Living in the city can be fantastic. I grew up in the suburbs of a desert city and all sorts of terrible things happen near you but the perception of how close that danger is skewed when you’re packed in so tightly. There are so many people in the city and you.. you can’t blame people for not seeing the patterns. You can’t blame us for not knowing, we weren’t prepared for it, who could be? Something happened to me. I have to explain, I hope you understand.
A month passed and it stayed there, we asked neighbours and no one seemed to know who owned the vehicle. We called the police department and they came out and put a few notices up on the car window saying it would be booted and towed if no one moved it. The next day the notices were removed from the car, but it hadn’t moved. It kept bothering me, I couldn’t explain anything about it just a red sedan with black tinted windows. We called the police department and they said that the vehicle is allowed to stay there and that they spoke to the owner of the car and they’re not breaking the law. They wouldn’t say who owned it.
I was relieved to know the police resolved the issue but this new unwavering statue remained on the street. I needed to know more, so I did what any single tech-field related bachelor would do and decided a stake out was in order. I called a few friends and we settled in and started watching the car. After hours of playing Mario on the DS we decided that the owners weren’t going to take the car for the weekend. Our will wasn’t that strong in watching the car and we went inside.
The next day I noticed something different though. I stared at the car long enough for it’s image to be wrapped around my mind. The left side view mirror had been winged out while we watched it last night but now it was tucked in. When I walked by the car another idea pierced through my head, “This car has never been dirty.” I knew what bothered me so much about the car. After not seeing anyone ever near it or water pooled around it the car had gone through dust storms, wind, hail, and everything else and I’ve never seen it dirty or spotted. I know it will sound weird but standing there with this thought in my head made me sick to my stomach, a guttural stench that made me want to get away from the car overwhelmed me to run back to my house.
I stayed away from the car for a while. It stayed there, pristine for months before I gained enough courage to approach it. The house next to mine finished renovating but there were no tenants. I spoke with my neighbours and the car remained a mystery to them as well but none of them seemed concerned about it. I didn’t want to seem crazy so I kept my feelings about it pretty close to the vest, besides my one friend, Rick, I talked to about it, but again didn’t want to come off as a paranoid whack-a-doo.
Then the time came. What you feel is the inevitable course of your life when something odd comes and it either goes away or it comes for you. The time in your life when something happens you don’t want to explain, when you see something you cannot comprehend and your mind exhausts itself.
City life has the benefit of walking distance bars. I was coming home one night, though morning would be nice. It was the start of fall so it was cool, the type of cool where you know that the night is almost over and the sun is going to rise soon. I was walking pass the red car on the opposite street when something white caught my eye, something white and long under the red car. I turned and under the car I saw a the torso of a hairless man, pale as a white morning sun with elongated legs arms wrapped around the undercarriage of the car, it was lifting itself up out of sight but a pink streak, thin and leathery ending in a flat forked tongue ascended the car to the mirror and a red spot of liquid on the side view mirror was gently licked off, clean.
What do you do when your forced with a reality that couldn’t possibly be true? You don’t think about pulling out your phone and gawking. You don’t think at all. You just observe standing as still as possible while projecting a will to be invisible. When I came back, from witnessing the extraordinary, when I gained my senses the sun had come up and I was standing on my neighbours Bill’s lawn. I embarrassingly ran home staggering and still unsettled by what I witnessed. I wasn’t about to stick my head under that car to take a good look at whatever it was.
So I did what any nerd would do. I used the internet. I looked for police reports and news articles about missing people in my area. A spike of disappearances coincided with the arrival of the car. A spike wasn’t conclusive but it was a talking point when I explained my experience and theory to Rick. I believed that this… thing was nesting beneath the car. I called Rick over for a weekend of bar shenanigans and we got loaded into the wee hours of the morning. I rambled about my theory as we walked back to the car and this time I had enough liquid courage to bro up against a kaiju. I’m so sorry. I picked up a heavy rock. I didn’t say anything to Rick I just grabbed the rock threw it at the passenger window as hard as I could. I imagined that the alarm would go off and whatever was there would… come out and Rick would see it. Instead the window broke and the deepest foul stench hit the crisp morning air like the shock wave of a comet striking earth. Light from the rising sun and street light showed the car had been stripped down to nothing on the inside, nothing except skeletons with fragments of remains on them. There was no blood, no insects, just the irreversible sight of horror.
Rick called the police while tears streamed out of my wide eyed face. Nothing came from beneath the car. The thing wasn’t to be found. The police arrived and interviewed everyone for hours. There were 13 victims in total. 13 people stripped to the bone. It’s been a few days since everything, they talked to the people who validated the car, but it ended up being the family of one of the missing victims on the edge of the opposite side of the neighbourhood. However, it was before the car arrived.
This thing… I destroyed it’s nest, I took it away from it. I’m so sorry. It’s going to find a new nest somewhere else, I’m going to try and find it to warn others. I can’t be quiet any more.
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Credits to: ImSoTaco
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