My Daughter Died On Her Sixth Birthday. A Man Just Handed Me Photos Of Her Seventh

  

I cannot describe to you how I feel right now. What I’m experiencing is so detached from the normal, I’m almost convinced I’ve finally gone insane.

Almost.

My wife, Bea, died during childbirth. She was gorgeous, funny, intelligent – stubborn. A woman whose laugh was so loud eating in restaurants was a challenge, and whose stare was so intense it made my hands shake. I lost her, as she gave birth to our daughter.

Sam.

Of course, I could have resented Sam. For taking away what was once mine in a way nothing else can be. For taking what was so truly and utterly pure. But I didn’t. I knew Bea wouldn’t have wanted any resentment. She wouldn’t have wanted our only child to have a life ruined by hate.

But this isn’t about grief. This isn’t about the physical sucker punch of losing forever something you loved. This is about something far more sinister.

My daughter was lively, always running and screaming, leaping up and down the climbing frame – causing havoc in her nursery classes. So for her sixth birthday, a trip with friends to the movies had left her so pent up with energy I could barely keep up with her as she dipped and dodged between people on the pavement. She’d occasionally turn back, through the sea of people and shout “Daddy, come on!” in a tone that was almost petulant. I couldn’t help but love her.

I tried to chase her, I really did. She was too busy looking at me when she dashed out into the road, and the bus didn’t have time to stop. A sickening crunch, and the world fell silent. I cradled her broken form in my arms, too numb to weep, too hurt to move. All I could feel was the warm blood gently seep into my clothes. In the state of shock I was in, I could just think about how I was going to wash my jeans. It sounds horrid, I know – but a loss like that tears everything away from you and leaves you with only the bare thought process that make us human.

The next week was a blur. I cannot place a single memory to a time, in between friends and family extending their condolences, and the howling sobs of mine that would break out at any moment – a door slamming, the gentle hum of the fridge or voices laughing on the radio.

I attended her funeral dressed all in black. By dressed, I don’t mean merely clothes, my very essence was dark. I couldn’t feel, or think and the day continued as I went through the motions, like a dying man treading water. Everyone wanted to tell me about Sam, and how perfect she was – what an angel she was, as if I didn’t know. As if I didn’t realise what a gift my own daughter was.

The man, stood out from the rest, as he walked up to me and handed me this large leather book. I assumed, at the time, he was a parent of one of Sam’s friends, handing me a collection of their photos together. Or maybe I was too numb to even process his cold hands, and how he never mentioned my daughter once.

For a month, I was lost. I drank, and stayed in our now empty apartment alone, watching old boxsets – too numb now to even cry. It was only when my sister arrived, when she held my hand and talked to me that I began to come out of my shell. She’d sit and listen to the most inane things I said, and gently coaxed me out of my depression. Not completely, but enough for me to begin to live what was almost a real life again.

That was when I opened the book. I’d decided to remember Sam for all the joy she gave, and was prepared to reflect on her life without feeling miserable.

I opened to the first page. It was essentially a binder, full of Polaroid photos of my daughter growing up. I furrowed my brow. They were taken from a distance, blurred slightly – and I was in a few of them.

I began to feel sick, but hoped that the following photos would provide some explanation. I came up with every excuse of how the man obtained these photos, desperate to view the moments of my daughter’s life without a sense of trepidation. The photos grew closer and closer to my daughter’s birthday. I could see the day I gave her a tiny bike after she turned five, and the skinned knees that ensued. The book had so many more pages, that I assumed the rest were empty.

But there was a photo of her just before the movies on her sixth birthday - I could recognise the pink raincoat she insisted on wearing, and my hands on her shoulders.

There was no photo of the crash.

Instead, her life continued inside this book. Her seventh birthday had a photo of me and her in the garden, covered in paint – with a huge canvas on the floor and an extremely messy painting. Her seventh birthday.

Her seventh birthday.

The reality of what I was seeing hit me then and I slammed the book shut. I sat there, at the kitchen table staring at the leather. This must be some sadistic photoshop, I hoped, someone had taken the time to pull a horrid prank on me. I say I hoped, because essentially – I couldn’t believe the other explanation. If there even was one.

Gritting my teeth, I decided I had nothing to lose and kept reading.

I can’t explain the emotions I felt whilst I read accurately, listening to the sound of the page turning. I can try, but nothing could prepare you for something like this.

Her life continued, showing her losing her baby teeth, her first day of senior school. My turning of the pages became more frenzied, and I began to notice something. The photographer was getting closer. Closer to her. As she grew older – not in every photo, but a general trend – the photographer was getting closer and closer. More daring, perhaps.

She was beautiful. Stunning. As a teenager she looked just like her mother, all curls and smiles. I grew older too, but the photos began to include me less and less.

Her sixteenth birthday was strange. A group of her friends, sitting outside, drinking from little plastic cups at a picnic. But there was someone in the background. Near the bushes of the park where this was taken, a dark figure stood. You wouldn’t have noticed him, if not for the small shadow he cast on the grass.

I leant back for a moment and exhaled. This was too weird. I’d been so caught up in watching my little girl grow up I hadn’t thought about how this would end. Moments like this, are so utterly surreal that sometimes you remove yourself from them. I almost felt like I was watching myself read these, like this was a dream, or a program on the television.

I continued.

The dark figure became more and more present in each photograph. I could almost make out features. His presence was towering, and as I turned the page I expected to see him disappear. But instead, as the photographs grew closer to her eighteenth (each birthday was marked by a caption underneath the Polaroid saying “Another year.”) she was no longer somewhere I recognised.

Instead, the photos were of her in a dimly lit house. Her face contorted by fear, striking all sorts of weird poses. Sometimes she would be dressed like an ancient queen or she would be dressed like a maid scrubbing the floors, the figure was there even closer now. His legs, or his arm would appear in each and every one. No matter how she was dressed, in every photo her face had this desperately pained expression. It killed me. There were bruises on her face. She looked thin, ill even.

I couldn’t do it.

This was sick. Properly sick.

My girl.

I soldiered on.

The last photo I looked at, before I slammed the book shut and swore to never, ever look at it again was of her eighteenth. The caption underneath read “At last!” in sloppy writing.

She was looking straight at the camera, crying. She was on her knees, dressed in a black evening dress – with an apple in her mouth and her hands bound behind her back. Her makeup was ruined by her tears. It was as if she was pleading me, begging me to help. But I couldn’t.

I closed the book and left the room, my whole body convulsing with sobs.

I couldn’t call the police, of course. She was dead.

The thing that keeps me up at night, isn’t the content of what I saw.

It’s that there were so many pages left. 

----

Credits

It Wasn't An Ordinary Glitch in Matrix

 

I’d always thought that life functioned like a system of complex computer programs.

For example, when you touch a stove, you get burnt. If you spend too much time in cold temperature, you get hypothermia. If you apply too much strain to a limb, it breaks. Every consequence is resultant from a previous action. A simple conditional statement, if you will. Now, I can’t confirm the existence or lack thereof in regards to a creator… a God, if you will. I obviously don’t have that authority. But if one were to exist… it would make sense that this is just the way that we were programmed. How the reality that we see in front of us was meant to function. Just a system of codes.

But just like man-made programs, nothing’s perfect. And with such a large and complicated one like life itself, even a God would have to make mistakes… right?

I can pinpoint the exact moment where it all started happening. At that moment, I wasn’t at a great spot in my life. Now, I wasn’t depressed or anything… just kind of disassociated with everything around me. My life had stagnated, to say the least. I had a feeling that my best years were behind me. And being a mere 32 years of age… that wasn't a good feeling.

I’d gotten fired from my last job when I was 29. Luckily though, I'd gotten a new one nearly right after. Now, it wasn’t one I liked but… I suppose beggars can’t be choosers. However, my office was only around a ten minute walk from my studio apartment, so that was good. Anyhow, it was a late night work session. Most everybody else had gone home, but I stayed due to the amount of work that I’d procrastinated on from weeks prior. I wanted get a good chunk of it done. At one point, I got up in order to pour myself some coffee. As I was walked into the kitchen, I noticed a door located in one of the corners.

The thing is... I didn’t think that I’d ever seen it before, but I also rarely went into the kitchen. I find small talk with my particular co-workers to be incredibly excruciating. I just assumed that I didn’t pay enough attention to notice it. It was a rather large area, after all. Out of sheer curiosity, I decided to see where it lead. I was honestly expecting it to be a pantry of sorts. However, I was surprised as hell when I opened it up.

It was an empty, medium-sized room with smooth grey walls and floors. I walked around, exploring the place for a while before quickly realizing that there was literally nothing in there. It was pretty damn weird, in all honesty. I mean, what the hell was this place and what purpose did it have? As I was about to turn and head out, I noticed what appeared to be small objects in one of the corners of the room. Now, I could've guaranteed that they weren’t there before. In fact, I nearly jumped out of my skin when I saw it. I quickly walked over and examined them, discovering that they appeared to be a couple of rifle rounds. I just threw them back down and left that room. I was beginning to feel uneasy as hell. I ran back into the office and prepared to head home. I just assumed that the work had been getting to my head. To make sure, I looked around in order to see if anybody else was still there. The janitor was, so I made the assumption that he was the one that had placed the bullets there. But in retrospect… that made absolutely no sense.

The sky was already dark as I started to make my way back home. It was around 8 PM when I’d left. Feeling somewhat hungry, I decided to stop by at a pizza place on the way. Now, I’d been to the place numerous times, so I’d pretty much memorized the opening and closing times for every single day of the week. That’s why I found it so shocking that the place was closed. It was always open until 9 PM on weekdays.

Whatever, I thought. This wasn’t even the strangest thing that had happened to me that day. The place must have just abruptly changed their hours. I looked over at the opening/closing times displayed out on the windows to confirm it. However, this part made less sense. 6 out of the 7 days maintained the same schedule. It was only today - Tuesday, that had changed so that it closed one hour earlier. Although this was somewhat disconcerting, it wasn’t beyond explanation. I just went home and made something else to eat instead.

These kind of small, unexplainable incidents started happening to me more and more often throughout the next few months. Things would be misplaced from where I had last left them, people I didn’t know seemed to recognize me while people I’d known for years seemed to have no clue who I was, and I’d keep finding bullets in the most random of places. One of the strangest incidents was when I finally decided to go and see a psychologist. After telling him everything that had been happening, he just stared at me for the longest time before saying: “This isn’t where you really are. This is just temporary, but it’s better that you don’t wake up right now” before literally leaving me by myself in his office.

The thing is, while these events were incredibly disturbing, they were still far and few between. In other words, they were still essentially manageable.

That all changed on a Saturday a few weeks later. The previous night, I’d been out drinking with a few friends. I guess I went a little too hard because I barely remembered anything when I woke up. The thing that I deemed rather peculiar was that I didn’t even feel the signs of a hangover creeping up on me. But just like the pizza place, I didn’t bother thinking too much of it. These were small details, after all. I turned on my laptop and started going through my emails. Having an inbox filled with random bullshit always bothered me. About a few minutes into that, I got a text from my buddy Ansel, who I had gone out with last night.

“Dude, I know this is going to sound crazy, but I actually think Matt might have gotten laid last night. Shit was nuts. You shoulda came man.”

I must have stared at that text for 10 minutes. You see, there were two things wrong with what Ansel had just told me. One, I vividly remembered going out with them on Friday. Now, I don’t remember most of the actual night, but I sure as hell remember getting off work and then entering our first bar. Second of all, who the hell was Matt supposed to be? I don’t know anybody named “Matt”. This was it. I’ve gone crazy, I thought to myself. But then I started to calm down. This kind of stuff happened to me sometimes. They were just momentary blips in the matrix. This couldn’t have been that big of a deal.

With this rationalization in my head, I just continued on with the day. I didn’t have anything planned, so I decided to stay in and binge YouTube. And that’s exactly what I did. I remember it starting out normal at first. I watched the channels that I usually did. At one point, I found myself watching a documentary about human trafficking. It was so weird… I couldn’t for the life of me remember how I had gotten there.

As I listened to the narrator talk, I began looking at the recommended/related videos. One caught my eye. The thumbnail was that of a man in military gear, sitting on top of a Humvee in a desert. However, the title is what drew me into it:

“Where do you think you are right now? Because it’s not where you’re supposed to be."

I remember just sitting there, trying to understand what that title was getting at. This was… strange, wasn’t it? I decided to click on it. Now, the video itself was extremely shaky and incomprehensible. It looked… erratic, in a sense. I could tell that it was filmed inside, but I’m not really sure in what kind of place. I could make out what appeared to be rotting wooden walls, but that was about it.

However… the audio was the really messed up part. There was screaming. Desperate, hoarse, painful ones. About three sets in total. And they wouldn’t stop. That’s when I noticed the duration of the video… 26,288 hours and 22 minutes. Now, I was pretty sure that wasn’t possible, because of YouTube’s upload duration limitations. I closed the video and then the laptop. That was enough internet for today.

I yawned and stretched my arms out. I felt so… tired for some reason. That’s when I checked the time. It was 11:00 PM. I got out of my chair and opened my blinds. It was indeed dark outside. What the hell? I thought. I knew for sure that I had opened my laptop at around 1 PM. There was no way in hell that it’d been 10 hours.

At that moment, I knew that something must have been very wrong here. But… what? What the hell could have been happening to me? I checked my phone. 78 missed calls and texts. I looked through them. Most of them were from my mother. Some were from my friends. A few texts were even from Brandi… my ex-girlfriend around three years.

“I really miss you” Is what they say. Why the hell would she say that now? I tossed my phone and started pacing around my apartment. My head started pounding. But it wasn’t just a headache. My left arm and ribs were also burning with this intense pain that I’d never felt before. I went to the bathroom, looking for something that could’ve helped. Eventually, I found some morphine. I felt sheer bliss as I injected it into my bloodstream. But then another troubling thought made its way into my head.

Why the hell did I have morphine?

I couldn’t recall a situation that could’ve lead to me having it in my possession. I walked out of the bathroom and started pacing again. This was just a nightmare, I tried telling myself. But why was the pain so vivid? I decided that I really needed to get some rest. I started heading towards my bed when I was jolted by the sounds of explosions coming from inside my bedroom. I flipped shit and ran the hell out of my apartment. I wandered around the streets for a while, not knowing what to do, not knowing where to go, and not even beginning to understand what in the actual hell was going on.

Eventually, I came across what appeared to be a group of four men huddled together at a crosswalk. They all had their backs turned to me, so I couldn’t make out any facial features, but I could also tell that they weren’t moving at all. I don’t know how to explain it but… the air started to feel hostile around me. It felt like I was heading right into danger. I started backing away, but not before the men turned around to look at me. But ironically enough… they had no faces to look at me with. Just smooth, empty skin where an expression should have been.

In an instant, they began charging at me. I started running. As I tried to evade what was surely a horrific fate behind me, I began notice that my surroundings had drastically changed. I wasn’t in the city that I had been living in the past three years anymore Instead, I was somewhere both familiar and not at the same time. Like I’d been to the place before but didn’t quite remember where it was.

It got to the point where I just couldn’t keep running. I remember collapsing onto the pavement and turning back in horror to see the group of faceless entities still thundering their way towards me. I just sat there, waiting for whatever twisted outcome to finally come and claim me. I didn’t want to deal with this shit anymore.

However, as the men got to within about thirty meters away from me… they just stopped. A few seconds passed before one of their throats seemed to get slit open by an invisible force. The others looked around frantically before two of them literally seemed to blow up. The last one just started sprinting away.

In absolute shock at what I had just seen, I pulled myself back up and started walking around again. As I did, my mind seemed to be getting clearer. This new city I was in… I started to recognize it more. But... what was I doing there? Eventually, my vision started to fade. But in the conventional sense. It was like the area around me was getting too bright. It got to the point where I could barely see anything. I passed out a few seconds later.

I awoke in a run-down cabin. I heard a bunch of commotion as figures swarmed around me, talking loudly to each other. I looked over to see a man in military gear kneeling beside me, administering a needle into my arm. We made eye contact. Wait. I recognized him.

“What’s up Dempsey? You’re safe now. We finally found ya.” He smiled at me. It was... Matt. I did know a Matt.

I started looking around the room to find it filled with other military guys. There were also two, skinny, broken looking men also being tended to. In addition to that, there were also three body bags on the floor.

I was still somewhat disoriented, so I passed out again. I woke back up again in a hospital room. A man in a suit was sitting by the foot of my bed, looking at his phone. He smiled when he saw that I was up.

“Mr. Dempsey. How are you feeling?”

He went on to explain how I was actually a Navy SEAL. I had been sent on a mission to capture a notorious human trafficker who had been tracked down to an abandoned town in Belarus. However… things went south and nearly everybody on my team had died, leaving only three of us, including me – to be captured and used as leverage towards the US government. We were held hostage there for three years, constantly being tortured during that time. It was only a few days ago before they finally found us, also managing to kill the trafficker.

After dropping that bomb on me, the man left me alone to contemplate. It all started to come back to me. The mission... the ambush… however, I didn’t remember the torture. That was when my memory became foggy and was replaced by the life I thought I had been living just a few days prior. The evidence of my physical deterioration was evident. I was bone-skinny, had cuts all over my body and was missing my left ring finger. But I don’t remember experiencing any of it.

I told all of this to my nurse, but she probably thought I was insane. Who knows, maybe I am. However, I asked for a laptop, so that I could type all of this down. My request was granted. The first thing that I did was search up major events that had happened during the three years that I was out of commission. It all lined up. The Cubs won in 2016, Trump took office in 2017, Carrie Fisher died, I knew it all. I even searched up Brandi’s Facebook profile. She had the same picture that she’d updated only a few months ago. There was no way that the last few years of my life had all been imagined.

Now, I can’t begin to speculate what happened. Was it a glitch or corruption in the matrix? I couldn’t say. Was it a mistake by God? Possibly. But...

Maybe it wasn't a mistake. Maybe it was deliberate. Maybe this “God” knew exactly what it was doing.

My Friends and I Tried Shooting A Found-Footage Horror Movie

  

When I say that my roommate Jack is an amateur at directing, I’m making an understatement. I mean, going into this little project of his, he literally had no experience. I don’t know why he thought that this would be a good idea. I couldn’t tell you how his brain works, to be honest.

It all began one boring night in my college dorm. It was a weeknight, and we couldn’t be fucked to get started on our assignments, so we decided to watch the Blair witch project instead. I swear, he must have been one of the last people on earth who hadn’t seen it at that point. I guess he loved it, because he wouldn’t stop talking about it afterwards. Specifically about how he could probably make something similar to it and blow up.

“Fuck studying man…” I remember him saying to me. “I could do it. How hard could it be?”

I tried to get him come back down to reality, but he wasn’t having it at the time. Thankfully, he ended up dropping the topic a few days later. Or at least… that’s what I thought at first. As soon as we’d finished our final exams and the year ended, he came up and asked if I wanted to be in the new film that he was directing Obviously, I said no.

“Do you even have a decent camera? Or a script?” I asked him.

“Dude relax, I have everything.” He said to me, seemingly trying to hold back a grin. I guess he really thought that this was a get-rich-quick scheme or something. “Look, can you just do it? I don’t want to pay an actor. I’ve literally asked everybody I know, but I’m still missing one character.”

I don’t know whether I should’ve been more insulted that he expected me to do this for free or that I was one of the last people he’d asked. However… I’d just gotten some incredibly shitty news a few days prior. I didn’t get the summer internship I’d been hoping for. With melancholy plaguing my thoughts, I decided to take him up on his offer. Might as well, you know?

As it turns out, Jack wasn’t lying when he said he’d figured everything out. He’d borrowed a fairly decent camera from his uncle and had actually secured a shooting location. It was a small, abandoned town off the coast of Italy. This was getting quite interesting, to say the least. There were two other guys who were supposed to part of this whole thing – Wayland and Mick. I already knew them both, but Jack knew them better. He’d managed to secure obtain plane tickets for us through his Girlfriend – who worked at an airport. On top of all this, he’d also set up free accommodations for us at a motel located in a town about a 90 minute drive from the abandoned one. Apparently the owner of the chain was a good friend of his dad’s. Surprisingly, everything seemed good to go.

We made the trip out there and checked into the motel about a week later. At this point, I was still incredibly skeptical about the how this “film” was going to turn out. In all honesty, I was expecting it to crash and burn in a week. These thoughts were only bolstered when Jack admitted that he hadn’t written a script.

“What the hell?” Wayland asked. “Well what are we supposed to do in front of the camera, then?”

“Just act natural” Jack responded. “You think the Blair witch project had a script?”

“I mean, it probably did.” Mick chimed in.

Jack just continued. “Whatever. Look, if we read off of a script, then it runs the risk of sounding unnatural. This town’s apparently creepy as fuck, just go along with the vibe.”

“Do you at least have some kind of story in mind?” I asked him.

“Yeah, of course. Four friends are documenting their vacation in Italy. One day, while at a bar in a small town, they’re told about an abandoned place near the coast where some weird shit always goes down. Being extremely skeptical, they all go and check it out. And then they get fucked. We don’t even need any creature prosthetics or anything. It’ll be psychological horror, where something’s clearly wrong, but nobody can figure out what exactly. Just act scared, for fucks sakes.”

This seemed to satisfy Mick and Wayland, but I could tell that they also thought that deep down… this sounded like shit. Whatever, I thought. At least I could go on vacation for a while.

For the first week, we just went and dicked around Sicily, getting shitfaced at bars and being a general nuisance to the locals. This was supposed to be the first act of the movie. However… we kind of winged the filming part. In other words, the footage looked like ass.

“It’s good enough. These are the unimportant parts anyways, who cares?” was all that Jack said when we watched it back.

I mean… he was the director. After that, we decided to finally get to work. Jack had the idea of incorporating some locals into the film, with their consent of course. We entered a bar in the small town we were staying at and tried to set up the scene. Jack spotted a middle-aged guy near the back and approached him, trying to explain to him what we were trying to do.

Halfway through Jack’s painful interpretation of the Italian language, the guy interrupted him. “Alright kid, I can speak English. What the hell is it that you want?”

Jack breathed a sigh of relief. “So, we’re shooting a horror film. Four guys on vacation in Italy. In this one scene, we’re sitting a table in a bar and discussing where we’re going next. One of us brings up the abandoned coastal town near here and we decide that would be a fun place to go. That’s when you chime in and say some bullshit about how we shouldn’t go because there’s a black-eyed demon who lives there or something. Now… you’ll be doing this for free, but if this thing becomes big, I’ll wire you some money. Just give us your contact information.”

After Jack’s spiel, the man just looked at him for a while, mouth agape. And then he chuckled.

“You kids are ballsy, I’ll tell you that.”

Wayland raise his eyebrow. “What’d you mean?”

The man then looked at us as if we’d just said the most ridiculous thing in the world. “So you’re telling me… you guys didn’t do any research before coming here?”

We all just collectively shrugged. The man seemed to contemplate something for a second before replying. “Well… I guess it is more of a local issue. Not too many people around here even know about it. The news wouldn’t report what really happened.”

Wait. What did he just say? “What… what’d you mean?” I asked him.

He glanced over at us with somewhat of a morbid expression. “There’s a reason that place is abandoned, you know? The mainstream story was that a fire caused the evacuation. However… only two houses actually burned down. No… it’s what caused the fire that made everybody leave. But it wasn’t a stove… or an arsonist… it was something that you guys aren’t ready to understand. And I’d advise that you stay the hell away from there.”

The man turned back towards the bar and just started sipping on his beer again. We just stood there in collective shock. After a few moments, Jack spoke back up again:

“Dude… that was amazing. Could you do it again, please? On film this time?”

The guy turned around: “Kid, are you stupid or something?” He threw some bills onto the counter and got up. “This younger generation... you guys don’t listen, do you? That’s why the news is filled with stories of people like you fucking up somewhere. Just take my advice.”

And just like that, he was gone. Now, none of us wanted to admit it, but that whole conversation did get us a bit spooked. Jack just wrote it off as some guy just trying to scare us. And again… we just agreed. In retrospect, listening to Jack’s mental gymnastics, attempting to justify why this was still a good idea was probably our biggest mistake.

Anyways… we managed to shoot the scene with the help from some other tourists. They didn’t seem to know anything about the town, so they made up a story about how an insane religious zealot performed some ritual and now the place made anybody who went there lose their minds. Things seemed to be coming together quite nice. However… the whole time we were shooting, I couldn’t help but notice that the bartender was sneaking glances over at us. As we left, I could have sworn seeing him shaking his head somewhat solemnly. That should’ve been another sign for us to leave. But alas… we continued.

We headed back to the motel and planned the trip out the next day. The story that we created was extremely generic. The guys go there and mess around for a few hours with nothing extraordinary happening. As they’re about to leave, they spot some weird symbols that had been spray-painted on the walls and floor of one of the buildings. They keep coming back, and things just keep escalating until they start going insane. The film was supposed to end with one of us standing in the water at night, walking backwards in a jerking motion towards the camera. Sounds more corny than scary right? Well at this point, we were too deep in to back out.

We made the drive out there in our rented car the next morning. We’d gotten directions off of google maps, but the main road to the location was blocked for whatever reason. Because of that, we had to find a detour. Eventually we did manage to get there, but it took around two hours. That was kind of annoying. What was even more annoying were the wooden barriers around the place. It really looked like they were trying to keep people out. That’s when I started questioning the legality of this. However, Jack quelled these concerns by telling us about a film shot entirely in Disneyworld without the parks consent, so we just kept on. Besides… this was such a small, insignificant place. Who would care?

We walked around for a while, trying to map out where everything was. That was an easy task as the place was quite small. You could walk end to end through the town in about ten minutes. the man at the bar was also right. Two houses seemed to have burnt down. The rest of the buildings – while empty and having moderate signs of environmental damage, looked to be perfectly fine. In fact, the place didn’t give off much of a creepy vibe at all. At first.

We filmed for a few hours before we called it a day. I have to say, it was honestly coming together better than I thought it could've. As it turns out, Wayland was quite the actor. Mick and I also managed to hold our own. In addition to that, Jack’s camera work wasn’t terrible. Now, it wasn’t good by any means, but it looked quite authentic and on par with modern day found footage films. He must have taken a few classes. As the sun began to set, we decided to wrap it up for the day and head back. As we were about to leave, I decided to take a look in one of the burnt houses, just out of pure curiosity. As I walked around the blackened, dilapidated structure, nothing really seemed to pop out at first. That was until I looked at the floor. There were… footprints? At first, I thought they must have been due to the dust, which worried me. I mean, there couldn’t have been anybody else here.

However, when I examined them closer, I realized something much stranger. The footsteps seemed to be sunken in, as if somebody took a heavy weight shaped like the bottom of a shoe and pressed into the floorboards. This was weird… to say the least. But not that weird. Not enough for me to think about it too long, anyways. I jogged back to the car, where everybody was waiting and told them all about it. As expected, they just told me it was nothing. And that’s also what I told myself.

Nothing extremely out of the ordinary occurred the following few days either. At that point, we’d even gotten around 45 minutes of decent footage. It was only until a week into shooting where I realized that something just wasn’t right about this place. The feeling of wrongness had been subtly building ever since we’d gotten there, but either nobody else noticed or nobody else wanted to admit it. I was watching over some footage that we’d shot a few days ago. In it, the sun was just starting to set. The thing is… I’d noticed something in the distance off the shore, in the water. At first, it just appeared to be a splash. But… it was large. What the hell could’ve caused it? Curious, I replayed the footage and watched even closer. Now, the background was pretty blurry and the splash was only in the shot for a few seconds, but I could’ve swore that there was something behind it. Almost like a dark figure. A… person?No way, I thought. That made no fucking sense, you know?

Even though I tried rationalizing this by telling myself it was a trick of the light, or my overactive imagination… or something, I still couldn’t stop thinking about it. I thought about telling the others, but I knew that they wouldn’t think anything of it. Especially Jack. He seemed to have gotten a lot more serious about this whole thing. My suspicions were confirmed when night came. We were getting ready to head out of there when he stopped us.

“Look… I have an idea.” He said. “Let’s stay here for the night. I packed sleeping bags and some food.

“Fuck that!” Mick replied. “Why would I want to spend the night in this dusty-ass place?”

After seeing that footage, I also shared his sentiments. I did not want to do this.

Jack kept going: “Look, what makes a movie suspenseful? Conflict, right? So far, there’s been none of that. We’ve found some spooky symbols, heard some noises, but that’s it! Imagine this… our car’s broken down in this scene. We tried to start it, but it just wouldn’t go. So we start arguing with each other. “Oh, it’s your fault, it’s his fault!” that kind of shit, right? As it ends up , we’re forced to sleep here, in one of the houses. And then sometime during the night, we wake up to some strange noises outside, so we look out the windows, and see a figure crouching behind the bushes or something. Tell me that doesn’t sound fucking amazing.”

While it didn't sound like anything original, this is what the movie needed. The others protested a bit more before eventually coming to a consensus. I also reluctantly agreed. However, I sure as hell wasn’t excited about the night. We moved into one of the houses and set up our sleeping bags there. Jack wanted us to only get a few hours of sleep before we started filming the night scene.

“Authenticity.” He explained. “The more tired you are, the more real it’ll seem.” I had to hand it to him at that point. The guy was dedicated.

At about 1:00 AM, he woke us up. He was already filming. The plan was to have Mick go out beforehand and start making deep, groaning noises. He’d also be the figure crouching behind the bush. We were planning to shoot and edit in a scene with all four of us watching from inside the house later. Groggily, I got up and played along.

“What’s going on?” I mumbled.

Jack put on his scared voice. “You guys didn’t hear that shit? Listen.” As Wayland and I strained our ears, he filmed us. As expected, we heard Mick’s groaning from outside.

“What the hell is that?” Wayland responded, deliberately making his voice go shaky at the end of the sentence.

“Fuck if I know.” Jack responded. “Sounds like it’s coming from somewhere near the shore.” He took the camera and started filming through the window.

“Shit… I think I see something in the bushes.” He paused for a second. “Wait… the hell?” His tone changed drastically. He put the camera down and turned back to us.

“Guys, what the fuck is that in the water?” His voice was completely sober at that point. It didn’t sound like acting at all. In addition to that, his face had gone completely pale. Confused, I just kept up the act.

“What’d you mean? What was in the bushes-“

“I’m being fucking serious.” He cut me off. “Look out at the sea.” With a sense of dread creeping into my psyche, Mick and I did what he said. However… I couldn’t see anything.

“Uh… have you gone mental, Jack? There’s nothing.” I heard Mick blurt out.

“Are you kidding me?” Jack pushed him out of the way and started scanning for himself.

“What the fuck is going on?” I heard him mutter.

However, as I kept observing the water, I noticed something rather peculiar. And frighteningly familiar. The waves were incredibly light that night, so I was able to make it out in the distance. Splashes. Large ones. And they seemed to be getting closer. Suddenly, I remembered the splash from the film footage that I had been looking at earlier.

“Give me the camera.” I told Jack.

Although he had a muddled look on his face, he didn’t protest and just handed it over. I turned it back on and started filming the splashes. And oh god… what the fuck did I see?

There was a figure wading through the water, coming towards us. It also seemed to have some kind of deep red glow emitting off of it. When I zoomed in, it was apparent that it was wearing some old-looking deep sea diving gear, but without a helmet. The weirdest part was that when I tried focusing in on the details of its face, I couldn’t. It’s not that the camera didn't have the capability… my eyes just couldn’t take it. They’d start stinging and watering and I’d have to turn away. But from the split seconds that I managed to sneak a look in, the face appeared to be… distorted, in a sense. Almost like it was that of a typical man, but was passed through multiple filters of some sort. Safe to say, this was beyond fucked up.

I put the camera down. “Jesus Christ!” I reeled back in shock. I decided to test my suspicions and looked back at the water. The figure was now gone. At least from my vision. I could still see the splashes. And they were getting dangerously close now.

“What the hell is it?” Jack and Wayland asked me in near unison. I gave them the camera and they took turns witnessing what I'd just seen in abject horror.

“We need to leave.” Jack uttered, in the most drastic tone I’d ever heard come from him.

“What in the hell are you guys doing?” We heard Mick call from the bushes. He was looking up at us, holding his arms up. I watched in horror as large footsteps started appearing on the beach behind him.

“RUN TO THE FUCKING CAR!” Was all that I managed to get out. He flinched for a second, before turning around to witness the sand being manipulated by an invisible force. He bolted right after that. We didn’t even bother rolling up our sleeping bags, we just ran like hell out of there. Being the slowest of the bunch, I was the last one to leave the house we were in. However, in my mad dash towards the vehicle, I slipped on some pebbles and crashed to the ground, scraping my wrists. As I reeled from the pain, I swore that I was able to somehow sense a presence coming towards me. It’s hard to explain. It was like the air around me began to feel hostile. In addition to that, I could hear multiple voices coming towards me. But none of them were distinguishable. They all seemed to be blending together, forming a disturbing cacophony of noise. And the worst part of all…

I couldn’t move.

I remember just sitting there, trying to prop myself up, but my arms were moving about an inch a minute. It also felt like I was being dragged down into the earth. A few seconds later, I heard the sound of pavement being crunched behind me. The closer and closer it got, the more and more it felt like I was sinking into hell.

My vision started blacking out before I was snapped out of whatever trance I had been in. I watched as a bright light flew past and hit something behind me. The suffocating disharmony of voices suddenly stopped and was replaced by a loud, guttural grunt. I looked up to see Jack standing about thirty meters away, holding a flare gun in one hand and the camera in the other. I took the chance and scrambled up, dashing towards the car. I got in and we sped the hell out of there.

We’re sitting back in the motel room now. None of us have said a word to each other. I mean… what the hell are we supposed to say?

UPDATE:

We’ve decided to end the trip early. As soon morning comes, we’re taking the next flight out of here. The rest of the guys have finally drifted off to sleep, but… I just can’t. That… feeling of sinking terror as that thing approached me… I can’t stop thinking about it. I can almost feel it still.

I picked up the camera again and skimmed through the footage. There was no way in hell that we weren’t showing this to somebody. Maybe there were answers out there. However, when I played the footage back… that thing was gone. I could see the water splashing, the concrete crumbling under its force, me paralyzed on the ground… but that goddamn thing was just not there.

What?

---

Credits

 

We've Just Discovered The Most Bizarre Virus

  

Alright, long story short – my name is Cam and I’m a virologist. If you’ve never heard of that title, it’s just a person who studies/researches viruses and any biological agents resembling them. It’s a decent job. Pays well and keeps me interested. I’ve never really thought about pursuing anything else.

That was until last night. We’ve discovered something very bad.

I was part of a 5 person team in a small lab situated up in the mountains of a western European country. I’m not going to give too many specifics here.

The project was spearheaded by a particularly exceptional microbiologist. Let’s call him Hathaway. Now, Hathaway had been on vacation for a while in South America. Everybody who worked closely with him or knew him well thought this was incredibly strange. I mean, the guy never took a break. However, it all made sense when he came back.

He looked like absolute shit. There were heavy bags under his eyes and scratches all over his face. He was jittery as all hell and could barely string together a coherent sentence. As we would learn later, he was never actually on vacation. I guess you could say that it was more like a business trip of sorts.

Apparently, he’d been in contact with a colleague of his based in Chile. He’d been informing Hathaway about some peculiar events occurring in a small village near the coast. Something to do with a potential unknown disease. The specifics remained a mystery to us at the time. All Hathaway said was that it was worth looking into. What worried a lot of us were the cuts on his face and forearms. When asked about it, he simply claimed that he’d fallen down a few times while hiking. Without knowing what else to believe, we just bought it. Besides… the prospect of studying a new virus was incredibly intriguing. This might have been something big.

We got to work right away. As the five of us – me, Hathaway, Jake, Beth and Collin, congregated in the main lab, Hathaway carried in what appeared to be a fortified glass tank containing a single bird. I think it was an Andean Condor, native to Chile. I’ll be honest, I was a bit worried at that point. We didn’t even bother asking how he got it past border security.

“Tell me this isn’t some derivative of the bird flu”, Jake asked.

“No.” Hathaway responded. “I uh… I have no idea what it is, actually.” We all collectively raised our eyebrows at this. “You see, it’s definitely not airborne. You can also touch the bird as much as you like, nothing’ll happen to you… it’s transmitted some other way.”

That’s when I noticed that the bird was actually blindfolded. I don’t why I hadn’t earlier. Why nobody had even pointed it out. I guess my subconscious wasn’t expecting such a bizarre sight.

“Don’t tell me it has something to do with that” I asked, pointing to where its eyes should’ve been. Everybody else seemed to catch onto the strange detail. Hathaway stayed quiet for a second, staring at the ground before finally nodding.

“Are you kidding me?” Jake inquired. “How does that work?"

“Wait, what the hell’s even wrong with the bird?” I found myself blurting out. Although, it was a fair question. Upon initial glance at it, nothing at all seemed to be off. The only somewhat strange thing was that it hadn’t moved much.

Hathaway sighed. “Not at first, right?” He dug around in his bag and pulled out another, smaller tank. It was filled with beetles. “We’ll do a demonstration here.” He walked over to the bird tank and dumped all of the beetles in.

“Jesus Christ…” I heard somebody mutter from behind me. Once Hathaway was finished, he turned back to us. His expression at the time was dead serious. In the gravest tone that I’d ever heard come from him, he spoke to us:

“I’m about to take the blindfold off of the bird. Whatever you do, don’t look at it. In fact, just leave the room. I’ll tell you when you can come back."

I think that we all hesitated for just a second when he said that. What the hell was going on? Eventually, we all just did as we were told. We stood out in the hall in absolute silence for maybe about 3 minutes. At that time, I couldn’t understand why it took so long for him to take a damn blindfold off. But then the noises started.

I… I can’t even find a way to describe them. They couldn’t have come from a bird, that’s for sure. Or at least, they shouldn’t have. If anything, it was like a screech, except extremely deep and guttural. And also… somehow discombobulated. A few seconds later, we heard Hathaway screaming expletives. It sounded like he was in pain. We stood there frozen, not knowing at all what to do. Eventually, we were called back in. Hesitantly, I went first.

As soon as I stepped in there, I saw Hathaway disinfecting his hand, which was now cut open. As he started wrapping it up, I turned my attention to the bird. It looked the same as it was before. The only difference was that it was covered in beetle guts. So were the glass walls of the tank.

After we’d all settled down from the initial shock, Hathaway tried to explain what the hell had just happened.

“Here’s what I think: Somehow… this virus is transferred upon direct eye contact with an infected specimen-"

“What the fuck?” Jake interjected. “No… no fuck that, it makes absolutely no sense!-“

“You think I don’t know that?” Hathaway interrupted back. “Just listen, alright? Anyways… there aren’t any immediate indications when something's been infected. They’ll act exactly the same as they were before. At least at first. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when they start changing. I’d say maybe three hours, tops. But once they do… you notice. The best thing you can do is to blindfold them. That way, you can’t get infected, and the subject loses all of its symptoms. Well… I suppose that the best thing to do is to actually blind them but… I had to demonstrate first. Now we just have to figure out what the hell's actually going on.”

After that brief and albeit somewhat unsatisfying explanation, we went to work. But shit only kept getting stranger.

After we’d blinded and killed the bird, Hathaway instructed us to start dissecting the brain. At first, we were tentative. After witnessing what had just happened, we were scared as hell of contracting whatever the hell it was that the bird had. Besides, we weren’t even trained surgeons.

However, Hathaway insisted that the only way this virus could be transmitted was by eye contact. As strange as this all was, we just went along with it. His reasoning for dissecting the brain first was that he’d made the assumption that this virus must be affecting the host on a mainly psychological basis. As it turns out, he was right.

Once the brain was exposed, we noticed something truly inexplicable. Something was moving around in there. We all turned to Hathaway, hoping for further explanation.

“It’s a parasite?” Beth asked, looking mortified.

Hathaway shook his head, looking incredibly confused. “No… it shouldn’t be. The bird’s been alive for weeks after infection. I see no signs of physical deterioration, no nutrient deficiencies, none of that.”

We were all absolutely baffled at this point. What kind of fucking virus is large enough to be visible? We just stared at it, not knowing what to do. Then out of nowhere, the brain started bulging outwards. Hathaway’s face dropped.

“It must know that the host is dead. It’s trying to come out.”

Thinking quickly, I went and grabbed a nearby beaker. I managed to trap the thing just as it burrowed its way out. I really didn’t know what the hell to expect at that point, but it didn’t stop me from being completely surprised at the appearance of the thing.

It looked… absolutely alien. It nearly resembled a bacteriophage, expect for the fact that it seemed to have tiny suction cups covering it. The head also appeared to be partially mechanical, with tubes protruding out and connecting to the legs. It was about the size of a black widow spider.

I heard a cacophony of screams ring throughout the room, while Hathaway shouted at me to not let it out. As everything started settling down, we managed to transport it into another glass tank, this time smaller and more fortified. We spent the next 12 hours observing and analyzing it. The conclusion that we came to? It made no fucking sense. We couldn’t classify it nor make sense of its various parts. Hell, the thing was too fucking huge to be any kind of pathogen. We would’ve written it off as some kind of undiscovered jungle creature, but the fact remained that it seemed to affect the behaviors of its host organisms.

Eventually, we decided to just secure and leave it, planning to continue our research the next day, even though that was unlikely to yield any solid results. Most of us even considered just turning it over to the government. We sure as hell didn’t know what to do with it.

However… Hathaway declined that proposition.

“We’ll figure out what it is” He claimed, sounding somewhat unconfident. “This is big, alright? I’m not letting it go just yet.”

Tired as hell and not wanting to get into an argument, we all decided to head off to our separate temporary dorms in order to get some rest.

What a big fucking mistake that was. We should’ve burned that thing right then and there.

I remember lying in bed that night when a troubling thought creeped into my head. If the way that this virus was transmitted was by making eye contact with an infected organism, then wouldn’t looking directly at the virus itself cause something similar to happen? How the hell would that even work? Did it replicate through our thoughts? Or did it need to control optical nerves in order to spread? How could that even make sense? But then again… none of this really did. However, I did recall Hathaway claiming that symptoms would surface three hours tops after the initial infection. It had been a hell of a lot longer than that. Being somewhat reassured, I passed out.

I woke up about four hours later. I groggily rubbed my eyes, wondering what could’ve taken me out of my slumber. I’m usually a very deep sleeper. As I awoke back into reality, I heard it:

Somebody was mumbling down the hall. It sounded like Jake. I got up and opened my door, planning to confront him. I stepped out and saw his silhouette, shrouded in darkness about twenty meters away. His back was turned to me, so I prepared to call out. That’s when I felt somebody cover my mouth and pull me into an adjacent hallway. Reeling at the initial shock, I looked behind me and realized that it was Hathaway. I was about to shout at him once he let me go, but he motioned for me to be quiet. I also saw the desperation in his eyes. I stayed silent as he gestured me back towards the lab.

I realized that we were fucked as soon as I saw what had happened. The reinforced glass tank where we had been holding the virus was empty. Whatever this thing was… it was out.

“Don’t look into his eyes.” Hathaway told me, in reference to Jake. “We weren’t careful enough… it must have infected him.”

“Did he open the fucking tank?” I asked him.

He shook his head. “No… no way. You need a password for it. It’s not even written down anywhere, only I know it.”

I looked back at the tank in abject confusion. There weren’t any cracks on it or anything. There was no feasible way out.

“The how the hell-“. I began to ask him, but he cut me off:

“Look, I don’t know. Maybe there’s a lot more about this thing that we can’t understand.” He sighed, throwing his hands behind his head.

My mind started racing. If this virus… or whatever it was, could’ve escaped at any time, then why didn’t it make a move earlier? This thing must have been smarter than we’d anticipated. I guess it somehow knew that it had a better chance of escaping when nobody was monitoring it. But how did it escape?

My thoughts were interrupted when we heard a knocking coming from outside the lab door.

“Hello?” A voice called out. It was Collin. I got up to open the door, but Hathaway pulled me back down.

“What the hell?” I barked at him. “Let him in before he sees Jake!”

“What if he already has?” Hathaway responded. And then I thought about it. It takes around three hours for the symptoms to manifest. So even if he’s been infected, he wouldn’t know it yet.

“Uh… the hell are you guys doing in there? I can hear you. Let me in, Jake’s being really fucking weird. It’s actually kind of scary.”

“Weird how?” Hathaway asked.

“Well, he woke me up when he walked past my door. Actually, I think he was standing right outside. Yeah, he was mumbling something. I opened the door and asked him what the hell he was doing. It was dark, but I could tell that he was just staring at me. And then he started rambling… it was absolute nonsense. He was stringing words together, but none of it made any sense.

“After a while of him not responding to a word I said, I gave up and walked past him. That was like 5 minutes ago. Look are you guys gonna come out or what? What are we supposed to do?”

Hathaway and I exchanged worried glances. If Jake really was infected… then so was Collin. We didn’t move.

“For fuck’s sake, what are you doing?” Collin went on, sounding more agitated now. “Is there a reason that you won’t let me in?”

That was followed by silence. A few seconds later, we heard him mumbling something:

“Shit… tell me that Jake wasn’t infected.”

I guess our silence was enough of an answer.

“No… no fucking way! So what happens next? Hathaway! What the hell am I supposed to do then?”

Hathaway just sighed and shook his head. “I… I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

We heard him shout some more expletives before walking away, fuming. We sat there for a while after that, having no idea what to do.

“Is there an emergency escape in here?” I asked him.

“No, but it wouldn’t matter anyways. We can’t let those guys out of here. I’ve yet to see what effects it has on a human, but it can’t be anything good. And don’t even ask me about a cure. I don’t know.”

“So what are you saying?” I asked him, dreading the answer.

“Best case scenario is that we blindfold and restrain them before they show any signs of aggression.”

He sighed, looking down at the ground before continuing.

“And then we hand them over to somebody else… somebody who can deal with this. We sure as hell can’t”

I know who he meant by that. I guess he just didn’t want to admit it. Hathaway pulled out two rolls of duct tape as well as what appeared to be two tranquilizer guns. I didn’t bother asking why he had them. Slowly and quietly, we opened the door and walked out into the hallway. The lights above were dimmed, so we could see, but not that well.

I was terrified at this point. I kept thinking about that damn bird. I didn’t see what it actually did, but the results spoke volumes. I did not want to witness how that translated over to humans.

We walked down various corridors for about five minutes before we heard a soft voice to the hallway left of us. It was Jake. This is roughly what he was saying:

“In time… where in time? I… it doesn’t make sense? I know that it doesn’t. So what do I do? I can’t stay like this…”

Obviously, this made no sense. What was even weirder was his tone. It wasn’t devoid of emotion. In fact, it was quite the opposite. He sounded genuinely confused and afraid. Barely making any sound, Hathaway peeked past the corner, his vision aimed at the floor, presumably trying to avoid eye contact. However, as soon as he did this, he screamed and jumped backwards.

I asked him what he’d seen, but he wouldn’t turn to face me. A second later, I found out why.

“I saw him… I saw his face. When I peered over, he was lying on the floor, staring right at me. Fuck… ”

I stumbled backwards, horrified at this sudden revelation.

“Don’t worry” He told me. “I’ll take care of Jake… and then I’ll take care of myself. Just go find Collin. And be more careful than I was.”

Without needing further conviction, I turned and ran the other way. As I did, I heard the sounds of a struggle and Hathaway screaming out in pain behind me. There was also… laughter, for some reason. Hysterical, deranged laughter. It sounded nothing like Jake.

I ran across corridors, making sure to only look to the walls, so that I could just see in front of me from my peripherals. I nearly jumped out my skin when I heard somebody call out from behind me. It was Beth this time. I’d nearly forgotten about her in all the panic. However, I wasn’t taking risks. I raised the tranquilizer pistol towards her general direction.

“What’s going on?” She asked, sounding terrified.

I responded curtly and directly. “Have you looked into anybody’s eyes since we left the lab?”

She let out a near whimper, “No… no why? Oh god… don’t tell me…”

“Yeah. It’s out.” I told her, still aiming the weapon at her.

“Fuck… well, I haven’t made eye contact with Collin, alright?”

Now, I suppose that most people would’ve let up in this situation. She obviously wasn’t infected, right? But there was something wrong with what she just said. Why did she mention Collin specifically? Why didn’t she just say that he hadn’t made eye contact with anybody? In addition to that, something about her tone was off. It was like a bad actor trying to deliver a line.

I didn’t know how to react, so I just froze there. Eventually, Beth started speaking again:

“Is that a tranquilizer gun? Because that won’t do anything.”

Before I could even react, she lunged at me. I closed my eyes as I felt her nails dig into my skin. And then into my face. She was trying to forcefully pry open my eyelids. Luckily, I had about 90 pounds on her, so I managed to throw her off of me. The whole time she was assaulting me, she was letting out some kind of extremely deep, throaty chuckle, as opposed to Jake’s boisterous hysterical one.

Beth got back up in an instant and lunged at me again. This time, I managed to put her into a chokehold. However… she wouldn’t go unconscious. I must have held her there for about three minutes, but her relentless scratching eventually made it a task too difficult. I pushed her away and started running.

As I bolted out of there, I could hear her coming after me, still letting out that disturbing chuckle. The weirdest part was that I could also hear her palms hitting the floor. Was she fucking crawling? I didn’t try and find out. I ducked into an adjacent lab and locked the door behind me. I heard her clawing at it from outside, so I just lied down of the floor for a while in order to catch my breath. God, she was still fucking laughing. What the hell was going on? Wait a minute… I thought. The laughing was too loud. It sounded like it was coming from in the room. Hesitantly, I checked the door. I nearly had a heart attack at what I saw.

She was… halfway through the damn door. But it was still closed. I could see her arms and face poking through the metal. Safe to say, I left immediatley. Thankfully, there were two doors in the room, so I ran out into an adjacent hallway.

I just wanted to get out of there. I started running frantically, trying to search for an exit, or a window, or… anything. At that point, I was quite disoriented. I couldn’t place where I was in the building. I still remembered to stay cautious, however.

My heart nearly leapt out of my chest when I saw an illuminated exit sign. I followed it and was finally lead to the door I entered through. However… Hathaway was blocking the entrance. He was hunched over, covering his eyes with his hands… and they were dripping blood.

“You know I… I just feel weird right now. Not like myself, you now?” I heard him utter out.

I tried thinking about it. Had it been three hours since our encounter with Jake? Surely, it hadn’t been. I guess he eventually heard me, because he shifted himself towards my direction.

“Cam… is that… is that you?” He spoke, in a soft but somewhat threatening tone. “I don’t know what happened. I tried killing Jake but he just wouldn’t die… I think it’s coming now. I feel weird. What’s happening to me? Can you tell me, Cam?”

Right after he said, a loud roar emanated from some corridor behind me. It was followed by what sounded like rapid crawling towards our direction.

“Don’t worry about me, Cam… I always make it.” Hathaway kept going. “I always make it… I… won’t make it.” He then fell to his knees, sobbing hysterically. I took the chance and bolted out the front door. As soon as I got out, I grabbed a bundle of nearby sticks and jammed the entrance. I’m pretty sure it won’t last long but… it was the best I could do.

I got into my car and sped down the mountain trail, back onto the highway. I got home about thirty minutes ago and I have no idea what to do. Should I call the police? Are they even going to listen to me? What about the FBI? Surely that’s the best option here. I’ll probably end up doing that soon.

That virus cannot spread more than it already has.

God, when I saw Beth’s face coming through the metal door… I don’t think I can ever forget that. And her eyes… they looked like something straight out of hell. Her pupils were replaced by what looked like this dark purple vortex, it was all so fucked up.

Wait.

I made eye contact with her, didn’t I?

Shit. 

---

Credits

 

The Havoc Project

 

Back in 2011, a man by the name of Jack Mayfeld conducted what was known discretely as “The havoc project”. I say discretely because even the participants weren’t aware of the title at first. The only person who called it this was Mayfeld himself. Everybody else was told that there was no official name. That it was just a simple experiment. I’m not going to go into how I knew the guy because that’s not all too important. All I’ll say is that it before any of this happened, I considered the guy a friend. You see, even though Mayfeld was never a secretive man, this whole thing was shrouded in mystery. Everybody, excluding himself, went in with minimal information, and they deemed the whole thing a crapshoot from the start. But I guess adding a decent amount of money into the equation was good enough to keep it going.

There was a lot of confusion and speculation as to why Mayfeld even wanted to do this in the first place. He was no scientist. No researcher. Not a religious man, either. He was just an eccentric entrepreneur. A successful one at that. Nobody understood why he wanted to pour so much money into something that wouldn’t yield further profits. Well… I suppose that the confusion stemmed more from the fact that the goals of this project were incredibly unclear. Again, everybody was in the dark here. We didn’t know what to expect. But even that didn’t stop everybody from being shocked at the ultimate outcome. Including me.

Even though this happened so long ago, I still remember it with vivid detail. More than I thought the human mind would’ve been able to recall.

Somewhere in the northern region of Austria, there’s a mountain range. On one of those mountains, sits a large forest, in a relatively flat area of land. A particularly strange thing about the area was the fact that animals and wild game were extremely abundant. There was also a strange lack of predatorial creatures. That’s what made it such a hotspot for locals to go out and search for fresh meat. Ultimately, it was a hunter’s paradise. But one day… they stopped coming back. Nobody could really pinpoint an exact time, but it was sudden. The family and friends of the ones gone missing would venture into the woods in search of what happened. What they would find was beyond horrific.

The bodies were mangled beyond recognition. Limbs were missing and the damage was unlike anything any creature on earth could’ve feasibly inflicted. They’d search the forest for hours, trying to discover whatever had taken away their loved ones in such a gruesome fashion. But they’d never find anything. A bit of time would pass before other hunters would decide to go back out there and try again. However, it’d always be the same story. Unimaginable deaths and subsequent search parties that went nowhere. But while all these deaths were chalked up to some kind of animal attack or freak accident, there was one thing that could never be explained. Every time a hunter wouldn’t return for the night, the nearby villages would experience something. Something very strange. It was a kind of subtle rumbling in the ground. Almost like an earthquake that was trying to be conspicuous. But nevertheless, it was felt. It was also accompanied by a bizarre sound that echoed through the air. Like a quiet, but deep and guttural screech. Nobody knew where it was coming from at first, but coincidence can only go so far. After a while, they’d figured out that the source had to be coming from the forest. Because of all these occurrences, people eventually stopped going in there at all. A long enough period of time passed that It’d become somewhat of a legend in the nearby villages that resided just a few miles away. The unofficial name of the place had become “Verwustung Wald”, or “Havoc woods”. That’s where the project name came from, you see.

This wasn’t something that gained a lot of outsider attention. The place was so isolated, barely anybody talked about it at all. How Mayfeld knew about it himself was a mystery at the time. He never bothered explaining it, adding fuel to the vague fire that was this whole situation. In fact, Mayfeld never even bothered telling us that the place was nicknamed Havoc woods. I guess he thought that would’ve deterred a lot of people from participating.

Here’s what he proposed:

There were 15 of us in total. 10 were to be sent into the forest for the main experiment. The other 5 were supposed to observe and take notes from the video feed coming from the cameras that were set up around the forest and on the individuals sent to the forest themselves. I was part of the four observing.

The experiment itself was incredibly strange. Now, Mayfeld never told us about the circumstances surrounding the forest until after the project was pretty much over, so we thought he was borderline crazy for making the participants do this. But alas... money's money. So we didn't ask too many questions.

The ones sent into the forest were split into two groups. 5 of them were the labeled the “Hunters” while the other 5 were labeled the “Prey”. The hunters were given realistic looking airsoft guns and told to track down the “Prey”, who were given protective gear. The Prey were supposed to be sent into the forest thirty minutes before the Hunters were. After that time had elapsed, the Hunters were told to head in and to shoot at the prey on sight, as well as to pursue them until they’d been hit. But this is the fucked up part:

While the Hunters were aware of the Prey, the Prey were not aware of the Hunters. They were simply told not to worry about the wildlife and that the gear was to protect them if they fell or something. The instructions that were given to the Prey was to simply wander around the forest for three hours before trying to find their way back. However, there was no need to worry if they couldn’t. They had GPS’s fitted onto their belts and would be located if they weren’t back within an hour and a half. They also had radios and would be told about the true nature of the experiment after they’d been shot, as to not stir any additional panic. After that, they were told to simply hide somewhere and wait for the three hours to elapse or until everybody else had been shot as well.

Now, there was obviously a lot of room for fatal errors here. In addition to this, everybody had signed liability contracts beforehand. Clearly, this was not very morally sound. But like I’ve said… money makes us do a lot of crazy stuff. Stuff that we don’t really think about until later.

So, the scheduled first day of the project finally arrives and we were split into two separate private planes. The one with the Hunters were flown out first, while the observers and Prey went afterwards. For some reason, the plane ride held an atmosphere of intensity that we didn’t initially expect. We all went into it fairly happy and somewhat excited. The payout was going to be great, and if Mayfeld turned out not to be crazy, then we were due to see some interesting stuff. But as soon as we took off, nobody really talked to each other. It’s as if this was a time for reflection. Time to think about what we were really getting ourselves into. And I guess the more we thought about it, the more it really didn’t make any sense. I mean, there was really no reason why we couldn’t do this in any other forest in America. Right? But at this point, it was far too late.

Mayfield’s demeanor during the whole ride also didn’t help with our feelings of uneasiness. Like everybody else, he didn’t talk. However, there was also something else that was subtle in his mannerisms. Eventually, we picked up on what it was, but didn’t know what conclusions to draw from it. He seemed… angry for some reason.

As soon as we landed, we set our stuff up in a medium sized cabin reserved by Mayfeld in one of the nearby villages. The Hunters were already in another cabin, but they were told to stay put. The Prey couldn’t know about them.

After we settled, we packed up our equipment into a bag and ventured out into the forest. Keep in mind that Mayfeld never told us about the history behind the place, so we were ignorant to the potential dangers we were facing. The locals also didn’t speak English, so there was no way we could’ve known. The trip wasn’t drivable, so we had to hike there. It took a total of around three hours there and back. Once we arrived, we started setting up the cameras in the various nooks and crannies around the forest. Some in trees, some on the ground, and some in bushes. We must have put up around 12 in total. Something I noticed was that the forest was absolutely pristine. It was filled with wildlife and immaculate foliage. At one point, one of the Observers - who was a hunting enthusiast, stated that we should kill a deer and have a barbeque back at the cabin. As soon as he said this, Mayfeld got dead serious and told him a firm no. In retrospect, this should have been warning to call this whole thing quits right there.

By the time we’d finished, it was almost dark. We made our way back to the cabin and settled in for the night. Most everybody was tired as hell at this point, so they passed out. However, I wanted to walk around the town for a bit. You see, I didn’t get to travel a lot and I've always thought that Austria was a nice place. However, Mayfeld specifically told us not do this, so I had to wait until he fell asleep.

I strolled around the empty village square while taking in the scenery. I was about to call it a night myself when I stumbled upon something rather peculiar. It looked like a child’s chalk drawing on the ground. I bent down to get a better look at it. I remember feeling chills go down my spine as I made out what it was supposed to be:

It was somewhere in the forest, for sure. There were crudely drawn trees and bushes, along with what I assumed were supposed to be deer. In the middle was a small stick figure wearing a dress. I assumed this was the child herself. However… there was also something else drawn in front of her. Some kind of creature. It was tall. About five times the size of her. It also had multiple, extremely large appendages that seemed to end in sharp points sticking out everywhere. In addition, it was extremely skinny, like its arms and legs were literal twigs. Safe to say, this unsettled me a bit. However, I chalked it up to some little girl’s overactive imagination. I didn’t even think about the fact that her being in the forest coincided with Mayfeld’s experiment. I suppose that I didn’t really want to think about it, actually. After that, I just went to bed.

As the sun started rising the next day, we put the plan into execution. We strapped body cameras onto the Prey and sent them out. We’d instructed the Hunters, also equipped with body cams, to stay back and wait for thirty minutes after the Prey had left. An observer went along with them just to make sure they got there okay. Or that’s what they were told, at least. Once there, the observer would pretend to radio Mayfeld. In reality, he was calling the Hunters, who were already on their way, letting them know that the Prey would be heading into the forest soon. And this is exactly what happened. The five Prey entered and started walking around. The Hunters got there roughly thirty minutes later. It had officially begun.

We watched the surveillance footage intently, waiting to see what would happen. Waiting to see why Mayfeld was so obsessed with this. We observed as the Prey wandered around aimlessly, probably just waiting for it to be over. The Hunters acted like real ones, as instructed. They moved quietly and stealthily, trying to use the element of surprise to their advantage.

Two of the Prey were hit without much issue. They were both body shots, so the damage was also minimized. At first, they were scared out their wits. Once we radioed them and explained the situation, they seemed angry for a bit. However, they eventually calmed down after being guaranteed that they were safe and that the experiment was essentially over for them. However… it didn’t take much longer for shit to start going south.

As the two Hunters who’d made the first shots went to go searching for others, they started reporting an inexplicable feeling of urgency around them. They’d say things through the radio like “I think we should head back, we’ve done what we were supposed to, right?” and “I think I’m being followed. I can’t see or hear anything, but I can feel it.” Mayfeld told them to calm down and that they wouldn’t get paid if they left early. His tone was harsh. More so than I’d ever heard him use before. After some more complaining, the hunters eventually relented. It was only until the 3rd Prey was shot where shit started really hitting the fan.

It was a messy one from the start. From about mid-range, one of the Hunters tried hitting him from the side. However, he missed. The Prey heard this, saw the Hunter, and started running away in panic. While doing so, he tried calling for help on the radio. But despite our protests, Mayfeld insisted that we couldn’t answer. That the Hunter had to get him first. Eventually, the Prey twisted his ankle and fell. The Hunter had caught up but wasn’t really sure what to do. He also called us, asking about it. What Mayfeld told him to do made all of us question his sanity.

“Shoot him in the vest, and then tell him to sit still for a while.”

The Hunter hesitated at first before apologizing to the Prey and taking the shot. Now, the guy was REALLY pissed after we told him what was going on. But there was nothing he could ultimately do. He'd signed the contract, after all. He just sat in some bushes, fuming.

As the Hunter who had shot him started searching for others, he passed by one of our tree cameras. What we saw was beyond explanation. The ground seemed to be pulsating, bulging up and down behind him. One of the other observers tried calling him on the radio, just to let him know, but Mayfeld screamed at him to not do anything. At this point, we were all in shock.

Eventually, something started materializing out of the ground. It was some kind of creature with multiple legs that was entirely made out of dirt. Almost looked like a spider. It was also massive. As the Hunter turned around, it lunged at him before tearing him to shreds.

As soon as this happened, everybody went into collective dismay. Except for Mayfeld, that is. One of the observers tried contacting the rest of the participants in the forest, but was told to stop by Mayfeld himself.

“Stop? Are you kidding me, did you see what just fucking happened?” He responded, sounding extremely shaken up.

However, as soon he put the radio to his ear, Mayfeld stood up and backed away from us. We watched in horrified anticipation as to what he would do. He took a pistol out of his coat pocket and pointed it at the guy.

“Put it down.”

His tone was icy and emotionless. As the observer obliged, the reality of the situation washed over us. This was not good. Mayfeld just sighed and told us to keep watching and taking notes, still keeping the weapon pointed at us.

“It’ll be over soon.” He told us solemnly. “I just need to know.”

Not seeing a way out of this, we just did as we were told. We kept watching the horrific footage in front of us. The two Hunters who had shot the first Prey were now sprinting like hell, claiming that something was definitely following them. However, they weren’t in view of any of the cameras we had set up around the forest, so we couldn’t see what they were referring to. We could only see what was in front of them. Eventually, one of them seemed to be tackled from behind, falling face-first into the ground. We heard him screaming, which was overlapped by an inhuman, primordial roar before the body camera was flung into the air, hitting a tree and breaking. We lost the footage to that one. The other Hunter eventually seemed to find a hiding spot inside a bush. As he sat there trying to catch his breath, we noticed that it was becoming more and more labored. Eventually it sounded like he was suffocating. We soon realized why. The bush seemed to be crushing him. Foliage began engulfing the camera as we heard him violently sputter out blood. We lost footage to that one as well.

I guess the other two Hunters were far enough away that they didn’t hear what had just happened. They kept on searching for the remaining prey as if everything was okay. Mayfeld could’ve prevented all of this from happening. He knew what was lurking in that forest. But for some reason, he felt that all of this death and suffering was warranted. And we couldn’t do anything about it.

We watched in abject horror as another one of the Hunters tagged its Prey. Once this happened, Mayfeld radioed and started to explain the situation. But in the middle of his message, a fucking tree started moving right behind the Hunter. Both he and the Prey looked up at it in absolute shock. From out of nowhere, the tree seemed to sprout arms and legs. In one foul swoop, it picked up the Hunter and crushed him to death. The Prey started scrambling backwards, eventually getting up and running away from the monstrous work of nature. However, it didn’t follow him. It just stood there.

At this point, the last remaining Hunter seemed to have finally heard the commotion. He picked up his radio and told us that he was getting out of there. That there was something very wrong and he couldn't stay there anymore. As he was running towards the forests edge, he tripped on something and went tumbling to the ground. The camera had fallen off his belt and was now pointed at a skeleton, which was still wearing a dirty, worn-out jacket. He cursed before running off again. Soon after, the rest of the Prey started heading out of the forest as well. They also all called in, claiming to have heard strange and unnatural sounds in the distance, in addition to feeling an ever-growing sense of vague dread.

We looked at Mayfeld, wondering what his next move was going to be. In fact, we were a bit frightened that he was going to kill us on the spot for what we had just saw. But he didn’t say anything for a while. He just kept staring blankly at one of the screens. At the skeleton. I looked at it closer myself. I suddenly understood why he was staring. There was something stitched onto the breast pocket of the jacket. It was hard to read, but I could make out “-feld”. Could it be? I thought to myself. I recalled that Mayfeld did have a younger brother, Owen that he used to talk about. But he hadn’t mentioned him in years.

After a while, Mayfeld let out an exhale and started pacing around. He eventually laid everything out to us. He told us about the forest, including how hunters went missing there all the time, along with the reverberations in the earth and screeching in the air that followed. But the thing is, it was the only ever the hunters. Nobody else. The search parties would always yield no further incidents. One time, a local child had gone missing. They found her about ten hours later, wandering around the woods. She was absolutely fine, even talking about a nice “wooden man” that she had met. The villagers soon realized that if you weren’t trying to kill anything in the forest, nothing would try and kill you. That also explained the lack of bears and other natural predators.

“The place is alive.” Mayfeld exclaimed. “And it killed my fucking brother.”

As it turns out, Owen had gone into a travelling and exploration phase around 2008. At some point, he’d made his way over to one of the villages near the forest by pure chance. There, he was told about the circumstances surrounding it and he found it incredibly fascinating. So he decided to go test it out himself. I mean, you can’t really blame him for not believing the stories. It was incredibly far-fetched after all. I guess he just thought it was another legend.

After a while of zero contact with his brother, Mayfeld started getting worried. He checked out the last messages that he’d received from him. They were pictures of Owen posing in front of the mountains and in the village. Mayfeld decided to go down there himself to figure out what had happened. Once there, he was also relayed the stories by the locals. They also told him that they pleaded for Owen not to go and hunt there. That he wouldn’t meet a good fate.

Unlike his brother, Mayfeld took these words to heart. You see, he was always a man driven by passion. Sometimes, this was to the extent where he lost all sense of reality and his moral compass went out the window. Let’s just say that he’d been involved in a couple of lawsuits prior to this. Whenever somebody messed with the people closest to him, he was always quick to act. Even if they were the ones that started it in the first place.

The reason that he flew us out here in order to conduct this fucked up experiment was to find out what was really going on in that forest. He didn't have us simply go around and shoot bears because he thought that would have been too suspicious. Instead, he passed it off as some kind of experiment that was suppose to test how humans would react when faced with somebody trying to kill them in the wild. In reality, all he wanted was to see what was really lurking in the forest. He also wanted revenge. Hesitantly, I asked him how he hoped to accomplish this. With a twisted smirk on his face, he picked up a radio.

“I have somebody on stand-by.”

We watched as he put the phone to his ear.

“Hello? Yeah... yeah. As it turns out, you’re going to have to drop it after all. Yes. I’m sure.”

It took me a second, but I finally realized who Mayfeld was talking to. He’d always had connections to the military. In fact, he was extremely good friends with a lot of the higher ups. He could’ve asked them to do a favor for him whenever he wanted. He was going to try and drop bombs on the forest.

Suddenly, we started feeling a soft rumble below our feet. A little while later, the screeching had also filled the air around us. We stared at the monitors to see what was going on in the forest, but we had lost signal to all of them. That’s when I realized that there was no way we could let him go through with this. If mere hunters could cause such a reaction, what would straight up bombing the place result in? I didn’t want to find out. While Mayfeld was an extremely smart guy, he was a bit insane sometimes. And right then, he was off the fucking edge.

Without thinking, I rushed him as soon as he looked away for a second. He took a reactionary shot, but luckily the bullet only grazed my shoulder. As we fell to the floor, I yelled at the other guys to help me pin him down. Eventually, we managed to subdue him completely. He was yelling and resisting up a storm, so we eventually decided to just knock him out. After that, I scrambled over to the radio he used to call the bombing.

I frantically yelled into it, trying to grab somebody’s attention. Eventually, I got through.

“Hello?” the crackly voice asked on the other side.

I pleaded for him not to do it. That it would probably lead to some disastrous consequence that nobody wanted to deal with. At some point, he cut me off.

“Alright, alright, I know! God, you didn’t think we were actually going to bomb a fucking forest in Austria, did you? How the hell do you think that’d look?”

Relief washed over me. The man on the other side of the radio followed up by asking me where Mayfeld was. I explained the situation to him. He explained to me that he was lying when he told Mayfeld that he was going through with the plan. In reality, he’d already sent people over here in order to arrest him. They were going to be arriving soon. Now, I didn’t know who I was talking to. It could've been CIA, FBI, or… whatever. But at that moment, I did not give a shit.

About two hours later, the Prey and the remaining Hunter had also made their way back to the cabin. After explaining what had just happened to them, we waited in silence. Roughly three more hours passed before they finally arrived.

As men in suits took Mayfelds body away, others started questioning us. We told them everything that we had saw, expecting them not to believe a word and that they were going to take us into custody as well. However, that never happened. They just nodded and listened intently. Afterwards, they thanked us and told us to hop back into the planes that we came in. That we were going home. They never told us not to tell anybody, however. I just assumed that they thought nobody would believe us. As I was about to board the plane, a question was still lingering for me. Surely Mayfeld had set up the air-bombing before we flew out here, right? If that was the case, why wasn’t he stopped right then and there? I asked this to one of them. He just chuckled when he heard this.

“In all honesty… we wanted to figure out if it was real as well. This forest could be a very valuable resource heading forwards. But hey, I didn’t tell you this, alright?”

He gave me one last smirk before walking off. As the plane started taking off, I noticed that the men in suits were already halfway towards the forest.

So you might be wondering what the point of me telling you any of this even was?

Well, it's quite simple. This shit's been nagging at me ever since I got home that night, and I need to get it off my chest. What the hell could they possibly use that place for? What the hell was really going on in there anyways? But… I suppose that I’ll never know for sure. And I suppose it’s ultimately better that way. All I hope is that I never have to hear about Havoc woods again. It might seem benevolent, protecting the life inside it and all… but that might not be the case for sure. I wish that I'd never signed up for the fucking Havoc project. 

---

Credits

 

Surveillance Footage of a Strange Ritual Gone Wrong

  

Alright, before we get into any of this, let me give a quick summary in regards to how the hell we even got ourselves into this situation in the first place. You see, my buddy Cal got laid off a few months ago. He was also kicked out of his girlfriend’s place a few days later for not wanting to meet her parents or some shit. He couldn’t afford another apartment just yet, one - because his savings skills are shit and two - he insists on buying shots of Patron Silver whenever we go out. Because of this, he was staying at my box (AKA studio apartment) until he got back on his feet. He eventually did land another job. However, since it paid considerably less than his old one, he still couldn’t break rent for an actual apartment. Things were still looking bad.

But one day he’d stumbled upon an ad made by a family renting out their basement in a nearby neighborhood. It was also cheap as hell. He’d pretty much made up his mind on the spot. Shit was starting to get cramped back at my place.

So he calls the dad back and they set up an interview. Cal heads over there, they talk for a bit, he gets a house tour and they make everything official. Nothing strange so far. He claimed that the dad and the rest of the family – little twin girls, a teenage boy, their adult son, a baby boy and the mom, seemed perfectly normal and didn’t give off any weird vibes. They seemed like a happy family. At first, that is. The only concern that the dad really raised was that Cal couldn’t go upstairs or have guests over under any circumstances. And that seemed reasonable enough.

Anyhow, the days start to pass and Cal settles back into a routine. He’d work, hang out with us afterwards, and then go to his basement. He claimed that it was nice down there. Pretty sparse, but warm and roomy enough. He’d give the dad 60 bucks cash every week and that was that. No problems.

Shit started to get a little bizarre about a month and a half in, however. He got let off work early one day, came home and found nobody in the living room. This was the first time that it’d ever happened. Usually the teenage kid – his name was Brian, would be playing video games or something. Cal decided to wander around for a little, in order to check out the place a bit more. He never really liked being there with Brian. Said it was always awkward because he’d never respond when he’d asked him something. It didn’t take long before he spotted something on the kitchen counter. It was a receipt from a hardware store. This is what it had on it:

4 buckets of red paint

A power saw

A sewing kit

3 bottles of rubbing alcohol

He didn't really know what to think at first. While these items were obscure, he just assumed that the dad needed these things for various projects he was planning. That’s why he didn’t panic when the dad rushed downstairs, looking flustered when he saw Cal holding the receipt. Cal just laughed it off and said something along the lines of “Planning something big, huh?” I guess the dad sensed that Cal didn’t find this too strange because he just laughed along. “No… no nothing. Just good to have those things on hand, you know?” was what he said back to him.

A couple weeks go by without any incident before the strangeness starts ramping up. Cal said that late one night, while he was watching a movie, he swore that he could hear a soft, anguished grunting coming from somewhere upstairs. Cautiously, he started making his way up there and into the living room. He wandered around for a bit before pinpointing the sound. It was coming from a bathroom near the kitchen. This is where shit went from creepy to absolutely horrifying. The lights to the bathroom were off, but he could clearly hear people talking in there. It was the dad and Brian. They seemed to be arguing about something. This is how he claimed the conversation roughly went:

Brian would grunt as if he was in pain from something and the dad would always tell him to be quiet.

“Shhhh, don’t wake him up”

“Dad, it hurts! Why are we doing this now?”

“Can’t wait till the 4th. You know that”

Brian grunts again. It sounds like he’s about to keel over from the pain.

“Son, relax. Please. The pain’s all in your head. Here, let me stitch it up for you.”

“Do we have to do this in the dark?”

“Yes, I’ve told you. We can’t let it see us, remember?”

It was at that point where Cal realized he’d stumbled upon something very wrong. He backed up slowly and headed back downstairs. He tried to get a look at Brian in the morning, but he seemed fine. Well… more so that he was just acting the way that he’d acted before. Cal told me about all of this the next day. This didn’t really scare me, however. I guess you could say that I have strange interests. I was into weird shit like this, and what Cal had just told me was about the most fascinating thing ever. I asked him to keep me updated.

A few more days pass and Cal’s claiming that none of the family members are even talking to him anymore beyond basic communication. In fact… they were barely talking to each other either. In addition to that, he keeps hearing the strangest noises coming from upstairs at night, usually during the hours of 3 to 5 am, when everybody should be sleeping. Shit like heavy stomping, multiple babies crying, even though he’d only ever seen one, and hysterical laughter coming from the daughters. One time, it sounded like the power saw went off only to be switched off abruptly. The dad had warned him about this beforehand, telling Cal that his wife was going through a “stressful time” and was starting to lash out at night, and to please not bother investigating if he heard anything. Now, I don’t know what constitutes a stressful time in this situation, but this was certainly not normal. One day, the dad comes up to him and tells him that they’re having family over in a few days and that he needed to find another place to stay that night. Cal said that this was fine and asked which day in particular. However… he pretty much knew already.

“The 4th” is what the dad says to him. What a surprise, huh? Anyhow, I get an idea once he finishes telling me all this of shit. If Cal wasn’t just bullshitting this whole time, then this was a potential chance to see some crazy stuff. Now I’m not entirely sure how legal what we did next was... but at the time, I didn’t really care.

I called up my friend Ricky – who works at a security shop and asked if he could hook us up with some surveillance cameras. Ones that picked up audio as well. I also told him about everything Cal had experienced. I wasn’t surprised when he jumped at the idea. He was arguably more into the supernatural than I was. In fact, he came over straight away and we started planning. Cal was understandably hesitant at first. We were going into some weird shit, after all. However, we eventually managed to break him down on the basis of sheer curiosity. Some even better news arose when the mom apparently had to go out of town in order pick up some family members sometime in the morning tomorrow. This was perfect, because the mom was usually the only one home between the hours of 9am-3pm, since everybody else was either at school or working. The baby would be in a day-care. Now, Cal had already told them that he’d be leaving yesterday, so they took his key away from him until the 5th. I guess whatever they were deciding to do needed to be secretive. However, Cal had noticed that the dad would always put a spare key inside a small crack on the steps. This meant that we were all set to go.

So it’s about 6am on the morning of the 4th and we’re waiting inside an all-night diner roughly across the street from the house. We got there so early because we didn’t know exactly what “morning” meant to the mom. We watch as the dad drives off first with the baby and the daughters. The adult son – Jake, was the next one to leave and Brian followed suit soon after. At about 10: 30 AM, the mom finally peels out of the driveway. We wait for another 15 minutes, just to make sure that she hadn’t forgotten anything before we make our move.

Walking as inconspicuously as we could, we cross the street and make our way to the house. Oh, I forgot to mention, Ricky’s friend Phil also decided to tag along, making it four of us in total. As Cal had promised, a spare key was indeed inside the crack. We unlocked the door and hurried our way inside. As soon as we entered, we were hit with the vague smell of burning incense somewhere. Cal said that the family didn’t usually do that, but we didn’t bother checking it out. We didn’t know when the mom was coming home, after all. We didn't have time to waste.

We started setting up the cameras. One in the living room, one in the kitchen, and one in the basement. We tried making them as discreet as possible, and I think that we did a good job. I mean, there was no way that you’d be able to spot them if you weren’t looking in the first place. After covering the bottom floors, we decided to head upstairs. Cal had never been up there, so even he didn’t know what to expect. But… things a got a bit peculiar here. All the doors up there were locked, including the bathrooms. Well, except for one. It was a mostly empty room with one bed and one dresser. I suppose it was a guest room. We decided to just set up a camera in there and one in the hallway. I have to admit, we were starting to get anxious here, so that’s where we decided to call it quits. Five cameras were probably enough.

As we were going down the steps, Cal swore that he could hear a baby crying somewhere. “I knew it!” I remember him saying. “They have two babies, don’t they?” I guess that we somehow missed it the first time, so we strained our ears, trying to catch it again. After about a minute, the muffled cries of an infant did become audible. We started walking towards where the sound seemed to be coming from and were led to one of the locked doors. That’s when we noticed something even stranger. The crying sounded muffled. Like it was being suffocated or something. However, it wasn’t intense or anything, just what you’d expect from a normal baby. Safe to say, this shit was getting really weird. We didn't know what to do, so we just decided to get out of there. As we were about step through the door, we’d noticed that Phil wasn’t with us anymore. We didn’t even notice that he was gone up to this point. I was sure that he was there when the baby started crying. We called out to him, but were met with no response. We were about to go back upstairs to look for him when he came out of the damn basement. We asked him what the hell he was doing, but he claimed that he was down there the whole time. In retrospect, that response really made no sense, but at that moment, we just wanted to get out of there, so we didn’t question him further.

When we got back to my place, Ricky started setting up the video feeds in order for us to watch. As we sipped on some cheap beers while waiting for him, I’d noticed that Phil seemed to be really quiet. In fact, he hadn’t said anything to us at all upon leaving the house. Really, I should’ve known that something was wrong right then. And maybe I did. Maybe I just didn’t want to admit it. In any case, Ricky got the thing set up and we all gathered around the monitors. These are the notes that we took while watching:

LIVING ROOM – (12:05 PM)

The mother comes into the house, but she's alone. It seems that she hasn't actually brought any family over. In her hands, she is holding a small white box and sets it on the coffee table.

LIVING ROOM/KITCHEN – (12: 05 PM – 3: 37 PM)

These are the times where the mom is the sole inhabitant of the house. Nothing much happens here. She sits on the couch, reading a book while the television plays in the background. Occasionally, she’ll get up and go to the kitchen to grab some fruit or something. This goes on for a while. However, at around 1: 00 PM, we notice something interesting that we hadn’t before. She hasn’t turned the page once. She just stares at the book.

LIVING ROOM – (3:37 PM)

This is when Brian comes home. As he walks through the door, he seems to make brief eye contact with his mom before heading down to the basement.

BASEMENT – (3:38 PM – 4:08 PM)

Brian enters and steps onto the treadmill, starting a light jog. Cal says that this is strange, as he’s never done this before.

LIVING ROOM – (3:55 PM)

The two twins walk through the door at this point. The mother does not acknowledge them as they go directly upstairs.

UPSTAIRS HALLWAY – (3:56 PM)

Using a key, the girls enter one of the locked rooms and close the door behind them. Upon recollection, it seems to be the one where the baby was heard crying.

BASEMENT (4:01 PM – 4:35 PM)

Brian gets off the treadmill and drinks some water. He sits down on a couch for a while, seemingly catching his breath. After about fifteen minutes of that, he gets back up and starts doing jumping jacks.

LIVING ROOM – (4: 12 PM)

Jake comes home and this time, the mother actually acknowledges him. She gets up and they start walking towards the kitchen.

KITCHEN - (4:12 PM – 5:12 PM)

Once there, Jake and the mother take a large pot out of the refrigerator and set it on the counter. It seemed like they were having a lot of trouble lifting it up. Jake takes off the lid, revealing what looks like thick, black liquid inside. They stir the pot for about twenty minutes before lifting it onto a stove and turning the heat on. An interesting note is that during the whole duration of this process, Jake and the mother seem to be talking casually, but not about what they’re doing. The conversation is about Brian and how he’s flunking science class. The liquid takes about twenty-five minutes before it starts boiling. Once it does, a light black smoke starts arising from the pot. Jake and the mother open up the pantry and take out gas-masks, putting them on. The smoke eventually engulfs most of the room and covers the camera. At this point, we can only see vague shapes we assume to be Jake and the mother moving around. But… not naturally. The mother seems to be walking back and forth in a bizarre manner, taking large exaggerated steps while waving one hand in the air. Jake looks like he’s twitching violently.

BASEMENT – (4:35 PM – 5:15 PM)

Brian finishes his jumping jacks and bends over, coughing out blood. He stares at the stain for a second before walking somewhere off-camera and coming back with two of the red paint buckets. He dips his hands into them and starts drawing a symbol on the floor, around where he coughed out the blood. He draws a circle within a triangle, with what looks like squiggly appendages coming out of the three triangle points. The blood stain seems to be turning black now. Eventually, it starts to move and a bloodshot eye materializes from it, blinking rapidly. Once Brian has finished drawing the symbol, he walks into the center of the circle – where the eye is, gets on his knees and starts praying. While he does this, he utters out a language that none of us are familiar with.

UPSTAIRS HALLWAY – (5:20 PM – 5:25 PM)

The twins walk out of the room, carrying a baby. Cal remarks that he recognizes the baby, it being the one that the family had first introduced him to. It is now unclear what the dad had brought out of the house in the morning. The twins set the baby down, and it begins crawling towards the guest room.

GUEST ROOM – (5:25 PM – 5:50 PM)

The baby crawls around the room, seemingly at random. About ten minutes of this occurs before the closet door suddenly opens on its own. The baby turns to look at the interior of the closet, and a worried look washes over his face. What he is looking at is unknown, being obscured from our angle. Eventually, a somewhat playful voice oozes out from the closet, babbling in baby talk. The baby suddenly smiles and then starts crawling towards the voice. Once in, the closet shuts behind him and everything goes silent. The twins soon walk into the room soon after and sit, cross-legged in front of the closet. They do not move at all.

KITCHEN – (5:12 PM – 5:45 PM)

The smoke seems to have gotten thicker and has obscured our view of the kitchen completely. The alarm has not gone off, however. Also, somebody seems to be continuously laughing hysterically somewhere right in front of the camera. But the voice doesn’t sound like it belongs to either Jake or the mother. It’s too deep and distorted. In fact, it doesn’t really sound human.

BASEMENT – (5:25 PM – 6:05 PM)

Unfortunately, we were too preoccupied with the other cameras that none of us had checked on the basement for a while, so we missed about ten minutes. At this point, Brian is praying erratically and speaking at an inhumanly fast rate. There is now a tall, dark figure standing in front of him. It seems to be humanoid with clear, shiny skin but has no defining characteristics, other than the huge, singular eye in the middle of its face. This goes on for a while. Halfway through, Cal left and locked himself in the bathroom. I can hear him crying in there. In addition to this, Phil still hasn’t said a word. He just watches the screen blankly, with a glazed look in his eyes. We’re going to need to keep an eye on him.

LIVING ROOM – (6:10 PM – 6:15 PM)

The dad finally enters the house, and there’s an obvious sense of panic on his face. He seems to be holding a baby doll wearing the same clothes as the real one. On second glance, the doll actually seems to be alive, moving around in the father’s hand. Upon realizing this, he screams and throws it across the room. As it starts crawling back towards him, he takes out a strange looking knife from his bag and stabs it multiple times until it goes limp. His eyes wander to the kitchen, where black smoke is now pouring out at a torrid rate. His eyes widen with fear. He calls out. Something along the lines of:

“Honey, we can’t do this anymore. Something went wrong.”

At this point, he begins crying.

“I can’t fix it. We shouldn’t have done this. I’m sorry… I’m sorry.”

He takes the knife and slits his own throat with it. As he falls to the floor, a creature that seems to be made out of the smoke quickly crawls over to him and drags him into the kitchen.

KITCHEN – (6:15 PM)

The smoke is still obscuring the camera, but something wet is audible. It’s hard to say what it is.

BASEMENT – (6:15 PM – 7:20 PM)

Again, we missed about ten minutes in the basement. Brian now seems to have been blended into the creature that had been standing in front of him. His head sticks out of the creature’s torso and his arms and legs are twisted, coming out at various angles through the creature’s chest and ribs. Despite this, he’s still praying. The creature walks off-screen for a second, before bringing out somebody who’s bound and gagged to a chair. It’s Phil. At this point, both Ricky and I looked at the Phil with us. He still wasn't moving, but he also wasn't expressionless anymore. A literal ear-to-ear grin suddenly materialized across his face. Slowly, Ricky walked backwards, while I kept my eyes on whatever that thing was in front of us was. Ricky quietly picked up my hockey stick and charged towards it. The thing reacted quickly and turned around just in time to bite the stick in half and knock Ricky down. While they wrestled on the ground, I reached underneath my bed and pulled out my Colt. As I struggled to load the weapon, I heard Ricky call out and say that he’d got it it under control. I looked over to see the fake Phil lying on the ground, with a piece of hockey stick lodged into its eye. Ricky had a large bite mark on his forearm, but he said that he was fine and sat back down in front of the monitors. I didn’t know what else to do, so I sat down as well.

At this point, we’ve probably missed about fifteen more minutes of the basement footage. When we checked back, the real Phil was lying on the floor with a big gash on his neck. The creature is now gone as well.

KITCHEN – (7:20 PM)

We’ve lost signal to this camera. Not sure why, but it's gone.

LIVING ROOM – (7:20 PM – 7:25 PM)

Jake and the mom are now lying on the floor with their limbs twisted beyond belief. About five or six of these large half-spider/half-infant looking things are now picking at their corpses. I have no idea where they came from.

UPSTAIRS HALLWAY – (7:25 PM – 8:07 PM)

The creature that merged with Brian is now pounding erratically on the guest room door.

GUEST ROOM – (7:25 PM – 8:07 PM)

The twins are playing paddy-cake while the closet shakes violently. This goes on for about 45 minutes before the creature finally busts down the door. The twins scoot backwards in horror as the creature approaches them. As it gets to about two meters away, the closet door suddenly swings open and the camera starts picking up a bunch of static. We see something large dash across the room and hear an inhuman roar before we lose signal.

LIVING ROOM – (8:07 PM – 8:15 PM)

The spider creatures are now gone and everything is still. We wait for about a minute before one of the twins drags herself into view, sporting a mangled leg. She maneuvers herself onto the couch and rests for a second before picking up the box left by her mother on the coffee table. She puts it in her pocket. We observe as she sighs loudly, while looking around the room. Eventually, we hear frantic knocking at the front door and a man’s voice asking if everybody is okay. The girl just ignores it. As she keeps wandering her gaze around, she meets the camera and stops. She squints for a second before flashing a bloody grin at us.

It was at that point where we killed the feed, packed up the monitors, drove out to the scrapyard and dumped them. When we got back, Phil’s copy seemed to be dissolving, leaving behind a thick, black liquid. Surprisingly though, it didn’t even stain the carpet when I tried to clean it. After that, we barged into the washroom, where Cal was lying on the floor, shaking.

We consoled him for about two hours before he finally came to his senses. After that, we just sat there for a while. Nobody said a word and nobody had to. We’d all made a silent agreement to never mention this shit ever again. Ricky went home and Cal slept on a spare mattress of mine. Well… he didn’t really sleep. I didn’t either.

In the morning I decided to drive out to the house again. I’m not sure why… I guess I was just trying to get some kind of closure. I was hoping that I’d go there and nothing would be wrong. There would be a happy family playing in the front yard and I could write this whole thing off as a horrific, vivid nightmare.

Unfortunately though… things don’t work like that. As I drove by, I caught a glimpse of the place. It was burned down. A bunch of cops surrounded it and they were talking to these guys in suits. I was about to turn my head back to the road, hoping to just forget this shit forever when I saw her.

The surviving twin, wrapped up in a blanket, sitting on the front steps. She was looking at me. And smiling. 

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Credits