghost, it is just me.” As she is talking she makes her way over to the table where the kettle and coffee and stuff is located, she immediately make us each a cup of coffee and then she takes a seat on the chair opposite me and hands me a cup.

Zoe, “Nothing, I just had the strangest dream.”

Chloe, “Oh, one of those, don't worry, I also had this strange dream where we finished our coffee and you got cleaned up and dressed and then we went for breakfast and, wait, did you know they have a nude adult only area on this ship?”

Zoe, “No seriously, I had a crazy nightmare.”

Chloe, “Let me guess, you dreamed that you finally kissed a man?” She starts to laugh as she finishes that last sentence.

Zoe, “You know what? Never mind.” I finish my coffee and I make my way into the bathroom and take a shower, after which I brush my teeth and brush my hair, well I guess I am going to the pool, so I might as well just tie my hair up, so as soon as I am done I go back to the bedroom to find swimwear to wear, but she already took clothes out for me, exactly the same style as what she is wearing and almost the same colour, I grab my stuff to go back to the bathroom to change, but she stops me.

Chloe, “Seriously? We have been getting dressed together and we even bathed and showered together since we were kids and now you want to change in private?”

I finally give in and I change in the room, as I take my underwear off she whistles. “ooohhh someone went through a lot of effort to clean up.”

I just blush, but then she put me at ease and shows me that she also went through the same effort. I finally put my swim wear and my shorts on and then I grab my lipstick, but as soon as I grab it I change my mind and chuck it back on the dressing table, I mean, what am I thinking, I am going to go swimming, not shopping.

But as soon as I chuck in on the dressing table I notice a notebook there that wasn't there before, I slowly pick it up and open it to see what it is about, just to notice the words “ Rules for the cruise”

Chloe grabs the notebook out of my hands and she looks at it with a frown, “Rules for the cruise? Don't worry about it, it is probably just some sort of safety manual or something, we can go through it later.”

Zoe, “I guess you are right. “

She chucks it back on the dressing table and grabs my hand dragging me out of the cabin, in the process I almost left my cruise card in my cabin, so I pull free and I grab the lanyard with my cruise card attached to it, that is one rule I do know of, never go anywhere without your cruise card, it is your ID, your money, and your cabin door key on a cruise. As soon as I got it I exit my cabin and pull the door shut, I follow Chloe to the elevator, she presses the button for deck 9 which also says “Lido deck” next to the button. As we arrive we find a group of people waiting to get into the elevator and they shuffle past us as we try to get out, then we make our way out of the deck onto open deck and we find that there are already a lot of people laying by the pools, all suntanning and then there is a huge screen displaying some slides while there is music playing and you can see a few crew members dancing around on the stage infront of the screen. But before I can look around more Chloe grabs my hand again and drags me through the crowds to the oposite side of the deck where we eventually walk inside again and find a buffet set up, we make our way to the buffet lines and we each grab a tray and put a plate and a bowl on our trays, then we follow the line and we start to add stuff from toast, some eggs, bacon, salad and as we go around the buffet line we eventually find deserts which of course neither one of us can resist and we both make sure to add some to our trays, then we went to the coffee station and we each fill our cups up with coffee, Chloe grabs some milk, but I always took my coffee black, so I just grab some sugar and we make our way over to the tables, as we walk around looking for a table we heard a voice calling to us, “Hey girls, why don't you join us?” I look up to see the two girls from the lobby sitting at a table and the one with the blonde hair gestures for us to take a seat on the opposite side at the same table as them. Well there doesn't seem to be any other tables available and they seem friendly enough, as it is always good to make friends, but then the dream I had the previous night came back to me and a chill ran down my spine, but it is already to late, Chloe is already making her way over to their table and she takes a seat opposite the red head, so I take the seat opposite the blonde on.

We introduce ourselves and they just look at us and then continue eating, then the red head looks at me and she smiles, “So you won this cruise, didn't you?”

Zoe, “Yes, but how did you know?”

Red, I will call her Red for now as she never gave me her name. “I can see the way you look out of place, it is as if you don't feel like you should be here.”

Zoe, “Yes, that is exactly how I feel, but how did you know that?”

Red, “I can see from the way you look around all the time, it is as if you are expecting to wake up any time and find out that it was all a dream, don't worry, this is all real, and if you allow yourself to, then you will have the time of your life here.”

Chloe, “Exactly what I told her, and maybe she might even meet a hot guy...” Smiling.

White, “maybe she doesn't want a guy, maybe that is your thing, maybe she likes girls?”

Zoe, I just blush, I've never actually told anyone that I like girls, but this woman picked it up without even so much as a hint.”

Red, “ No need to blush, it is nobody's business who you love or are attracted to, as long as you are happy and you enjoy yourself. So ignore people and stop worrying about what they might say or might think. “

Chloe, “That is a good point, you told me the exact same words once, and yet you never implemented it in your own life.”

I look at Chloe in shock, “You knew?”

Chloe, “Of course, I always knew, I could see how you would look at some of the girls at school, you would almost drool over them.”

And I found myself blushing again, she is right, there were a few girls at school that I would drool over at times, heck I would even go home and look for woman on adult sites that look similar to them just to satisfy my own curiosity and needs.

So as we all finish eating the twins as we decided to call them invited us to join them on the adult deck, they said it is usually more quiet there and clothing is still optional. So we follow them towards the adult only deck, they walk in front of us, both walking like they are ramp models, both wearing very revealing bikinis and similar shorts to us, as we got outside we follow them around the one corner, and up a set of stairs to a deck that is completely private from the rest of the ship, you can see a few bar waitresses walking around with drinks and a bar in the corner, with a female bar tender, all walking around topless wearing only very tiny bikini bottoms, I look at them and once again I can feel my mouth watering, yes, I do like woman and I can't help but look at beauty when I see it. But then the twins pull me out of my trance as they lead us to a corner and they both take their tops off, and my drool is back, but this time I just swallow it as I don't want to offend anyone. A waitress comes over and hand us each a glass of dry red wine, I decide to also take my top off as I would really enjoy a proper tan and I take the shorts off, Chloe just looks at me as she takes her top off, she decided to keep her shorts on for obvious reasons as she is still trans gender and hasn't gone for an operation yet, but then one of the twins convinced her that it is okay and nobody will judge her, so she gives in and takes her shorts off, you can see that she is still shy, but they eventually got her to calm down by telling her how pretty she is and how lucky any man would be to date her, so she finally gave in and relaxed a bit.

As I lay down on my sun bed I heard a cat meow, I pull the towel away from my eyes to see the lady with the cat standing over me, “You really shouldn't be here, let me guess, you didn't read the rules yet?”

Zoe, “if its about the adult area, I am 19 now, I know I look younger, but here, look at my ID. “ Showing her my cruise card.

Cat lady, “No, it is not safe, you should go. Go back to your cabin and read the rules and then you will understand.”

But before I can say anything else the twins are standing between her and myself.

Red, “Che, it is day time, so why don't you and your kitty cat leave and go back to your bar?”

Che, looking at me, “Just please do yourself a favour and read the rules, then you will understand.”

Red, “Che, you should leave now, she is with us, and you forgot, in the day we have the power, so leave now. “

Che, “Yes, it is day time for now, I might see the two of you tonight, then we will see who runs away. “ her cat still sitting on her shoulders just hissing at the twins as she leaves.

Chloe, “What was that about?”

White, “Don't worry about it or her stupid rules, she just drinks to much and then she forgets that she doesn't own the ship, she is just another passenger here like the rest of us.”

Zoe, “I guess you are right. “ So I take another sip from my wine and I turn my deck bed so I can get a better view of the twins.

Red looking at Chloe, “hmmm, I see you might have an admirer pointing towards a guy laying in only his underwear a few metres away from us, that is when I also notice how he has been staring at Chloe. He then gets up and walks over to us handing her a piece of paper and whispering something in her ear, she just blushes and then smiles and nods at him, he nods at the twins and then he leaves the deck.

Zoe, “What was that about?”

Chloe, “Oh he asked me to join him for a drink later on deck 13? “

Zoe, “I didn't know ships have a deck 13?”

White, “This ship does, but it is only accessible for special guests and by invitation only, so I guess Chloe is on her own there. “

Red, “Oh my, look at the time, I think it is time for all of us to go get ready for the evening.”

I look up to notice that the sun is already setting, I could swear that it was morning just a few minutes ago, but then I feel it, the sunburn, I must have fallen asleep, I look around to notice that Chloe is already gone and the twins are getting up and putting their bikini tops and shorts back on, I do the same and I thank them and greet them and then I make my way back to the elevator and back to my cabin, as I arrive I notice that my cabin has already been cleaned and everything looks like it has never been touched or used. “Wow, a girl could get used to this.”

I enter my cabin and grab a clean pair of underwear from my closet, I need to first take a shower before I will even bother to decide which evening dress to wear.

As I get out of the shower I find that my towel I used this morning has been removed and replaced with a fresh dry towel, so I grab it off the rack and dry myself off. I hang the towel back and walk into my bedroom naked, I mean, heck, who is going to see me. As I enter I find the under wear I took out still on the bed with a low cut black evening dress, I really can't remember taking that dress out or even seeing it in the closet earlier, but then again I can be a bit scatter minded at times. So I put the tiny lace panties on and put the bra on, which seems to be the perfect fit, I look in the full length mirror across from my bed and I model for myself a bit, trying to walk like those ramp models you see on TV, luckily for me I do have nice hips and nice breasts, so I actually manage to pull it off. After a few tries I smile at myself in the mirror and I go back to the dressing table and I start to dry my hair and make sure it it perfect, then I do my make up and finally when I am happy I put the dress on which fits me perfectly, bringing out my curves as well as my breasts, I then put the high heel shoes on and I look at myself in the mirror, as I turn to grab my lanyard I see the notebook again. “Rules for the Cruise.” That is when I remember the cat ladies words, so I decide to just humour her and read the rules.

The first few pages are the regular thing, mostly about not smoking in your cabin, not going into any area that says crew only, and all the safety drill information and how to know which alarm means what, and what to do and where to go during an emergency, which lifeboat I am assigned to and life jacket stuff.

As I read along I get to the last page and then I find a page that is written by hand, almost as if written in a rush.

Rules to survive this Cruise and to finally get home.

Please if you find these rules then make sure you follow them to the letter, this is not a joke and a matter of life and death, I am sure that you probably won this cruise the same way I did, and if you had the feeling that it was to good to be true and you are reading this then I assume you made the same mistake I made and ignored your gut feel. Anyway, this is a list of rules I managed to come by from another guest who has been here for a while, but neither one of us understood this cruise fully and we both messed up, so please follow these rules to the letter and if you notice anything that is missing then please add it to the list.

  1. Always keep your cruise card with you, no matter what, this is your life, it is your ID, your money, your key card as well as the only thing that stands between you remaining a guest and eventually going home or becoming part of the ship and joining the crew for eternity.

  2. Not everyone on the ship are human, all the crew are entities who were once guests like yourself, but they have become part of the ship and they now serve the ship, they are neither your friends or enemies, but each one has a job to do and can only do their assigned job, do not try to communicate with them unless if they communicate with you first. Not even all the guests are human, some are entities who also belong to the ship and have become trapped here, in order to see who is human and who isn't, humans have shadows, entities doesn't. Do not trust any of the entities, the only one who is on your side is the lady with the cat.

  3. Everything on the ship is free, but do not over indulge, remember all debt eventually comes due, take only what you need to survive, if you are out in the lounges and a server offers you a drink, accept it, but never take another drink until your drink is finished, and then always wait at least 3 minutes before you accept the next drink.

  4. If the Lady with the cat offers you a drink then pay close attention, if it is red wine then decline in a polite manner, it is not wine, if it is anything else then you must accept. She is your friend, and she will always try to protect and help you, always listen to her and follow her advice. But avoid her between 0:00 midnight and 3:33 am, you do not want to run into her during this time, if you do then pray for a quick end.

  5. The twins are not your friends, they are witches and they need energy to survive, but don't ever be rude to them, rather keep them on your side, but at a distance, they can still help you if you run into one of the more violent aggressive entities, if they do invite you to join them for a drink then do not decline, they can make you do it even against your own will, but make sure that you always maintain eye contact with them, regardless of what they are wearing, they might wear revealing and seductive clothing and they might try to get you to look at their breasts or even female parts, do not break eye contact, if you do look at any parts of their bodies you will be under their control and then you must hope that the lady with the cat is nearby to help you, otherwise you will not have a pleasant end.

  6. If you see a man with a samurai sword, then be polite with him, he is neither human, nor an entity, the same as you he was brought here, unfortunately he decided to stay in order to protect other humans who get stuck here, do not ask for his name, and do not go looking for him, he does have a tendency to find you when you need him, always be polite to him and offer to join him for a drink or a meal if it does happen did he did safe you. He doesn't talk much, but he is a good listener.

  7. You will receive a new activities guide in your cabin each morning when you wake up, always go through it as it has important information on it, always follow any tips listed on it as it is for your own protection, you will also have to try and attend at least 3 of the listed activities each day, if you do not attend at least 3 of the activities then the day will cycle and you will have to repeat the same day over and over until you managed to attend at least 3 activities.

  8. If you want to go onto open deck and you notice that it is very bright outside or you happen to be outside and a second sun appear, then make sure you go below deck immediately. That means that the ship has entered the domain of the void walkers and if you don't get burned to ashes within the first 3 minutes then the void walkers will pull you into the void.

  9. Always follow any commands made by the captain over the ship PA system, but always remember that the captains voice will come over the PA system as a female voice, if any other voice speaks over the PA system ignore all instructions and go back to your cabin immediately, get in bed and stay there until the next morning.

  10. Always make sure that you are in your cabin between midnight and 3:33 am, do not leave your cabin or open your door, no matter what you hear, even if it is the voice of a loved one, ignore it, do not even respond, the shadows can mimic anyone, and even if it is a loved one, if they are outside of their cabins between midnight and 3:33am then it is already to late for them.

  11. You will notice that every time you get out of the shower that an outfit will be waiting for you on your bed, always wear this outfit, don't ever try to wear anything else, if no outfit has been placed on your bed then you can wear anything you want. Always make sure that you shower when you wake up and also that you shower again between 4pm and 6pm. If you do not shower at these times you will find yourself exiting your cabin and ending up back in your bathroom until you showered, the ship do not like it when you skip a shower.

  12. You can have visitors in your cabin, but don't ever allow anyone to sleep over and don't ever sleep over in another cabin but your assigned cabin, whoever sleeps over in a cabin they were not assigned vanishes without a trace during the night and has never been seen again.

  13. The ship does not have a deck 13, if you get in the elevator and there is a button for deck 13 then immediately exit the elevator and take the next elevator, if the same happens then take the stairs, if there is a button for deck 13 then that is the only deck the elevator will go to. If you are taking the stairs and see a sign for deck 13 then immediately go to deck 6 and find the lady with the cat, she can protect you against the cult.

  14. If a stranger approaches you and invites you to deck 13 then immediately get up and find the cat lady, she will take care of it for you.

  15. If you are a virgin then make sure you avoid any males that are very well dressed and well groomed, they will approach you and invite you to join them for drinks, if you are near the twins or the cat lady then you will be safe as they will help you, if you are alone in any of the cabin decks and you see one of them approach you then run, do not take the elevator, take the stairs and find either the twins or the lady with the cat, they are the only ones who can protect you.

  16. The ship has fire proof doors on all decks above the sea level decks, if you find yourself been followed or chased by any entity, regardless of the entity, make sure you press the release buttons next to these doors, they will close and slow the entities down.

  17. Do not ever go to deck 0 or any of the decks below deck 0, these are crew only decks, the only exception to this rule is when you need to go see the medical staff as the infirmary is located on deck 0, then make sure you use the midship stairs or elevators and then follow the signs to the infirmary, go straight to the infirmary, do only what you need and say only what you need, do not interact with any other crew members, even if they are trying to interact with you, only speak to the medical staff.

  18. You might run into the ship security from time to time and they might ask to see your cruise card, show it to them, but if they ask you to hand it over to them then tell them politely that you still need it and will hold onto it for now.

  19. You will notice that it said cruise to everywhere and nowhere, the ship will dock at strange places that you might never have heard of before, that is because these places doesn't exist on your plain of existence, unfortunately you have to go out and explore and act like a tourist, but always make sure to follow the instructions on the brochures handed to you by the security at the boarding gates of the ship and make sure you are back at the ship at least an hour before the ship leaves.

  20. If you follow all the rules and do not lose your cruise card and remain human for long enough then you will eventually go home, if not, then you will become one of the entities that roams this ship just like myself.

Good luck and love Che, the Cat Lady.

I read the rules, then I read them again, and again, this must be some kind of joke, but then I remembered how when we were on the deck I made the mistake to look at the twins topless bodies and how it felt like I was almost pulled into a trance and how I felt helpless, that is when it occurred to me that when I woke up I couldn't remember falling asleep, it was almost as if I just blacked out, and I felt more tired then I felt even last night. “Oh shit, Chloe..”

I grab my lanyard with my cruise card and I left my cabin and start to hammer on her cabin door immediately, but there is no answer, that is when my brother opens his cabin door and looks at me strangely as I am hammering on her door shouting her name.

He then calms me down and tells me that she came back much earlier and she changed and said she has a date and will see us tomorrow.

I can feel myself going pale in my face as I turn my back against her cabin door and slide down to the floor, just sitting there holding my hands over my face, my brother comes closer to try and talk to me, but then I remember that the lady with the cat might be able to help me, so without another word I jump up almost pushing my brother out of the way and run in the direction of the nearest elevators, I press the button over and over as if that is going to make the elevator come faster, but well, lucky for me it was close, so it arrives within seconds. But as soon as the doors open and I step inside and I reach to press the button for deck 6 I froze in place, there it is, “13” that dreaded number, I take a moment to think it through, but then I remember the rules. The doors are already starting to close and without thinking any further I jump out of the elevator just in time before the doors close, hitting my head against the opposite wall, all I see is a white flash as I try to get back up after diving into the wall and I can feel my head pounding, but I do not have time to worry about myself right now. My best friend is in danger and I need to find a way to rescue her. But there is no way I am going to even bother with the elevators right now, I am on deck 9, so I know it is not too far down with the stairs to deck 6, so without wasting another minute I ran down the stairs, I nearly bump into my mother as she is on her way up hand in hand with some very fancy well groomed male, and the moment I saw him I remember the rules, he also looks at me and smiles, but before he could say anything I turn and grab him by his jackets collar and pull him back, throwing him off balance and he falls backwards on the stairs, my mother turns to me in shock, she was about to say something when the twins came around the corner and they walked up to him, the moment he saw them he jumped up and ran into the elevator without the doors even opening. My mother just stood there in shock, first I grabbed her date and threw him down the stairs, then he ran right through the doors, I don't have time to explain anything to her, so I just told her that I think that she had too much to drink and needs to get to bed, luckily she doesn't argue and finds her way to her cabin.

0 Comments
2023/11/11
09:00 UTC

1

Cruise to nowhere - part 1

Have you ever had that feeling that something is just to good to be true? Well someone once told me that when something is too good to be true, then it usually is to good to be true.
Well my mother always had this habit of entering every online contest she could find, whether it is a questionnaire or even a survey, the moment she sees  the words “contest” or “win” she couldn’t help herself. But she also has this “fire and forget system” where she will enter and completely forget about it. It usually ends up been a dud, but she does have luck in that way where she would win little prizes at times, I think the biggest prizes she has won so far would be a months worth of groceries, which is always welcome as we are a struggling family. My father died just after my younger brothers birth and he was a struggling musician, so he didn’t have any life policies or even a funeral plan in place, my mother worked as a waitress at the time, so everything just accumulated to more debt for her, she ended up working double shifts 7 days a week and the few hours she was at home she would drink until she passed out. As I was the eldest the responsibilities of taking care of our home and my younger brother fell upon me, luckily I have always been an A student at school and I just got a scholarship to go to varsity to study for a medical doctor.
Another thing that always counted in my favour is that I always had great looks, so I always ended up getting photographic modelling work which helped us as the money was pretty decent and I could at-least afford to buy some basic necessities for our home and myself, and since half of my mothers money went into alcohol and cigarettes it made things really tight at home, but it could have been worse, considering that she was there when my father was mutilated and murdered for a packet of smokes. She saw everything, the robbers didn’t just rob him, they tortured him and by the time the police arrived he was unrecognisable.
My brother is 16 now and he is very sporty, he excels at every sport he tries and he keeps winning prizes, which makes me proud of him, but it also made him a bit over confident and arrogant, I myself am a 19 year old girl and I will be starting my first semester at the best medical school in my country next year.
Let me tell you about the town where I live, I live in a small town just about 30km from the nearest city, and as we can’t afford boarding school my brother and myself always had to get up early in the morning and make it to the main road and hope someone would give us a ride to school, the mornings were the easy part of the day, it is in the afternoons that we really struggled and we have learned to just walk up the mountain after school as we got a better chance of getting home, some days we would get lucky and someone would pick us up, but other days it would take us hours to walk home.
That’s a bit about my life.
Now let me tell you what happened to us, so I finished school last year, but because I didn’t want my brother to go down alone I would still go down to the city with him daily, and I used this year to try and make extra money doing part time work in the city while my brother was at school. So on the last day of school for the year I met him at our usual spot and we decided to start making our way up the mountain when this really expensive car stopped next to us, I don’t really know much about cars as I’m more into my modelling and medical stuff, but if you see a long black sedan with tinted windows and shiny mags pull up you know that you are either in trouble, or you got very lucky.
So the car pulled up next to us and this tall blonde well dressed, well groomed middle age man got out and looked at us. Aren’t you Zoe and Jean Clarke?
Zoe. “Depends who is asking and why.”
Man. “Relax, I’m here to deliver a prize to your family, would you guys like a ride home?”
Zoe. “Um, a prize?”
Man. “Yes. “ smiling. “Your family won the family of the year contest.”
Zoe. “Oh okay, what is the prize?”
Man. “I’m sorry, but I can only disclose that to Mrs Clarke.”
Zoe. “You mean Miss.”
Man. “Oh I apologise, I didn’t realise she got divorced. “
Zoe. “Widowed.”
Man. “I apologise and I’m sorry for your loss, now would you please get in? I’m on a rather tight schedule.”
My brother and I look at each other and he just shrugs and gets in the back, I take a seat at the front and fasten my seatbelt. Honestly I am pretty thankful for this ride as it is very hot today, not that it’s ever not warm in South Africa.
So the man gets in and he offers us each a bottle of cold water which we gladly accept as we are both dying of thirst and then without another word he starts the car and off we went, you know when you walk the same road every day you actually stop noticing the scenery and you just focus on where you are walking, that is how my brother and I have become, we stopped even noticing anything any-more, but today it was like as if for the first time ever we could enjoy the scenery again and the beauty of nature, but as I got lost in though the car came to a standstill and the man turned off the ignition. I look up to see that we arrived at my mothers work place.
Man. “You two wait here, I will go fetch your mother and then we can all go talk at your house.”
We both sit in the car stunned, how did he even know where mom works? Oh well, with all these contest and surveys she’s always filling out you never know.
We watch on as he walks over to the owner and speaks to the owner, we can see the owner arguing with him and shaking his ear, but then this strange man pulls something out of his pocket and hands it to the owner, the owner just goes pale and he becomes docile at once and goes inside, after a few minutes he comes out with our mother and we can see him handing her a thick envelope and shaking her hand, she just smiles and gives him a tight hug. Then her and the man comes over and they both get into the car.
Zoe. “Hi mom.”
Mom. “Hi kids.”
Jean. In his usual arrogant tone. “Hi mom.”
Zoe. “Mom, what just happened?”
Mom. “Oh nothing, James just gave me a years worth of wages and said to have fun and he will see us when we get back.”
Now I am very confused. “A years wages? See us when we get back.”
Man. “Don’t worry about it, I will explain everything at your house.”
Just then we pulled into the driveway and we all went inside.
The man grabs a cooler box out of the drunk and he joins us on the veranda, he then first takes out a bottle of wine and then 4 glasses, but then he stops and looks in the direction of the gate and back at me. “Zoe, I think you might want to get that.”
Just then I heard a voice calling my name at the gate. “Zoe!!! Zoe!!!! “
I get up and grab the gate keys to let Chloe in, now Chloe is my best friend, but Chloe is not her real name, she picked the name Chloe because she said it rhymes with Zoe, she use to be a boy, but she is a transgender girl now, and honestly if she had to enter modelling I would quit, she actually got a scholarship to go and study psychiatry.
So as Chloe and I get back inside the man is sitting on the one chair by the table with a huge grin on his face. He poured 5 glasses of dry red wine and everyone seems to be waiting in anticipation.
Man, “well, now that we are all here I guess I can tell you what your big prize is.”
Jean. “Let me guess, a years worth of groceries.” Still in his arrogant sarcastic tone.”
Mom. “Stop it, don’t be rude.”
Man. “No, well that as well. But you guys, the 4 of you won an epic cruise to everywhere and nowhere. “
Chloe. “Wait, that doesn’t make any sense at all, everywhere and nowhere?”
Now have you ever had that feeling that something is wrong? Terribly wrong? Like first of all it’s too good to be true, and yet nothing makes sense?” Well that’s the feeling I have right now, and looking back, I wish I went with my instincts.
Man. “Yes, you will go everywhere and stay nowhere. Congratulations.”
So we all take our wine glasses and cheers and take a sip. “ I’m still feeling uneasy about the whole thing. But I decided to keep quiet for my moms sake, she’s been working for years without even so much as 1 day break. And I could see that she was really excited for this.
Mom. “So how long is this cruise for?”
Man. “Oh just a couple of months or so. Don’t worry, you will have the time of your LIFE.” The way he said LIFE, with an almost creepy voice gave me the chills.
But hey, it’s a cruise, the worst that can happen is the ship can sink, right?”
Man. “And don’t worry about bringing anything, everything will be provided for you on the cruise, it’s an all inclusive cruise, even your clothing will be provided. We already got your sizes and everything, so your cabin will be fully stocked, and the best part is all food and drinks are included in your package. “ then he looks at my brother. “And since it’s in international waters, there is no age limit stopping you from enjoying yourself.”
Mom. “I don’t think I want him to start drinking yet.”
Claude looking at my mom, you can see he is furious now. “Sure mom, you already drink enough for us all.”
Zoe. “Stop it now!”
Mom. “It’s okay, he is right.” I can see she is almost in tears.
Man. “Anyway, you guys can celebrate tonight, but be ready by 0:00 (midnight) that is when your driver will collect you. “
Chloe. “Midnight?”
Man. “Yes, your cruise leaves at 3:33am.”
Zoe. “You do realise that we would never make it in time.”
Man. “Relax, our driver has never missed.”
Jean. “Frowning now. “Never missed.”
Man. Looking at his wrist. “Oh my, look at the time, I got to be on my way.” And he gets up and walks out. I get up to follow him, but when I get to the gate both him and his car are gone. As I look around in confusion I feel a cold chill run down my back, nobody is this fast, I was just a few seconds behind him.
I get back to find the group already in the second bottle of wine, it seems this strange man left is 6 bottles, so I join in, more out of nervousness, but soon the wine hits me and I fell asleep on the couch. But just as I start to fall into a deep sleep my mom shakes me awake.
Mom. “Zoe, we got to get ready, the driver will be here shortly.”
Zoe. “Mom, are you sure you want to go?”
Mom, “Of-course we are going. It’s a free holiday.”
Zoe. “But mom, doesn’t something feel off about this whole thing?”
Mom, “of course, but I spoke to the neighbour and she said she will check on the house for us.”
Zoe. “Not that, this holiday.”
Mom. “Yeah, a fee all inclusive holiday? It’s about time we won a big prize like this.”
Zoe. “But mom, can you remember…”
Just then I get interrupted by a car hooting st the gate.
Before I could say anything else an excited Chloe grabs my hand and yanks me to my feet, “let’s go sleepy head.”
My mom locks up and we all get to the car waiting for us. It’s another black car similar to the first one, but this time it is a pale blonde woman driving it. She speaks to us in an almost hypnotic voice, “welcome, please get in, we have a long way to go.”
Claude. “No shit. Not sure how we are going to make an 8 hour drive in 3:33.”
Woman. “I am the best driver there is.”
Claude. “Okay transporter. “
My mom, Claude and Chloe shuffled into the back and I decide to hop in the front seat again.
But soon after I got in a fell asleep again just to be awoken by this strange woman. “We have arrived.”
I look around to the back to find the others also fell asleep, they are all yawning now and stretching.
We shuffle out of the car to find an empty peer with a huge cruise ship waiting for us.
Zoe. “This is strange, where is everyone else?”
Woman. “Already on-board, we are a minute late. So off you go.”
We make our way hesitantly into the ship to be greeted by an annoyed looking crew member, “you are a minute late.”
Zoe. “Sorry, we were not the ones driving.”
I then look around to find the door we entered through was already closed behind us.
Crew. “Follow me please, I will show you to your cabins.”
Chloe. “Cabins? That means we get more then one?”
Crew. “You were each assigned your own individual cabin.”
I could see this crew member wasn’t the talking type, so I stopped asking questions. We follow him down the hall, up the stairs into what seems to be the most beautiful love I’ve ever seen.
The stairs seems to be made out of pure crystal and even the lights seem to be made out of crystal. He leads us over to a desk that says “Guest Services” where they immediately hand us each a blue card with our names and photographs on it.
Mom. “How did you get our photographs?”
Guest service associate. “We got them after you entered the contest.”
Claude. “So you were spying on us?”
Zoe. “Relax, they probably just did a social media survey on each of us.”
Chloe. “I bet.” I can hear the disbelief in her voice.
I look around the lobby and I see a whole bunch of people at different tables chattering away and enjoying different drinks, then I notice a table with 2 really beautiful woman sitting, they look to be about my age, but one has long blonde hair and blue eyes and she is wearing a long white dress, and the other one has long red hair and green eyes, and she seems to be wearing a similar dress to the other one, just hers is red. Then another table caught my eye, at it there is a slender beautiful lady sitting, she had long black hair, and is wearing a body hugging black evening dress, she has these sharp blue eyes, almost cat like, and talking about cats, she has a black cat laying in her shoulders just staring back at me, I couldn’t help but notice that she was sipping from a glass of red wine, then she looks back at me and lifts her glass and gives me a nod. “

0 Comments
2023/11/11
08:07 UTC

1

Relato sobre minha vida, espero que eu possa contar pra alguém isso part 1

Bom pessoal, antes de tudo quero contar isso pois isso tem me assombrado desde 2018, sim todos os fatos contados aqui aconteceram e eu sou pessimo de contar porém espero que alguém possa me ajudar ou pelo menos me escutar.
Em 2018 foi onde tudo começou, bom eu moro com minha vó, e eu tenho descendencia espirita (embora eu nao acredite nessas coisas) e eu soube disso desde criança e ja tinha ocorrido situações estranhas, tipo como falar com uma senhora na rua e ela desaparecer simplesmente. Mas nesse ano em especifico eu simplesmente fui dormir na cama da minha vó, apos ela sair pra ir no mercado e tive um ''pesadelo'' até ai tudo bem, levei um sustinho e dps tentei voltar a dormir, só que quando percebi estava tendo o mesmo pesadelo novamente, e essa coisa que eu não sei o que é ficou de frente pra mim, e quando eu acordei senti eu só caindo em cima da cama como se eu tivesse levitado, bom essa foi minha primeira experiencia com essa coisa que esta me perseguindo, tentando entrar na minha mente, ou assumir meu corpo, não sei se vocês acreditam nisso mais juro por tudo que isso aconteceu comigo, se tiver alguém pra responder isso e tiver curioso eu posso continuar contando, pois tem muita coisa que aconteceu envolvendo isso.

0 Comments
2023/09/23
04:05 UTC

2

Atavistic Brain Disorder

Doctor, I'd like to inform you that Operation Eternal Rest for Christ was a resounding success. Albeit with a high casualty rate, we have nonetheless put our old friend in the ground. Actually, no, most of him was scattered about in the explosion.

You need not worry however, I've got a piece of him with me, so you could study whatever made him into an amalgam of living necrosis. That wasn't any ol' regular zombie. Not at all, whatever had gotten into Christiansen made him into a cancerous ghoul hell-bent on ceaseless murder. Even so, he was undoubtedly alive at the moment of contact. He clearly wasn't too happy with hearing my voice calling out his name.

As for the ghouls, none of them made it out alive. I feel like I should have some sympathy for them because of how he basically made piñatas out of them but I can't bring myself to feel bad for the death of murderers, pedophiles, and all other manner of scum being torn to bits.

What's really interesting is the manner in which he tore through them, quite literally, I might add.

He came out of nowhere, after our guns for hire were convinced, his house was empty, and began beating the living fuck out of them with his own torn-off arm. Christiansen used his own arm like a club to batter and smash everything in his path.

Bullets didn't do shit to the thing he had become, and neither did knives. He ate all of it. To be quite honest, I wasn't even sure if there was anything left of him in his new body.

A monstrosity of a man, a gargantuan, fat-headed and like a mole as to the smallness of his eyes; disgusting with his short, broad, thick, and half hoary beard; disgraced by a neck faded under its titanic head; bald-headed with a few stray strands of hair sticking out crudely, barely hanging on to dear life. His skin colored the shade of rot; one whom it would not be pleasant to meet in the middle of the night even if he wasn't driven by a lecherous drive for bloodshed; with an extensive belly and a noticeably taller than I remember him.

After a few bloody moments, he reattached his appendage and punched one of the ghouls so hard his arm broke. Without even flinching he shoved the sharpened ends of the broken bone into the neck of another, tearing a new hole in it. He proceeded to hack through several men this way before kicking one so hard his knee shattered and then he decided to nail a couple of men into the floor with his exposed bone fragments, right before spewing acidic blood onto their faces – I can say so because I saw their heads melt off.

At this point, one of the sad excuses for hired guns pissed himself and blew his own brains out. Our colleague noticed it and didn't let a good body go to waste, he fixed his broken arm and shoved it into the corpses body before yanking out a handful of guts and then used the headless corpse like some medieval type morning star.

Oh, what a shame it took him about ninety seconds to get off thirty men. I was just starting to enjoy the carnage. Some of them died too quickly relative to their crimes, doc, but I digress.

Once he was done with those cretins, I leaped into action and called out his name. Wolfgang always hated it when I called him Wolfy. Hearing me calling him that made him squint his already barely visible blackened eye orbs he let out a sickening belching sound as acidic slime drooled down his face, melting some of the skin around his mouth.

Driven by the atavistic brain disorder he decided the best course of action was to tear his head off along with a segment of his spinal column and use it as a weapon against me.

The scariest part about this whole thing was just how accurate he was, hell, he even got me a few times. I don't know what kind of intergalactic prionic spaceworm got him into that state, but we have to prevent anyone else from going this far.

Perhaps afflicted by the same atavistic brain disorder that zombified our former pal; I shot the head. It didn't do shit… why I did this? I don't know!

Eventually, he got me, and pinned me to the floor with that living dead head skull of his screeching in my ear as his free hand was trying to pry my helm open; without any hope to throw the monstrosity off, I shoved a hand grenade into his neck hole. The moment my hand reached inside; I felt the fleshy hole clenching its walls around my arm.

I guess both Christianen and I had gone too far, but sometimes going too far is worth it, right?

I was prepared to die when the grenade went off, but by sheer dumb luck the amount of flesh on that abomination just absorbed all of the blast, leaving me covered in monster gore and clutching the fleshy skull mace I am currently on my way to deliver to you, Doc.

P.s I threw up a little in my helm and the smell is killing me right now, so don't worry if I pass out the moment we meet, I haven't been touched by his internal juices just like you instructed!

0 Comments
2023/09/17
20:57 UTC

1

There Was Really Nothing There

Yesterday, upon the stair there was nothing really there. I saw there was nothing there at three AM today, oh how I wish, I wish something would come my way.

When I was younger, I was living my life on the edge. Growing up with alcoholic and drug-addicted parents, I didn't know anything much about anything other than the pure joy of intoxication. I was hooked on the spirit by twelve. Every day, something went wrong. My eldest sister killed herself by accident. My brother was shot right in front of me over a botched drug deal. I watched Pa sell Ma to other men for money to buy more booze he'd drown me in. Things went wrong every single day, but at least it was something.

Then one day, I got clean; I got sick of being sick and tired and I got sick and tired of living on the edge so I got clean and I made something out of the nothing that I was. I turned my life around and made a career for myself, helping other people like myself. Eventually, I fell in love. At first it felt like I had made it, like I was on top of the world, but after we settled and got married and built a family, love did the worst thing imaginable.

It gave birth to absolutely nothing.

Gradually, then suddenly, I stopped finding any actual joys in life.

Everything grew more and more mechanical, monotonous, and cold.

Lifeless.

Meaningless.

Waking up every day felt the same until I stopped feeling anything altogether.

A chasm of emptiness opened up, following me everywhere I went, swallowing everything around me until there was nothing.

Waking every morning, I saw nothing of importance.

Kissing my wife, and her lips tasted like nothing, and so did her food.

Hearing my kids and their voices sounded like nothing.

As did my own voice.

Every day passed like nothing had happened because nothing ever did happen in my home town designed in accordance with the gloomy architecture of nothing.  

Every now and again, I would wake up drenched in cold sweat, fearing for some odd reason that something had happened. Nothing ever did, leaving me empty and distraught over the fact the Nothing was slowly and methodically squeezing the sanity out of me.

Even when Pa passed away, I felt nothing. At his funeral I stood there, completely submerged in the emotional void of nothing as they lowered him into the ground. My eyes watered, but I felt absolutely nothing.

Life just went on, as if nothing had happened, because nothing indeed ever happened.

Even now, coming from work to the site of a catastrophe…

To the pile of ashes that used to be my home…

To find the scattered bone fragments of my family…

After everything that was mine was reduced to nothing –

even after something had finally happened, only nothing remains.

When a police officer told me I should find some solace in the fact that the explosion killed them so fast they felt nothing, all I could say was;

"Neither do I."

0 Comments
2023/09/11
00:12 UTC

2

Agony

Morgan’s chest rose and fell as she stared at the dull yellow light bulb swaying above her head. Each breath stung worse than the previous. The aftershocks of two suns colliding pounded against her ribcage, agitating the solar plexus.

The terrible flames liked her nervous system. Their pulsating dance syncing with the desperate screaming of her self-inflicted wounds. She couldn’t even think about moving a single muscle - fearful she might break into pieces if she did. Fearful of aggravating the violent chills. Dreading the chills turning into seizure-like spasms.

All she could do was imagine herself disappearing...

Morgan hated her life. She hated herself, and she hated what she had become...

Unintentionally, she shook her lower lip. The self-loathing had gotten the best of her, starting an avalanche of bone-breaking trembling. Morgan’s soft cries turned high-pitched and feral. She roared as her spine melted under the pathetic mass of her spread-out form.

Someone banged on the other side of the wall, yelling at Morgan to shut up.

The familiar nasal voice disgusted her, firing bile up her esophagus. The living black hole inside of her grew aroused, and the sensation disgusted her even more than the nauseating voice. Warm saliva escaped her parted lips, burning her chin. She howled as she pulled herself upward.

Burning hot nails dug into every inch of her skin.

Her neighbor shouted again, louder.

The appalling voice broke her out of her pained trance.

Forcing herself upright, drowning in lactic acid, Morgan finally understood it was the right thing to do.

She flexed her neck, almost relishing in the feeling of her bones roping into knots. She knew doing it would lessen her torment. It didn’t even matter at this point that he had a sick wife and four little kids to take care of. Morgan needed to take care of herself.

The furious pounding of a fist on her door sounded like music to her ears.

“Coming...” she cried, unhinging her drool-covered lower jaw.

0 Comments
2023/08/03
21:25 UTC

1

Nihility

The last thing I can remember before passing out is the whole congregation dancing. While these people were all unknown to me, I felt some kind of kinship with them. We were all dancing as part of our attempt to unite with God. I don’t remember how all of that ended. I remember the room twisting and turning; the loud, cheerful music. Limbs moved in all directions as bodies twisted and contorted under the influence of wine and divine flesh. The whole universe began spinning around me. No, I spun at its center; uncontrollably at the whim of sinister gravitational forces. The warmth I initially felt quickly dissipated, leaving a nauseating vertigo in its place.

Instead of ascending into the bosom of the Lord, I think I might’ve fallen into the ninth circle of the abyss. Colors and sounds began to lose their essence as everything turned so suddenly, so cold and black. There was no pain, no fear, no feeling at all - rather, a sudden and yet gradual disappearance of the world; of the self, my… self.

I woke up once the ground beneath started stirring my body up and down, irritating the fragile composition of this flesh prison. As soon as I opened my eyes, the vertigo threatened to cripple my still-intoxicated mind. I didn’t feel any fear as everything around me moved. The walls, the furniture, the floor. The danger of being in the epicenter of an earthquake hadn’t sunk in quite yet. As I was struggling to pull myself upright, I finally noticed the ground wasn’t really shaking. It was swaying back and forth, like waves in the ocean. Everything was swaying.

The outline of everything around me rippled and gently danced to an inconceivable rhythm. Only when I noticed my own skin ripple, in the same manner, did I finally register the full scope of the cataclysm I was caught up in.

The animal inside finally awoke, stumbling over the swaying floor and the limitations of the human body. I crawled as fast as I could out of there. The chorea of the world around me prevented me from making much progress at first as I fell face first in my first few attempts to reach open space.

After what seemed like an hour, I finally pulled myself outside, my vision obscured by the downpour of blood masking my busted-open visage.

The heat outside was unbearable. It felt like hell on earth. The iridescence and sound of the sun pounded across my already battered form mercilessly. Beating me down as I stumbled onward, trying to get further away from the epicenter of the strange disaster plaguing this place.

Each step felt like an arduous journey across mountain ranges as the light emanating from the firmament weight down on me growing infinitely heavier with each passing moment. Slowly grinding my consciousness into dust. Everything started turning dim again, dim and distant.

My clarity returned to me when the popping and clanking melody broke through the songs of Sol overhead. I wish I’d died then and there. I instinctively turned to the source of the sound and the scream of bloody murder erupted in my ears. My own scream, closing in on me, were the partially scorched bodies of my brothers and sisters. Locked in a manic dance that further broke and mutilated their already lifeless bodies.

I tried to run, but the treacherous Telus wouldn’t let me get far ahead before I fell down again.

Finally, overcome with fear and anxiety, I could simply stare at the sun as it moved back and forth; up and down and side to side in the sky. Singing in the highest and lowest of tones imaginable.

The surrounding heat increased. I could feel sweat rolling down my skin. Its salty composition scorched my open wounds. The air in my lungs became hotter and hotter; beginning to tear through the viscous fabric. I could feel the star above me slowly drawing near.

We were on a collision course - The star and I.

I was falling down into the ravenous maw of the sun.

A sacrifice to Molech, placed within his smoldering hot bowels by the hands of the fire-kissed skeletons those same bowels had birthed prior.

And yet, in those final moments of inescapable doom, I finally found peace.

In those brain-melting moments when I was dragged about into oblivion by the red-hot bones of the dead who had risen from within the void beyond their poisonous grave to tear me apart into tiny pieces to be fed to the Ignis Dei I finally felt at home, I finally felt loved…

The God of Fire decided to break my heart instead, however, as he rejected me. His kiss poisoned my body, but it wouldn’t take me to spend the rest of eternity to spend with him in the wonderful land hidden deep within the mushroom cloud.

A paralyzing thunderbolt burned through my spine, twisting and stretching it from the core of the earth and into the stratosphere, into the realm of the gods themselves. It left behind nothing but pain, terrifying and suffocating pain as it made me watch the dead slowly dance away into the mists of Abaddon, leaving me on my own.

Trapped within this body of mine, trapped within this skull.

My attempt to escape this false world had failed. Leaving me was once again faced with the ugly face of the false prophet as its oversized jaw filled with jagged teeth and bloodshot eyes shook from side to side in disapproval.

Once more, I woke up; undoubtedly alive. Alive and crucified to this feeble form that wouldn’t move nor let me breathe under the immense weight of the cancerous growth that continues to bloom inside my chest.

I lay in bed, paralyzed with fear and grief yet unable to scream due to the suffocating hand of apathy wrapped around my throat. All the while, the Great Pan screams violently and ever so gleefully into my ear, turning my blood cold as it pushes me to drown in ice-cold rivers of dread. At the same time, the insufferable rays of the sun crawl against my skin, torturing me mercilessly with the prospect of having to spend yet another day in the clutches of this sadistic reality.

In moments like this, I can only think about how nothing is more horrifying than the idea that without the pills on my nightstand, I am nothing more than a lost child trapped in the cold void of a dead body.

0 Comments
2023/07/22
22:22 UTC

1

"Niles Express: Life in the Machine"

Isaac laid on the cold trailer floor in agonizing pain, surrounded by a sea of packages—loathing himself for his poor life choices and lack of ambition. Isaac’s back burned and throbbed; a lightning bolt of agony struck his spine with each movement. Boxes poured down the silly-slide-like shoot and filled the truck. Fear gripped Isaac as he stared at the machine gun turret mounted to the ceiling across the conveyor belt. Mom was right, he thought. If Isaac had stayed in college, maybe he’d be doing something that mattered.
The light attached to the machine gun flashed red. Isaac lifted his water bottle to his mouth and drank. The water tasted like bleach. The smell of cardboard, plastic, and disinfectant saturated the air. Isaac threw up every morning before work; everyone had a morning ritual. Isaac’s ritual was hurling his breakfast five minutes after eating. The water washed away the post-breakfast vomit. A surge of energy, euphoria, and bravado networked through his veins and drowned his brain in dopamine.
BRRRATATATA!
Wails echoed through the warehouse. Three trucks down, someone failed to keep the light off. Isaac arduously picked himself up and got to work building walls of boxes.
“Isaac, you need to pick up the pace!”
Isaac turned around to see Frank; Frank was clean-shaven, his eyes surrounded by dark purple rings, and he wore a garish orange Niles Express polo.
Isaac grabbed his back and winced. “I need to report an injury—every time I move, I feel like I’m being electrocuted.”
Frank gripped his baton and gnashed his yellow teeth; the veins in his forehead formed a ‘Y.’ “Did you get hit by a box?”
Isaac frowned. “No.”
Frank threw his bald head back and guffawed. “That’s not an injury—just wear and tear of the job.” He jabbed his club in Isaac’s chest. “I’ll motivate you!”
Isaac grinned wryly. “Motivation isn’t always a good thing—Timothy McVeigh was motivated—and look where that got him.
BASH!
Isaac’s head jerked to the right; he swallowed a mouthful of blood and teeth.
Frank rammed the tip of his club into Isaac’s gut. Isaac hunched over in pain. “The load rate is seven-hundred-twenty per hour!”
WHACK!
Frank brought the bludgeon down on Isaac’s back; Isaac collapsed face-first on the rollers.
“You should stack one package every five seconds!”
CRUNCH!
Isaac’s nose flattened beneath Frank’s club. Crimson spilled from Isaac’s mouth and nose; tears bled from his eyes; Frank raised his club above his head. His chest heaved, and his teeth clenched in a sick grimace.
“I WILL TEACH YOU ABOUT PRODUCTIVITY AND EFFICIENCY!”
Isaac raised his hands defensively. “Ssshelp!” he mumbled through a broken jaw.
SMASH!
Isaac’s fingers turned in the opposite direction and broke, bones burst through purple flesh; he clutched his destroyed hand to his chest and rived on the ground.
Frank raised the club again. “YOU WILL BE EFFICIENT!”
WHUDD!
Frank’s nuts ruptured underneath Isaac’s steel toe. Blood rolled down his legs. The old man dropped to his knees and cupped his groin. The club clattered to the ground. His face twisted in an expression of agony. The light turned red.
RATATATATA!
Bullets punched through Frank’s chest and stomach. Jets of blood sprayed the stainless steel ceiling and walls. Frank looked like a bloody slice of Swiss cheese. His bloody lips quivered, and a tear rolled down his cheek; Frank’s eyes rolled into the back of his head and dropped forward. The bell rang, signifying the end of the day. Isaac’s jaw swelled to the size of a baseball. He rolled out of the truck, punched out, and ambled home.

1 Comment
2023/07/05
01:38 UTC

2

Toxoplasma

“Maybe you just didn’t get over Basil’s passing as much as you’d like to think you did.” Once my therapist said those words, I immediately regretted seeing him again. Basil was my cat. He passed away nearly a year ago from kidney failure. He was an old cat, and it hurt to lose him, but it wasn’t something unexpected; his health was noticeably declining for a while before I finally put him to rest.

I was at peace with Basil’s passing. Not that it didn’t hurt. It did, of course. He was a part of the family. It still hurts thinking about him. The same way that it hurts thinking about the people I’ve lost throughout my life. I doubt someone would tell me I’m still grieving over the passing of my grandpa who passed away eighteen years ago. Nor Helena, who was my best friend, who passed away seven years ago from IPF. I still think about her a lot. That doesn’t mean I’m still actively grieving.

Mentioning that I mistake random noises for Basil’s presence was a bad idea. I guess. That’s probably what made the doctor think I was still not over his passing. God forbid my mind misinterprets something a sound or a flash of light for my dead cat. I know he’s gone, and I no longer have his litter box or bowl, but sometimes my imagination acts out. On some days, when I’m completely drained, I can hear a sound that sounds remarkably similar to what he sounded like when he was digging in his litter or when he ate. I even have moments when I catch a false visual cue of his form jumping or walking about. It’s just common sense, I think. My brain conjures up images and sounds that had been a constant in my life for over a decade, to very similar stimuli.

Even more so when I’m drained and right now, that’s pretty much all I am. Burnt out even.

That said, having to deal with Basil’s ghost would’ve been far more pleasant than that thing. Even if he came back to haunt me because of some arcane antihumanitarian diabolical cat magic pact.

Speaking of that thing, I don’t know what the fuck it was. I don’t want to know what it was, but it looked like a cat. A gigantic cat. A gargantuan house cat of sorts and I’m not talking a thirty-pound Maine Coon big, I’m talking lion-sized big. Though, it wasn’t a lion… It was a cat… At least that’s what it looked like. In certain moments.

This whole thing is hazy, just like Basil’s imaginary phantom. I was having a hard time falling asleep, as often happens with people dealing with insomnia. Nothing seemed to help me get a good night’s sleep. Nothing short of pills, which I refuse to take because it seems like they’re letting you sleep without letting you properly rest. I might be wrong, but that’s beside the point.

Anyway, thinking about not thinking, or thinking about nothing, isn’t an option. Counting sheep and whatnot doesn’t work either. These things make me think and therefore keep me alert enough to not fall asleep. Same with breathing exercises. My mind has a hard time shutting off, but it eventually grows tired of running around and lets me rest, insufficiently most days, but that’s something too.

That night, I couldn’t fall asleep, and I was getting frustrated with my restlessness. Instead of tossing and turning in bed, I got out of bed and dragged my aching joints for a walk around the city.

No later than ten minutes into my stroll, I began hearing this beautiful melody in the distance. Something inside told me to follow the melody, and so I did. Before long, all I could think about was finding the source of this wonderful song echoing ever louder in my ears. I was so enamored by this song that I didn’t even notice where I had gone.

This magnificent song completely enchanted me. An ethereal keening performed with an angelic voice filled with a sorrowful, droning hum and pained delivery. So much so that I ended up dumbfounded on the other edge of the city when the stench of decaying trash finally returned me to my senses. I was standing at the edge of the landfill, not sure how I got there, but it was eerily quiet. The hauntingly terrific melody was gone.

Not that I had the time to be dumbfounded. As soon as I realized what happened, a shadow flew over my head and my body moved on instinct, flinching at the sight of the oncoming object. A dark mass landed not too far from me as the unfortunate circumstances of my military experience came into effect once again.

The mass shifted quickly, revealing a pair of jaws filled with serrated teeth.

My brain shifted gears and forced my legs to run without direction. I just had to get as far away as I could from that thing. As I ran, it hissed like a threatened cobra. I could hear its weight pressing against the ground behind me. It was a heavy thing. I just ran, trying my best to ignore the panicking internal dialogue raging inside my head.

After a couple of minutes, the noise behind me faded out, and I slowed down, now walking with intent, trying to make sense of what had happened to me as I made my way home. I walked for a few more minutes in the dark streets until I heard the single most terrifyingly uncanny sound.

A sudden and unexpected meow that just echoed straight into my ears out of nowhere. In that moment, this simple meow sent chills down my spine, forcing me to stop and turn. I couldn’t see much in the dark. The street lamps in this part of town are old and far too few to provide any kind of sufficient illumination.

A second meow glided across the nothingness as I saw a sliver of a shadow darker than the darkness itself slithering its way through the street. My body moved on its own. Forcing me to run again.

The meowing followed, occasionally growing deeper, too deep. With each successive call, I ran faster. As I ran, I looked back every now and again to see if I had lost whatever the hell was following me. Each time, I heard yet another uncanny meow.

By the time I had gotten to a properly illuminated neighborhood, I could see the shadow snaking around behind me from time to time. The meowing had gotten more erratic, more desperate, more sinister even. At one point resembling the sound of a man badly mimicking the sounds of a cat. These strange vocalizations made me feel even worse, and I was slowing down as my body was finally succumbing to exhaustion.

My lungs were on fire and my heart bouncing into my throat, my body was begging me to slow down and once the meowing had gone silent; I figured I could stop for a moment. By this point, I wasn’t too far from my home too. Shouldn’t have done that. Immediately, I saw two orbs floating in the darkness before the craziest puma growl ever exploded right in front of me, freezing me in place.

The beast pounced on me. I could see its mass flying straight at me and I don’t know what happened, but I just stumbled over my feet, thinking I’m just going to die. By sheer dumb luck, the beast overshot me and I heard it slamming onto the ground with a loud thud. It hissed at me and, fueled by a new wave of adrenaline; I just bolted out of there. As fast as my body would allow me to run. I sprinted full force, completely ignoring the fact my shins and knees screaming in pain and my lungs drowning in fire. I couldn’t stop as long as that thing was right behind me. It was making these really breathy noises, almost as if it was laughing at me.

I had a one-track mind at that moment, lose the damn thing at all costs. No matter how far I pushed, though, the thing seemed hell-bent on getting to me. I could almost feel its rancid hot breath across the back of my throat at points.

I was lucky there weren’t many late-night drivers around that night because I would’ve probably ended up dead, running across the road as I did. Never stopping to check whether there was any oncoming traffic. Fear is a powerful motivator sometimes and at that moment there was nothing I was more afraid of than the ghastly predator hot on my trail.

I didn’t know how much longer I could run at that pace. The morbid realization that this beast refused to conform to the laws of nature was absolutely terrifying. On the one hand, the fear provided me with additional fuel, and on the other, I was growing exhausted by the second. And that thing just ran at a high speed for longer than any goddamned cat should be able to.

The only reason I could even keep the distance between us was because I kept zigzagging and crisscrossing between buildings and roads as I ran.

Finally, as I began feeling that this was the end, a tidal wave of light behind me forced to beast to come to a halt. The deafening sound of a car horn blaring forced me to stop and turn. At that moment I saw the beast that was trying to hunt me. The flood of light completely demystified the creature, leaving it naked before my eyes.

It was a massive gray cat; far bigger than any cat I’d ever seen before, covered in a striped gray and brown fur. It contorted its face in rage as it hissed, baring its teeth at the approaching vehicle. The sound the beast made jolted me once last time before it turned around and ran off into the darkness. Blending perfectly into the shadows as the car sped away between us.

I didn’t sleep that night, nor the one after it… I don’t sleep much lately, in fact. I have a hard time around cats now, and it seems like they’re everywhere nowadays. Maybe I’m just losing my mind. It might just be the lack of sleep finally getting to. Still, I just can’t shake the feeling of being stalked by a horde of cats. Every time I hear a cat outside, I’m reminded of that awful scowl. They just keep meowing and hissing all the God damned time. It’s like they’re following me. I can’t help but feel like they’re waiting for the perfect moment to strike. I know it sounds crazy, but I swear, there weren’t that many cats around here before.

What’s worse is that every one of those cats looks at me. My entire body seizes up because all I can see is the terrible scowl and blood-red eyes. Evil eyes serving as a gateway from which the void is gazing with a palpable lust for blood.

Lately, even the phantom flashes of Basil I get seem more ghastly and, at the same time, more tangible. There’s an air of cold malevolence to them. These lapses in perception are no longer a bittersweet reminder of a beautiful past, but a sign of a predatory presence toying with its food.

It scares me to say this, but I’m having a hard time telling what is imaginary and what’s not.

0 Comments
2023/06/09
16:14 UTC

3

We Were All Men

Another one has fallen victim to the charms of the wonderfully terrible monster plaguing this old city for as long as it stood. Oh, how he reminds me of myself when I was this young. I wish I could’ve warned him about the war being a cruel lover. All I can do now is provide him with some comfort as his body grows cold.

I was sixteen when I went off to the war, young and mindless - seeking the thrill of adventure I went to fight in a war that has been raging for eternity. A war where heroes are made, but none are ever born.

I’ve fought and I’ve brawled, and I’ve whored myself shamelessly to the mercurial empress of all glories. I’ve killed sons, brothers, fathers and I’ve lost. Lost so much… I’ve lost friends, brothers… and my sanity and eventually my life.

Barely a year on the line I ended up stepping on a mine and in a single instant I’ve lost everything but the ability to feel an overwhelming and all-consuming pain.

Infernal agony

… tore through what had remained of me as I clutched my exposed guts while coughing up blood and crying for my mother to come and carry me home. She never came, and I never left this place.

Wheels of Samsara

… turn in on themselves with enough force to create a karmic black hole that has kept me in the periphery of this never-ending war, locked in a staring battle with the heavens.

The sun infected my still warm corpse

… With the spores of life, as soon as the man in me had died, crows and other scavengers devoured my dermis and musculature while maggots and other microfauna had nestled inside my motionless tissue anchoring it to the soil with their vibrant dance of blooming decay.

In a matter of moments, nothing of my previous-self remained intact but the seed of a new life had already sustained itself by consuming my blood and rooted itself within my caramelized ribcage, beating with purpose as my heart once beat.

Before long, the seedling flowered into an entire tree, obliterating what skeletal remains of my previous life had clung onto this world.

And now, here I stand, the resting place of a man who had repeated all of my mistakes.

I stand as a monolithic reminder that life always marches on…

Forever mindlessly courting its lecherous mistress named Death…

I am but one of its countless victims.

We were all

… This entire forest

We were all once men madly in love with life -

Men whose lust for life had bloomed into a forest where a single moment in time stands still forever…

And now I

… We all long for the permanent comfort named Death.

0 Comments
2023/04/21
15:33 UTC

1

We Were All Men

Another one has fallen victim to the charms of the wonderfully terrible monster plaguing this old city for as long as it stood. Oh, how he reminds me of myself when I was this young. I wish I could’ve warned him about the war being a cruel lover. All I can do now is provide him with some comfort as his body grows cold.

I was sixteen when I went off to the war, young and mindless - seeking the thrill of adventure I went to fight in a war that has been raging for eternity. A war where heroes are made, but none are ever born.

I’ve fought and I’ve brawled, and I’ve whored myself shamelessly to the mercurial empress of all glories. I’ve killed sons, brothers, fathers and I’ve lost. Lost so much… I’ve lost friends, brothers… and my sanity and eventually my life.

Barely a year on the line I ended up stepping on a mine and in a single instant I’ve lost everything but the ability to feel an overwhelming and all-consuming pain.

Infernal agony

… tore through what had remained of me as I clutched my exposed guts while coughing up blood and crying for my mother to come and carry me home. She never came, and I never left this place.

Wheels of Samsara

… turn in on themselves with enough force to create a karmic black hole that has kept me in the periphery of this never-ending war, locked in a staring battle with the heavens.

The sun infected my still warm corpse

… With the spores of life, as soon as the man in me had died, crows and other scavengers devoured my dermis and musculature while maggots and other microfauna had nestled inside my motionless tissue anchoring it to the soil with their vibrant dance of blooming decay.

In a matter of moments, nothing of my previous-self remained intact but the seed of a new life had already sustained itself by consuming my blood and rooted itself within my caramelized ribcage, beating with purpose as my heart once beat.

Before long, the seedling flowered into an entire tree, obliterating what skeletal remains of my previous life had clung onto this world.

And now, here I stand, the resting place of a man who had repeated all of my mistakes.

I stand as a monolithic reminder that life always marches on…

Forever mindlessly courting its lecherous mistress named Death…

I am but one of its countless victims.

We were all

… This entire forest

We were all once men madly in love with life -

Men whose lust for life had bloomed into a forest where a single moment in time stands still forever…

And now I

… We all long for the permanent comfort named Death...

0 Comments
2023/04/20
23:58 UTC

1

Terminal Lucidity

A sudden headache struck the old goatherder. The pain was so sharp he blacked out for a second. Returning to his sense, he was sitting on the grassy shores of the great sea. Red dots and lines danced in his field of vision as electric shocks traveled across his skull and neck. The old man looked up.

The last thing he saw was a fiery sphere hurling towards him from the sky. The same star he grew up watching grow in size and proximity in the sky with each passing day.

The old man didn’t feel pain upon impact. In fact, he felt nothing at all.

The falling star crashed into the great sea with such heat it had evaporated. The force of the impact had pushed vast quantities of salt buried beneath its waters into the air. In the minutes after the crash, skies rained flames and salt in the shape of a poisonous snowstorm that ate the fabric of the world as it cascaded onto the earth.

The blast generated by the impact was so great it had set the entire world on fire; dismantling the continents and stripping the earth of its surface before the solar system followed suit; crumbling into dust. Followed by the demise of the rest of the Milky Way Galaxy in a display of colorful cosmic fireworks going off as the stars imploded on themselves one by one leaving behind nothing but a trail of pure darkness until the entire universe collapsed in on itself in a supermassive explosion that unraveled the entirety of creation revealing the threads that held it all together.

A spiderweb of threads colored in impossible hues intertwined endlessly in impossible shapes and knots.

The threads refused to be torn apart by the blast, instead pulling the dried-up skeletal remains of the universe back together into place. Reforming a grotesque skeleton devoid of life with such a force that an impossibly massive array of colors, sounds, and immeasurable heat arose from the core of the titanic bone formation leading to the inevitable birth of particles.

Particles so small and elusive, yet so magnetically charged they immediately pull each other closer and closer. Slowly they merge to give birth to atoms that further metastasized into elemental molecules. Ones that give birth to the building blocks of the flesh of the universe.

Before long, muscles and tendons shaped like stars and nebulae began taking shape all across the barren skeleton of the cosmos. In no time, the threads of the universe, the fabric of fates drove the universal evolution to a point where the entirety of creation had regrown its organs in the likeness of luminous stars and quasars, the light devouring black holes and the planets upon which the amorphous divinities breathed life.

Life gave rise to consciousness, and consciousness gave rise to awareness, which eventually birthed mindfulness from which came the imitation of the divine and the cosmic. Miniature godheads who manipulate and cultivate other lifeforms attempting to tame their planets end up constructing cities and establishing civilizations before they set sail across the vast expanses of the universe, always building, always growing - forever evolving, without control, without limit.

In due time, the evolution of creation has gotten out of hand, turning malignant, tumorous - cancerous. It stretched the body of the universe to its absolute limit and beyond. Rapid expansion through an ever-increasing acceleration. Expanding velocity of formation that leads to the overstretching of the ligaments and tendons of reality slowly tearing it at the seams without ever stopping until it all burst.

And the cycle of collapse and rebirth began anew.

Tenfold. Hundredfold. Thousandfold.

Growth and decay - Divine procreation leads to the birth of universal infancy, which grows and renews itself rapidly until the universal telomeres begin to erode and collapse under the weight of cosmic renewal. Thus, driving to an acceleration in the divisions of cells, allowing for genetic-coding mistakes, leading to the perfect conditions in which cells become cancerous. The malignant clusters overwhelmed the healthy organs and eventually, the entire body rots away, leaving behind nothing skeletal remains to be used as fertilizer by the forces beyond in their recreation of everything from beyond the void.

Birth and failure and renewal and demise

– Ad infinitum

A single second outstretched beyond the limits of elasticity into a loop twisted seamlessly around a dreamlike eternity within the rapidly deteriorating in a decline geared towards an irreversible collapse. Innumerable eternities compressed into a single instant inside the mind of a rather featureless and dim entity, no longer displaying any signs of vitality. As its mind drowns in infinite possibilities and outcomes, the entity remains perched motionlessly on a brightly shining throne within a room flooded with pure white light.

Smaller entities not too dissimilar to an ocean of fireflies congregate in a nearby room. Swarming about in an eerie silence until one dares break the deafening tension in the room with a terrifying cry that sounds the crowd of sentient flames into a frenzy;

“ELOH MT…”

(God has died…)

0 Comments
2023/04/07
19:37 UTC

1

The Second Coming of The Demon

The following is a transcript of a video recording found on the mobile phone of Mateusz Kowalczyk. The man in question was a part of a missing group of backpackers all of whom are now presumed dead. Their remains are yet to have been found. M. Kowalczyk's remains were found in the Tarty national park, not far from Poland's border with Slovakia. His body was bisected and the two halves were found some five meters apart. The recording contains graphic language.

***

M. Kowalczyk is pacing back and front in front of the camera in a dimly lit space. His heaving is audible. M. Kowalczyk appears to be in distress. He wraps his hands around his abdomen and collapses to his knees. Vomiting. He gasps and coughs as he finally sits up in front of his camera, visibly shaken.

I'm recording this just in case whatever the fuck is out there catches up to me too. I think I lost it, but I'm not sure. I don't know what the fuck this is but it's not human. It's some kind of… Monster…

Fucking… Monster…

M. Kowalczyk begins heaving audibly again, running his hands across his face as his body visibly trembles for a few seconds before his manages to steady himself.

Ah-it, this thing killed everyone, it killed all the others. Tore them apart, with its bare hands.

M. Kowalczyk pauses for a moment, shifting his gaze downward and swallowing loudly before returning his gaze to the camera.

Some kind of lizard-man, I don't know what the fuck that was. I don't… I… ugh… Shit… Fuck… I don't… Oh fuck… Relax Maciek, relax… you're fine… you're alright… you're safe… Ugh… Gah…

We were just camping before… we're just camping with this group of people from all over Europe. Just camping. I went for a little walk. I walked for a maybe ten minutes minutes before I needed to take a leak and… and everything was quiet… everything was quiet… then the sound of Dany's rifle went off. He was the only one with a gun. He brought it with him from Lwow to hunt. It was so loud, so loud against the night's silence. It startled me and I franticly zipped my pants… I ran back to camp…

M. Kowalczyk pauses staring at the camera for about thirty seconds.

All I could hear were screams, huh-huh-huh-huh… Screaming, the screaming haaah.. huh… I didn't know what was going on at first… huh-huh-huh-huh… I saw Dany shooting his rifle again… huh-huh-huh… More screaming… Everything was so loud… huh-huh-huh…

I saw it, I saw, I saw…

Huh-huh-huh-huh-huh…

It had Klaudia its hands… Huuuuuuuuuuuahhuhuh She was, she was she was she was… huuuh-huuh-huuuuh… Broken… Broken… Broken… Scales… it had scales… Like Armadillo… Tall… White… Pales all over… huh-huh-huh Klaudia was dead…

Dany shot it… huh-huh-huh-huh-huh.

It tossed her… She didn't move, I saw her face… ughhh

M. Kowalczyk is visibly struggling to speak coherently

I saw its head, it had no features huh-huh-huh-huh-n-n-huh-huh-nothing-just scales.

It tossed her, it tossed Klaudia at Dany…

I saw others… Dawid… Janusz… Marek… Kasia… Anna… Jag… dead… broken…. blood… guts… bones… huh-huh-huh-huh-huh

Dany fell, struggling to push Klaudia away… huh-huh-huh-huh-huh

It just jumped at him and-and-and-and t-t-t-t-t-t-tore ahaaaaaaaah

M. Kowalczyk begins crying audibly

It tore his leg ooooooooagh

M. Kowalczyk begins weeping uncontrollably, he proceeds to weep for about forty seconds before attempting to speak again.

That sound… that scream… aaah aaaah aaaah

I-I-I-I couldn't do anything Ah-ah-ah-ah I couldn't move… aaaaghhhh

It just-just-just began…. It beat

It was beaaaaahaaah Dany aaaaaaaaagha with aaaaghhaaa his leggggg

So muuuuuaghch blooodgh tshhh

I jus-jus-jus-ran

I jus-ran… Ah raan

M. Kowalczyk resumes weeping uncontrollably again. The crying continues for a while until a low muffled growl is audible in the distance. M. Kowalczyk's crying stops immediately and he stares for a couple of seconds at the camera, wild eyed and growing noticeably paler. He begins muttering unintelligibly before grabbing his mobile frantically and ending the recording abruptly.

***

M. Kowalczyk's remains were found three days after the aforementioned recording. The area in which his remains were found is now under the investigation of the local authorities.

0 Comments
2023/03/30
22:04 UTC

1

Catharsis

Even with the ugly scars beautifying the left side of my face, I don’t really have a tragic story to tell. No devils are hiding under the demonic appearance, either. There was never any angst or darkness or anything like that. Even though there is some mental pain stemming from the nightmares. As far as I was concerned for most of my life, the scars were there because of a fight I had with another kid who shoved me into a glass pane that exploded, lacerating me all over. A childish miscalculation that had cost the kid who did this a lot.

Even with the scars, I have led a decent life; I got the degree I wanted and I work in my dream job. Made the best friends in the world. I married the love of my life, and I have got a kid on the way. Even with the nightmares and agitation and hyper-alertness, life is good. I am not a violent man. I have a lot of unexplainable anger, but I usually just curse it out.

Not too long ago, I couldn’t remember shit before the age of ten. A blank period in my mind. Completely gone. Not that it mattered. Life was good. My parents were the best anyone could hope for, and the kids at school were supportive. Even with my scrambled egg of a brain, thanks to my supportive environment, my confidence was always fine. I was never conscious of my appearance.

Even when the wounds healed faster than expected, I was in a lot of pain. Sleep used to be a fucking nightmare. Literally, night after night, for I don’t remember how long I’d see these fucking terrifying visions in my sleep.

They were all the same, always the same.

Every time, I’m lying on the ground surrounded by shadowy figures. Sore and exhausted, with everything burning and my inside screaming. Tears running down my face, snot and mucus abstracting my breathing. The fear of death washing all over me like pins and needles running across my skin as one figure draws closer and closer before it is actually standing over me. My chest feels as if it’s about to collapse under the weight of the world, and everything fades for a single moment.

The feeling of flames bursting from under the skin of my face forces my eyes to open again. I can only watch in horror, immobilized by it, as one of those ominous figures is digging its talons into my skull.

The pain wakes me up every time, screaming bloody murder. It feels so real; it felt so real. Every single time, the sensation of my flesh being torn open with a methodical precision pulsates violently through my head. I could only compare it to experiencing a botched lobotomy wide awake.

My therapist, at the time, kept insisting that the nightmares were just my mind rationalizing the accident, as we called it. I had gotten into a fight with another kid, and he didn’t think about the ramification of shoving my face into a glass pane hellbent on smashing both to bits.

Therapy didn’t do shit for me. It didn’t help with the nightmares, and neither did the meds. What helped me was music, though, the darker and more uncomfortable the better. It helped me get all my negative feelings and thoughts out. It helped burn out the tension formed through the nightmares. The auditory hell I subjected myself to was a shining light that illuminated my path through my own internal hell.

That’s how I ended up listening to the Devil’s Record. Forty-something minutes of the display of the worst humanity straight out of Halmstad. The epitome of all negativity compressed and packed into a neat little auditory package under the wraps of fine musicianship. What a fucking record, an absolute masterpiece. My sister-in-law recommended this one to me, and I’m glad I took up the offer, even if it wasn’t my usual cup of tea.

It took me a while to actually listen to it, partially because of the hype she had built around the damned thing. I refused to believe this thing was as good as she said, but when I finally got to listening to the record. All I heard was the truth and nothing but the truth.

The record starts with a corruption of the first stanza of Hughes Mearns “Antigonish”; “As I was going up the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there. I saw him there again today. I wish; I wish he’d go away”.

Oh, how this stanza resonates with me; that night, I was hiking with a beer bottle in hand while listening to the Devil’s Record. The music completely submerged me in a sea of darkness conjured by the charm of violins and the frantic humming of cellos breaking distant sheets of glass when a barely human creature popped up from out of nowhere, almost. He tapped me on the shoulder and when I turned, I couldn’t help but notice the pitiful state of this guy. Tattered clothes loosely hanging onto a thin, skeletal frame, sores all over his face, and a smile revealing lots of missing teeth.

I pulled out one of my headphones once his lips moved. He was asking for some change. Something about his face wasn’t right. It was making me anxious. And not because it was a meth-head. I’ve seen plenty of those before. It was something else. I told him I had nothing to give him.

Guess he didn’t want to take a no for an answer. Guess he needed another hit, so as I turned to walk away, he grabbed my arm. Maybe he wanted to rob me, maybe he was just off his rock, I don’t know. I don’t care. All I can say is that it was a grave mistake on his part. He pulled me closer to him and, as I spun; I saw his eyes.

Those fucking eyes, I’ll never forget those eyes, they’re burned into my memory. It all came back when I saw those fucking inhumane eyes of his. Six kids piled up on me. Beat the ever-loving shit out of me. Fuck knows for what reason. Some kid bully shit. A scream roared in my headphone, turning into a rolling howl, as the memory of me being pinned down on the grass by two fucks while a third one sat on my chest with a shard of glass in hand. The left side of my head came on fire as the memory of one of those fucks carving up my face finally resurfaced. Three other shits were watching the carnage, cheering on their friend to maim me.

Fear crawled up my throat, and as it reached my mouth, it turned into venomous anger. The creature holding onto me was barking unintelligible noises at me. I tightly clasped my hand around his coat. He was the one who held my legs when my face was being carved.

Pain, terrible pain overwrote any semblance of sense in my mind finally pushed me over the edge. As the sound of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata echoed in my ear, I began smashing the bottle onto the man’s face. With each stroke of the glass shard in my mind, I landed a matching blow to his face.

Fortunately for me, after a few blows, my hand must’ve slipped, and I ended up breaking the bottle across his head. The sound of broken glass returned me to my senses, and I let go of the bloodied man.

He fell to the ground, muttering something. Blood poured down his face and into his eyes. They were the eyes of a man afraid for his life. Once I saw the fear in his eyes, my anger turned to terror. My vision began spinning, and I started trembling. Chills ran down my spine as I stared at what I had done.

There was only one thing I could do, and that’s what I always did. I did my best to act as if I wasn’t feeling anything. I just spat on the ground and walked away. The whole time, the haunting images of that god-awful day bounced around inside my skull. Slowly but surely chipping away through my usual act.

Once I was sure no one was around to see me, I finally broke down. I collapsed into a fetal position and began crying.

And I cried until my head fucking spun from the tension. The pain I felt that night was… I don’t even have the words to describe it. It was the most immense and overwhelming feeling I’ve ever had. Pure suffering in its most complete and utter form.

And even though now I know what happened to me, my pain remains constant and sharp. There is no catharsis. I gain no real deeper knowledge of myself, and I know I am quoting American Psycho here, which is kinda funny because, unlike Patrick Bateman, punishment did not elude the six sick fucks that scarred my face. No… They all spent a while in juvey and besides that…

Four of them are dead, as far as I know. One was caught diddling kids and was locked up, and didn’t make it long behind bars. Another had a bit of an identity crisis and ended up on a rope. The sadist who carved my face pushed his girlfriend too far and ended up with six bullets in his head and chest. The fourth died from some aggressive cancer.

The two still living don’t have much time left either, one’s homeless meth head who probably has a faceful of gangrene, and the sixth one is the one who told me about all of this… Turns out the result of what they had done to me weighed a little too heavy on his poor soul and he turned to the bottle to handle the guilt. He fucked up his liver and is now in urgent need of a transplant.

I found this out completely by accident on a trip with my wife to the hospital. What’s more, I’m a compatible donor, and he was very apologetic, but I’m afraid he isn’t as remorseful as he claimed to be. I think he just fears for his life, now that his mistakes have caught up to him.

Otherwise, he wouldn’t wait until I unintentionally ran into him on his deathbed to fucking apologize.

1 Comment
2023/03/30
00:42 UTC

1

The Night Stalkers

They always came at night. The terrible and inhumane things that had haunted me for years and years. I can’t even call them creatures because I never knew if they were physical beings or not. These horrors came only after the sunset, and the darkness of the night had blanketed the world with its false serenity. Nothing was serene about the nights when these malicious apparitions came to me.

I can only speculate where they came from and what they are. In my mind, they seemed like a product of prayer, a healing prayer meant to improve the health of my grandmother in her childhood days.

She’s told me about a time when she was an orphan in Western Ukraine after the Great Patriotic War when her legs started atrophying for no apparent reason and no doctor could actually help her. She spent months losing the function of her legs until an elderly woman came to visit the orphanage and found my grandma with her decaying legs. And grandma said she can vaguely recall seeing this woman standing over her, chanting; praying. After that, grandma’s legs miraculously healed.

I don’t rule out the possibility of some extraordinary thing happening there. Maybe this woman was a faith healer, maybe she was a witch doctor of some sort, and maybe she was handling forces that were far beyond her control. We’ll never know for sure. Maybe because grandma regained her legs, something had to be taken as payment. My health and my sanity.

Judging by my family’s history; it’s probably not just me. An uncle of mine became increasingly volatile before having a huge argument with the family and leaving the house. He ended up involved in the 90s Russian oligarch-gang affairs and had his life cut short. Another aunt died relatively young due to “alcoholism” even though she was by all means nothing like what one would imagine an alcoholic to be. My cousin is having weird health issues that cause her to feint every now and again, without a detectable cause.

And I, well, I, I was being visited by grotesque fiends for years at night, starting out maybe when I was five… As long as I remember myself, they’d show up at night. Horrible and inhuman; ugly, disgusting, and visually torturous. There were insectoid things, there were just ghastly amorphous shadows and there were humanoid things too. A pale, thin thing without a face and absurdly long arms with almost cartoonishly long claws. There was also a reflection of myself with its mouth sewn shut, with mouths gaping on its palms filled with Piranha-like teeth. There was an ostrich-like monstrosity with four hooves and an elongated human face. Some of those things looked like mutated animals, others like completely alien things.

The worst one of all was a vaguely anthropomorphic entity walking on all fours, almost like an ape but with an awkward gait. Its joints clicked and cracked as it crawled towards me, emanating a terrible stench of pus mixed with wet dirt as it stalked. The thing was almost completely nude, aside from the occasional tuft of hair jutting out of its muscular frame. Its most uncanny feature was its face; the thing was reversed upside down. Its mouth was on its forehead, a hairy set of lips containing a single bloodshot, soul-piercing eye and its eyelids were above its crooked chin; perpetually closed until was about to feed, revealing needle-like teeth under each eyelid and long, prehensible forked tongues.

Every time these things came to me, they came to feed on something inside of me. As a little boy, I would freeze up at the sight of something shifting and maneuvering in the dark until it revealed its horrific face to me. I thought the fear paralyzed me, but in actuality, it was something else. Something I figured out when I was a teenager. These things are like vampiric parasites; they would latch onto me with their feeding organ and fill me with a paralyzing agent to keep me still as they fed on me. Every single time they’d suck this something out of me, leaving me exhausted and in pain the morning after. Specifically leaving my bones aching and riddling my skin with the feeling of pins and needles at the site of the bite, without leaving physical marks behind.

Seems like these things leave nothing physical behind, nothing that can be seen under the light of the sun.

Naturally, I tried telling my parents about the things that haunted me at night, but they reassured me these were just nightmares or night terrors. I wish they were nightmares, but they weren’t because on many nights during which I wasn’t being attacked, I suffered from nightmares about these hellish things.

We talked about sleep paralysis too, but it wasn’t it, and when I tried to protest, they dismissed it as a wild imagination. I didn’t know that vivid imagination and sleep paralysis left behind traces of brain-melting bone aches in a child.

By the time my pain noticeably crippled me, I guess it was too late. Inflammation was burning its way through my spine. It turned out. The spinal column was already in an early stage of fusing and contorting itself. I was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis. That didn’t explain the pain in my arms and legs, nor did it explain the awful nightly battles I was having time and time again. Either with these tormenting beings or with my own body.

Many nights I had cried myself to sleep from the unbearable pain. It had gotten so bad that even taking a deep breath was becoming painful and something inside of me seemed to have snapped overnight.

The childlike existential dread of these things had turned into a burning, passionate hatred fueled by the vicious joy bringing relief of adrenaline carried on the wings of my stress-induced agitation turning into outright boiling anger.

Some time after my diagnosis, I had decided enough was enough at the same time the concept of evening was being stretched into later and later hours of the day. I had started seeing these things before I was in bed. I could see them lurking at the periphery of my vision. Stalking the unlit rooms of the house. Salivating their neurotoxin as they waited for me to head to bed.

Figuring I had to at least try to defend myself from these things or else I might end up dead or worse, a vegetable, that’s why I finally chose to fight back. Throwing fists proved effective against one or two of these night stalkers, but they’ve adapted as well. Those that usually came alone stopped coming alone. Instead, they started arriving in packs, consistently. At that point, punching and kicking didn’t suffice, and I ended up getting overwhelmed with my body becoming the banquet of alien hyena-like swarms. The mornings after were pure arthritic agony.

It ruined my sleep, and my awful mood sapped the strength out of me and the will to live a normal active life, making my condition even worse as the days wore on and I found myself in a deeper abyss of bone-breaking pain.

At the time I hit my lowest point. I was becoming increasingly anxious about everything and slowly turning agoraphobic. The stress was killing me, and my internal fury was reverting to its original state. I was becoming afraid of those things again. I was becoming afraid of every movement and noise and sensation gliding across my skin. My entirety was being consumed by my fear. At some point, I began feeling as if each move I make, physically and metaphorically resulted in a burning hot nail being inserted into my skin. And that led to my mind turning in on itself. Dysthymia came first, followed by a full-blown depression. Suicide ideation came about later. I didn’t really plan to kill myself. I just kept romanticizing the idea of dying to escape all of my pain, in my head over and over.

Eating became an issue, moving became an issue, and leaving the house became an issue. Everything was falling apart around me and only the night stalkers remained. I’ve gained a new friend in the form of the occasional bowel inflammation.

These things destroyed everything for a large chunk of my life, but then, in a strange twist of fate, they were also the key to fixing most of my problems. They were winning battle after battle, but this led to my victory in our war.

One evening, as I was making coffee in the kitchen while my parents were out of town, there was a power outage. The house went immediately dark, and my mind went dark with it. Instead of freezing, probably because of my horrible sleep schedule and the constant mental strain of the never-ending stress and pain, my brain just went into an overload. An eerie cold sensation washed over me as the pain disappeared into the void of the darkness. Clarity graced me for the first time in a long time, right before I felt something touching the back of my neck.

With a swiftness I couldn’t even imagine myself having, I turned and swung my mug wildly. I hit something solid. The sound of shattered ceramic tore through the silence, followed by a terrible shriek that rocked the entire house. Somehow, I don’t even know how, as if one of the same horrors haunting me possessed my body, I kept swinging the jagged shard still connected to the handle of my now destroyed mug. The sound of soft thumps sounded almost melodic to me at that moment. Eventually, whatever I was hitting fell down.

Before I knew it, the fluorescent light had washed the kitchen anew in a white shimmer, revealing my handiwork. A bloodied chimera of avian and serpentine features was prone beneath my feet. Unmoving, still, dead.

Pulsating waves of blood raced through my body, leaving a strange after-feeling all over my body. Before long, the pain returned, followed by the realization of what had just happened. I had just killed one of those monstrosities.

Dread mixed with excitement swirled in my mind as I understood the ramifications of my actions. Both because I could finally prove the beings were real and because I killed a presumably living creature and left its corpse in my parents’ kitchen. None of that mattered come morning.

Unfortunately, or maybe, fortunately, nothing remained of the thing by the time dawn arrived. It evaporated as if it had never existed, leaving nothing behind. A pile of ceramic shards on the floor and a coffee stain. No blood, no flesh, no corpse, nothing. Only pain, lots of pain. My body was beyond sore that morning. My body was in shambles, but at least I knew, I knew I could stop these things from hurting me further. I could finally end their reign of terror over my life.

And so, I’ve finally fought back, now properly armed. Keeping a knife under my pillow, just in case.

For years, I’ve fought these things off, killing many of them. I’ve ended up knee elbow-deep in monster blood and yet they still kept coming, again and again. Somehow, even those I’ve butchered and dismembered returned. They were almost taunting me as they came back after each time I killed them to do it again and again, as if trying to prove the point that my efforts were futile. Even if it seemed so, they weren’t really futile. My condition had gotten better because these things could no longer feed on me anymore, and fighting so frequently had improved my overall feeling. The depression was gone, and I found a new joy in life. Each morning proved to be a new challenge, a new mountain of incorporeal corpses to overcome.

I fell in love with my violent routine, even though it made things with people rather complicated sometimes. It’s off-putting to have a knife under your bed, especially when you live in a decent and quiet part of town. I’ve never really bothered telling anyone about the fiends. It’s not like most people would believe me, anyway. And it’s not like my joy would last forever. Life is a struggle, after all. It is pain. And it is agony.

One day, they just stopped coming, just like that. The hordes of parasitic ghouls were nowhere in sight. Gradually, then suddenly, they just faded out of existence. Maybe they never even. Maybe I was just imagining them after all. There is no proof of their existence, and there was never any proof of their existence anywhere. My condition is an actual disease, fully diagnosable and somewhat manageable. Not to mention that my awful mental state is the way it is because of my disease.

I am a deeply disturbed man who is the son of an anxious and ridiculously superstitious, to the point of mild supernatural paranoia mother who has a medical issue that we have no real concrete explanation for. That said, I doubt these things weren’t real. They had to be. I could see them. I could feel them, I could fear them. And now they’re gone. I never imagined I’d miss the torment, but here I am, clearly losing my mind over the fact that I am not suffocating on a mouthful of dread. I am losing sleep because there is nothing lurking in the shadows and over the fact that I am completely and utterly alone. Unbothered and undisturbed. Stressing over the ghastly silence and the oppressive emotional void that comes from a not-so-sudden lack of constant stimulation.

Hemingway has this classic moment in “The Sun Also Rises” when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt. All he can say is, “Gradually, then suddenly.”. That’s how the silence drives you insane, especially after living years and years inside a storm of noise and chaos. You wake up one day, and it’s silent. It’s weird, but it’s a welcome change, and then you wake up the next day and it’s still silent and on the third day it’s silent still by the end of the week you are suspicious because it is still silent, and it’s never been silent and you’re thinking all these thoughts, “is this for real? Is this a trap?” but it remains silent.

Before long, before you even realize it, you’re resentful of the silence and then you become afraid of the silence and you can do nothing to end it.

I just want something to go wrong for one night, but nothing ever does, and it hurts, it really fucking hurts because I’ve destroyed my life, my brain, I’ve destroyed everything to get over the pain and the chaos and now that’s gone but the mental agony still pulsates in my spine crippling me for days on end and there’s nothing I can do about these mental wounds. Nothing I can do to make them stop stinging and bleeding now that nothing but the cold gray silence remains.

0 Comments
2023/03/27
01:26 UTC

1

"Strange Incidents at Theater Ten"

Dear Mayor Thompson,

You'll probably stop reading, crumple up this letter, and throw it in the trash, but I implore you to keep reading. Founded in 1970, Theater Ten revived downtown, and provided a safe, fun place for the people of Burningham to enjoy. Unfortunately, over the years, the theater has transformed into a source of anguish. The disappearance of movie-goers of Theater Ten is still fresh in everyone's mind. My sister, Joan is among the twenty-three missing; she attended the screening of Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors with her boyfriend. After Joan disappeared, I couldn't eat or sleep for days. There's a hole in my heart that can't be filled; it's been five years, but it still doesn't feel real. I feel like I’ll get a phone call from Joan, or she’ll pull into my driveway with her beat-up blue station wagon and take me hiking; I miss her every day.

I understand this theater is a historic landmark, and you don't want to demolish it. You either don't understand or don't care that people feel unsafe visiting or working at the theater. Lest we forget about what happened after Theater Ten closed? Several people have survived incidents at Theater Ten, and fortunately, I’ve been able to track down several of them, including a few who were willing to report what they’ve witnessed.

1975: A customer complained the butter dispenser dispensed pus into his popcorn.

1978: A young married couple visited the theater to watch Halloween. The wife got up in the middle of the movie to use the bathroom; she was gone for an hour, and the husband got worried and searched for her. On the way to the bathroom, he brushed past a paunchy woman with swollen, crusted eyes and cheeks stained with yellow vomit. He found his wife in the bathroom

dead—Facedown in a pile of yellow bile.

1979: An employee discovered human fingers in the popcorn machine.

1980: During a sudden blackout, a little girl disappeared from the arcade. Staff discovered her locked inside one of the arcade cabinets, insisting she was sucked into the game.

1982: Several customers complained about bombastic patrons covered in bruises, scabs, and rashes, ruining their movie experience by talking during the film, chucking popcorn at them, and kicking the back of their seats. When asked to stop their obnoxious behavior, they responded by coughing on or scratching them.

1983: An employee went on their smoke break behind the theater and was found headless, cigarette in her hand still lit, body leaning against the brick wall behind her. Even stranger, guests of Theater Ten claimed Cujo cut out, and footage from behind the building played on screen. The footage was a young woman smoking, then two hands emerged from behind her and tore her head off.

1988: A group of teens broke into Theater Ten. According to the witness, this is what happened: “The auditorium smelled like stale vomit. Sores and blisters covered the other patrons. Coughing and sniffling bounced off the walls, and the audience guffawed at the static on the screen. My friends sat down, and the seats snapped shut on them as a Venus flytrap closes on a fly. I felt like I’d pass out, and I couldn’t breathe. The patrons sprang up from their seats and chased me from the theater.”

1989: Two brothers broke into Theater Ten to steal movie posters; while exploring the building, a man in a torn black usher uniform accosted them. According to the witness, this is what the usher looked like: “Yellow ooze leaked from lesions on his cheeks and sores on his lips, blood spilled down from boils on his forehead, black carbuncles were behind his ears.” The usher scratched the other brother during their escape, and he died a few days later.

The disturbing nature of these incidents proves something very wrong is happening, and Theater Ten is not safe for the general public! I’m aware that I’m not the first person to write to you concerning the theater. It’s a source of pain for so many people. Others may not have been as tactful as me. I’m sure you’ve had several letters cross your desk accusing you of accepting bribes or certain favors in exchange for reopening Theater Ten. For everybody’s sake, including your own, this theater must be destroyed!

-Anonymous

1 Comment
2023/03/25
15:58 UTC

1

Zombie Girlfriend Ate My Brain

0 Comments
2023/03/12
13:27 UTC

2

Choirosarkos

You are torn from the magnificent realm of dreams by a familiar yet alien cacophony of sounds that travel at the photonic speed tearing through the obsidian hued fabric blanketing the night's sky. As soon as your eyes open, the silver heavenly oculus casts its ferrous stare down upon you. A great fear arises within the depths of your heart for the impossibly foreign sounds are violating the silence once more and they are getting closer. The pale white dread forces you into an upright position as the melody of perdition echoes again, stronger, closer, inching nearer and nearer with each movement of a forgotten fallen abominable deity's movement. This orchestra of otherworldly frenzy can only mean one thing and while your mind drifts to a distant place and in a different time where you once more endure the sight of your relative being dismantled, dissolved and devoured until there is nothing left - no flesh, no blood, no sinew nor bone; your legs begin running.

As you run an ocean of living panic takes center stage. Your sisters and brothers, your mother and father, everyone you've called family scatter. You are left behind as the hecatoncheirean poetry draws painfully close to you. Instinctively, you turn back and your heart almost skips a beat. Behind you; a grotesque amalgamation of muscle arrayed in strange mounds supported on ever stranger shapes, hairy manes and teeth. An arachnid formation of eyes glisten at you - they hunger. The thing behind you is a legion and a singular organism both at once. It is so structured and yet amorphous both in the same. It is a singular ravenous maw and many hungering mouths. It is the swarm, the host, the angel of death itself and there is no escaping its murderous lust.

Its moans and shrieks and coughing and whooping laughter and draining the life right from inside your form. You run and run and run, but one of your legs gives out – for a fraction of a second and a sharp pain, unmatched by anything other than the nauseating noise all around you tears through your pelvis. You fall the ground, dust creeping into your facial orifices as you try to get back up, but the pain only gets worse. It burns through abdomen and you feel something snapping and falling out.

One Lernaean Myrmidonhead clasp its jaw around your organs and the others followed suit. You try to fight, but there is no point. Kicking and screaming seems only to arouse the beast, encouraging it to sink itself deeper and deeper into your body. The pain slowly takes over everything, overriding every sensation into a storm of agonizing, anginic and hypovolemic convulsions and stupor that slowly envelops your entire being in its cold and interstellar pulse as your sensations, thoughts, memories slowly bleed into a tunnel shaped temple where your mind will drown in everlasting darkness of the sentient black hole that grinds your cadaver into dust.

0 Comments
2023/02/25
22:53 UTC

1

Zorgs

Rise and shine, boys, rise and shine!

Oh, what's with the long faces? Is it the strange feeling of wetness? No? Oh, oh, I know – you must be wondering why you're so cold even though the sun is shining brightly… Don't worry, it's about to get really hot in here in just a second. Real bloody hot!

It's not that either?

Damn…

Maybe it's the fact that you can't wrap your heads around how I'm standing here, in front of you, in one piece.

Yeah…

You've gang-raped me and slit my throat before cutting me into these little pieces of meat you cooked on an open fire before you ate me with some beer.

Except, all of that happened in your heads. Worry not, my darlings, you had tons of action last night. All of you went above and beyond in your performances.

With each other.

And I had a blast watching you all get under one another's skin as you were exploring each other's anatomy.

Men expressing their love for one another is the most beautiful thing in the world.

Oh, don't look at me like that. All of you know deep down inside you were having the time of your lives… I wouldn't have been able to separate you even if I tried. You were practically stuck to each other. Trapped in a violently passionate dance of lovemaking…

And now you lie completely naked and fully exposed across from one another and by now you all must be asking yourselves the same burning question;

"How the fuck am I still alive without skin?"

0 Comments
2023/02/17
23:19 UTC

2

"Cyanide Suppository"

I know nobody will believe me, but this happened. I don't drive, so that means getting around is a bitch! Naturally, I use Uber when I can't bum a ride. One night I called Uber to pick me up from work. Regret filled my stomach the moment my ride pulled up. My driver's name was Lloyd, and he drove a dark blue jeep caked with dirt with a dent in the passenger side door. Lloyd had long, shaggy brown hair that spilled down his back; black sunglasses covered a withered and wrinkled face; he wore a ratty Patriots hoodie.

Despite better judgment, I got into his car; I was ankle-deep in fast-food bags; the jeep smelled like ass.

Lloyd flashed a yellow toothy smile. "Is there any particular station you want?"

I squashed a cockroach crawling up my leg. "Nope."

Lloyd pulled into oncoming traffic and smashed into an SUV. The driver was blonde, middle-aged, and wore a business suit. "What the fuck!" She screamed.

Lloyd popped open the glove compartment and retrieved a black, snub-nose revolver.

"I'll handle this."

"Where are you going with that gun?" I said.

Blondey stomped over to Lloyd. "You hit me, retard!"

		           BLAM!

Blondey dropped to the road; blood poured from the hole in her forehead, and her baby blue eyes rolled upward. Instinctively, I reached for the handle; to my dismay, I discovered the handle had been torn off. Lloyd jumped back in the car and hit the gas.

"What the fuck!" I screamed.

Lloyd stomped on the break and shoved his gun in my face. "Shut Up or else!"

"You can't just kill people!" I cried.

He pushed the gun barrel against my nose. "Humanity is a disease, and I'm the cure!"

Urine leaked down my ankle. "Please let me go."

Lloyd retrieved an orange pill bottle from his pocket and tossed it at me. "Take the pills, or I'll bite your buttcheeks off, jerkcrap!"

The pill was black and cone-shaped. I plopped it into my mouth. "Can I go now?"

Lloyd frowned. "That's a suppository, dumbass!"

I spat the pill into my hand. "I'm not shoving this up my ass, dude."

BOOM!

Blood rushed down the hole in my leg; burning pain spread through my knee. I slumped over, clutching my leg as blood seeped through my fingers. The air smelled and tasted like fireworks.

He pointed his weapon at my ball sack. "Do you wanna lose a nut too?"

I grabbed the suppository and pushed it into my rectum. It burned almost as bad as my knee. It felt like shitting in reverse. "Why are you doing this?"

"You've been drafted into a war against yourself," Lloyd said.

"What does that mean?" I asked.

The car ascended into the sky ;I felt like I was sinking into my seat. A tidal wave of calm washed over me like a roaring tidal wave; it felt like I was becoming one with everything. The hole in my leg healed. I peered out the window and saw clouds and sky. We climbed higher and higher until we were in the darkness of space. Lloyd's skin turned into green scales. I observed my skin was green and slimy.

I glanced down at my claws, and I glimpsed into the rearview mirror; my face was elongated like a crocodile, and I had a shark-like fin on the top of my head and yellow eyes.

I kicked the back of Lloyd's seat. "Where are you taking me?"

"Quiet, young lady!" Lloyd barked.

My dick and balls twisted in knots; my chest expanded into volleyball-sized tits. Terror. That is what I felt when I grabbed the crotch. My penis had turned into a vagina. Lloyd hopped into the backseat and pinned me down. Thick strings of saliva dripped from his mouth; onto my face. "You're going to bare my seed."

I sunk my shark-like teeth into his neck and tore his throat out. Blood cascaded down his scaly chest and stomach. Gurgling reverberated through the vehicle; I pushed Lloyd off me into the pile of garbage. The jeep spiraled into a black hole. I woke up nude, behind a dumpster in a Wendy's parking lot, to a naked homeless person peeing in my mouth. He had gray shoulder-length bits of food clung to his bushy gray beard.

BANG!

A bloodstream ran down the hole in the center of the man's forehead. He dropped into a pile of trash bags next to the dumpster. Lloyd waved from his car. I got up and ran faster than I ever have. I ignored the dirty looks and screams of disgust by the people I ran past. I realized I'd been gone for two days when I got home. I had no memory of where I'd been or what was done to me. I've never taken drugs or alcohol, and I'm in excellent mental health despite what some jerk doctors say. Moral of this story: Don't use Uber.

1 Comment
2023/02/09
20:34 UTC

1

Andrew Ate

Andrew ate his mashed potatoes and chicken silently, locking his gaze on the wall in front of him. The wall was pure white, with an ocean of lines drawn across it from top to bottom. No matter how many times Andrew had tried to count the lines, he failed each time, losing track of his how many he had counted before giving up. There were simply too many lines to count, yet something in the back of his mind urged him to try again and again.

As the man ate, something started bubbling up in the back of his throat; a feint yet noticeably sensory anomaly. He ignored it at first, thinking it was nothing as he kept chewing on his meal. With each successive intake, however, the sensation grew stronger. Turning from a phantom itch in the back of his throat to a gradually sizeable rock at the base of his throat.

Andrew realized he had eaten one spoonful too much once a wave of sharp pain exploded in his chest. Exacerbated by his own breathing, in a matter of moments, the painful sensation became comparable to that of a heart attack. Growing worse with each breath. Soon enough, Andrew collapsed onto the floor, grasping at his throat and chest. As he struggled to breathe on the floor, something moved. Something moved inside him. He could feel it. He felt something shift inside, causing shooting bolts of lightning to course through his torso.

The urge to vomit came immediately after. Andrew could feel the liquid coming out of his stomach and traveling upward toward his mouth. Each second become more unbearable than the last as torturous angina shifted and crawled inside of him. The man was in so much pain he couldn’t even properly scream. Every movement of air to and out of his body felt like a rain of swords came down, crushing on him.

The feeling in his limbs gradually faded as he writhed on the floor, coughing and wheezing. The movement of the malignant sensation inside of him made him spasm as his insides attempted to escape his body. Whatever force was pulling his viscera upwards was forcing him to live through an oral pseudo-birth-giving. A sensation of super-heated saw-blades clawed at each cell in his throat once the malignancy inside his body was nearing his mouth. Andrew’s vision rapidly faded in a sea of throbbing heat strokes dissolving his skin.

A cacophony of anguished vocalizations escaped his throat as his vocal cords struggled against the mass crawling out of his mouth. Before he knew it, Andrew felt a relief; if only a momentary one. In a millisecond, the suffering returned. His oral cavity burned as if someone was force-feeding him searing hot coals while he was being waterboarded.

A red torrent escaped his mouth, slowly forming a puddle underneath the man. He felt his remaining strength fade as the puddle grew wider and wider, threatening to take Andrew’s consciousness away. Eventually, it stopped, leaving the man with a strong metallic scent in his mouth.

He stared at it for a moment, too weak to move or shift his gaze. The puddle shifted, surprising him. His vision spun and his entire body pulsated with pain. The puddle became noticeably moving about, shifting away from its source, sending cold chills across Andrew’s emaciated body. He pulled himself upward, barely being able to straighten his head. Too exhausted, hurt, and overcome by an intense fear as the red puddle shifted and twisted, creeping away from its source and growing larger and larger, vertically.

The amorphous mass stood nearly as tall as the man it expelled itself from. It had no features nor a steady form as its entirety swayed softly. With no sensory organs; with no eyes to speak of, it somehow stared at its creator. Andrew stared at the thing he had birthed and felt its gaze being burnt into his skin. He could feel the hatred emanating like heat from within its presence. The man’s instincts took over. Something inside of him just knew he had to get up and run from this thing. A chill ran across his body, swiping most of the pain and exhaustion away. The sensation of his own heartbeat pounding in his chest and the increasingly hostile aura of the seemingly living liquid in front of him told him to get up and run.

His body was too slow to react; once he stood up. It was already too late.

A tendril shot out of the crimson shape. Andrew blinked and a sharp pain pulsated violently, drilling through his abdomen. His gaze fell down and horror gripped his mind, but before he could even asses the cause of his newfound suffering. An anguished moan escaped his mouth before wave after wave of pain exploded within his body, slowly blanketing his entirety in one endless stream of a concussive force tearing apart his bodily fabrics.

Before the sea of nerve-searing lightning and fire drowned out his awareness entirely, Andrew saw red droplets falling like rain all around him, slowly turning into a cold, all-encompassing darkness.

“Wake up,” a soft whisper awakened Andrew, pulling him out of the ever-calm sea of eternal equilibrium. Exhaustion and malaise blanketed his mind as he slowly opened his eyes. Unable to form a single coherent thought, he found himself faced with the same snow-white wall covered in markings. A stood by the wall, dragging her finger across it, her fingernail visibly cutting into it.

“Eighty-six thousand four hundred...” her voice trailed off as she turned to face the prone man. Her mouth widened into a smile. The moment Andrew saw her cold blue eyes, something inside of him clicked and he knew he had to avert his gaze.

“You’ve lasted an entire day... I wonder how more deaths your brain can handle before your mind shuts down completely,” she said, each word burning hotter than the previous as Andrew slowly came to realize a wildfire was crawling towards him, spreading outwards from what appeared to be flaming wings coming out the woman’s back.

0 Comments
2023/02/01
23:15 UTC

2

Pietaador Biisteerrson

If I had to describe Elina Remes in one word, that word would be a rose. Eye-catching, beautiful, and yet thorny. Very colorful and yet incredibly pure. I’ve known her for over two decades. When we first met, Elina was that one girl all the boys at school liked. Most ended up being weirded out by her artistic interests and unusual choice of pets. I on the other hand found her peculiarities charming. I guess that’s why we bonded and remained friends all those years later. Still, as people age, they tend to drift apart. The same happened to her and me. We’ve remained close nonetheless, regardless of time and distance.

It wasn’t much of a surprise when she called me, wanting to talk about nothing in particular. The odd thing was, however, the way she casually spoke about being separated. I remember the happiness written all over her face at her wedding. In fact, she always seems to be content with herself and her life. A woman with a positive heart and yet so dark a mind it would’ve driven anyone else to madness.

The thing about Elina is that her life was always decent; her parents are great, and she has got a great relationship with her siblings. She was never hungry or seriously ill. A dream-like existence. One that potentially enabled her to see things we, the less fortunate, not that my life is so terrible, couldn’t see. She could express and redefine darkness to even the most morbid individuals.

As we spoke over the phone, the topic of art naturally came up. Elina said she was about to launch her first exhibition in a few weeks and wondered if I was interested in getting a sneak peek at her works before they go public. Admittedly, I’ve always liked her paintings and getting to see a bunch of reptiles was just a sweet bonus. I agreed, and we’ve spent a weekend together since she lives quite a distance away.

I ended up driving through a blizzard to see a bunch of depressive paintings, nearly killing myself through exposure just because I felt like having a few drinks and a chat with an old friend. Granted, said friend is probably the most intelligent person I know and is someone who understands me like no other on a spiritual level of sorts, but next time, I’ll have her over at my place…

Once I arrived at Elina’s, I instantly remembered how great it was to grow up in a distant village in the mountains. The silence, the cold yet real humanity, and the almost romantic atmosphere around everything. It was almost intoxicating.

Speaking of intoxicating, as it is customary for us, an offer of a drink followed a greeting from my dearest friend and that’s how we’ve spent nearly half a day. Drinking vodka and catching up before for a few hours before Elina’s art collage came to mind. I had almost entirely forgotten about it in an endless conversation about idiots at work, idiots in the wider world, and idiots as a whole. Honestly, for someone who had been through a recent separation, Elina seemed genuinely happy, with no signs of hurt or longing. Almost eerily so. And it’s not like she hid her emotions, either. We declared our love for each other a few times that day.

Eventually, after being already fairly intoxicated, Elina grabbed my hand and pulled me into her gallery room. Proudly unveiling painting after painting. Before long, a picturesque cacophony of artistic madness surrounded me. Paintings the likes of “Tears of Agony” which was a painting of a screaming face with tear marks carved into the skin surrounded by a rainbow of fiery colors in violent strokes mimicking flames or “Until Death and Beyond” which was a painting of a man kissing his dead lover as the latter lay lifeless, pale and emaciated from consumption were so emotive and true to life they had a sobering effect on me.

Another painting; “Oppression” had an incredibly realistic depiction of possessive oppression or the tight grip of madness on one’s mind. A pair of conjoined ghastly faces, sharing a cheek and obscuring each other’s mouths with equally deathly hands surrounded by pitched darkness. This one was really powerful; I could almost hear their muffled screams as I looked at it. I almost felt bad for them as I looked at these faces.

There were dozens of such paintings in that room, all different, each unique. A new flavor and shade of the mental hell this woman was spilling out of her brain somehow without ever having to pass through the gates of perdition.

Elina found it funny that I was so blown away by the majesty and purity of her works. The unbridled darkness in “A Northern Night Over the Gaping Jaws of Hel” and the insane detail of drawings on the robe of the courtesan in “Jigoku” were all just so captivating and beyond any logic. I knew she was talented, but I did not know she had gotten this fucking brilliant.

And yet, there stood one covered canvas Elina seemed to avoid showing to me. I noticed she skipped that one a few times, but before I could ask her about it. She said, “I’ll be back in a moment” before leaving me alone with the visual madness that was peering straight into my mind.

Whatever was under that cloth really intrigued me, regardless of if this was something unfinished or something that wasn’t up to her standard. I wanted, I needed, to see it. The hidden painting was almost calling out to me, begging for my eyes to experience it. I walked over to the covered canvas, thinking it wouldn’t be too big of a deal if I just took a peek at what was underneath and pulled the cloth away.

My heart skipped a bit when I saw what was underneath. I couldn’t believe my eyes. It couldn’t or shouldn’t have been real. Just couldn’t. My skin crawled, and a sudden breeze caressed my limbs as I stared into the eyes of that thing.

Pietaador Biisteerrson.

A hundred-eyed, dog-headed, tattered-winged abomination with a serpentine lower half. A demonic presence that no one should’ve ever known about. I have told no one about this thing since my mother decades ago. This creature used to haunt me at night. It would just stand over me and drool hungrily as I cowered away under my sheets, trying to fall asleep.

The terrible snorts that accompanied its putrid breath once again came to mind, as I could not turn my gaze away from the illustration of the chimera. Torn between confusion and a growing dread, I continued to stare at the creature trapped on the canvas. As if attempting to face my greatest fear once and for all.

The sound of violent coughing forced me to pull my gaze away from the devil in the painting. Hyperalert and practically wheezing, I left the gallery room, calling out Elina’s name. She wouldn’t answer, but the coughing got worse and louder. Almost to the point of vomiting. I could hear audible pained gasps for air between the fits of a cough. I looked around for Elina, but I couldn’t find her. The house seemed to grow bigger and become labyrinthine in my panic.

“Ella, are you alright?”

“Hey, Ella, is everything okay?”

I kept screaming as the sound of her coughing assaulted my eardrums. Finally, I found her crouching on the floor next to a bed. I stood over her, placing my hands on her shoulders as something escaped her mouth.

“What’s wrong, El..?” I didn’t even finish the sentence. She turned to face me. Her gray eyes were bloodshot and pleading, blood pouring out of her mouth. The color was fading from her skin as she bent herself once more in a coughing fit. Her throat was making all sorts of disgusting sounds between pained moans escaping her mouth and reflexive attempts to expel whatever was stuck inside of her.

The sight of her in this state threw me into a state of panic-induced dizziness, interwoven with fear. I could feel my heartbeat in about every organ and the room was spinning at irregular angles. The combination of alcohol in my system and the sensory overload weren’t doing me any favors. I was getting sick myself and totally lost. Elina grabbed onto my shirt and collapsed on top of me, her head facing downward. I heard something make its way up her throat. That sickening sound, God…

A current of blood came flooding through her lips as I hopelessly watched until she fell on the floor. Completely still. I just stood there, frozen, unable, and unwilling to move. Feeling as if I am experiencing an out-of-body experience.

I thought she was dead; I thought I was dying or was already dead. Maybe there was something in the alcohol. Or something in some of the paint she used. I didn’t want to die. I felt like screaming and crying, but I couldn’t utter a sound. My body wasn’t my own during these moments. My mind was eating itself alive, trying to keep me afloat in all of that madness, but nothing could prepare me for the sight of Elina’s body jolting violently and flipping face upward. She shook violently, grasping at her chest and throat before a thundering crack out of her mouth, echoing like gunfire in my ears.

A dog’s snout came out.

Followed by a massive black mass of muscle and fur and snakes and skin all pulling themselves up from within her mouth with a wet noise violating the room.

It all happened so fast, almost like a movie reel. It was too fucking insane to be true and yet there I was, face to face once again, with that animal that drooled over my form when I was a child. Crawling out of the body of my friend.

It let out a terrible roar that turned into a shriek and eventually into a whistle. I just closed my eyes and prayed for everything to stop. My prayers came true when a wave of burning liquid iron covered everything from my head to my chest. An ocean of searing pain. It was so bad I couldn’t even scream.

After that, came darkness. Pure nothingness. The sweet release of death whose joy-bringing embrace I felt but for a moment and then I was gone.

Eventually, I woke up, wrapped up in blankets in a very warm room. Looking around, it felt very cozy. I thought I was in heaven. Especially after seeing Elina’s angelic face smiling at me.

“Wha… what happened?” I let out.

“You went outside underdressed and passed out…” she said before smacking me across the face. “Idiot, don’t scare me like that!” She scolded, trying to sound stern, but her voice sounded caring and sweet.

My thoughts were still swimming in the mush that was in my brain. My entire body was sore and my head pounding.

“I left you for a second to answer the phone, and you end up half-dead.” Elina complained, “Damn you men!”

“A s-s-second?” I slurred.

“Well, yeah, maybe more than a second… “

“What… about… the… creature… and… you… and… blood…” I questioned, struggling with my verbiage.

She sighed, “You looked at the Bies-infested canvas, love.”

I looked at her, perplexed. She must’ve noticed the change in my expression.

“You won’t believe me now, but this thing is how I get inspiration. It shows the viewer terrible things. Had it in the family forever. We’re immune to its effects. I don’t know why. We see the visions, but everyone in my family knows it’s all not real. It doesn’t freak us out. I look at it every now and again and use the visions as inspiration for my paintings,” she explained.

“Aha…” I wasn’t sure if to believe her. A demon-infested painting canvas sounds kind of impossible, but a lot of things around this woman are impossible. I can’t stress enough just how good these paintings are at being macabre in the rawest sense.

She figured she didn’t convince me just yet, so she got up to her feet and walked out of the room saying, “let me show you something.”

I wasn’t really able to think straight, so none of anything made sense to me at that moment. Elina came back a few moments later holding a piece of paper she handed to me. Her husband’s death certificate.

Cause of death; suicide. The poor bastard shoved scissors into his eyes and ended up killing himself that way.

Elina’s voice turned solemn. “I told him not to look at it, but he did when I wasn't home to stop him, after years of me warning him against it. I don’t know what the canvas showed him, but he couldn’t handle it.”

“Oh” was the only thing that escaped my mouth in response. I was in pure disbelief and potentially considering the truthfulness of her words. After all, why would she lie to me?

In typical Elina fashion, she lightened up the mood, saying, “I never told you why I am single. I just told you I am” before snatching the death certificate away.

“I’m just glad you’re still alive...” she muttered, walking out of the room.

0 Comments
2023/01/13
23:54 UTC

Back To Top