Grandpa's 2nd Voice

When I was younger, my grandpa and I would watch those medical mystery TV shows. You know, the ones with six-legged cows or skinless babies that still manage to live. Weird allergies, genetic mutations, and even the somewhat comical “Well the doctor made a really big oops and left medical equipment inside of you and you’ve been living with it for 5+ years” stories. They were educational and gross at the same time, something that I fed off of as a young teen.

Grandpa would always joke around that he should be on those shows. I knew he wasn’t serious - he hated drawing attention to his issue. I would occupy myself with what they would title an episode of his, and always came back to the blunt, retro movie title of “The Man with Two Voices”.

Ever since any of my family can remember, grandpa’s had “two voices”. The only way for me to describe it is to compare it to having phlegm in your throat when you’re sick, and how it sometimes creates a split in your voice. There’s your normal speaking voice that you can hear fine, but underneath it is like a deeper growly echo. Then it’d be gone when you cleared your throat. My grandpa is like that all the time, but his “second voice” is just as loud as his normal voice.

I remember him telling me stories when he was much younger, and his mother pulling her hair out over the whole ordeal. Took him to doctors that stuck scopes and lights down his throat - nothing. Primitive x-rays on his neck - nothing. I used to ask grandpa why he didn’t go back to the doctor after that, especially now with all the new things they have in hospitals that he didn’t have growing up.

It was always the same answer, “They can’t tell me nothin’ new.”

We named his second voice “Ed”. My grandpa’s name was Albert, usually Al, so it sounded like a TV show. Ed & Al. Al & Ed.

When my grandpa died, it was tragic. Despite his vocal anomaly, he had tons of friends and people that loved him. Or, my skeptical mother would say, people that liked his “circus act”.

Her skepticism - that grandpa was using some sort of parlor trick - was quickly debunked at his autopsy.

Grandpa should have gone back to the doctor, we learned. An ultrasound would have indicated that his beer gut wasn’t actually beer, and his “second voice” was literally a second voice. The small, curled-up body of his unknown twin was unearthed from his belly, connected to his esophagus below his collarbone. His childhood doctors did not detect it.

It was made clear, then, that the hollow tube connecting the mouth of grandpa’s twin to his esophagus was the source of grandpa’s second voice. A voice that kept talking past grandpa’s death, according to the autopsist. Ed was still alive some days after that.

Rosebuds

One of the freakiest things that I’ve ever heard of happened to my mom, when she was carrying me she had a lot of problems (she almost got a miscarriage and I was born 2 months earlier) and when  I was born she also had a lot of problems.

So while she was all drowsy on her bed because of the drugs and of blood loss a nurse came in, and asked her for the roses on her bed stand because there was a priest that came to bless the kitchen and my mom was all like “Whatever, no harm’s done so be my guest”. After a while the nurse came back and gave my mom the roses.

Some minutes later another nurse came in to clean and do the usual nurse stuff and my mom told her “Thanks but another nurse came in some minutes ago”, to what the nurse replied: “No, no one was supposed to come in, unless one of the interns mixed up the schedule no one should be here” And my mom: “No, the nurse came in here some minutes ago” she described her and the nurse told her “there’s no one with that description working here ma’am”.

My mom told me that it could’ve been the drugs and blood loss but that she’s almost sure that the nurse that came in was dead or something because the hospital is a very old one and if the kitchen was ever blessed it must have happened a long time ago.

She still has the rosebuds btw.

--

psychedelicalligator

Army Man

During my senior year of high school I got a job working at a large department store that I will not name (but if you think for even half a second about ‘large American discount department stores’ you can probably guess what it was). I ended up working in the deli. You know how things go when you first get plopped down into a group of people who’ve known each other for a long time: it’s pretty uncomfortable because they have lots of in-jokes or catchphrases that you have no hope in hell of understanding. That’s what I thought the Army Man was, an in-joke.

You see, whenever there was some sort of accident — like, say, a woman working in bakery knocking over a stack of boxes, or one of my coworkers in deli dropping an entire eight-piece chicken on the floor on the way to the fryer, it was customary to jokingly grumble “The Army Man did it” and then restack the boxes or throw away the chicken or whatever. I never bothered asking for an explanation since the only thing that makes you feel like more of a loser than not getting an in-joke is asking everyone what an in-joke is all about.

After a while, though, I began to understand a little of what the crack meant. Sometimes whenever anyone blamed something on the Army Man, they would put their arms out in front of them and do a sort of pantomime of an on-your-belly-under-barbed-wire boot camp crawl. I took this to mean that that there was an imaginary solider crawling around on the floor of the store, causing all sorts of elfish mishaps, and some past joke to this effect had spawned whatever meme my coworkers were perpetuating.

I’d been working for a few months when I finally decided to ask what the Army Man was all about. I was in the break room when one of my coworkers, let’s call her Betty, happened to go on lunch. She was about my mom’s age and took a motherly interest in my current affairs, so she asked me about how my grades were and if I’d been accepted to any colleges and all that jazz. I humored her while she ate and then, about five minutes before my break ended, asked her about the Army Man.

Betty froze up completely, holding her lips really tight, and just shook her head. She refused to say anything about the subject, not even trying to be subtle about it, but Betty was always one for melodrama. I mean, Betty had made the joke along with everyone else; I didn’t understand why she wouldn’t talk about it now, unless she was being intentionally childish. I dropped the subject and went back to work.

A few days later I was in the break room again when Ruth, one of the women working in bakery, happened by. This time she brought up the subject with me, asking if I’d spoken to Betty about the Army Man. I figured it wouldn’t make any sense to say otherwise so I said that I had, and that Betty had refused to say anything about it.

Ruth just nodded and said, “Well, you know how Betty is.” When I said that I didn’t Ruth held her hands in front of her like she was praying and began to flap her lips in a silent imitation of prayer. Betty was an ardent Pentecostal, I knew, and instead of swearing had a habit of yelling out “Help me, Jesus!” when she got hot grease on her hand, but why this meant she didn’t talk about the Army Man, I had no clue.

So Ruth explained:

Sometime the year before one of the unloaders working third shift had been moving pallets into the large freezer where we kept all frozen goods that weren’t on the shelves; it was common practice to keep the freezer door open for most of the night while the unloaders took stuff from the truck and moved it in. This particular unloader had surprised his coworkers when they found him outside the freezer with the door slammed shut. When they tried to open it he begged them not to and, when they ignored him, he tried to fight them away.

At first they thought it was a joke, but soon it became obvious that this guy was desperate for them not to open the freezer door. He refused to tell them exactly what had happened; from the way he talked it sounded like he’d seen an animal sneak into the freezer, though why this would freak him out they couldn’t guess. They got the managers on duty that night, explained the situation, and against the unloader’s protests, ventured into the freezer.

There was nothing in there but boxes, though a few of them had been pulled down from their shelves and smashed, ruining quite a bit of merchandise. The unloader was fired, since it was assumed he’d done something wrong and was trying to shift the blame onto someone else. But before he’d left for good he’d worked a few more days, Ruth told me, and it was during this time he mentioned to some coworkers exactly what he had seen: a shape like a man on his stomach, naked and pale, just disappearing between the plastic flaps that hung down over the freezer door.

Of course the unloader could have mistaken a reflection in those same plastic sheets for whatever it was he claimed to have seen, so he was generally laughed at even after he was fired. It became harder to joke when other people began to see and hear it, though.

It was just snatches of conversation you might pick up, Ruth told me. The women working the returns desk, for instance, would mention that they thought they heard someone on the floor on the other side of their counter, but since they couldn’t see anything it must have been something on the floor — but they didn’t bother looking, because of course it was nothing. Cashiers had similar stories of hearing something move through their checkout lane even though there were no customers, something too low to the ground to be glimpsed over the edge of a counter. Coupled with the description the unloader had given, this was when people began to think of the thing as a person trying to be covert, pulling himself around on his stomach by use of his forearms. This was why they started calling it the Army Man.

Betty saw it in the deli. We had a hot case, a metal plexiglass display where we put warm food such as chicken and what-have-you under heatlamps; the top half of the case was filled with pans of food, French fries and so forth, that we served to customers, while the bottom half was filled with boxed eight pieces and rotisseries that the customers could grab on their own. One night while closing, Betty had bent down to clean the glass windows on this section of the hot case. She screamed her all-purpose curse — “Help me, Jesus!” — before promptly tumbling back on her ass and twisting her ankle.

At first the people working with her thought she’d just slipped, since the deli floor was covered in grease pretty much all the time. Betty was having trouble standing up again so they called in management, who quickly arranged a way to transport Betty to the hospital. While they waited, Betty explained to them what she saw: on the other side of the glass, out on the floor of the store, had been a thing looking back at her. That was what she called it, Ruth told me, not a man but a thing. Betty was out of commission while her leg healed up — it wasn’t broken, just twisted monstrously bad.

After a few weeks of general annoyances, a guy working in electronics insisted he’d seen someone crawling around on the merchandise shelves at the back of the department. Thinking it was a customer’s kid, he ran over to straighten them out, just as a few plasma TVs were knocked over and shattered. When he told management his story they of course didn’t believe him; there was barely enough room on the shelves for the TVs themselves, let alone a person, child or not. He was fired.

Four months or so before I started working, one of the mechanics in automotive refused to let a customer take their car back. The customer was naturally pissed and had called the department manager, a man named Rick. As the mechanic later told anyone who would listen, he’d been working on the customer’s car when he had to take a leak. Upon returning he’d seen things like fingers poking out from the vehicle’s undercarriage, curled around the bumper, but they withdrew before he could do anything about it.

He searched the car and found nothing, but when the customer came back he still had his doubts about letting the automobile leave the garage. He laid out the situation privately for Rick, who volunteered to test drive the car first and explained it away to the customer as some new quality control policy.

Rick drove fifteen feet into the parking lot before one of the front wheels of the car let out a groan and fell off completely. Needless to say Rick was very much embarrassed and there was a tangle of the usual insurance issues, with the customer blaming the store for tampering with his car. Somehow this was all settled out of court.

Rick killed himself two months after the car incident, though no one could say why. He hadn’t seemed particularly depressed and he’d been working as hard as ever, but one night he went home and (from what Ruth heard) overdosed on sleeping pills. Ruth had her own ideas, of course: the Army Man had gotten into the car with the intention of leaving the store, but Rick had foiled its plans and so, instead of following the customer home, it had chosen to follow him home instead. This naturally raised more questions than it answered: what the hell was the Army Man, then, and how had it gotten to the store to begin with? Ruth just shook her head and said something like, “Don’t ask me. I just bake French bread.” And that was that.

I quit the deli a few months later to head off to college. In the intervening time I had begun to wonder why people continued to joke about the Army Man, if it had ever existed in the first place and if it was half as serious as Ruth made it out to be. Was it just some way of relieving stress, trying to make it seem less important than it really was, or were they fucking with me? In time it occurred to me that if Ruth was right, if this Army Man could somehow pass between people and places, then there was a chance, however small, that it might come back to the store, or worse, that Rick had brought it back before he killed himself, and if either of those had happened, it could leave again with someone else.

Perhaps it was done out of fear, as a superstition. I’d been doing it too, I realized. It was just part of the atmosphere of the deli, part of working with people for an extended period of time: you adopt their references, their in-jokes, their memes.

I work in the campus library currently. It’s quiet, but I’ve never heard anything whispering across the carpeted floor. However, when I’m not paying attention while stacking books on a cart, a practice that inevitably leads to a bunch of them falling over, or when the network goes on the fritz and we can’t figure out why, I often find myself muttering, “The Army Man did it.”

I think a few of my coworkers have overheard me, because they’ve started to say it, too.


—Credit to H.P. Shivcraft (@SomethingAwful)

My Aunt’s Farm

Recently I begrudgingly made my annual visit to my aunt’s farm.

I hated every minute of it. I got scared of almost everything there. When the horses neighed, I squealed and jumped. When I saw the cutlery they used to shed meat off of the bone, I couldn’t sleep for the entire night. When I spied the scarecrow in the field, I could have sworn it turned and looked back at me.

They made fun of me constantly for that. I couldn’t even taste the steak without thinking of the poor thing that had to die to provide it. I hated the screams the livestock made when they were butchered, I always felt like they should have been killed beforehand.

But the absolutely worst part of the whole trip was finding enough people to come along with me to begin with- it’s getting tougher finding a new harvest with each passing year.

—
Credits to: fonzihippo

The Looking Game

The blaring sound of seven in the morning jars you violently from sleep, shoving dreams away like rocks off a cliff, never to be seen again. You stir and make morning noises as you reach from beneath your sheets and blindly search for the Snooze button. Once silenced, you convince yourself not to rappel back down the cliff of slumber and reluctantly get up to begin your day.

Yawning widely, you shuffle from your room to the hallway, wiping crust from your eyes and drool from your mouth. You never were a very pretty sleeper – part of the reason why you are still single. The thought makes you smile randomly.

You eventually find the bathroom and, after a few seconds of grasping in the dark, turn on the light. You flinch back like a frightened vampire before shaking your head at your own immaturity and stepping inside for a meeting with the porcelain head.

Concluding the meeting with a flush, you move to the sink to wash your hands. Your eyes wander up to the mirror, looking at your own semi-sleepy reflection. Your hair is a mess, and the bags under your eyes look like plums. You think to yourself, Wow, who’s that sexy beast? and chuckle softly, wringing soap from your hands.

Then, as you dry them on a towel adjacent, you get an idea.

Have you ever actually seen yourself looking away in a mirror? Not like you turn your head and look back with your eyes – that doesn’t count because you’d still see your reflection looking at you. You’re thinking more along the lines of catching yourself looking away, of somehow moving so quickly that you defy physics and actually see your reflection looking away before it can look back with you. Like the reflection is someone you can trick into making a mistake.

Clearly, you think to yourself, this is a dumb idea, a really dumb one. You can’t catch yourself looking off in a mirror. The amount of damage you’d need to do to the laws of nature and time… Well, simply put, it’s impossible.

That being said, you decide to try it anyway, a little pointless experiment to pass the time. It is Saturday, after all, so it’s not like you have anything better to do right now. Might as well indulge in a little childish self-amusement.

You place your hands flat on the sink, lock eyes with your reflection, and slowly turn your head until you can barely see the edge of the mirror. You mentally count one… two… three and turn sharply back to the mirror. Your reflection stares back at you. The both of you purse your lips thoughtfully.

You repeat the process: stare, turn, count to three, and turn back as fast as you can. Same result: staring at yourself. You stick out your lip in a pout. You don’t even know why you’re doing this, but it’s frustrating as hell. Maybe it’s because you’re still half asleep. Maybe it’s because you’re just crazy like your parents used to tease. Whatever the case, you decide to try again.

You stare at yourself, seeing all the colors in your irises, the red of the thin veins along the scleras. Slowly, you turn away, finding a point on the wall to focus on. However, instead of turning back immediately, you wait, keeping your head still, your eyes locked on the little nondescript spot. You tell yourself that, if you wait long enough, maybe you can fake it out, trick it into letting you win the game. You smile a bit at your own silly stupidity, but restrain the laughter, trying to maintain focus.

You count the seconds in your head. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. You remember your childhood, games played with friends, games like Hide n’ Seek or The Staring Contest. Fifteen. Sixteen. Seventeen. You remember your own competitive nature back then, the desire shared by all children to succeed over your friends, the desire to win at everything you do no matter how pointless or impossible. Twenty. Twenty-one. Twenty-two. You understand that you feel the same desire now, to reach for something you know is too far away, to try anyway until your fingers wrap around its barely material form. Twenty-five. Twenty-six. Twenty-seven. Even if it means falling over the edge, even if it means going just a smidge too far… the desire to win, in this moment of ticking seconds, is just too great.

Twenty-eight. Twenty-nine. Thirty.

You snap your head around so fast that it makes your vision blur for a moment. You have to blink the sudden fog from your eyes in order to see. When you do, you see the mirror, same as before and yet completely… different. First, you stare in disbelief, then you let out a long, deflating sigh which, as your lips slowly curl up into a smile, changes to a small, abrupt, slightly shocked laugh.

Your reflection, standing directly opposite you, is still staring off to the side. You can’t believe it. A disembodied image of yourself following movements and actions completely independent of you. You’ve only seen yourself like this in pictures or home videos. It’s unsettling, not to mention completely terrifying, to see it happen in a mirror, something not capable of prerecording images. But, more than anything, it’s unbelievable. You didn’t think this would happen – it’s just a silly little game, a whim, the result of boredom and one foot still in dreamland – but somehow it did exactly what you’d wanted it to do. It’s like finding fossils in your backyard or creating a hair loss solution from blood pressure meds.

You want to tell someone about this, show this to someone, maybe even create a sideshow attraction out of it and become exceedingly famous. You want to let someone know how you played the most impossible game there is and came out on top.

That being said, you’re locked to the sight of yourself looking away, unsure what might happen if you move or speak. Then, as you continue to stare at your imperfect doppelganger, the elation you feel slowly degenerates into something like soft unease. Something isn’t right. It should’ve moved back by now, the delay filled up as the reflection struggled to right itself and restore the natural order of things. But it remains fixed on the spot on the wall, so still that it doesn’t even seem to be breathing. The unease begins to calcify, to cling to the lining of your stomach and slowly weigh it down with growing nausea. What’s going on? Why isn’t it fixing itself? Why won’t it look at you and put everything back the way it was?

As the seconds pass without change, panic begins to bubble inside you. You want to speak, to shout at the reflection, to reach up and smack the glass as if you could wake it up or something, but you remain as fixed as it is, though a slight tremor begins to move through your bones. You shake and sweat, the desire to scream and cry and beg for the figure in the mirror to please, please look at you almost overwhelming. What if it never moved? What if it stayed that way, and every time you looked in a mirror next, all you would see is this sideways glance, unsullied as you brushed your teeth, unbent as you washed your hands, unsaturated as you stepped out of the shower? What if it never leaves this mirror, and all the mirrors in the world would only show the wallpaper behind your back, the towel rack behind your head, the empty space where you should be but will never occupy again like a lifeless ghost?

Then, after nearly twenty straight seconds, it finally moves – slowly turns its head to face you again. Your relief is palpable, heating your skin like a warm blanket. You are about to smile and let out the biggest breath, maybe even laugh and crack some kind of nervous joke to break the excruciating tension, but you stop when you actually see what it looking back at you in the polished glass.

Your reflection has changed but in a subtle, unnerving way. Its eyes are wide and fixed, its forehead smooth, its mouth a straight line – veritably, the complete opposite of the expression you wear now of fearful confusion. This face, combined with the renewed stillness and flawed exactitude, makes it seem more like you’re looking at a doll replica of yourself than your actual reflection. You find yourself wanting to back away, to turn out the light and leave the bathroom as fast as possible, but you’re fixed to the spot, staring at what should be a perfect representation of yourself but is somehow anything but.

Then, to your horror, the eyes of your reflection roll back into its head, leaving only bloodshot whites and fluttering eyelids. The head falls back while the mouth opens in a soundless, screaming gape. Then, with a brief shudder, the body crumples out of frame like a puppet relieved of its strings, the sounds of flesh and bone thud-thud-thudding against the floor clear and perfect.

Suddenly, you are staring at a reflection of the wall behind you.

You feel your heart hammer in your chest. Sweat beads across your skin and makes your hands slick and clammy. You’re shaking all over. Something’s wrong. Something’s gone terribly wrong, and you know that, if you just turn your head, you’ll know exactly what it is. But you’re scared, more scared than you’ve ever been in your whole life.

It’s just a game, you find yourself thinking. It’s just a game. Nothing was supposed to happen, especially not something like that. It’s not even possible, none of it is. It’s just a stupid, harmless little game… right?

Against all better judgment, you slowly, slowly turn your head and look down.

You see your own body lying still and lifeless at your feet.

As the knowledge of what you’ve done invades your mind, as the enormity of it brings you towards complete and total mental collapse, you have one final, cognizant thought: It is just a game, and I guess I won.

—
Credit To – MercuryCoatedVeins

Moving Day

I helped my mother move out of her apartment today.

She had been living there since I was born, and it was about time for her to find somewhere better. Her furniture was heavy, but I managed to get it in my truck alone, easily enough. Her television was a pain, but it fit cozily between my front and back seats.

The pictures of the family were placed in my passenger seat, so that I could look at them while I waited for street lights to signal. There was one of me drenched in mud in the park nearby, way back in the 90s, that gave me a slight chuckle. Another photo of me and my mother, embracing each other at a football game after the final touchdown made our team victorious.

I couldn’t stop smiling as I placed them in the seat. Moving her mattress was a little tougher, but after throwing away the sheets, it was easier to handle and slid nicely into my truck bed.

There was some dirty kitchen ware that she had no need for in their state, so I had to throw those away along with the sheets.

Her body, though, was a pain to stuff into the storage box.

—
Credits to: Neon_Platypus1

Pet Policy

We had a mouse problem at the Pink Ridge Inn. A set of double doors to the boiler room were pretty warped and banged up, so there were plenty of spots that mice could come wriggling inside from the small soybean field that stretched north from the rear parking lot of the hotel. I had just started at the Pink Ridge Inn a few weeks ago at this time and was still working the 3:00 pm to 11:00 pm evening shift. This was late November, so the Indiana winter was settling in rapidly.

We had a long-term check in on a Thursday night: the Crockers. The Crockers were a bit odd. The mother was a portlier woman—not fat, but robust and saggy from the stress of raising a family on her own. There was no Mr. Crocker present. She had two children. The older of the two was her son Michael. I gauge he was around 15 or 16 and in the grips of teenage angst. He had his ears pierced with black rubber studs, he had the remnants of black polish chipping off of his nails, his hair was heavily gelled and fashioned into twisted spikes. Michael had all the signs of troubled youth, but I may be quick to judge. He could hardly be bothered to look up from his smart phone and muttered something about “how stupid” it was to be living at a hotel for the next four months.

Mrs. Crocker’s other child was a girl, about the age of 7 or 8. She wore a pink faux-princess dress and slippers dotted with gaudy rhinestone. Her short, black hair was pushed back by a headband that had two furry kitten ears poking up from her head. It looked like she had scrawled whiskers on her cheeks with markers and Mrs. Crocker had subsequently tried to wipe them away, but only managed to leave faint lines and a lot of black smudging. Her daughter’s name was Audey. Audey had the sort of glazed over eyes and frozen, tepid expression of someone on a lot of prescription drugs. I assumed Ritalin or Adderall. It was 2013, a lot of kids these days are pumped full of pills and lumber around like zombies.

"I do have a pet," Mrs. Crocker said.

"No problem," I replied. "We allow pets, but there is a pet fee. $25 a night, but we only charge up to five nights, so you will only pay $125 total."

She sighed and massaged the bridge of her nose between her eyes. She was flustered, but she agreed to pay the fee. I got her all checked in, handed her the keys, and sent her on her way. Mrs. Crocker, her son Michael, her somnolent daughter Audey, and a cat.

A few days passed and the calendar turned over to December. That’s when the snow started, and once it started, it had no plans to stop. It seemed like every morning I woke up to fresh powder on my car.

One night was particularly bad. I was working the front desk and I was the only employee at the hotel. Usually after about 5:00 or 6:00, there’s only a lone Front Desk agent left to tend to the whole building. The wind was driving huge snowflakes down from the sky so hard that I couldn’t see further than ten feet out the window. The whole world outside the Pink Ridge Inn was whited out to me. No one was coming to check in in a storm like this, so the night was pretty slow. At 9:00 pm, the phone rang. It was Justin, my manager.
"How’s it going up there?" he asked.

"Slow. Real slow," I said.

"That’s not always a bad thing. Make sure you print out all the reports you need tonight in case the power goes out," he advised.

"Already done."

"Cool. I need you to do something for me. It’s supposed to get cold as balls out tonight, so that means it’s pipe freezing season. If we don’t keep the pipes on the perimeter of the building warm, we’ll have a ton of floods on our hands." He paused and I could hear as he dragged from a cigarette and sighed out the smoke. "First I need you to go to all of the corner rooms that are vacant and turn on the heat. Those corner rooms have two walls exposed to the outside, so they’re most likely to freeze. Then you’ll have to go out back of the hotel to that little room where all the Grunau pumps and valves are. There’s a heater in there that will keep the whole sprinkler system from freezing up."

I told him it was no problem and made my way through the halls. The Pink Ridge Inn has four floors and is shaped like a big, boxy horseshoe, meaning there were 24 corner rooms total. I went from floor to floor, and though I knew that over 80% of our rooms were occupied, I never saw a single person in the halls. I didn’t hear anything coming from their rooms. That is, until I passed room 214.

In 214, the Crockers were lively. Michael was blaring some tinny nu metal from the speakers of his iPhone and Mrs. Crocker was shouting at him to turn it down. I could hear Audey’s voice, flat and inflectionless, repeating over and over “Mommy, I’m clean now. Mommy, I want out. Mommy, can I stop brushing my teeth now?” The TV was on too, and loud. Maybe I should have stopped and told them to quiet down, but I had better things to do.

I went back to the ground floor and went out the back exit. The snow was blowing nearly horizontal across the parking lot and I stopped for a moment to watch the stream of white flakes streak through the yellow carona cast by the parking lot lights. I pulled my coat tight around me and headed for the Sprinkler Room, but after about ten feet, there was a huge flash off to the west, followed by a boom like a cannon. The lights shut off. I froze in my tracks and stood in the night—a darkness painted white by blizzard. After thirty seconds or so, the backup generator kicked on and I watched as the lights in the windows flickered back to life. The parking lot lights were still off, however, as the generators were not connected to the exterior lighting.

I shrugged and leaned into the blizzard, cursing the snow and the wind as I neared the Sprinkler Room. I felt the snow compacting under my boots, but it seemed strangely… crunchy. Crunchier, at least, than I was to snow being. I thought nothing of it as I reached the Sprinkler Room doors and flung them open. It wasn’t a room so much as a closet really, filled with rusted pipes with chipped red paint and awash with gauges and valves and tubing. In the corner was a small heater which we turned on each winter. I flicked it on, lingered a minute to make sure it was working, then closed up the Sprinkler Room. I turned around and as I began to trudge back to the office, the parking lot lights sparked and twinkled on. The vast, open space of the parking lot was cast in a yellow glow that made the snow on the ground glisten like a field of gemstones. But I gasped when I saw what it was that I had been crunching underfoot. Strewn across the snowy lot by the dozens were mice. Dead mice. Not just dead mice, but bloody, eviscerated mice. The little brown creatures lay on their sides, as if curling into the fetal position, their pink guts exhumed from their bellies and frozen to the concrete. I bent down to examine a few: they had bite marks and the fur and flesh was shredded, as if by claws. Winter is hard for strays, I thought. Maybe the cats around the area were starting to band together and hunt mice in hordes. I shuddered at the sight of all the mousy carnage (or maybe it was the cold that made me shudder) and retreated back to the warmth of the office.

The next few nights were just as cold. I actually ended up staying at the hotel on Sunday night because the weather was too rough for me to drive home. I programmed a key card for room 210 and sealed myself away after 11:00. Most of the night I just surfed through the channels, but around 2:00 in the morning, I thought I heard scratching at my door. I muted the television and sat up in bed. I heard a meow. Throwing the comforter aside, I rubbed my tired eyes and walked to the door. I cracked it open and looked both ways down the hall: there were no cats. I shrugged it off and went to bed. But when I woke the next morning and headed down stairs for breakfast, I was greeted by a mutilated mouse carcass set just outside my door. Damn cats, I scoffed.

I went downstairs. In the breakfast lobby, there were only a handful of people awake. The Crockers were there and Mrs. Crocker was juggling between trying to stop Michael from making a mess with his food and trying to make Audey eat hers.

"I’m full, mommy," Audey crowed, in her even tone.

"What do you mean you’re full?" Mrs. Crocker groaned, "you haven’t eaten a thing."

"I’m not hungry," Audey protested.

I got a coffee and an orange and disappeared into the office; I didn’t work again until 3:00, and I didn’t plan on spending my morning among the guests. Justin was in the office checking his email when I sat down at his desk.

"Morning, sunshine," he greeted. "Thanks for getting that heat turned on last night."

"Yeah, no problem," I said. "Hey, did you see all those dead mice out in the parking lot?"

"I did. Now that’s a health code violation waiting to happen.”

"Mhmm," I mumbled as I dug my nails in the orange rind.

"It’s 214. She’s got all those damn cats up there," Justin complained.

"Cats? She told me she just had one," I said, a bit surprised. "We only allow one pet per room, right?"

"Yep. She’s got three of them up there. Which is why I told Mrs. Crocker this morning that she needs to either get rid of the cats or find a new hotel."

I frowned a bit because I noticed that Audey was wearing her kittens’ ears headband again this morning. She must really be fond of her cats. I peaked my head out from the office just as the Crockers were leaving and Audey was being dragged along by her mother who had a tight grip on her wrist.

"But I don’t want to get rid of my kitties," Audey whined, near tears. My heart sank.

Michael, his arms crossed, noticed me peeking and glared at me with a harsh scowl. His predatory eyes made me wither.

I worked that night. And once again, I had to go outside to fix a problem. It was about 8:00 pm and the snow was steadily falling. I got calls from a couple rooms on the first floor saying that their toilets wouldn’t flush. In fact, they were slowly starting to back up. I called Justin and he told me I would have to go out the side door to the edge of the parking lot to the pump systems that kept the massive amounts of sewage moving through the hotel.

The pumps were in the ground under a 10-foot circle of concrete. There was a pair of steel doors in the center of the circle, which you could lift open and stare down into a deep, black hole that must have gone down at least 50 or 60 feet into the ground. Since one of the pumps had malfunctioned, the hole was pretty full with a murky, putrid water. I gagged at the smell of it when I opened the hatch to look down into the muck. It steamed in the sub-freezing air. There was a small electrical box nearby which I opened and I found the red lever I needed to trip. I hit the switch and a horrible grinding noise came from deep down, followed by a screech and the sound of something tearing. The system struggled for a few seconds, then there was a gurgling sound from the hole and the pumps began to churn normally. I pulled out my flashlight and shined it down into the sewage-filled hole. The water was starting to recede down. A few bubbles rose, and then something pushed up to the surface—something big. Whatever it was, it must have been what was clogging the pump. I shined my light on it and grabbed a stick nearby. I carefully leaned down and tried to roll the thing over for a better look. It bobbed in the fetid water, then finally turned over. Instantly, I vomited on the concrete.

It was a cat.

I swung the doors closed over the hole and ran back inside. My nerves were quaking as I charged down the hall towards the office. When I reached the lobby, my eyes caught movement in the corner, in the planter of one of the fake ficus trees: a mouse, its hind legs gnawed off, but still alive, trying to claw its way down into the artificial tangles of dried grass. I had to call Justin, the police, somebody.

I pinned in the code to get into the office and stepped into the laundry room. All of the laundry machines were spinning: there were towels in both of the washers and a comforter in one of the dryers. But the dryer on the far wall was making a thumping sound. I sighed. Why did this shit happen to me? Why did everything break down on my shift? I was disgusted and overwhelmed. I marched over to the dryer and leaned in to see what was drying. Tumbling round and round in the perforated steel drum, its fur singed and its limbs battered, was another cat.

"Meow," I heard behind me.

I yelped and shot straight up.

"Mommy says we can only have one kitty," it was the slow, lifeless voice of Audey.

I turned.

The little girl was lying on top of the large employees’ refrigerator, her arms crossed at the wrists in front of her. She licked at the back of her hand softly. She had drawn three whiskers on each of her cheeks in black marker. Her lips were stained a bright red, wet with blood. Cat’s ears protruded up from the tangles of her black hair.

"I’m mommy’s favorite kitty," she said, as if it were a simple fact. Then she got up on all fours and arched her back. Her bloodied mouth parted and her eyes shined bright in the light. She hissed at me.

"Reeeooow," she screeched and pounced off the refrigerator to the tile floor.

I darted across the room, slipped out the heavy metal door, and frantically pushed it shut behind me. I sat on the carpet with my back against the door and panted heavily, my shivering fingers reaching for my phone. I was trembling so badly that I could hardly find Justin’s number in my contacts list.

"Hello?" he answered.

"Justin. It’s about, its, god, fuck, it’s about the Crockers," I spat the words out in a jumble.

"Calm down, man, calm down. What about them? Did they get rid of their cats?"

Nails were scratching at the door just behind my head. “Yes,” I said. “They got rid of the fucking cats.”

—
Credits to: Zyclin

My Dog Never Barks

My dog never barks.

When he was a puppy, and first getting to know the world, he developed a case of neighbor’s cat to the face prompting an emergency visit to the vet. Through all of their poking and prodding, and even the initial attack he never made a noise, not even a whimper.

A year ago, my old house caught fire. I woke to his face at the edge of my bed. He was pressing his nose against me repeatedly as he pawed at the covers, but even in the rush to get out, even as I heaved him through a window, he remained silent.

I joked he was my barkless dog - that maybe he was just waiting until he had the right thing to say.

He’s staring at a point over my left shoulder, and his bark is deep and guttural, his hackles up.

My dog never barks.

—
Credits to: nerdheroine

Blue Kings

The term “synthetic drug” refers to a new type of drug on the market that has been created to skirt existing laws on illicit drugs. Thousands of psychoactive compounds are regulated by the law of the Federal Controlled Substances Act. However, in creating synthetic drugs, manufacturers alter the chemical structure of an illegal drug, modifying it to create an “analog” or derivative of that drug, to, essentially, make it quote unquote legal.

Synthetic drug manufacturers are devious in marketing their goods. This is known.

Furthermore, it’s also known that synthetic drugs induce a variety of side effects which can vary from person to person—often lack of pain response, hallucinations, and a severely hindered judgment.

I don’t know how much of those facts and statistics are relevant to me, and what happened to me, but… I need answers. Answers to dangerous questions. Questions I shouldn’t be asking.

I work nights.

I’ve only ever worked nights at Sunshine America—a dingy 24/7 gas station situated in the slums of downtown. And I don’t work there anymore.

I had a pretty fucked up experience there.

To set the stage, it was a typical April night; pitch black, as I rolled into the parking lot. And for the most part, but for some unexpected rain, everything went predictably. Counted my cash, double checked the lotto numbers, made coffee, and then bought myself a monster and a bag of corn nuts for the night and pulled out my laptop to start killing time.

I usually would free write during my shifts, and I’d text whoever was up. Eventually, my girlfriend went to bed and I had no one to text or talk to. I decided to hit up my buddy Mike—he worked nights too. We talked for a bit while I tried to fight off my writer’s block. I had a hell of a headache, though, which didn’t exactly summon inspiration.

At one point in the night, a truck rolled into the lot. I don’t remember seeing it come in. Rather, it was just there when I looked out the window. I seldom take notice of a car actually driving into the station, unless they have a shitty muffler or ridiculously loud bass. This car, though, was a shady looking one—the kind I’d expect to pre-pump and then skip out on paying.

It was a piece. An old, black pickup, victim to merciless rust. It had this huge dent on the driver’s side and a busted headlight. Looked like the asshole had driven into a tree. Didn’t have a license plate, either. I decided not to authorize him if he tried to pre-pay. Having no license plate was just cause enough.

And I went back to writing, and texting, and basically doing nothing. When I finally got up to start sweeping the place, I’d forgotten about the sketchy pick-up. That is, until I saw it—still sitting with its engine rumbling at pump 4.

In hindsight, the whole thing seemed really shady, but at the time, I was just confused. The guy had never gotten gas at all. Nor had he come in for smokes or a drink or anything. So, taking the bucket of washer fluid in hand—so it looked like I had some reason to go outside—I opened the door. And as soon as I did, the engine roared and rubber squealed.

I was baffled as the guy tore out of the parking lot. A cigarette flew out his window and exploded in orange sparks against the pavement. He was down the street in a matter of seconds. I went over to the cigarette butt and stomped it out. It wasn’t really anywhere near the gas pumps, but I felt a little paranoid anyway.

For a while, I thought about the truck. I asked Mike about it and he text back, suggesting that maybe the guy was scoping the place out with intent to rob it.

“Yeah, probably. I’ll tell my boss in the morning,” was my response. I’ve never been afraid of hold-ups. I’d gladly hand over however much cash I had in the drawer. Nothing worth getting shot over, and corporate can suck it.

Nonplussed, I swept inside, stocked the cooler, counted cigarettes, and still had four hours to kill. Usually it get’s unbearably slow around 2:30, but it had been slow as hell even before then. I did a routine walk-around the store, just to check on everything. My writer’s block was still weighing heavily on me and Mike was getting slower with his responses.

I noticed, at some point, that my cash register’s screen had the “out of paper” symbol lit up for pump 4, which was weird because I don’t remember anyone stopping to fuel at that pump in a while. But then again, a lot of people come and go when I’m doing the cooler and I don’t notice.

Taking the pump keys and a new roll of paper, I went outside. Nice night. I decided to have a smoke break once this was taken care of. I remember thinking that because I vividly recall the feeling of cosmic coincidence that overcame me when I approached the pump.

I thought they were blue L&M’s at first, just by the color of the box. But when I took the cigarettes down from on top of the pump, I was taken aback to find no brand name. No design. No disclaimer. No barcode. No serial number. Absolutely nothing, but they hadn’t been opened. And by that, I mean that the box still had the plastic wrapping on it.

I remember thinking, are these even cigarettes? But I stock about a hundred of these fuckers every night, and they felt like a box of cigarettes to me.

More curious than anything, I opened them up and checked—sure enough, they were cigarettes. Pretty normal looking, too.

Now, I was eighteen, mind you. Free smokes were a thing of celebration—a lucky find—not something considered sketchy or even that unusual. Someone left them here, I reasoned. And they’re probably some foreign brand. Shit, or it was some printing fuck-up.

Either way, the seal hadn’t been broken, so I figured they couldn’t be tampered with. Same rule as beer, right? And for that matter, having any kind of plastic wrapping at all made them authentic, with my logic.

I’m sure by now, you’ve deduced that there was something fucked up about these smokes. Why else would I be making a case for my decision to smoke one? You’d be right.

So, I smoked one. Half of one. It tasted kind of metallic, so I didn’t finish it. I ashed the thing and stood outside for a long time. My headache was totally gone. I remember staring at the dumpster for a long, long time before thinking I was really tired and kind of like I was going to fall.

In that moment, I saw nothing wrong or strange with sitting down. Then, lying down on my side. I felt really weird, but I remember that I didn’t think there was anything wrong at all.

Before I go any further, I’ll say that my girlfriend has always been terrified of the dark. She says that she sees stuff in the dark and her mind makes it into all sorts of scary faces and figures and what have you. In contrast, I’ve always been the opposite, especially since she confided this in me. If I see something I can’t identify, I check it out. I get closer.

I don’t do that as much anymore.

I remember lying there, just thinking about shit, weird shit, like Wilt from Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends drinking a purple slurpy. And of course, in the moment, that was totally normal.

Eventually, I saw something by the dumpster. And looking back, details are very blurred. Like when you try and visualize what you saw during a dream. But whatever I saw, I remember thinking that it shouldn’t be over there. I don’t know why that was the thought, but it was.

I kept looking at it, thinking about what it could be. From my position, it looked a lot like a wilting fern. I finally got up, my head spun, and I started to take in how fucked up I was.

Shit, I’m at work! I realized.

I didn’t attribute the feeling to the cigarettes at the time. I just freaked out. I wanted to feel normal. And across the parking lot, by the dumpster, I still saw that fern-looking thing.

My whole perception of the thing changed in one single moment—when it… moved. And huge,
shiny black eyes fell upon me. I remember thinking about my girlfriend. I remember thinking how illogical it would be to run inside, despite how utterly terrified I was in that moment.

I should get closer. I should see what this thing is.

That idea didn’t last long. The thing, whatever it was, I still don’t know, put its hands over its big black eyes. I remember being particularly shocked by its fingernails—long, yellow and twisted. When I still held my ground, that’s when… it screamed. It opened its big toothless mouth far wider than I’ve ever seen a mouth open, and it made this pathetic wailing sound.

It sounded like it was being tortured.

Now, I was scared. I ran back inside the store and promptly locked the door. I didn’t know what to do. I was still feeling really fucked up. Nothing was staying still. I could hear my heart beating in my ears.

I’m going to die from fear, I remember thinking.

It’s in your head. It’s a bad trip. You got drugged. You’re having a bad trip. You’re at work, get your shit together.

There was a woman at the counter, and she nearly made me shit myself. Half her face hung dead. Sagging. Expressionless with one eye looking ready to roll out. The other half was contorted with anger. I was ready to cry out and make a run for my car, but I realized, with unimaginable shame and sorrow that she was a stroke victim, or something of the sort. I think, at the time, I thought she had a birth defect, or something.

Whatever I thought, I felt horrible, and mortified by the way I was thinking and acting. This is some strong shit I’m on, I thought.

“I’m sorry,” I said to her. “Can I help you with anything?”

And I recall, my words sort of hung in my ears after I said them.

She said something in a broken voice, and I asked her to repeat herself. She said it again, clearer: “Fuck you.”

I remember feeling like shit. I must have offended her, or kept her waiting, or both.

“I’m really sorry, I was taking out the trash-”

“Fuck you.”

She said it even clearer that time. And the muscles in the half of her face I presumed non-functional twitched into life. She twisted her head to look at me—twisted it at an impossible angle—and started screaming it: Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you! For what felt like far too long. So long the words began to lose meaning and definition. Just loud screeches.

At one point, as I cowered by the door I’d locked, I couldn’t distinguish words at all. I closed my eyes, unwilling to look at her—it—and the screaming continued, even once I opened my eyes and found her absent. The distorted curses kept coming. Until they blended into a sound like microphone feedback.


Eventually, it stopped, leaving me sitting against the door with a ringing in my ears.

This is all some kind of dream. A trip. I’m on a bad trip.

I kept telling myself shit like that when I thought to dial the police or make a run for it.

I went to the bathroom and washed off. I felt a little better. I could see my reflection rippling like the mirror was a standing wall of liquid.

Feeling less shaken, I returned to the counter. I paced for a while, occasionally glancing out the window. I was paranoid as hell. Everything would set me off—the air turning on, the lotto machine making its usual beeping sounds, even the quiet sounds of the building settling. It was all making me twitch, and panic.

I didn’t want to reflect, or think about it—any of it. I just paced.

There was this awful smell that had overcome me too. Like dog shit and rotting fruit. It was driving me crazy, and I wasn’t sure if it was even there or not. All my other senses had proved unreliable.

But I did smell something, and I traced it to a plastic grocery bag, from Meijer I think, stuffed underneath the coffee maker.

It smelled awful. Of course, I opened the damn thing, and it took me a second to process what it was.

…Teeth. Bloody, rotten, black and yellow teeth. A big wad of them, all stuck together with thick, strings of tar.

And this is when I started to fear for my life. Because it was right then when this trip started to affect me physically. I remember feeling a hot, wet hand grab the back of my head with unbelievable force, and push my face into the paper bag. The smell was unbearable and the terror that embodied me had no outlet. I quickly started swinging wildly.

The bag was pushed into my face from the front too, and I was losing air. I let out a scream for the first time and I was released. Still swinging like a madman, I fell into the newspaper rack.

I fought with the bag on my head for a minute before I got it off. The fluorescent lights were blinding. I spat out mushy, black teeth, realized they’d been into my mouth, and immediately vomited into the bag.

Then, I didn’t use logic or reason. I went into the drink cooler, barricading the door with unopened crates of Pepsi.

I grabbed a Monster and drank about half to get that god-awful taste out of my mouth. Then I sit with my back to the wall, staring at the door. Refusing to take my eyes off it. Refusing to blink.

The voices started somewhere in there. I could hear them, but not with my ears. Like they were in my head. But I could still hear them. I can never explain this part well when I tell people this story.

They weren’t saying anything, and they were mostly whispers. The visual that came to mind when I heard them was a room of murmuring heroin addicts with bone tight skin and yellow eyes, like lemurs. It was a powerful image too.

I tried to shake this picture as soon as it formed. I drank more Monster. I sat there for what felt like an hour. I rocked back and forth, ignoring the voices. And this is the part that still fucks me up to think about.

When I was sobbing in there, I took a moment to close my eyes. When I opened them, I saw myself, sitting against the door to the cooler, across from me. The thing looked just like me, but was barefoot, and it wore a wide smile. It had no eyes, or nose.

It got on all fours and ran at me. I tried to shield myself but the next thing I knew, I was on the floor, and I felt more pressure on my head than actual pain. And I vomited again—this time blood and bile, mostly. I was alone in the cooler now. I lay there for a while before I managed to get up and take in the silence—the normality.

Was it over?

I felt more sober.

I went to the bathroom again and checked my reflection. I looked like shit. Puke stained my collared shirt and blood was smeared on my face. My eyes were pink and watery, sitting in purple cradles. I washed off again and, again, felt better.

I returned to the store and took in the newspaper-strewn floor. I didn’t see the bag of teeth though, looking back. I didn’t think to look for it at the time. I never found it either. It was only later when I remembered it.

I checked my phone. No new messages. That’s kind of weird. I expected a few from Mike, wondering what I was doing.

After I cleaned up the newspapers, which were yesterday’s anyway, I felt my phone vibrate.
“Alright, well, be careful.”

I stared at it. He was responding to my last text. The one I’d sent hours ago. I looked at the clock to see just how long it’d been, and I nearly dropped the stack of papers in my hand.

2:39.

That was impossible. Completely fucking impossible.

Nine minutes? That all happened in nine minutes?! No fucking way. I tried to wrap my head around this as I cleaned up the vomit and blood in store and the cooler.

I felt okay, though. I felt fine, really. Kind of congested, but that’s all.

And from there, everything seemed normal. Eventually, I unlocked the door, but it was a tough decision. I told Mike about it all and at first he laughed at me, then when I brought up the cigarettes, he told me what I was already thinking—that they were laced with something.

And I wanted to agree with him, but there was so much that argued that. The clarity of the whole experience. The plastic wrapping on the cigarettes. And later that day, my boss called, asking if I knew anything about why the cameras shut off around one in the morning—around when that truck pulled up.

I don’t know.

I have no fucking clue.

The realist in me is prevailing. I need to know one way or another—did it happen, or didn’t it? I survived it, whatever it was.

You’d expect me to throw those smokes out on the highway, but I didn’t. I still have them. I have the pack right here next to my laptop. And that’s why I’m writing this.

I need advice. I need help. I have a strong desire to find out. I mean, I survived it once. If I smoked one… with a friend… in my own room… then I’d know. Then, maybe, I’ll have some peace.

They’re calling to me.

Those voices.

I hear them some nights, in my dreams. I hear them.

What should I do?


—
Credits to: Limboom