The Door That Wouldn’t Knock

Alan stood back and scratched his head.

“Bizarre,” he murmured.

He’d become fascinated by his new front door soon after Dana had brought it home from an estate sale. Alan had offered to give it a fresh coat of paint, but his wife was adamant.

“Oh, no you don’t,” Dana warned him. “It’s beautiful as it is.”

She was right, of course. Though weathered, the door was wonderfully sturdy with fancy decorative scrollwork. It gave their house a unique, rustic charm.

But shortly after installing it, he’d noticed something odd. Even now, moving to touch it again, he remained fascinated. Sometimes he considered calling the nearby university to see if anyone could explain how, no matter how hard you knocked, the door only issued the faintest muffled thumps.

He couldn’t resist trying again. He gave it a good, solid rap. Then another. And another. It sounded like he was knocking on a cushion.

Suddenly the door flew open.

“Goddammit!” Dana yelled.

“What?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”

But she only seethed, then slammed the door in his face.

Alan frowned in perplexed silence, until the door opened again. When he saw Jess, he crouched and smiled.

“Hey, pumpkin! What’s up?”

Jess hesitated, chewing her lip. When she finally spoke, her voice sounded distant, like a whisper down a long hallway.

“Daddy? I know you’re there, Daddy. You have to go. You’re making Mommy mad.”

As she retreated, he stepped forward to hold her and hug her and tell her everything was okay, but his foot would not cross the threshold, and the door slowly closed.

Alan stood back and scratched his head.

“Bizarre,” he murmured.

—
Credits to: IPostAtMidnight

Life and Death

Dan awoke in a panic before calming down to examine his surroundings. He was in a cramped, empty room; the only noticeable features being two towering doors standing across from each other as if in some sort of stark standoff. Dan couldn’t remember how he had gotten there or why he had fallen asleep, but he had never woken in an area so strange.

“Hello? Anyone there?” he questioned. His friendly tone quickly became agitated, “OK, I don’t know who’s behind all this, but I am not a willing participant!” His voice was now noticeably angry, “Look man, this is bullshit! I’ll sue! Do you know who I am? I know a lot of people you do NOT want to meet and I’ll call them right now if I have to!” he reached for his pants, only to realize that his phone was not in his left pocket. He began frantically feeling and searching his various pockets but was unsuccessful. “OK…I’ve about had enough of this shit.” His voice hit the surrounding walls and died, as if he had never said anything at all.

The silence was deafening. Dan veered his attention back to the doors. The door on the left immediately drew his attention. Its gleaming white finish was almost too intense to stare at, it’s presence glistening and lighting up the surrounding wall space. Dan wasn’t exactly a door expert, but it had to be the most alluring design he could fathom, like it was designed to be perfect. It’s angelic presence demanded attention.

The other door lacked the same appeal. This one was shorter than the white door, and it was old, battered, and dirty. The door seemed to fit unevenly into the wall, and he could see pitch-blackness through the resulting cracks. The door’s placid emptiness seemed to contaminate the surrounding area, and the light from the opposing door died as it reached its counterpart. Unlike the previous door, which was characterized by light, this door was clouded in darkness. Dan couldn’t bear to look any longer and he pulled his eyes away. This door, it seemed, was evil, somehow. Apart from its less-than-appealing design, something else, something he couldn’t explain, flooded through the dark cracks.

Dan moved toward the white door. As he closed the distance, the blinding light began to fade, and the details of the door became more apparent. Positioned in the center of the frame was a golden plaque. Etched into the gold was a large paragraph of unreadable text. As he moved closer, the text became clearer, as if it had changed from when he had first seen it. He squinted his eyes and read:

“This door is life. Beyond it, there is harmony and eternal happiness. The troubles you know now will lose significance. Those you miss and loved ones you have lost will no longer hold meaning to you. You will be in perfect happiness. There is no evil beyond this door, it is forbidden. It is impossible. This door is life.”

The words penetrated Dan’s very being. Filled with a sudden joy he could not understand (or care to understand, for that matter), he reached for the shining glass handle, but in a sudden trance of human curiosity he withheld his arm. There was still another door to check, another option.

Dan backed away from the white door. The more he stepped away, the brighter the door’s illumination became until the details and the plaque had disappeared and only a white, shining light remained, too bright to distinguish. He struggled to pull away his gaze before realizing that he had almost backed into the other door. He jumped back in panic and turned to face his foe.

Much like the other door, this one had more to it when Dan was closer. What was once covered in an eerie blackness was now clear. This door, like the one before it, featured a small paragraph in the center of the frame. This one neither shined nor changed. It was rotting in its place and crumbling under what seemed like millennia of decay. The knob seemed to melt towards the floor as if it pulled away. He struggled to read the fading text:

“This door is death. Beyond it, all the horrors and terrors that you could imagine live and thrive. Your troubles are magnified here, your fears apparent, and they are all that is real. You will search for happiness and never truly find it. Your pursuits will only lead into further lust. There is great evil beyond this door. This door is death.”

Dan’s heart sank at the final words. He backed away from the door until he stood evenly between the two choices: one beautiful, with promises of good and happiness; the other disgusting, with assurance of misery and hopelessness. An easy choice, Dan surmised.

He moved towards his decision, his eyes again adjusting and making out the details of the door as he moved closer. The glass handle was now in sight. The promises on the plaque seemed to already be coming true, as the horror he felt in the presence of the other began to fade the closer he got. Eager and curious beyond imagining, he again reached for the handle.

Whether by a twist of fate or a random chance, he was stopped. Not physically, but rather like his heart could not bring himself to do it in light of a new variable. Noises now emitted from the opposing door. It was the first sound he had heard other than his own voice since he had woken. The noise was indistinguishable at first, but became clearer as he listened. It was a woman, sobbing and screaming in horror and agony. Dan turned to look at the blackness. The sound seeped through the dark cracks. The cries escalated in both volume and emotion. The light from the white room now gleamed brighter in the corner of his peripheral vision, brighter than it ever had.

He was in the middle of two opposing forces: his pursuit of happiness, and his instinct for compassion. Whoever this woman was, she clearly needed help, and Dan wasn’t the type of man to ignore the cries of a woman in peril. The words on the plaques echoed in his mind, beating the sides and practically escaping through his ears. If he went to the left, he figured, he would no longer care for the woman, assuming the plaque was telling the truth. This wasn’t right, he decided, as Dan could not bring himself to justify blissful ignorance. The light from the left gleamed now even brighter, as if it yearned to change his mind. He pondered the idea of letting go and succumbing to the light, to be perfectly happy. Never before had Dan been so deeply conflicted.

At this point, the woman had stopped crying and was now screaming at the top of her lungs, it seemed. This time, no amount of happiness could pull him away. “DAN! WHY!? OH GOD…oh god. Dan…!” Dan immediately turned at the mention of his name. The truth is that he mentally never made a decision. If he had, he probably would have chosen the other door. Rather, his body, without thought and in fluid motion, darted towards the black door, his adrenaline fueling his plight. He ran from everything he could ever hope for towards the girl who knew his name. Racing against his own mind and the chance to reason himself out of it, he grabbed the melting doorknob, pulled the door with all the fury of his humanity and plunged into the blackness.

Dan awoke, coughing up blood and in intense pain. Burning wreckage and blood littered his resting place. He struggled to raise his head towards the love of his life, now sobbing in immense joy. “Wha…what happened?” Dan coughed through his broken ribs. A familiar voice responded,

“We were in an accident...I thought I’d lost you!” Her sobbing resumed. Dan struggled to sit up but his ribs ached in resistance. He began questioning what the hell had just happened. The door’s ominous text still rang in his head:

“This door is death.”

Knock at the Door

Sleep. That's all I wanted. Drift off into a world full of impossibilities. A place where all the troubles of the world drift away. Not tonight, though. Tonight, an unwanted visitor knocks on my front door. He knocks repeatedly with the same sounds:

Dun, dun, duh, dun, dun... dun, dun
 
Over and over again. Why is it here? What does it want? Does it know I want to sleep? It must be one of those local hooligans. I wish I could just take my shotgun and shoot their brains out. Slowly wash their blood off my body.

Dun ,dun, duh ,dun, dun... dun, dun
 
Damnit! So close! God, why must I be condemned to this? If I want him to leave, I guess I'm gonna have to go tell him. Why is it so persistent to be let into my home? I have nothing worth taking. The objects in my home have sentimental value, or none at all.

Dun, dun, duh, dun, dun... dun, dun
 
Damnit, it doesn't matter! I just want to sleep and dream peaceful dreams. I get out of my bed, and open my bedroom door.

The thing that was knocking... was right outside my bedroom door.

The Artist

There’s this painting my wife loves, called “Death and Life”, by Klimt. I don’t know what she finds so fascinating about it. I made all the right noises when she showed me her beloved framed print when we were first dating, oohing and ahhing and making up some bullshit about warm and cold color schemes and the specific choice of angles and line. She was an artist, our first few dates involved long walks through museums, starting in Picasso’s blue period and ending in heavy petting and blue balls.

I took an art history course as an elective when I was finishing up my doctorate, I remembered enough of the lingo to charm my fantastically gorgeous future wife and lure her back to my stupidly filthy apartment. We’re talking me as the foul bachelor frog, sitting on a lillypad made of empty take out containers surrounded by pond of enough unwashed clothes to keep a laundromat in business for a cool 6 months.

I remember scrambling to find 2 of any sort of cup-like container for the bottle of wine we had brought back while she was in the bathroom. I rinsed out a couple of coffee mugs and ran into the bedroom to try to clean up the condom wrappers that had been sitting on my bedside table since 2003. On the bed, neatly laid out against the rest of the chaos, were my wife’s dress, bra and panties. She came out of the bathroom completely nude aside from a pair of high heels, took the wine from me and took a swig straight from the bottle. I fell totally, completely and irrevocably in love.

I have no head for artistic things- I work in finance, I get creative with numbers, not paint- but I fucking love her stuff. She’s made a name for herself over the past few years, critics call her the American Damien Hirst. One of her first exhibits was composed of a dozen oil paintings of rotting pastries, surrounding an actual cake filled with thousands of dead lady bugs being fed to a mummified tarantula dressed up as Little Miss Muffet. I have no idea what it meant but it was sick, successful and catered by Balthazar so I ate about 20 croissants. They did not have bugs in them. I checked.

She was amazing. She had the body of a Laker girl and the face of a Modigliani model, and still does. She’s charming, charismatic, deep- the kind of person people flock to, want to be around constantly. She fucked like she had something to prove, she had a twisted sense of humor. As soon as I hooked a job with enough figures to keep a girl like her satisfied the way she should be, I proposed, bought her a historical brownstone in the city with a garden full of roses and hardwood mahogany floors. And for the first few years, she seemed happy. We were the kind of couple you see in New York Magazine and scoff at because they’re just too damned lucky…

But we had a rough spot, like all married couples do. She was still the superficially the same woman I fell in love with- looked amazing, people always asked me when she was going to host the next dinner party, she still had an amazing eye for art. I knew, though- I knew she was miserable. I could see it- the misery- in the corners of her eyes and the curve of her mouth.

It happened gradually. First it was the shower curtain. She bought 3 or 4 from a small boutique downtown, brought them home so we could choose one out together. We decided on one, pale blue, made of material that was impractical and way too expensive for a drapery in a bathroom but we had the money and it made her happy so why the hell not. A few days later, I was shaving and realized she still hadn’t put the curtain up. It wasn’t until about a month after that I caught a glimpse of it hanging up in her studio, cut to shreds and dyed till it was almost unrecognizable.

I chose to ignore it because I had learned it’s usually not the best course of action to call an artist out on their creative license, unless you want to start an all-out war with no discernible end.

A year after that, though, I had no choice. She had been so on edge it was like she was standing on a razor. She usually had a show every 3, 4 months or so, and if anything she had too many ideas, the galleries always asked her to trim down her collections. When the year passed without so much as a single finished painting, I started to worry, both about her wellbeing and our bank account. We were extravagant spenders, and each of her shows would bring in a cool $20,000 that paid for a few months of European beaches and ski trips in Aspen.

The final straw, though, is when she burned down the roses. It turned out she had finished dozens of projects over the year, she had hated all of it and had either destroyed or painted over everything. While I was at the office, she flew off the handle, doused about 16 canvases in lighter fluid, and set the yard on fire. When I got the call from the fire department, I rushed home to find her sitting in the back of the ambulance, covered in ashes, blonde hair singed at the ends. She was smoking a cigarette. I looked over the burnt flowers, the skeletons of her paintings, the ruined limbs of broken sculptures, and asked her what happened and why. She took a drag of the cigarette and said:

“It was mine to burn.”

She took big, fancy pictures of the inferno. A family of bunnies suffocated in the smoke, she had them stuffed and mounted in size order on a baking soda volcano like the kind you see in middle school science fairs. She gathered up a few of the charred bits and pieces, wired it together, and made some warped, pained-looking kind of phoenix thing weighing in at 400 pounds and easily over eight feet high. She called the whole thing “From the Ashes”, and the reviews in the Times called it “…incendiary. Her first foray into becoming a true artist”. Someone bought the phoenix. I pity the person who wakes up every day and looks at that strange thing, suspended in constant agony.

We were both drunk, at a random, expensive, vaguely Dante’s Inferno-themed bar in San Francisco when I finally got a chance to ask her what was bothering her. We had been making dark jokes all night about the beautiful irony of her show and our current locale. At first she vehemently denied anything was wrong, angrily pointing out that we had made four times as much off of her last show as anything before it, that it had more than covered the damages, that it had paid for the vacation we were on. I stayed silent. She tossed her newly cropped hair, and looked like she was going to open up for a second. I saw her soft blue eyes fill with tears, then she took a shot of whiskey from a glass that had a bull’s head and smirked.

“Well, for starters,” she slurred, nonchalantly dangling the glass from the bull’s nose ring. “I’m fairly certain I’m pregnant.”

She let the glass drop from her finger and it shattered on the floor as she slid out of her seat and stumbled to the exit. I sat there for awhile and drank more, feeling furious, confused, and miserable. I remembered her face when she showed me that Klimt painting. I remembered how she wore glasses back then, and how she pushed them up the bridge of her nose when she smiled as I talked about the fucking warm and the fucking cold colors and the fucking angles and lines.

We converted her studio into a nursery. Rather, I did, while she stayed in San Francisco and did God knows what with her artist friends. I had a landscaper come in and replant the roses. I worked a lot of overtime, drank myself to sleep while I skimmed through parenting books. She came back when she was almost full term; I came home from work one night to find sonogram pictures posted all over the fridge of two healthy-looking twins, big baby girls. I walked into our bedroom and saw her dead asleep on top of the covers, belly swollen, smelling faintly like pot and paint thinner. She had a rainbow of dried paint on her fingertips. I loosened my tie and walked to the nursery.

She had been busy.

The canary yellow I had chosen was covered in a layer of translucent blue, and she had covered one wall in Klimt-esque patterns and curlicues. The creamy plush carpet was covered in paint splatters- she had worked furiously to finish. She had cut a swathe from one of the new rose bushes and made a giant bouquet, shoving them so tightly in the vase that some had escaped and made their way from their perch on the changing table to the floor. She had scattered them in the bassinet, on the windowsill. It was chaotic and beautiful. The next few years were peaceful, for the most part. We bonded over raising the girls. Despite my wife’s less than careful prenatal preparation, they were wickedly smart and beautiful. They both looked like her, with long curly blonde ringlets and blue eyes. Sometimes, when I put them to bed, I wondered if any of my DNA was in them at all. They were like miniature versions of her.

My wife agreed to see a psychiatrist for a little bit. She took some medication for awhile, Xanax, some mood stabilizers. Eventually she and her doctor decided her crisis had been hormonal and temporary. We started having dinner parties again, soothed the gossip that had infected our social circles.

She stopped painting and took up teaching at a university. She seemed content again, even happier than she was before. Every once in a while I would catch a look in her eyes like repressed artillery fire, like she was ready to explode at any second, but it never lasted for longer than a few seconds before they went back to the soft cornflower blue I knew so well. And who doesn’t get a little agitated every once in a while?

I rose through the ranks at work. I loved the feeling of power that came with promotions. I loved my girls. And by God, I loved her. My crazy, disgusting, beautiful, hateful and loving, extraordinary wife.

Then came today.

Today, I came home from work early.

Today, my wife took the day off to be a chaperone on a class trip to the MET. They were after her for months because of her expertise in the art world, they wanted the children to experience the culture in the most sophisticated way possible. I thought it was ridiculous, they were one to three year olds in a private daycare; they saw more beauty in Cheerios than in Monet’s water lilies. But they wore my wife down, and she was given a gaggle of toddlers and wide-eyed teachers to tour around the museum.

I came home for lunch because I had forgotten my iPad that had notes on it for a presentation I was giving that night. I walked through the rose garden and notice a tiny piece of sculpture left over from the Ashes exhibit from so long ago. It was half of a tiny bird- it had the kind of exquisite detail that my wife used to be so famous for. I was pretty sure it was an actual bird that she had cast in clay. I thought I could see a small piece of feather in one of the cracks. I idly wondered why I hadn’t noticed it before.

I went inside and poured myself a glass of orange juice. The fridge had pictures that my daughters’ drew- happy, crooked stick figures that looked nothing like the beautiful horrors their mother used to churn out. I was happy about that. I hoped they would fall in love with numbers like I did.

It was absolutely silent, and I sipped the sweet citrus and enjoyed the nothingness. Then I thought I caught a vague scent of fresh paint in the air.

Curious, I walked into the living room. And there was my wife, sitting on the leather couch with a bottle of wine, looking like an angel of death.

She was covered head to toe in blue-gray body paint, with a special concentration underneath her eyes. She was wearing a revealing patchwork blue dress, covered in crosses of various shapes and sizes. Not a dress, I realized, but the shredded shower curtain from so many years ago. I could see most of her still-perfect breasts, the curve of her waist. The bottle of wine was elongated and painted a strange shade of orange. The smell of paint was stronger in here, an overwhelming smell of lighter fluid, and something else I couldn’t place. She had shaven her head.

I stared at her for awhile- minutes? An hour maybe? Eventually she took a swig of wine from the bottle, swirling it around in her mouth. I noticed paint, deep blues and even deeper reds, around her fingers. I sat down in the arm chair across from her, unable to think of what exactly I wanted to ask her.

Maybe because I knew.

Maybe because I didn’t want to know.

I noticed a camera on the table between us, I went to pick it up and she rested her gray hand on mine before I could, softly, gently, with all the familiarity of years of marriage. She opened her mouth to speak, soft pink lips made pallid by the paint.

“They were mine.”

And I’ve been sitting here, knowing what’s behind the door to my daughters’ room, with the Klimt wall we never repainted. Knowing why my phone keeps ringing with calls from the school, from the NYPD. Knowing why I couldn’t find my sleeping pills last night. Knowing what that smell is. Seeing in my peripheral the red pooling and staining the carpet from underneath the door, the pile of clothes neatly folded next to my wife on the couch. I can picture that thick wire she used to fit all of her subjects where she wanted them, what a perfect, detailed recreation it must be.

Because she’s so perfect.

I see the phoenix in my mind’s eye.

I hope, when she flicks that cigarette she’s about to light, we both fucking burn.

—
Credits to: photofreecreepypasta

Eye of the Beholder

Floaters, swimmers, squigglys, everyone sees them in their periphery. I always tried to study them when I was bored. A useless endeavor thats taught me more than I assumed it ever could.

My obsession with them started out as many do, with innocent youthful observation. I quickly discovered that moving your gaze to them scares them back to the edges of your vision. This is where most people give up. I had a plan, though. I would stare at a fixed point and try to observe as many things without averting my gaze to them.

My technique slowly improved, and I saw that the little things were a little like the planarians from my high school biology lab. For the longest time they never did much more than what most people see. One day during a class which I had no interest in, one suddenly developed what I can only assume was an eye spot. I assume it was an eye of sorts because now it would speed across my field of view and slam into other unsuspecting swimmers. I named him Raging Red.

Red kept ramming the other couple of floaters until he ripped it in half. A cloud of black puffed into my vision. Red’s outline turned from the translucent silver to an inky black. After weeks of observation this color did not fade. After the fatal incident, Red left the remaining floaters alone. Now he preferred to ram at the edges of my vision, like it contained him. He was persistent, and I find it important to note that I never felt anything from all of his activity. I also would like to note that with his darker outline it was considerably harder to lose track of him. As far as I could ever tell, he would flatten himself to the edge of my vision and hide there when not in view.

Eventually during his frequent escape attempts, I felt a sharp prick near my tear duct. Red was gone from my vision once I opened my eye. I ran to the bathroom, and saw drop or two of blood running down my cheek. Red was also slithering down my cheek, I could tell because I moved my gaze around but he stayed fixed. After a little squirming, he settled on my cheek. I tried to brush him off, but it was like ink had dried onto my skin. He was about the size of my thumb.

Later that evening, my college roommate didn’t say a word about my new marking. I happened to have a skype call with my conservative mother that same night, but she didn’t say a word about it. I noticed in the feed from my laptop that it wasn’t showing either. I excused myself to the bathroom for a moment, and sure enough he was still there, maybe even slightly bigger. I went to bed, thinking maybe I’d let my imagination run a little wild with this floater thing for a little too long.

I woke up to my eyes crusted shut. I brushed it off as allergies acting up, and went about my day. Day after day when I’d wake up, my eyes were crusted shut. On the third day, I took the time to look at what I was wiping out of my eyes. Dark brown. I went to the bathroom, red was writhing in my skin. It was painless, but the sight made me weak. It brought me to my knees. I looked up, and saw a floater sliding around the holes of an electrical socket, slithering in and sliding out of a different hole.

Writing, slithering, slinking. They were all over the bathroom, and all over me. I could just barely feel the delicate movements all over my skin. All those little silvery translucent bodies, sticking on the walls, hanging from shelves. A particularly large floater flopped from the light fixture on the ceiling and landed on my head, covering a good portion of my face. Any calm or collectedness I had left me. I pulled myself up on the sink, and almost fell back to the cold tile floor.

Red was growing. I pulled my shirt up, and his inky form stretched down my neck and almost to my waist. My skin lost all color, something inside me told me to run. I ran for the front door. Floaters were slithering all over our small apartment. As soon as I hit the hallway, not a single one in sight. I sat outside on the steps, trying to reconcile what had happened. My roommate walked up the building while I was sitting outside, I started to say “Hi” when I saw the floater clinging to his face. I couldn’t choke a word out, and just nodded through his questions about my well being.

Every single morning my eyes are sealed shut with that dark brown gunk. It took a few years, a couple of short stints under professional observation and some booze, but I can almost tolerate it all now. I keep bowls turned upside down so they don’t fill with floaters, cups too. I can’t stand to see them writhing together like mass of snakes. I keep a picture on my wall. It’s from my last psychologist, he took it to try to prove what I see in the mirror isn’t so, but he doesn’t see what I do. He can’t see that Raging Red grew so big that his black lines cover the vast majority of my skin, and he can’t see his pulsing red eye on my cheek, watching over his young. I can’t bare the sight of him, or his grotesque eye squishing around in my cheek.

—
Credits to: photofreecreepypasta

The Gas Meter Man

I used to live in a weird little village. A couple thousand people lived there supposedly, but it was a commuter village, so their lives were elsewhere aside from the farmer’s market during the summer, a general store, and an unsettling little pet food store, but that’s a different story. I didn’t go to the local school and I’d been excommunicated so I didn’t really know anyone aside from the guy across the street and his bigoted landlord.

Every so often, a guy would come over to the house to check the gas meters. He never really bothered us aside from occasionally looking in the windows for a little too long before walking away. It was odd, but seemed harmless.

As the year went on, he started coming over more than once a month. My mom figured it was because of the snow and they needed to make sure the meters were still working. That seemed plausible, and, being a kid at the time, I didn’t want to think anything else.

Fast forward a couple months. My house had two stories and the yard was sloped so the front entrance on the top floor was flat as well as the entrance to the backyard on the lower level. There was a concrete ledge next to the house that was barely big enough for most of the trash cans. It was a pain to get to and from there you could see right into my mom’s room. If you had curtains and closed them, people thought you were up to something.

Since it was such a small town, either you knew everyone and their business, you knew someone like that, you minded your own business and didn’t really talk to anyone, or you simply had a vacation home that was clearly empty for the entire winter. We’d already been marked as someone no one should trust, talk to, and in a couple cases even look in the direction of in our last village so we went with it. One day the gas guy got onto that ledge, which must’ve taken a great deal of effort, and stared into my mom’s window. Because of the layout of the room she didn’t see when he got there so who knows how long he watched her. He ran after getting caught.

A week or so later a different gas guy came by the house with a little thing that looked like a smartphone. My mom talked to him and it turned out they hadn’t sent the other guy and didn’t know who he was or how he got a uniform. He also said that he could just read the meters with his little device and wouldn’t need to mess with the meters unless they were repairing something.

The guy never came back, and I moved pretty far away, but it still scares me.

—
Credits to: photofreecreepypasta

A Fixer Upper

About four years ago my husband and I began restoring a home in an up and coming historical district. Vaulted ceilings, detailed mouldings, hand carved handrails and mantle. They were all painted over, but fortunately the paint came off to reveal beautiful old wood. Under the old, trampled carpets were gorgeous wood floors. We were ecstatic with our purchase.

The trouble began a year or two into the renovation. My son, 10 or 11 at the time, wouldn’t look at the mantle. He wouldn’t say a word to me about it, but I saw him changing his gate and turning to avoid even a short glimpse of it. Finally, I sat him down and asked him about it.

“Matt, what’s wrong with the mantle?”

His shoulders heaved and his gaze swept across the floor, “I don’t know, did dad scrape it up when he was taking the paint off?”

I squinted at him and tensed my lips, “You know what I mean. Why won’t you even look at it?”

“Don’t you see the face, mom?”

“What face?”

“It’s on the corner, by the dining room side.”

“I never noticed a face, and I’ve been in that room more than anyone else.”

“It’s there!”

He got up and drug me over, pointing at the corner.

“Can’t you see him? He has pointy eyes and a sharp chin!”

“I don’t see anything.”

He took a deep breath, he forced himself to look, and he traced the features of the face with his pointer finger. I still couldn’t see a thing. He walked away, shaking his head in disbelief. I studied it over and over, every grain dozens of times to try to see his tormentor. I had no such luck.

It was months of him walking with his head turned and purposely rerouting around the family room before we were used to it. It was odd, but nothing life shattering. As we stripped more paint and pulled more carpet, he started seeing more faces in the wood grains. An awkwardly placed pot here, an off center throw rug there, and it was good enough. For awhile.

Eventually, the day came when these faces would follow him along the surfaces he saw them on. He said they’d begun to scowl and laugh at him, instead of staying still and watching. The first day or two my husband carried him through the house to get him from A to B. It was terrible for us, but we painted over the mouldings and mantle. My son would walk through the house with his nose held high in the air to avoid the hardwood floors.

I asked him if the faces were in other places. He wasn’t sure, so my husband took him down to the local Home Improvement center. He was shaky, his eyes moved erratically around the hardwood floors on display. After he had carefully examined every display, he was fine. No faces, nothing that bothered him in the slightest.

The night following our experiment at the hardware store, I heard a thud from across the house. The thud was followed by crying, then hurried footsteps. I wandered up to the upstairs hallway. Where the hall turned before reaching the bathroom, there was crack in the drywall and a dripping blood spot. There was a trail of blood, barely noticeable, barely there, leading to my sons room.

I peeked in the door. He was bawling on his bed.

“Matt, what’s wrong honey?”

He looked up, he’d busted his nose running into the wall.

“It was another one! It came out of the ceiling!”

“You mean you saw it in the patterns on the ceiling?”

“No, like, it popped out like someone pushing their face through a sheet.”

I sat on his bed with him. Embraced him. I wiped his bloodied nose with the sleeve of my robe. He slept with a pillow over his head. I couldn’t calm him down, he was shaking, his breathing was labored. He started sleeping with a blindfold in an attempt to avoid more of these faces. The blindfold worked well for bedtime.

I was scrubbing the floors when I noticed that it looked like termites had been eating at our floors. I didn’t think anything of it. I noticed it happened in an… isolated way. It always happened near a rug, or something we’d placed to hide one of those faces. That very night, my son was complaining about splinters in his feet. I took a look.

It was like staring down a porcupine. Tiny, deep and countless. I stopped counting after twenty five splinters in his left foot. I spent hours digging them out.

“Matt, what happened?”

“I was just walking, and every step felt like I was stepping on a bunch of tacks.”

We sent him to my mother’s house across town for a week. No mystery injuries, no faces. During his week away, everything was quiet. I couldn’t even find the termite damage. As the weekend neared, I started hearing a sharp creaking sound up and down my hallway.

I peaked out of my door to see if it was something. Waves of tiny splinters were popping up and settling back down like a chipmunk was burrowing through my floors. The house was silent, then the light in the hall went out. My screaming woke up my husband. I told him what I saw, and he inspected the floor. Undamaged. He went back to sleep, I wasn’t so lucky.

I tried to go back to sleep. I tossed. I turned. Nothing felt right, even my blankets just wouldn’t lay right. Every creepy night time cliche came to visit. Tree branch scraping window, check. Shadows dancing across the room, check. Closet door I don’t remember leaving open, check. Then, I looked at my alarm clock. At first the numbers were jumbled, like my brain refused to process them. I looked to my husband. He was out cold again. Back to the clock. Gone.

I couldn’t see it from my bed. I stood up, my stomach sank. I didn’t see my clock anywhere. I knelt down and lifted up the dust skirt. There was the clock. I reached under, but the clock seemed to move just out of reach. I kept reaching further and further for it. Before I knew what was happening I had both shoulders under the bed. I looked up.

There was a hand coming out of my floor, pulling the alarm clock just out of reach. I started to scream, another hand grabbed my mouth. My husband slept through the thrashing under the bed. The hand pulled my gaze down to the floor. I fought harder, but couldn’t escape its grasp. Then a face started rising up out of the wood grains.

I couldn’t pick the face out or help a sketch artist, but I remember the eyes. White, veiny, distinctly… human. They rolled around without purpose in the wooden sockets. They suddenly stopped and locked with my eyes. I heard the sound of wood cracking. I struggled to look around. I saw it’s mouth opening wide, with thin strands of wood like stitches stretching between the wooden lips. A long, twisting and swirling tongue came out towards me. It had the sounds of an old house “settling” that I use to hear at night. It was cold and slimy against my cheek.

I lost my shit. My thrashing and attempted screaming under the bed must have woken my husband up again. When I caught a glimpse of his legs getting out of bed, whatever had me disappeared. I couldn’t muster an explanation. Neither of us understood what was happening, but when I finally told him what had happened he believed me. Mostly because of the handprint over my mouth.

Matt come back home after school that Monday. He was ecstatic. He didn’t see any of the faces. My husband wanted to pick up all of the covers we’d put down. I didn’t think it was a good idea, but he still wasn’t completely sold. I drag him aside.

“Mark, don’t you remember what happened this weekend?”

“Maryanne, I think we should give it a shot. I think it was all just stress and overreaction. Matt seems fine now.”

Everything was quiet for weeks, maybe even months. One night the creaks and cracks started again. No faces, but the noises were loud enough that they woke up the whole house. My husband and I followed the creaking down the hall, and down the stairs. It started moving closer to us. It was in the ceiling, then in the floor, and then in the walls, too.

I stumbled forward from a hard smack to my back. I jerked around to see what it was. A dusty arm retreated back into the plaster wall. I checked the wall, it was undamaged. I looked up and down the hall. Thump. Thump. It was like there were hands hitting walls all around us. My husband hit the wall back. The hole he left flexed and gnashed. The jagged edges arranged into human like teeth. The wall smiled and laughed at us.

Arms stretched from the walls, leaving chalky dust in the air as they flexed and grabbed at thin air. They managed to snag one of my arms. Then the other, then my legs. I thought it was going to rip me in half on the spot. My son and my husband grabbed and jerked at the arms to no avail. After what felt like an eternity of fighting, my husband jerked it out the wall. It fell to the floor in a flow of dust.

All three of us ran. Hands coming out of the floor tried to grab us. Faces scowled or laughed. They pinched us, smacked us, and tried to trip us as we ran for the door. We scrambled for the front door, through the hands and feet, through the faces and deafening creaking. We tried to jerk the door opened. It wouldn’t budge. The lock was gone, the door seemed to just turn into wall with no jamb or edge.

“Nooooooooo…” a voice groaned, “Stay with all of us…”

My husband kept jerking at the door. He hit it, he kicked it.

“We want your company.” the voice said.

Holes opened up in the door between punches. Rows of old crooked nails came down, two old marbles filled holes above it. It stretched out towards us in a deformed head. It shook it’s head no.

“You will stay!” it boomed, “You belong here now!”

My son was at a window in the living room. He smashed it with a small table. We ran for the window. My husband grabbed an antique oil lamp on his way out. He lit it on the porch, and threw it through the window.

We watched the house go up in flame that night. We all had some minor burns, the flames spread faster than they ever normally would. We stood in the street and watched everything go, and through the flames I saw a toothy smile of nails.

—
Credits to: photofreecreepypasta

Trails

I used to live somewhere with a lot of trails that were more like footpaths the locals knew about than anything marked and they definitely didn’t show up on any maps. There was weak phone service, but only in random spots and not on any of the trails.

Once I decided to go left where I’d usually turn right. I went up these hills with little holes in the ground and it sounded like there were crickets everywhere. I thought they were rattlesnakes but my mom insisted they weren’t because it was too cold for them to survive. We didn’t realize I’d been right until we were surrounded by hundreds. We couldn’t see any because it was dusk but running home was memorable.

There was a trail that was only accessed if you went through a hole in a fence, across a dead field, then up a steep hill with trees so big and thick that if you didn’t know it was there you probably wouldn’t find it. I only knew it was there because I saw the neighbor’s kids go up there with their bikes. Looking back it’s shocking they survived going down that hill, but that’s another story.

Anyway, we went up there quite a few times and found out that the path forked pretty often so it was difficult to remember which way we came. We didn’t get lost often, but it happened.

Once we explored a place down the same trail, but we turned down a way that was much less traveled. From where we ended up, we could easily be seen from all around, but because of all the trees surrounding us, we wouldn’t be able to see anything trying to hide. We heard some sound following us, and we figured it was a harmless animal crunching on leaves in a weird way.

We went deeper into the forest, talking about the repairs our house needed and how the street our house was on the corner of was so steep. We also talked about how I’d be turning 12 and other personal information. The sound persisted, and since it wasn’t a crunch I was used to hearing, it stuck in my mind.

My mom suddenly wanted us to calmly go straight home as the crunching got much closer. It wasn’t until I was a bit older that my mom told me it wasn’t crunching, it was clicking, and that she saw someone with a camera hiding and smiling from behind a tree. I can only imagine why they’d want pictures of an 11 year old in the middle of the woods with no one besides her mom knowing where she was and no way to defend herself or call for help, let alone be heard. It still scares me.

Another time we went waaaay deeper into the woods than usual. My mom felt uneasy for some reason and decided to go a little bit ahead before my little brother and I did. I agreed to that and I was so busy making sure my severely autistic little brother didn’t fall down one of the cliffs that the trail was next to that I didn’t realize how long my mom was gone or what was happening.

When she came back she was doing the thing where she tries to appear calm but is clearly terrified to the point of shaking. We left immediately and never went back. I never found out what happened. I doubt she even remembers now.

(This story was submitted by a user who wished to remain anonymous)

Remember Smith

Hours have gone by, with nothing. I’ve typed the same shit over and over, which is getting me nowhere. It’s time to get something done…

Smith, before I go further with this, I want to establish how much I hate you. Although, in a sense, I’m proud of you. This trap is rather elaborate, and even uses my own idea against me. You’ve thought around every corner to ensure my suicidal demise in the end, and for that, I commend you.

How long you’ll go on is lost to me. I’m not sure how, but perhaps this log will be recovered, and someone else will want to dent your face in. You may have gone years without being caught, but you won’t continue much longer, not like this. I’ll try to be sure of it.

Now, with my personal message out of the way, I’m not sure where to begin. I have what feels to be all the time in the world, yet that’s not something I can be sure of. For some time, I’ve been oblivious to the loss of blood from my wrist. It wasn’t apparent until the pain began to set in, but its been slow. I’m hoping I can at least keep alive until this is finished, wherever it may be going. I apologize for any blatant typos or unfixed errors. A perfect paper isn’t my highest objective at the moment.

I’ll start by talking about him, I suppose. Smith. We worked for a time, but we never shared a friendship. Our relationship was strictly business. We never met outside our work, and left much of our personal lives undisclosed. Knowing of his past could’ve surely prevented this, at least this outcome.

I work(ed) at Massachusetts General Hospital, by the way. My occupation is a general researcher, but I had a bit of a side interest, which Smith apparently shared. As I delved into the medical research field, I began a fascination with technological enhancements. It was more of a fantasy to me, a strange world that I dreamed of and sketched throughout the day. For Smith, it was essential, to say the least. It was his pursuit.

It was his obsession.

The first day Smith confronted me was while I was on break. At the time, I believed he was actually working at Mass. General. However he sneaks about, he must be good at it.

Smith was drawn in by a sketch of mine. It was a undeveloped, spur-of-the-moment idea: a wrist device, similar to a watch, that could regulate areas of the body by injecting various chemicals into the bloodstream. In theory, it could adjust body heat, maintain blood sugar levels, keep its user alert and awake, or vice versa. It was another fantasy to me, as I would never have the time or resources to construct such a piece. Smith, on the other hand, saw potential in it.

Him and I chatted for a while, about are similar views on the concept. Its hard for me to say this now, but at the time, I found him to be quite an engaging man to speak with. His insights into this world of technology were beyond any that I had heard. He’s the only individual I’ve ever spoken to who looks at tech enhancements as a real use and possibility.

From that day, we scheduled various dates in which we worked on the prototype device. Smith was rather paranoid of ideas being stolen, so we kept our location and progress quiet from other researchers. We worked at his apartment, which was secluded enough.

Throughout the project, Smith never stopped encouraging me, if “encouraging” would be an appropriate word. It appeared to be the only matter he focused on, annoyed that I didn’t feel the same. Yes, I thought the project had potential, but I still had a job to keep, at the very least. This frustrated him, for sure.

It was clear that Smith knew far more on the subject than myself. He constantly spoke about how he’s worked with tech for years. After only a week’s worth of collaborating, I wanted out, but was unsure of how to go about telling him. After all, he grew angry if I even questioned him. Abandoning him wouldn’t be much more promising.

Goddamn. The pain’s worse now, for sure. Maybe the wound’s worse than I thoughtt.

I’ll state that I had one major interest outside of tech enhancements. Over the years, I’ve developed an interest for writing. When I think about it, my interest in the latter came from my writing, as the ideas started out just story notes. I never explained this to Smith, for reasons that I hope I’ve made apparent.

Naturally, the project with Smith had taken up most (if not all) of my time outside work. Smith practically forced me to meet with him whenever I could. If I began to refuse, he would interrogate me, asking me about my life, what I could possibly be doing in place of our progress. I’ll admit, he frightened me. I’m not sure what exactly about him was unsettling, but he seemed capable of pushing to the end, meeting his goals at whatever costs.

I’ll leave out the time in between, but before I left the project, we had made progress. Though we still were nowhere close in finishing the prototype device, we had made much ground in getting its basic functions working. The only reason I stayed was because of the device itself, that my fantasy sketch might just become a real, working tool.

Then, all our progress was shattered.

Unsurprisingly, Smith grew impatient. Despite our progress, he wasn’t yet satisfied. He wanted the device fully operational, right away. He began to tamper with at the delicate piece. His hands were shaking, jolting with various screws and micro-sized vials. He began screwing with the device’s code, ultimately erasing hours of work, and rendering the technology near useless.

He blamed me for our failure, of course. I tried to argue how it was his own fault, but this only sent him off more.

“What have you fucking done?!”, he screamed. “You’ve never cared about this from the start, have you?! This was just some fucking drawing that you made, that I wanted to see for real! THIS is the stuff I live for! I’ve done this before! I’ve created my own inventions, and tested them! What have you done?!”

He grew violent, making threats and throwing objects about. Needless to say, I didn’t want any part of him anymore. I left on the spot.

I continued with my regular job, and found a peace of mind again. Smith’s threats continued to echo in memory, however, as they were too sinister to be passed off.

Four days after I abandoned the project, I was approached by two men. Where they came from, I didn’t know, but they were investigators. They asked if I’d see Smith, as they’d been tracking him for a long time. I told them a bit of what I knew, and what followed was a long, tedious interrogation.

Eventually, when they knew they’d been told everything, they told me the truth about Smith.

Smith Alexander wasn’t lying when he said he’d “done this before”. Despite meeting me in the hospital, and describing his job, he’s never worked there in his life. He’s never worked in any hospital, or any medical or science profession. He’s slid and faked his way about the systems for years, with almost no one catching on. As unsettling as it is for an impersonator to be creeping his way about a medical facility, it was his reasons for being there that set me off.

He was looking for live subjects; injured individuals for him to test his “designs”. He’s scanned businesses, schools, and public areas to find a wide array of experimental material.

In short, he used people as human test dummies.

What he did with his captives ranged from lethal to vomit-inducing. The investigators told me some reports, as well as showed me some photos. He loved to tamper with the heart, resulting with some of his less-brutal murders. However, his psychotic designs had no limits. Some of the photos showed a man with both his arms sawed off, with metal rods replacing the limbs. Another photo showed a woman with her back flayed open, syringes lining her spine, which had turned a sickly black color. He didn’t discriminate when it came to his victims. I stopped looking at the photos when they started included children.

I’m getting drowsy now….fuck. I should at least get to my own predicament, before I end.

Last night, I was working on a novel of mine, right inside my apartment. It was still unfinished, but I was closing in on its conclusion. Despite the confidence, a lack of rest got the better of me, and I drifted into sleep right at the desk.

Fuck. I just realized that I may’ve been knocked out by the water I was drinking at the desk. It had an interesting taste to it, but my focus was devoted to writing. Smith must’ve slipped in here before and drugged the glasses.

I need to keep on subject. I awoke this morning, right in my apartment, at my desk. The computer screen blared in front of my eyes, which showed a blank page. My ears were greeted with two words:
“Start typing.”

A cold, narrow shaft bumped against my head. The voice was familiar, but given that I woke up seconds before, my mind was still dazed and unfocused.

“Start typing, dammit!”, the voice shouted, with a cold surface being pressed against me.

The voice was Smith, and he was holding a pistol to my skull.

“Smith”, I said, beginning to wake. “What the hell ar-“

“Type, or your face will be smeared on the monitor”.

I listened, despite my confusion. Slews of letters appeared on the screen, as I was only complying for my life.

“There”, he said. “This is what you wanted, correct? You wanted to write? I knew it was your hobby. I’ve seen you work like this a number of times. Now that you’re out of the project, you have all the time in the world write.”

Smith reached over my shoulder, towards my right arm. He pressed a small button on a watch, which was secured on my wrist. I hadn’t noticed it until he reached for it.

“Don’t stop now”, he said. “I’ll explain your situation: That’s it, by the way. Your design. I made it possible, all without your help. It’s a prototype, as it only has one feature. It’s connected to the keyboard that you’re using now. More importantly, its needle is connected to your bloodstream. Fiddle with it, or stop typing for more than ten seconds, then it will send a small dose of lethal poison into your system. Your heart, along with everything else, will die in less than a minute. All you have to do to prevent that, is just keep typing. Keep typing to your heart’s desire….”



“You’re fucking crazy!”, I screamed, smashing the keyboard with a fist.

“Don’t type too aggressive, now. That keyboard breaks, then so do you. Before you get any clever exploits in mind, I’ve wired the keyboard to the watch in specific ways. Tricks such as weighing down the keys or holding down one letter won’t work. Don’t bother with trying to get up, either. I’ve removed all the phones from this room, and there’s no inhabited room nearby in the building. Help is unreachable, unless you run out of this room. If you wish to attempt a suicidal escape, by all means, go ahead.”

“You won’t get away with this, you sick fuck. Someone will come for me eventually, and I’ll tell them everything.”

“Perhaps they will, but will you go on that long? I guess that’s up for you to find out. Now please, continue to write. I won’t distract you any longer. Enjoy your session, David.”

And with that, the bastard walked out. If I had to guess, he’s still been uncaught

That was about six hours ago, if I’ve been keeping track of time right. He’s right when he said there’s no way out of this. I’ve been here continuously writing and deleting the same shit, trying to think of a plan. He’s left every crack sealed, as far as escape goes. Despite his warning, I actually did try screaming for help earlier, and no one’s shown since then.

After hours of useless plans, I knew the best (and only) course of action would be to write my own, final chronicle. I’ve explained a story, and the trap, so I suppose the only part left is the warning. God DAmmit! My wrist is fucking killing me at this point, and the pain’s moved up towards my shoulder. It’s painful to lift my right fingers, let alone my arm. Smith’s rushed most of his prototypes, and this oen was no exception. Even if I keep going, I’m sure I’ll die from blood loss soon.

Over the course of typing this, I’ve found the best loophole available:

The computer’s locked on this text program, but I can still send out the document directly from it. I’m going to think of every address I can remember, even one’s of those I don’t know personally.

My name is David Mallory. Smith Alexander is most likely still out there, wherever he may be. He probably skipped this town right after trapping me here. He’s dangerous, to say the least. He uses random people as test material in his terrible, rush “ideas”.. He’s created devices to kill, like the one clasped to my wrist right now. I don’t know what his end goal is, but he’s had no problem murdering so far.

End goal…that needds to be said. He must be stoppped.

Despite Smith’s impatience, arrogance, and outright insanity, he has a plan. Over the course of working with him, he’s made hints to something bigger, morE significant than his regular, brutal enhancements. He talked about how he planned to “bless society” with a grand technology, a modification that would be to all, for all.

He even talked about how he would sneak it into circulation.

Whether it’s a virus, nano-sized tech, a fucked up drug, I don’t know. But whatever twisted vision it is, Smith’s capable of it. He’s been capable of all the violence he’s committed so far, and he’s a danger to aNyone at this point. If he’s got away with his crimes so far, what’s to stop him now?

That’s it„ for me. I’ve gotten out all I can in this little time. Fuck you, Smith. Goddammit, fuckk you…

6he pain’s moving towards my chest now, my heaart. I guess this watch didn’tt work as well as SMith thought. By the time I put in the addresses and send this out, I’ll be close to keeling over. I’ll let the poison take me, then. SHouljd be less painful, I hoep.

Forget about mE, my lifee. Remember Smith, though. Remember his atrocities that I’ve detailed, that he’s still out there…

…and he’s still working.

—
Credits to: creepy-creepy-pasta

The Girl in the Log

I always hated visiting my grandpa’s old cabin. That might make me seem spoiled or ungrateful. What kid doesn’t enjoy seeing her grandpa? Especially considering he was the only grandparent I had ever known. Both of my mom’s parents were killed in a car accident before I was born, and my dad’s mom walked out on him when he was very young. He still doesn’t know where she is or if she’s even alive.

So that only leaves my paternal grandfather. My parents desperately wanted me to have a good relationship with him. My dad insisted that, although Grandpa was stern and quiet, he really did love me. He just didn’t know how to express it. I figured that was probably true, but it didn’t change the fact that trips to his house were filled with idle hours watching television and reading while he worked during the day, followed by awkwardly silent dinners in the evenings. I rarely saw him, and he seldom spoke in any loving way. He just kept a wary eye on me, like he was waiting for me to break something of his or talk out of line.

Still, my parents insisted on sending me to spend a week with him every summer since I was ten- old enough to look after myself for the day. I had visited his isolated cabin in the woods several times before with my parents, but this would be the first time I stayed overnight by myself.

There were no kids my age around, or neighbors of any age for that matter, so I would have to pass the time by myself. This may sound awful for a ten year old girl, but I was used to being alone. I was an only child and was always a bit of an introvert. Truthfully, I knew I probably wouldn’t be able to make new friends even if I had the option.

So, on my first day at the cabin, I set out into the woods with a Nancy Drew book tucked under my arm to find a peaceful area to read, away from the musty “old person” smell of the cabin.

After walking for a while, I found a little clearing illuminated by the sun breaking through the trees. Pushed against a large oak and surrounded by pretty flowers, was a large hollow log. The whole scene reminded me of a place where the characters in my stories would have their adventures, so I decided to make this little clearing my own special spot for the next six days. I plunked myself onto the center of the log, leaned against the trunk of the oak tree, and began to read, thinking that I might be able to enjoy my week here after all.

I was incredibly comfortable in my new place. The smell of the flowers, the hum of the insects around me, and the gentle breeze soon had me drifting to sleep, content with the feeling of nature.

The wonder was gone when I suddenly awoke hours later to find that the sun had set. The moonlight cast eerie shadows on the ground. The trees that felt so welcoming during the day were spooky silhouettes against the darkness, bending and snapping in the wind. The insects’ pleasant buzz was replaced with a distant howl and the low hoot of a nearby owl. The dry leaves scraped across the forest floor beside me with a rustle that chilled me to the bone.

I sat up on the log, rubbing my eyes and attempting to clear my sleep-fogged mind. Just as I was realizing the trouble I would surely be in for coming home so late, I heard it. To my left, at the end of the log, I heard a voice say two words.

“Hello, Ella.”

I froze. I have never felt so cold, so vulnerable. There was something wrong with that voice. It was too creaky. Too low. Too dry. I heard the leaves scrape across the ground again, but I felt no more wind. The air was oddly still. The realization suddenly hit me that this creepy rustling noise was not leaves; it was the low, raspy giggle of whoever had spoken. They were laughing. Laughing at me.

Slowly, I turned to the source of the awful laugh, and felt my blood freeze at the sight beside me.

A little girl crouched at the end of the log, her cracked and bloody fingernails scraping the dark wood. Her hair was probably blonde, but it was also slick with dark red blood, pouring from the horrible gash on the side of her head. The blood trickled onto her grey, bruised face. Her eyes were bloodshot, as though she had been crying for hours, maybe even days. But I could only assume she eventually ran out of tears and decided instead… to smile.

Oh, God. That smile…

A grin stretched unnaturally wide on her bruised face, clashing with the sadness of her eyes, giving her the look of one who has truly gone insane. Her teeth were mostly stained with blood, but the parts that were not shone white. Bright white. She continued to giggle, but did not part her teeth. She giggled through them and stretched that grin even more as she watched me.

She sprang from her crouched position on the ground and perched beside me on the log. The movement was so sudden that I clambered back, crashing onto the soft ground and staring in wide-eyed terror at the thing above me. She giggled louder at my terror, sounding like the static on a phone, and tilted her head to the left as she observed me. She tilted it so far that I could swear I heard her bones cracking, before she spoke.

“You’re scared,” she said, grin never wavering, head still tilted. It was not a question, but I could somehow tell that she wanted a response. I tried to speak, but all that escaped was a pitiful squeak. I then did what any child would do- what most adults would probably do in this situation- I peed myself.

The creature noticed, her awful eyes observing the growing darkness on my jeans, and let out a hiss of delight.

“Good,” it said.

At this point, my mind finally gained control of my body, and I managed to get up and RUN. I got back on the path and was out of there. The girl didn’t chase me. She stayed perched on that log like some gruesome bird, and continued to laugh.

I couldn’t get away from that laugh. It didn’t get quiet as I ran. On the contrary, it continued to get louder and louder the closer I got to my grandpa’s cabin. Only when I reached the yard did it start to fade. By the time I threw open the door to the house, it was only a whisper. Once I raced through the living room, down the hall, and into my bedroom, it was barely audible. Just before it faded completely away, I heard it say one more thing, so softly I wasn’t certain I’d heard correctly:

“Better lock the door.”

And it was gone. No whisper. No laugh. I turned on the light switch and slammed the bedroom door, leaning against it to catch my breath.

“Where have you been?” a gruff voice demanded from behind me.

I spun around, thinking for one horrible second that the creature had followed me home, and breathed a sigh of relief when I saw my grandpa kneeling beside my bed.

I began to stutter about dead little girls and chilling grins and evil laughs. My grandpa rolled his eyes and cut me off before I’d formed one coherent sentence.

“Whatever, I don’t care,” he grumbled, climbing to his feet. “Enough excuses. You’re home now. But know that you won’t get off easy next time. No crazy ghost story will help if this happens again.”

I was devastated. He didn’t believe me. Of course he didn’t. What adult would? Definitely none like my mean old grandpa.

“Something smells,” he griped, wrinkling his nose and glaring at me. “What’s all over your pants?”

Oh. Right.

“I, uh, I wet myself,” I admitted quietly, blushing at my shoes. “When I got scared.”

“Ugh!” Grandpa groaned, disgusted. “I thought you were old enough to be done with that sick crap. Clean up and get to bed. I’m not going through this every night.”

My loving grandfather then stomped out of the room, ignoring my apologies, and slammed the door.

Great guy, that gramps of mine.

Admitting defeat, I changed into my nightgown and clean panties, putting the soiled ones in the washer. I felt better. As mean as my grandpa could be, he’s still an adult who I knew would protect me from whatever was in the woods. After all, the giggling had stopped once I reached the guest bedroom. I felt safe there.

Until I went to bed.

Still on edge, I left the lights on and read a funny book to calm me down. I was beginning to drift off, feeling safe and warm, when I heard the dry, raspy voice say the words I would never forget.

“You didn’t lock the door, Ella.”

I shot straight up and looked at the window. There she was. Both hands pressed against the glass. Grinning that awful grin. The wild red eyes looking from me, to the door. The unlocked door. The giggle was mocking me, celebrating that she would win even though she gave me a head start. She continued to laugh as I flew from the bed to the door and locked it. As I heard the satisfying ‘click,’ I heard her croak, “Never forget.”

It stopped. She was no longer at the window. The raspy chuckle was not heard.

I didn’t go back to the woods that week. I stayed in the house to watch the news and read. Boring was good. Boring was safe.

I locked my bedroom door every night, and every night I woke up to the rattle of someone trying to get inside my room. The doorknob would shake loudly as the creature would grow frustrated with its resistance; the banging against the strong, wooden door would shake my bed. I never moved nor made a sound. I waited for her to give up, which she would. The shaking would stop, and I would hear low, deep breaths just outside the door. Sometimes the breathing would cease after a few moments, and sometimes it would follow me into my dreams. But it was always gone in the morning.

Years went by. I continued visiting my grandpa for one week during every summer, and I continued to spend the days indoors. Locking the door became a ritual, and I knew to expect the rattling as the creature tried to get to me. It no longer phased me. Part of the reason for my lack of fear was that I knew that the thing couldn’t get past my locked door (for whatever reason) but I also wasn’t afraid because I was fascinated.

The incident had sparked an interest in the paranormal. I was no longer a frightened child; I was a know-it-all teenager. I wanted to know more about the ghoulish girl. Who was she? How did she know my name? Why did she tell me exactly how to escape her? There came a point where my curiosity out-weighed my fear. I had a chance to encounter something few people ever will. I could find answers others would never find. That is why, when I was fifteen, I made the decision to unlock the door and confront the spirit.

I was an idiot.

The first night of my stay that summer, I got ready for bed and closed the door, resisting the natural urge to lock it. I tried to ignore the heavy dread that settled on me as I climbed into bed. I had made up my mind. I would no longer be a scared little girl.

So I waited. I had no intentions to sleep that night. I pulled out my iPad and played some games, alert to every creak and groan of the old house.

It was close to midnight when I heard them. Footsteps. Coming toward my room. This was it. I froze. Goosebumps all over my body. My heart pounding out of my chest. I set my iPad aside and watched the door that protected me for so long.

The doorknob slowly turned. I held my breath. The door was opening. This all happened in just a few seconds, but it felt like hours.

The door was completely open now, revealing a larger silhouette than I expected. I fumbled for the lamp next to my bed, grabbed the thin chain, and tugged. Light flooded the room to reveal…

…my grandpa.

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. The relief was overpowering. There was nothing to fear. My disappointment that I would not discover the secrets of the dead was pushed aside by the sheer joy that I was safe. No dead girl stood before me. It was only my grandpa, smiling at me in a way he never has before as he stepped into my room.

“Grandpa! You scared me,” I laughed, pushing my hair back with shaking hands.

“You left the door unlocked for me,” he noted, smiling warmly and closing the door softly behind him.

“Yeah, I did.” I couldn’t stop laughing at my own foolishness for leaving it locked for so long.

“I knew you’d come around, pretty girl,” my grandpa whispered, sitting beside me and tucking a strand of hair behind my ear. “I knew I just had to be patient for you.”

Uh. What was he talking about?

“I could have unlocked it myself,” he continued. “I have the key, of course. I thought many times about using it. But I resisted. I knew I had to give you the choice to let me in. It’s more special that way. I knew you’d come around.”

This wasn’t my grandpa. My grandpa was strict and never smiled; he never had a kind word to say. My grandpa doesn’t sit on my bed and touch my hair. And he certainly doesn’t run his hand up my thigh like he’s doing right now…

“Stop it!” I cried, slapping his hand away and jumping out of bed. “What are you doing?!”

A flicker of surprise passed his face quickly before he relaxed back into that sickly sweet smile.

“Honey, I won’t hurt you. Just come back to bed and we’ll take it easy.”

This wasn’t happening. This couldn’t be happening. I felt like I was going to vomit. I wanted something paranormal, something otherworldly. But this… this was real. Far too real.

“Shy all of a sudden?” the man on my bed asked, chuckling. “Allow me to break the ice, then.”

With that, he grabbed my hand and pinned me onto his lap before I had a chance to react. With surprising strength, he squeezed me arms to my sides and silenced my cries with a crushing kiss.

No. No! NO!

Summoning all my strength, I broke away from him and tore out of the room. I heard his surprised yelp and his pounding footsteps as he quickly chased after me, but I didn’t look back. I hurried out of the cabin and, ghost or no ghost, I was heading for the woods.

I wasn’t sure where I was going or what to do. I just ran as fast as I could, my grandfather right on my heels cursing and screeching that I would regret this. I ran, hoping there would be a house on the other side of the woods. Or maybe he would trip and break something. Or maybe he would grow tired and give up. I didn’t know.

We reached the clearing where I had met the little girl five years earlier, and I was struck with an insane idea. I’m not sure what I expected to happen, I just knew what my grandpa was threatening and I was desperate to stop him.

I raced to the old log and fell to my hands and knees, peering into the hollow darkness within.

“Help!” I screamed, my panicked voice echoing back to me. “Please, help! It was unlocked! The door was…”

Two strong hands grabbed my shoulders and whirled me around. I was looking into the face of the lunatic I once called “Grandpa.” His eyes rolled wildly in his head, his thin white hair stuck out at odd angles, and his mouth was twisted into a furious snarl. Panting and heaving, his red face was full of hatred and contempt for me. I saw no love there. No mercy.

“You,” he wheezed, “are going to regret…”

He stopped. I heard something move behind me, and his eyes widened in terror as he gaped over my shoulder. With a scream, he pushed me away and jumped back. I fell on my butt and backed away, turning toward my savior.

Her skin was still grey and her wound was still bleeding. That impossibly wide grin was still plastered across her bruised cheeks. Her eyes, however, were no longer sad. They glowed triumphantly as she approached my whimpering grandfather.

“Y-you!” he stammered, falling backwards and attempting to scramble away, seemingly unable to break eye contact with the dead girl.

She chuckled as she watched his horror. Giggled louder when he let out a painful cry and clutched his chest. Giggled louder still as he fell to his side, clawing at his heart. Laughed harder and louder than ever when he turned his head toward the night sky, the life fading from his eyes.

I squeezed my eyes shut, my back against a tree, and prayed for it to end soon. It did. The girl’s laugh faded away, whispering one last message: “Goodbye, Ella.”

The next day, I called the police to let them know that I had gone for a hike that morning, only to stumble upon the corpse of my beloved grandpa. Some nice officers arrived to comfort me and get my statement before driving me home. The cause of death was a heart attack. Some people thought it was odd that he had been in the woods when he died, but no one questioned too much. It wasn’t unheard of for him to take late night walks.

I didn’t tell my parents what happened. I didn’t think there would be a point. It would only cause more pain. He was dead. That was all that mattered. I even went to help them clean out his old cabin. I was tasked with boxing up the books. As I pulled an old photo album off the shelf, I managed to let it slip through my fingers and hit the floor, sending poorly secured photos flying everywhere.

Cursing my clumsiness, I bent down to gather them all. I picked up the photo closest to my feet, and froze.

It was her. Sitting on the porch of my house, holding a baby and grinning a wide grin that was much more pleasant when it matched her eyes. Her skin was creamy white and her cheeks were rosy. No wound spilled blood onto her beautiful blonde hair, but there was no doubt: this was the grinning girl I had feared for so long.

I hollered for my father and asked who she was. Looking at the photo, he paused for a long moment as tears filled his eyes.

“Well, the baby is you. And the girl holding you, she’s your sister. Abby.”

He looked at me with a sad smile.

“Sorry, kiddo,” he said softly. “We weren’t trying to hide her from you or anything. It’s just… difficult to talk about. She died when she was ten. You were barely a year old. We should’ve told you all of this sooner but, we weren’t sure how to go about it. At some point, I guess we just decided to let it go, figuring it would come up when the time was right.”

I could hardly register what he was saying. I heard myself ask how she died.

“She was playing in these woods out here, running around and having fun, when she tripped. Banged her head on a log and died instantly. She was found in the same general area they found my dad…”

At these words, he broke down in fresh tears. I comforted him numbly, knowing I would never tell him what I knew in my heart. He need never question his idea that his daughter was playing happily before she died. It would be cruel to tell him that Abby died running away in terror of the man he called “Dad.” Nor would he ever know how long her spirit lingered in that place, unable to rest in peace until she had warned the sister she knew so briefly of the danger, only leaving once the monster was dead.

Looking at the photograph of the smiling girl who held me so securely in her arms, I could only think of two words as my eyes filled with tears.

“Thanks, sis.”

—
Credits to: photofreecreepypasta

Mr. Welldone

Hello.

I am Mr. Welldone.

I watched the copulation which conceived you and I screamed in horror. I saw you birthed like a hatched parasite, hairless and gagging, and I grit my teeth in hatred, sliding them over each other again and again and again and again and again until they were flat and smooth. I will watch you wither and grow old, as your body congeals and the weight of your years pulls your flesh from your body and I will grin and snicker, laugh and laugh. I will see your desiccated corpse pumped full of superficial chemicals, interred into the dirt to feed the eyeless, subterranean creatures of the earth and I will howl because I know where you are going.

I know where you are going.

I know the secrets of this earth, as I knew the secrets of the one before it. I will bring about the End, and you cannot stop me.

You read these tales and you do not know that with each you read, with each you create and recreate, with each you retell, with each you claim ownership of, you beckon the End.

For there will be some among you who will try to verify these tales. You will seek them out. Those that do so with passion will find that many of them are falsehoods… but some will be harrowing at the very least. Others will leave you scarred for the rest of your fleeting days. Others still will leave you stripped of your flesh.

And that flesh will be used to build more, and more, and more tales. Twisted and stretched to cry out to more curious individuals.

And I will smile, my teeth clenching together tightly, tightly, tightly until one cracks with a satisfying pop. My eyes unblinking; watching everything fall into place; wide and empty; weeping and shriveling with delicious, protracted agony.

I am so excited. So very excited.

Even as you read this, some among you are emboldened. The sick part of you which lusts for the End whispers into your mind, making you want to see the horror, the pain, the blood, the death. You want to see it. You want to see what lies hidden in the Dark, beyond sight, smell, taste, hearing, and touch.

Come.

Come and see.

I will show you such wonderful things.

—
Credits to: photofreecreepypasta

The Tale of the Smiling Man

Everything I am about to tell you is absolutely 100% true...

I used to live in Boston, Massachusetts with my roommate John. I am a night person but he isn't. He is asleep by 9 P.M., and in the apartment complex we live in, they shut of most power at 11. Therefore, its not like I can jump on any video game of any sorts. On most days, I just chill out and play Angry Birds, Minecraft, or Slender on my Kindle Fire. But since it's been stolen I just head outside for a walk around the city.

John asks me why I do so, and what I see.

I simply feed him lies about police chasing criminals and fires around town. But, usually the city is dead by 10:30. There are few cars and people. It is usually peaceful so I can think for a while. I enjoy the walks, they help me clear my head of all anger and sadness, and think of the better things.

All of it is peaceful, except for one night. I was on my way back to the Apartments, when I saw a man standing at the end of the sidewalk. I peered down the road to see him better. He was a man wearing an old suit with a top hat and tie. It was very, very old fashion.

Then I saw him dancing, he was basically doing the tango, by himself.

The next part was the creepiest: I saw he had a painful smile, one that looks as if cartoonish.

He started walking towards me.

The fear caught up with me. He was insane.

He came towards me, doing is dance, inch by inch, moving ever so slightly.

I couldn’t move, as if I was frozen in place. My bones chilled. Fear then forced my legs to run. I saw a bloody dagger equipped in his hand. I ran as fast as I could without looking back, I dashed for my apartment.  I peered over my shoulder to see he had vanished, gone away. I sighed in relief and when I turned my head around, there he was.

He was standing there smiling at me with his dreadful smile.

I froze once again.

He was a car length from me.

I started to sprint once again. I was getting close to the apartment, when I heard a laugh. I looked around.

No one in sight.

I walked into the apartment complex and as I was about to head up the stairs, he was there, waiting for me. I screamed and ran to my room, locked the door, and pushed my bed in front of it.

John awoke. “What the bloody hell is going on?" he yelled in an interrogative manner.

I then told him everything. But the scariest part about it was that he was not a ghost, not a zombie, not a killer. But a normal man, only insane. That smile creeps me out even today. I have moved into a new building along with John.

He was more scared of this Smiley guy even more than I.

The even weirder thing is that I’ve seen him walk by my window, even though I am on the 6th floor.

Daycare

I still can’t get what happened last week out of my head. I mean, it doesn’t fit together at all. I haven’t been able to get any rest for the past few days just thinking about it, so I figured I’d just write it down here and see if you guys had any better luck explaining it.

I work in daycare. It’s a pretty established place in a big city on the coast. That’s about all I can say. I still work there and I don’t want someone linking this post back to my employer. I’m not supposed to talk about anything that happens to the kids online.

We mostly cater to the professional crowd. Busy people in finance and internet startups, who don’t use the office daycare. Or don’t have any office daycare. It’s a common sight to see someone in a business suit drop of a baby with a large cup of Starbucks in the other hand. People who can afford to blow twenty five bucks a week on coffee. Go figure. One of the attractions was that we offered daycare for infants as well. A Godsend for the jet setting crowd in the city I suppose.

Lucy C. was my favourite baby. Lucy’s her real first name, which is all I’m prepared to share. We all have favourites, working in daycare. We’re not like parents, having to spread the love out equally. Anyway, when you’re faced with four screaming babies, you grow to like the quiet ones more than the others. Lucy C. was as close to a perfect baby as we’d ever cared for. Wasn’t much of a crier, unless her nappy was full. Went to sleep like clockwork. She had a crown of wispy blonde hair, which set off her piercing cornflower blue eyes.

Mr C., as far as I could gather, was a self made businessman. One of those internet start up companies. I never caught what he did, and the five minute handovers in the morning really didn’t make for startling revelations about his hopes and dreams. He was always dressed sharply. I’m not one for chasing fashion but some of the other girls here whispered designer labels that I’d only heard of in celebrity mags when they referred to his latest threads. He seemed genuinely pleasant, if a little distracted in the mornings.

I’d never seen a Mrs C. There was an Abigail C. on the emergency contact form all the parents had to leave with the centre but she was listed as his sister. I know some of the others joked about whether he was on the market, so to speak, when they saw his sports car pull up to drop little Lucy off in the mornings, but that was just our equivalent of locker room talk. He was awfully rich though, successful in an ecosystem which chewed up and spit out a hundred other young businessmen every year. Some kind of magic touch, the others said, coming out of nowhere and building something up like that. Young entrepreneur of the year award and all that jazz.

I try and think back to that morning last week. Did Mr C. look strange that morning when he dropped Lucy off? To be honest, I’ve been over those five minutes hundreds of times over the past few days. His suit was immaculate. He greeted me like he did with the rest of the staff, warm smile, a kiss for Lucy, a gentle request for us “to take good care of his girl”. Just about the same thing any of the other twenty or so parents that hour would have said. Maybe there really wasn’t anything wrong. I keep on thinking back because if things had gone differently, I might have been able to save Lucy. Shit, I don’t know why I wrote that. Lucy’s fine. Or she should be. I don’t know why I can’t get it out of my head that I made a terrible mistake. Why there’s this guilt I feel when I check in at work and look at her favourite toys on the playroom floor.

The children were taking their afternoon nap after their midday meal. The chime told me that someone was at the desk. The other staff were busy with cleanup, so I went to see who it was. We didn’t have any early pickups scheduled, so I thought it might be someone making enquiries.

The guy was dressed in a suit, same as most of the other parents. It was a rich part of town. My breath caught a little when I saw him. He was really good looking. Not your high school crush good looking, I mean that guy looked like he was plucked straight from a fashion magazine. He stepped up to the counter and flashed this perfect white smile at me. There was something about this guy. I mean that smile made me go a little weak at the knees and it’s embarrassing to say but it also gave me a bit of a tingle down in my pants, if you know what I mean.

And then the strange part. As soon as I felt that little spark of arousal, it got drowned in this terrible feeling. Dirty. I felt dirty. Shameful. Like that time I’d walked in to call my younger brother down for dinner and found him jacking it to some random porn site. The kind of dirty that makes you feel like you’ll never be able to scrub it off.

When the man spoke, he had a sort of radio voice, you know kind of deep and smooth. It fit him perfectly.

“Mr C. and I had an agreement. I’m here to collect Lucy,” he said.

Not that Mr C. sent him. Not introducing himself. It was such a strange thing to say that I just stood there and gaped for a minute.

He just stood there, his eyes twinkling with good humour from that devilishly handsome face. Like he already knew the punchline to the joke.

It was an odd request. But we do get third party pick ups from time to time. It’s very, very rare. And we either need to be told in advance or be informed personally by the parents. Nobody had mentioned that baby Lucy was going to be picked up that day.

I told the man that we couldn’t do it unless he had authorization from the parent. He appeared to wait a while, deep in thought. Then he smiled and told me that everything had been arranged. He gestured towards my phone on the table. Just then, the damn thing rang. I jumped, a little edgier than I should have been. This strange man was really making me nervous. He had this weird air around him. It was intimidating. Like I was totally undeserving of his attention. His stare made my breath catch in my throat.

On the phone. Mr C. That was odd. He didn’t have my number. Hell, I didn’t have his number stored on my personal phone either. And it was on Facetime as well. I accepted the call and Mr C’s face filled the screen. Something was off about the call. At first I figured it to be the network connected. A little lag. His lips were out of sync with his voice. It was a disconcerting image, like a badly dubbed film.

“Hey. There’s a guy over there with you right?” Mr C. had a look of intense concentration on his face. There was something else there, a mark on his cheek. It was too small, too blur on the screen of my phone to make out. I knew for sure that it had not been there when he left Lucy in the morning. It seemed like some angular shape, the size of a quarter.

“Yes, there is sir.” I was mesmerized by the video feed.

“You need to give Lucy to him, you hear? Just give him Lucy.” His tone was clipped, urgent. There was something else about those flapping lips. They seemed to be repeating the same thing over and over.

“If you say so, Mr C. Is there something wrong?” Same two words. I could almost make them out.

“Nothing’s wrong. Just give him the girl. It’ll be fine after that.” I could see the slight parting of his lips for the sibilant. A small roll of his tongue for the second word. And repeated, over and over.

I looked back up at the man, standing there with a quiet smirk on his face. “I’ll go get the baby.” I left him there, and slowly made my way to the creches. S. L. I turned the words around in my head. What could Mr C. have been trying to say. S. L. Save. Save? Lucy?

I stood over the crib where she lay sleeping. She gave a gurgle of complaint as I scooped her up into my arms. Save Lucy, Mr C. had said. Did he know about the man at the counter? What agreement did they have? My mind was clouded with questions. I’d been given a direct instruction from the parent. Maybe there was a home emergency or something else.

The man beamed widely. He drew closer to the counter. There was a smokey smell about him, I hadn’t figured him for a smoker, with his perfect white teeth and his toned physique. He reached out for Lucy. I stopped short. “How do I even know you’re the man that Mr C. told me about, you could be anyone?” I said defiantly, not intending to let her go without a fight.

“Oh, Mr C. and I go back a long way. You could call me a godparent almost.” His mouth twisted at the penultimate word, like it left a sour taste in his mouth. “I’ve been watching over her since she was a baby. Here, I’ll prove it. She has a small birthmark on her left hip. Check and see.”

Triumph. There was no such birthmark on her. I’d gone over the files of each of my charges and I knew them almost as well as their parents did. Maybe even better, after all, I spent more time with them. I placed Lucy on the table and tugged at her nappy. Expecting to see pale skin, my mouth dropped open when I saw that angry red mark on her hip. That was not all. It was familiar. It was the same mark that had been on Mr C’s cheek. I try and try to remember what the mark looked like, but every time I do, my mind slides of the shape. It’s slippery in my mind, like trying to grasp a fish. It was small and angular. Almost like one of those runes they have in fantasy novels. That’s the worst thing. I stared at it for a good five minutes and I can’t form the shape in my head when I try to remember it.

“You seem reluctant, young lady. I assure you that no further inconvenience will befall you regarding this matter. The business is between me and baby Lucy here.” He leaned forward onto the counter. “It’s a slow day, I supposed you and I could come to some small agreement for the handover? The child needs to be given willingly and I’d hate for this to be delayed any further than it already has.” The smell of smoke grew stronger.

I picked up the baby and hugged her to my chest. She began to squall at the uncomfortable pressure. “I’ll need to speak to my supervisor about this,” I said. The man sighed and straightened up. “I was really hoping to be done with this business this afternoon. No matter, what’s due to me will come in the end. If not from you, then maybe from someone else more amenable.”

I turned around to call for the manager, but when she called back and I turned to the counter, the man was already gone, without so much as a chime from the door. I shook my head. He had been there a moment before and there hadn’t been a single noise when he disappeared. He left nothing but the faint smell of smoke and a freezing cold spot on the counter where he’d rested his elbows.

I censored the worst part of the events of the afternoon, saying that someone had come by to pick Lucy up had left without her. The manager, Jane, didn’t believe me. She looked Mr C. up on the register and gave him a call from the counter phone. I watched, biting my lip, as her jaw dropped and her face turned white. “You must have been mistaken. Mr C…” she swallowed. She took a shuddering breath. “That was the cops. Mr C. is dead. After dropping Lucy off this morning, he drove straight to his office and blew his brains out.” I shivered. Jane mistook my reaction for shock. That it was, but shock of a different kind. I took a look at my call history. Three thirty-five. The call was at three thirty-five. I shook so hard that the phone clattered to the floor.

Jane was still her take charge self, even while reeling from shock, she managed to call up the emergency number from the register with shaky fingers and dialed Abigail C., Mr C’s sister. The cops weren’t going to pick Lucy up, they had better things to do. She would be on the red eye flight over to get Lucy the first thing in the morning. That left us with the problem of taking care of the baby overnight. Jane offered to pay me double to stay there overnight with Lucy and I’d get the day off the next day to boot. It was a practical decision. None of the staff had small children at home and it would be easier to leave the baby in a familiar environment than to move all the stuff to one of our houses.

—

I had settled down for the evening. Dinner was some forgettable microwaved package out of the fridge. At least the place was set up for sleeping over. I’d been given a couple of hours off to grab and overnight bag and a shower. One by one the rest of the staff said goodbye, until it was just me and Lucy.

I couldn’t shake off the feeling that there was someone else in the centre apart from Lucy and I. The kind of feeling you get on the small hairs on the back of your neck that something isn’t quite right. I put it down to that creepy episode with the dark man earlier in the day and that impossible phone call. I checked on Lucy for the fifth or sixth time. She was sound asleep. Sleep came less easy for me.

Lucy’s crying woke me up in the middle of the night. I rushed over to the next room. I checked her nappy, she didn’t need changing. It was only after I blinked the sleep from my eyes that I saw the indentation of a hand on the clean white sheets of her crib. A big print. A man’s hand surely. I didn’t have to touch it to know that it would be freezing cold just like the countertop, but I did it anyway. I sucked at my lips as the cold sheet burnt my finger, almost like putting my finger on an ice cube straight from the freezer.

I hugged Lucy to my chest.

I gave a little scream as my phone rang from the next room. I looked at the number. Mr C. It took me three tries to hang up, my quivering finger missing the little spot on the touch screen over and over. Immediately after I killed the call, my phone sounded again. And again. And again until I powered it down. I glared at it, chest heaving. Ever wondered what goes through your mind when there’s nothing pumping through your veins but ice, and no motivation but raw animal fear? Nothing. That’s what. Instincts take over. You look for an escape. An opportunity. But what was there to run from? The feeling that I was being watched by that dark stranger? The phone calls from a dead man? I hit all the lights in the centre, power bill be damned. I felt trapped by those cheery pastel walls. I looked at the clock. Three am. Another three hours till first light. I held Lucy tighter. Those were the longest three hours of my life.

—

A rap on the front door woke me up. A tall, thin woman stood outside the glass doors of the centre. She was dressed for mourning, black from head to toe. It was windy out, her short bob whipping around her head. I hurried to let her in. She introduced herself as Mr C’s sister. Sensing my doubt, she showed me her driver’s license and the phone which had the number on our records. Lucy didn’t complain when the lady picked her up.

I got the release form ready and passed it over for the lady’s perfunctory signature. Everything checked out except for one thing. She didn’t have a trace of sadness around her, apart from a little dark under her eyes from the late flight across the country. Funny, for someone whose brother had just shot himself. She flashed me a smile as she pushed the signed form back across the glass counter.

I watched her stride confidently back out through the glass doors. There was something out of place with Mr C’s sister.

*from someone else more amenable.* That’s what the man said. If not me, then someone else.

There was a thud as the door closed. The wind snagged the woman’s hair from the collar of her dress, and there, red and raw on the nape of her neck, was that same symbol.

By the time I got out from behind the counter and out through the door, they were both gone.

—

It’s been a week. Mr C. didn’t have family in town. The authorities didn’t bother us about her, really. A cop called by to make sure that she had been handed over to an appropriate guardian and that was that. When nobody was looking, I would try dialing both Mr C’s number as well as his sister. The numbers were live for a day or so, then they were disconnected. I’ve tried for hours to remember the symbol that was on Lucy’s hip, the bizarre thing that appeared the day her father died. But I can’t. I just can’t do it.

I wonder what kind of agreement he had with Mr C, and how Lucy fit into the whole thing. I hope that Lucy is alright, somewhere out there, and that I’m just being paranoid. I know deep in my heart that this is a lie I need to tell myself if I am to have any semblance of normalcy after that one day. Most of all, I try to forget the face of the dark stranger with the perfect smile, who made me feel all hot and shameful at once, with those freezing cold hands. And I lie awake in bed, hoping that if I forget him, then maybe, just maybe, he will not remember me.

—
Credits to: photofreecreepypasta