La Nuit

In France, a young ambient musician by the name of Charles undertook an interesting new project. He was going to record the sound of himself sleeping, and release it under the name “La Nuit” (The Night). Charles lived alone in a rural area, which would remove things like car alarms, traffic, and such from being recorded. He planned his project for many months, acquiring the sensitive equipment to capture all outside noises as well as his own during sleep.

Finally, on the 27th of September, he decided to execute his plan. He set up all his equipment, and fell at sleep at midnight.

The next day Charles reviewed the recording. For the first hour, the recording played his own tossings and turnings as well as some distant dog barks and a few car alarms (So much for his plan to distance himself from cars). These continued throughout the 2nd hour as well, until Charles heard something that horrified him.

For at exactly 3 hours and 24 minutes in, the recording played the sound of his bedroom door opening.

Snowscape

It’s been a while since I had anything like human contact, so I’ll attempt to be as brief as I can. At least the sound of typing is noise, and the echoes it produces are the nearest thing to a reply I’ve had in months.

I lost my job back in August. The dollar’s dropping, the economy’s poor, and son, you just aren’t a competitive investment anymore.

I’m young and I don’t have bills, so I took it in stride. The days of day zero closure notices and no parachutes were stories I’d only heard from my bitterest relatives, and besides, it’s hard to feel betrayed when you grow up learning these things really are only business. I collected my generous severance and decided to take a week off or so. A few years of being on call made me appreciate the value of a vacation, whatever form it was in, and my girlfriend and I had our savings.

Like any self respecting nerd, the week quickly became a blur of pizza orders every two days, progressing day by day into a schedule defined by creeping nocturnalness. The girl complained, but she often did. To be perfectly honest, her sleeping form in the bedroom soon became far more familiar to me than her waking self, a persona I now only encountered during the blurry hours just before I slept and just after I woke.

A week became two weeks, then a month. Slowly, the creaks and groans and occasionally startling shuffles of the old apartment building we lived in lost their frightening nature. I’d always been the horror junky, and I suppose my jaded nature made such assimilations much more graceful. In time, even the intermittantly flickering streetlights and faint chatter or the distant televisions, conversations, apparitions, or whatever existed in the building became more reassuring than unsettlings. I even began to fancy the old stain in the bathroom linoleum, which the landlord swore was wine and I believed was blood, had begun to fade.

Like you’d expect from any nocturnal, unemployed gamer, my relationship with my girlfriend quickly went downhill. Our infrequent conversations grew more heated and then more frigid, an affair of pauses and token acknowledgements. She started going out more. After a while, she stopped coming home more. After that, she stopped coming home at all. I barely noticed. I don’t think I noticed much of anything at that point. The days blurred more, and I could rarely remember if I had eaten, when I had woken, or how long I had been like this. I began to forget what the daytime really seemed like, even the struggling blue-grey of dawn and dust receded as the winter set in. Days became measured in a succession of the flickering street light’s sick yellow sodium arc.

After a while I began to notice a distinct absence in the air. The times I did come to enough to remember to shower or eat, I was drowned in the smell of the building collection of garbage bags in the kitchen, and the sullen stillness of the white courtyard beneath my windows. I often wondered how it could have so little snow, barely six inches, at any time, yet never display a single footstep too or from the darkened windows. At least, I’d think, the neighbors were quiet. Even the nocturnal whispers from the ducting had seemed to grow muted and fade until I no longer could distinguish them from the gentle hum of the building’s innards.

After maybe the fourth or fifth time I experienced these moments of clarity I resolved to remove the trash. The small had faded from sharp to mute, a sweet and musty reminder of life amidst the sharp winter air leaking in through the ill-maintained windows. It repulsed me.

With some effort, I gathered as many bags as I could and struggled through door after door. I winced at every bang and crash at the door, with no leaking sounds of televisions left I had nothing to gauge my racket, and every moment seemed to tear at the brittle air of the building. Around then I noticed I could see my breath, though I did not feel any colder than normal.

After an eternity pushing through the empty hallways, I pushed through the front door of the building into the cutting air outside. A low, constant hum echoed off the snow as the wind pushed over the undisturbed snowcover all about me, forming an inch high mist of blowing grains, tumbling and twisting over the dunes which had formed on the adjascent parking lot, piling on the doors of the various stores which lined the streets. I briefly wondered how bad the weather had been lately, to push the life out of city so thoroughly, then pushed my way down what memory served was the sidewalk, keeping to the edge of the building like it was a life tether.

By half-forgotten habit, and perhaps a morbid curiosity of what other humans looked like, I strained to see through each mirror like window for signs of movement or habitation. What blinds were drawn displayed vacant apartments, tinfoil to block the sun, the occasional poorly-placed shelf or couch. Not a single shuffle or rustle escaped into the vacuumous winter atmosphere.

I rounded the corner to the back alley to find the hulking form of a garbage truck in the alley, laden with snow and ice until it seemed more an ancient monument to the cold than a sign of civilization. It should have seemed unsettling to me, but by then I was so eager to abandon the icey landscape to the relative warming tones of my monitor’s glow my only thought was to drop the garbage off and set back inside my apartment. I rushed down its length and in front of it, ready to throw the bags overhand into the dumpster, when I was stopped by the only light to eminate from the cab of the truck, the rapidly scrawling digits of a radio scanner, visible through the open door of the cab, pushing its tenuous glow on a clipboard and pen.

Abandoning my garbage, I lifted myself into the cab and attempted to read from the frost-bound paragraphs tightly wound over the paper. Near the bottom, ink blurred by its inability to set in what must have been well frozen paper at the time, was scrawl “Four weeks now. Even the radios have gone quiet. -67c last time a station got through. Gas froze last night. Need to find someone”.

I looked back up, down the alley, across the snowscape of parking lots and buildings being swallowed by snow, and listened hard to the howl of ice over ice. I tried to imagine wolves, or mocking voices, or anything from the hellscapes of the stories I had studied so thoroughly, but the tone never changed, never let up or grew louder.

It’s a lonely place, missing the end of the world.

The Time Paradox

A baby girl is mysteriously dropped off at an orphanage in Cleveland in 1945. “Jane” grows up lonely and dejected, not knowing who her parents are, until one day in 1963 she is strangely attracted to a drifter. She falls in love with him, but just when things are looking up for Jane a series of disasters strikes: First, she becomes pregnant by the drifter, who then disappears. Second, during the complicated delivery doctors discover that Jane has both sets of sex organs, and to save her life, they must surgically convert “her” to a “him.” Finally, a mysterious stranger kidnaps her baby from the delivery room.

Reeling from these disasters, rejected from society, scorned by fate, “he” becomes a drunkard and a drifter. Not only has Jane lost her parents and her lover, but he has lost his only child as well. Years later, in 1970, he stumbles into a lonely bar, called Pop’s Place, and spills out his pathetic story to an elderly bartender. The sympathetic bartender offers the drifter the chance to avenge the stranger who left her pregnant and abandoned, on the condition that he join the “time traveller corps.” Both of them enter a time machine and the bartender drops the drifter off in 1963. The drifter is strangely attracted to a young orphan girl, who subsequently becomes pregnant.

The bartender then goes forward 9 months, kidnaps the baby girl from the hospital, and drops the baby off in an orphanage back in 1945. Then the bartender drops off the thoroughly confused drifter in 1985, to enlist in the time traveller corps. The drifter eventually gets his life together and becomes respected and elderly member of the time traveller corps, and then disguises himself as a bartender and has his most difficult mission: a date with destiny, meeting a certain drifter at Pop’s Place in 1970.

Don't Worry About It

You’re slowly stirred awake by the distant ringing as the phone beside your bed pulls you out of your dreams. Your thoughts gather themselves and you groan, reaching over to answer.

As soon as you place the phone to your ear, you’re greeted by the background noise consisting of twisted screams. People in agonizing pain begging for help or death, not that the interference allows you to hear any individual voice clearly enough.

“Get out of the house now!”

The call ends abruptly after what you could have sworn was a voice from closer to you than on the other end. You shift yourself to the side of the bed, sighing while rubbing your eyes. A call this startling and this early in the morning would keep you awake.

Your wife shuffles to the side, apparently also woken by the call. She wraps her arms around you and gives a light kiss on the neck.

“Don’t worry about it,” Her half asleep mumble calms you down somewhat.

Just as you’re about to place the phone down, it rings again. You fumble slightly and drop it. Instead, you feel your wife’s arms tighten around you, preventing you from leaning forward.

It’s then you notice a subtle difference between the arms around you and the familiarity of your wife’s.

“He’s too late to save you anyway.”

Always the Same Word

If you watch every State of the Union Address since it’s been filmed and available on tape, you’ll see that halfway through–exactly halfway through–the President always says the same word.

Most say it under their breath during the standing ovations, but some are forced to work it into the speech itself.

The Missing Village

In November 1930, Joe Labelle, a Canadian fur trapper, snowshoed into a thriving Eskimo fishing village situated on the shores of Lake Anjikuni in Canada. Labelle was greeted with an eerie silence. He thought this was very strange because the fishing village was a noisy settlement with 2,000 Eskimos milling back and forth to their kayaks. But there wasn’t a soul about.

Labelle visited each of the Eskimo huts and fish storehouses but none of the villagers was anywhere to be seen. Labelle saw a flickering fire in the distance and approached it gingerly, sensing something evil was afoot on this moonlit night. Upon the fire was a smoldering pot of blackened stew. To make matters more mysterious, Labelle saw that not a single human track had left the settlement.

Labelle knew something bizarre had happened to the 2,000 people, and so he ran non-stop to the nearest telegraph office and sent a message about his findings to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The Mounties turned up hours later, and they too were baffled by the mass vanishing act. An enormous search party was sent out to look for the missing villagers, but they were never found, and the search party unearthed some strange findings.

All the sleigh dogs that had belonged to the Eskimos were found buried 12 feet under a snowdrift at the perimeter of the camp. All of them had starved to death. The search party also established that all the Eskimos’ provisions and food had been left in their huts, which didn’t make any sense at all. Then came the most chilling surprise of all; the search party discovered that all of the Eskimos’ ancestral graves were empty. Whoever or whatever had taken all the living villagers had also dug up the dead as well, even though the icy ground around the graves was as hard as iron.

Later on that unearthly silent night, the Mounties watched in awe as a strange blue glow lit up the horizon. The eerie radiance was not the northern lights, but seemed steady and artificial. As the Mounties watched, the light pulsated then faded. All the newspapers of the world reported the baffling disappearance of the 2,000 Eskimos, although many believed that a rational explanation would eventually come to light, but the Anjikuni mass disappearance is still unsolved.

A Child's Eyes

Every child fears under their bed. If they don’t, they fear the closet, or maybe that little crack in the almost closed door.

Scientists know that children are more perceptive, they see things adults don’t. They aren’t yet tethered into only accepting what society wants them to accept. They see what is truly there.

They see the monsters.

If you were to borrow a child’s eyes and see through them for a night, you would go insane. To be able to see what you only dimly remember, burrowing into your covers while wearing those train pajamas, hoping to a God you can barely comprehend that “it” doesn’t see you back…would drive an adult crazy. Because Adults forget the rules.

1) Cover yourself. If you can’t see it, it can’t see you. Even if it makes it harder to breathe.

2) Don’t make a noise. Every whimper can lead to destruction.

3) Don’t move. It attracts their attention.

4) Only light can make them go away. Bright light. Flashlights make it worse.

Teens are caught in the middle. They still feel what’s there, but they cannot see… and they forget the rules….

Why do you think there are so many insomniacs typing at their computers, subconsciously praying the light from their monitor will be enough to keep them away?

It’s not. Now look behind you with a child’s eyes and try not to scream.