• Creepypasta Megathread: Post your favorites!
    71 replies, posted
[QUOTE=Dogchow33;33516163]"Squidward's Suicide" NSFW. Not in the sexual way but the gory-esque way.[/QUOTE] Typically when the internet rapes someone's childhood it's with r34. This is going to haunt me for weeks.
[URL="http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/God%27s_Mouth"]God's Mouth[/URL]
[QUOTE=bunnyspy1;33515683]can someone post the morrowind creepypasta with the assassin thing and shit[/QUOTE] I love that one, here it is. [url]http://inuscreepystuff.blogspot.com/2010/09/jvk1166zesp.html[/url] [quote]Some people might recall some momentary buzz caused a couple of years ago by a particularly odd Morrowind mod. The file name was jvk1166z.esp. It was never posted on any of the larger Elder Scrolls communities, usually just smaller boards and role-playing groups. I know in a few cases rather than being posted it was sent via PM or email to a 'chosen few.' It was only up for a few days, to the best of my knowledge. It caused a buzz because it was a virus, or seemed to be. If you tried to load the game with the mod active, it would hang at the initial load screen for a full hour and then crash to the desktop. If you let it get that far, your install of Morrowind, along with any save files you had, would become completely corrupted. Nobody could figure out what the mod was trying to do, since it couldn't be opened in the Construction Set. Eventually, warning were distributed not to use it if you found it, and things died down. About a year later, in a mod board I used to frequent, someone popped up with the mod again. He said he was PMed by a lurker who deleted his account immediately after sending. He also said that the person advised him to try playing the mod through DOSbox. For some reason, this worked...sort of. The game was a bit laggy, and you couldn't get into Options, Load Game, the console, or really anything else, other than the game itself. The QuickSave and QuickLoad hotbuttons worked, but that was it. And the QuickSave file seemed to be just part of the game file, so you couldn't get at it anymore. Some speculated that the changed game used an older graphics renderer, making DOSbox necessary, but it didn't LOOK any different. This part I can speak about from personal experience. When you start a new game in JVK (as the board came to call it), once you left the starting bit in the Census Office and came into the game proper, the first thing you notice is that the 'prophecy has been severed' box pops up. This is because every single NPC having to do with the main quest is dead, with the sole exception of Yagrum Bagarn, the last of the Dwemer. Their corpses never despawn, so you can go check on all of them. In effect, you begin in a world that is domed to start with. The second thing you notice is that you're losing health. It's only a bit, but it keeps happening, a little bit at a time. The longer you stay in one place, the quicker it seems to occur. If you let this loss kill you, you'll find the cause: a figure we came to call the Assassin, because he seems to wear a retextured version of the Dark Brotherhood armor from Tribunal, even though the expansions don't work in JVK. It's all black, completely untextured, like he's just a hole in space. The way he moves...he gave me quite a start, the first time I saw him scuttling around my dead body. He crawls inhumanly on his hands and feet, his arms and legs splayed out like a spider. You'd usually only see him after death, crawling around and over your body just before the reload box popped up. Occasionally, you could catch a glimpse of him darting around a corner or crawling on a wall or ceiling. It made the game very difficult to play at night! Other than that, the only noticeable difference is that at night, at random intervals, every NPC in the game will go outside for a few minutes. During this time, the only thing they will say when hailed is, "Watch the sky." Once they return to their normal behavior they act as normal, though. After a while, a player on the board discovered a new NPC named Tieras, a male Dunmer in the temple at Ghostgate. Two things are notable about this NPC: first is his robe, a unique article of clothing that was lovingly rendered with twinkling stars all across it, looking like a torn-off chunk of the night sky. The second is that all of his dialogue, in addition to showing up in the dialogue box, is voiced. You can skip it if you wish, but it all sounds like it's in the default male Dunmer voice. Some people said that they thought the voice was "slightly" different, but it was a very, very good imitation. I won't go into the details, but the questline he sends you on has to do with a dungeon referred to simply as 'The Citadel.' At least, to the point I reached, the quests were all of a fairly generic 'discover the secrets of the ancients' bent. the entrance to this dungeon is on a small island far to the west of Morrowind proper. I eventually discovered that if you used a Scroll of Icarian Flight at the westernmost point on the main landmass and jump directly west, you'd end up almost exactly at the island. Even though the dungeon is called The Citadel, it goes straight down. It dwarfs any other dungeon, both in size and difficulty. From a natural cave area you'll proceed down into an ancestral tomb looking area, then Daedric ruin area, and then a Dwemer ruin area. I made it down to the Dwemer Ruins before I quit. The creatures here were strong enough that a level 20 character would have to take care, and since you can't use the console in JVK, level 20 take a while to get. Since QuickSave and QuickLoad are your only options, it's all too easy to get yourself into an impossible situation, too. I did, and I just didn't have the energy to start over. Now what I'm telling you is based on what those few who went further reported. Past the Dwemer Ruins you find yourself in a level like the Dwemer Ruins, but darker. Rather than the usual bronze, all the surfaces, including those of the creatures, are black. The sounds of machinery are loud here, and grow louder still randomly. There's also steam or fog everywhree, limiting your vision to about ten in-game feet or so. If you can make it through all this, you will reach a hall that those who found it called it the Portrait Room. Like the fire in torches or other effects from early 3D games, this room has picture frames that always face directly at you, no matter how you look at them. The images in the frames were always randomly chosen images from your My Pictures folder. On the board, the ones who got there had some fun posting screenshots of the Portrait Room with various pictures in the frames (Usually porn, of course). At the end of the hall was a locked door. After admitting defeat and returning to Tieras, everyone just found him saying, "Watch the sky," in his gravelly voice. What's more, nobody else in the game would say ANYTHING. There was just a completely blank dialogue box with no options at all. They wouldn't even rattle off the usual canned audible greetings. The only exception was at night; whenever they'd go out for a few minutes, they'd still repeat it. "Watch the sky." At this point, one of the players - a friend of mine from the board - noticed (and the few others who got this far agreed) that the night sky was no longer the usual night sky of Tamriel; it had changed to a depiction of a real night sky. And it moved. From this point on, everything is based on what this one person reported. Eventually, he got himself kicked from the board, but I kept in contact with him for as long as he responded. According to him, based on the constellations and planets, the sky started around February 2005. if you died, loaded, or went back into the Citadel, it would start over. When the usual day sky graphics took over, the movement would be suspended until the stars appeared again. In the space of a single night, everything would move about two months worth. Since the timescale of JVK was more or less that of the standard game, that meant that a bit less than an hour was a 24-hour period. He became convinced that the door would open based on some kind of celestial event. Of course, waiting for that meant leaving the game running. Of course, THAT meant that the game couldn't be left unattended, thanks to our old friend, the Assassin. My friend decided he's hang out for a whole day, just to see if anything happened. That would be about a year's worth of movement. Here's the post he made at the end of this experiment: "I loaded in Seyda neen, where it all starts. It wasn't too bad, just had to check in now and then to move around and heal to make sure I wasn't dying. But check it out! 24 hours exactly in, and the Assassin learned a new trick! HE SCREAMS!!!! I was reading and all of a sudden, this crazy loud shriek just about makes me crap myself. It's like something out of a horror movie! I look up, and there he is, just crouched down right in front of me. Of course, the second I moved my character, he ran off. When I went back down to the Portrait Room, the door was still locked. Damn it, damn it, damn it!" A bit later, he came to the decision that he needed to wait three days - three years. The PM advising us to try DOSbox showed up in February of 2008 was his reasoning, anyway. "After the first shriek, the Assassin stops hitting you out of nowhere. Now he'll shriek, and if you don't move for a few seconds after that he hits you. I think whoever made the mod was trying to help. At night, I've got my headphones on and I was just kind of dozing off...when he wakes me up with a shriek; I jiggle the mouse, and I'm good!" That post was two days in, from his laptop. Once it was over... "FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK! FUUUUUUUUUCK! So FUCKING done. So, I wait, the three days, right, and right after the FUCKING Assassin made me jiggle the mouse, he shrieks again. So, I look, and everyone in town is outside. They're all saying, "Watch the sky." I don't see anything, though. But then the game starts getting dark...like REALLY dark. I turn up the brightness all the way on my monitor, and I can still barely see. I can see other people in the game, little figures running around in the distance, just running back and forth. If I try to get close, they run off. Now, I was trying to sleep, so the lights are off, and this is kind of creepy. I don't want to get up to turn on my light because I don't want to miss anything, but NOTHING fucking happens. Eventually I go back to The Citadel...it's still dark, and I gotta swim, and the whole time I can see all these guys swimming all around me, just barely there. I make it to the Citadel, and it's normal light inside, and I get worried. Sure enough, the Portrait Door is STILL FUCKING CLOSED. I go outside and it's ALL STARTING OVER. So that's it. I'm fucking going to bed, and I'm fucking done. The end." After that, two things happen. first, another of the people who got to the Portrait Room claimed that the Assassin was showing up in his regular Morrowind game. (Quick explanation. If you reinstalled Morrowind to a different fold, you could have a normal Morrowind install along with JVK.) He himself chalked it up to an overactive imagination at first, but he reported a couple of really big scares with the black figure crawling right at him, or seeing it waiting for him just around a corner before scuttling off. Another of those who reached the Portrait Room started a regular Morrowind game, but never for sure saw him; it was just a couple of maybes, late at night, and always at a distance. The second is that my friend started getting really abusive and short-tempered on the board, though he stopped talking about JVK entirely. It got so back that he was soon kicked off. I didn't hear anything from him for a couple of weeks after that, so I sent him an email. This was part of his reply: "I know I shouldn't, but with classes out I've got some time, so I started JVK up again. It's almost 2011...and I think I've got the sleep madness! But stuff is happening! It's still dark...once it gets dark, it never gets any lighter. It stays like that. The people moved a few months ago...everyone in Seyda neen just went to that little bandit cave and moved in. They killed the bandits inside, and now they're just standing around inside. They don't say anything anymore; they don't do anything when you click on them. I quicksaved and killed one, and he just stood there until he died without fighting back! And it's like that everywhere. You have to walk, since the quick travel people are all in caves now, too, but all the cities and towns re just deserted; all the people are in caves and tombs. Everyone in Vivec is down in the sewers. I'm going to Ghostgate next...I want to see if Tieras is still there. I'll tell you what he says when I get there!" i replied and said i wanted to see what he said, too, and waited a day. When I didn't get a reply, I mailed him again, and a couple of hours later he sent back: "Sorry, I totally forgot. So it's 2014 now...since it's always night, the stars are always moving. The whole screen is dark, but you can still see the brightest stars moving around. Tieras was gone...everyone in Ghostgate was gone. i don't know where they went. They're not in any of the nearby caves. But there's new stuff...people still don't say anything, but their eyes are bleeding. it's so dark that even with a light spell you have to get right up against them to see, but there they are, little dark streaks coming down from their eyes. I think I gotta be getting close. I know this is stupid, and there's no way the pay off is going to be worth it, but I just want to be able to say I stuck it out!" I got that one during the day. Later that night, I got a follow up email: "Some of the planets aren't moving right. It's pissing me off...if this keeps up, I won't be able to keep track anymore. It's almost 2015 now, I think. Fuck. You know, I just now noticed that there aren't any monsters anymore, either. I'm completely alone outside now. The main quest peoples' bodies are still laying around, though. i went to check on them. I don't need headphones anymore, so I just leave them off. When he shrieks, it's like he's screaming right into my ear. I think I even kind of anticipate it. He's around a lot more now, a lot closer. He's different from the other people who started showing up, remember? They keep running around, just where i can barely see them. I have to admit, it's kind of creepy at night. Sometimes, when I go to the bathroom or whatever, I swear I can see something out of the corner of mye ye. I'm keeping all the lights on now." I sent him a letter, jokingly telling him to get some real sleep, and left it at that. Two mornings later, I found this in my email. It was the last thing I got from him. After this, he stopped responding completely: "I just got up from a fucked up dream, I think. The Assassin shrieked at me, and when I opened my eyes, he was right there, crouching over me. His arms and legs were longer, more like a spider's. I tried to push him away, but when I touched him my hands just went inside and I couldn't get them loose again, like he was made of tar or something. Then I woke up, I thought. he was gone, but when I looked at the monitor I wasn't where I was. I was in the Corprusarium, with Yagrum. For once, the light was okay, and I could see him all bloated on those mechanical spider legs. I sat down at the computer and he started talking to me. Not in a box, but really talking to me,in Tieras' voice. He knew things about me. He told me things that I never told anyone, some things I totally forgot about. He told me that almost nobody had made it this far, and that the door would open up soon. I just had to hang on a little while longer. He said I'd know when it was time. He said I might be the first one to see what was inside. And then I woke up for real, but I was at the computer. I still wasn't where i was. I'm swimming out to The Citadel Island. And I can hear this tapping. It's at my window. It's over on the left, so I'm sending you this, because I left my laptop by my bed, to the right. Just a little taptaptaptap...like he's knocking his finger against the glass. I might still be dreaming now." So, I guess that's the end of the story. I know there's a few other stories floating around about the mod, but this is the only I know as true, as far as it goes. I deleted my JVK copy of the game pretty much right after I gave up, but I'd like to get the mod again, if anyone still has a copy of the file. I'd like to see some of this for myself.[/quote]
thanks
[QUOTE=FPKawaii;33416256][url]http://www.smwcentral.net/?p=viewthread&t=42510[/url] I started reading this thinking it was going to be lame, but it ended up being pretty creepy. You should also read the rest of the thread to see what others. discover about it. And here is a completely true story of the time I played Minecraft.[/QUOTE] Good read. I think the creepy part is that the ROM actually exists.
[QUOTE=bunnyspy1;33523589]thanks[/QUOTE] No problem, its one of my favorite creepypastas, to the point that I wish that the mod was real so I could play it. :v: [editline]1st December 2011[/editline] [QUOTE=TheWhiteFox1;33448412]Now, there's one story I remember reading back in the first "Creepy Stuff Megathread", one absolutely amazing creepypasta. It was written like a journal, and it was about this woman and her boyfriend going to see a play. Going there is fine, but they get lost on the way back home. Eventually, they're in an area they can't even recognize, and as the story progresses, the boyfriend becomes more and more aggravated. Now, the thing that was most prevalent about this story, was that at the end, there was an image of what looked like a structure, resembling the Citadel from HL2, buried under the sand in a massive desert. If anyone knows what I'm talking about, and can repost it, I'd greatly appreciate it, as it was one of the best stories I've ever read.[/QUOTE] Now someone go find this, im intrigued.
Unbranded Laptop My brother moved out of the house back in 2002 once he got his job as a computer technician, and he recently went missing. When I went to his house, it was locked, with 3 sheets of printer paper taped to the front door. While coming home from work one day, I noticed someone had left their damaged grey laptop laying in the middle of my driveway. I got out of my car to examine it more carefully. The LCD definitely showed signs of user related damage. There was a large hole on the left side of the screen that appeared to fit a standard Phillips Head screwdriver perfectly. There was a webcam above the display, and it was also destroyed with the same screwdriver. Other than those, everything else on the computer showed minor signs of wear. Almost all of the keyboard's keys were faded, but not to the extent that the laptop could be considered unusable. I looked at the back of the display to find out what brand it is, but I couldn't find anything. I looked at the entire laptop's shell, but there was no text or logo stating what brand it was. In fact, there was no warranty sticker, no "Proof of license" sticker on the bottom, no text whatsoever. What was even more odd was the fact that the only ports on the laptop were a VGA port for connecting an external display and a USB port. How long could this laptop have possibly run without a charging port to recharge the battery? It must have been a very low end laptop where you had to remove the battery pack and put it into its own charging dock. Why did it exactly have a web cam, though? Curious as to what was on the laptop, I ran inside to my basement where my old desktop was currently being stored. The reason it was down there was because I forgot to bring that behemoth to the local SarCan to recycle it. I would have been using it as my regular computer, but it takes 5 or 6 hours to fully boot because the system always goes through recovery mode every time you start it, and the processor is way too slow to "recover" everything on the 500 GB hard drive I had installed on it [A 120mhz Pentium processor doesn't get you far]. I removed the old LG CRT monitor from the desktop and plugged it into the laptop. I went to push the power button when... ... I stopped. There's no way this is going to work, the battery has to be dead by now. I rummaged around the basement to find my battery voltage tester and immediately withdrew the battery from the laptop and checked the voltage. Lo and behold, it had no charge. Well, I thought, might as well just leave it and take everything to SarCan tomorrow morning. With that, I unplugged the display from the laptop, put it back into the desktop and simply left everything downstairs. After leaving the basement I went to go watch TV for about 3 hours or so before going to bed. I was suddenly awakened from my deep slumber by the sound of the Windows 2000 start up jingle, and fell out of my bed. It was so deafeningly loud, I swore someone was holding a pair of speakers right next to my ears. I stood up in a groggy daze, and it took a couple of minutes to figure out what the sound was. The desktop! I must have accidentally hit the power switch while trying to switch monitors! I headed to the basement, but froze in the middle of the steps. I just remembered there was no way my computer could have started up, because I have Windows 95 installed on my desktop. I was reluctant to go down the steps after that, but my common sense started kicking in and I thought I must be getting my OS's mixed up. When I walked down, I was shocked to see that my desktop wasn't on; in fact, I remembered it wasn't even plugged in. I had to make sure of it though. I checked behind the desktop - everything else was plugged in except for the tower. There was absolutely no chance of that laptop turning on, it was impossible. I removed the battery from the laptop again and re-checked the voltage. This time, I couldn't get a direct number. The voltage tester was just going insane. I re-inserted the battery and pressed the power button on the laptop. Some indicator lights flashed, meaning the computer definitely started, except this time the start up jingle wasn't played at all. I needed to see what was going on here. I connected the CRT monitor back into the laptop. And what I saw... ... was a bare desktop with 3 icons in the corner. The task bar was empty, and there was no Start menu button. The wallpaper was black. Why would anyone do this to their desktop? Anyone could remove all the icons, but Added by Bill9929 they had to be pretty skilled hackers to remove the Start Menu button. Of the 3 icons, one was a Games folder, one was a Videos folder, and the last was the DOS Command Prompt program. Maybe this was a kids' laptop? Clicking on the Games folder confirmed my suspicions; a little girl must have owned this laptop. I felt some remorse for the poor girl because there was only 1 game in the folder. The program name was "princess.exe". I clicked on it just to see what the game was like. A fully animated title screen came up, with various generic fairytale princesses twirling across the screen, and then the logo flew down with a bunch of sparkly doves holding it. The game was called "Princess Creator: Make yourself Beautiful!" Ah, so it must have been one of those low budget "put .png of various clothing items onto a photo of yourself" games. I was right, as the menu popped up I was given the option to "Dress up" or to "View pretty pictures". I wanted to see what the girl looked like, so I clicked on the 2nd option. She had to have been no more than 5, and on top of that she looked very cute. She was of either Mexican or Added by Bill9929 Spanish origin. She wore a somewhat tattered white dress with small red frills around the sleeves and collar. It had small roses on it. I smiled, as she looked like she had a lot of fun putting a virtual tiara on her head. However, browsing through the photos, about halfway through, there were pictures of a room with nothing else but a bed inside. She must've been dodging the camera for the hell of it, I guess. After that I felt I'd seen enough with that program, and might as well go see the other 2 files on the laptop. I decided to go into the Command Prompt to see if I could locate any other files on the hard drive. I simply got a ":\>_" line with no drive letter. Ok, this is really strange, I thought. I typed into the command box "start C:\" to see if I could open the directory I wanted to explore. I pressed enter, and DOS simply replied " 'start' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file." After a few seconds, the program crashed, bringing me back to the desktop. So I guess the last thing to look at is the videos. As I double clicked the folder... ... and the screen faded to black. I thought it had crashed, but I noticed that there was a small "_" flashing in the top left corner. Suddenly, the text "start :\>videos\001.wmv" flashed briefly, then a video appeared in full screen. It was the girl again. This time, she was smiling, bouncing slightly in excitement. Her happiness made my heart feel warm. My guess was that she must've been recording herself play the dress up game with the webcam. At first she was simply moving her finger across the track pad, clicking, then giggling excitedly for a bit. She must've been laughing at the things she put on herself in the game. After about 2 minutes or so, the screen would cut to black for a fraction of a second and then return to the girl playing the game. This time, however, she was dressed differently, in a simple pink t-shirt with the words "Go Go Girl!" stitched in glitter. I guessed the game was recording her every time she started it, without her knowing. That made me sort of uneasy - I mean, why would anyone program a game to do that? Whatever, I guessed it was going to be the same sort of thing over and over with the video, so I might as well turn off the computer. I reached over and pressed the power button, and... ... It didn't shut off this time. The video continued to play, and I saw the girl this time was wearing an orange tank top with nothing on it. She was smiling and giggling as usual, and I thought maybe I could turn off the computer after the video is done. It couldn't be that long. The video seemed to drag on, with more cuts of her playing the game in a different outfit, and I started to doze off. However, after the next cut in the video... The girl was just staring at the camera with an expressionless look on her face. Wondering what the hell was going on, I become interested in the video again. This one didn't make me smile. It made me extremely uneasy to watch her without her usual smiley face on. It was dark in the room, but there was 1 desk light on at the side. She was in some sort of night wear. What was she going to do? She sat there for a minute with that blank expression, like she wasn't thinking at all. I started to get really tense, as if something awful was about to happen. She bent over and picked up a hand saw from the left side of where she was sitting. She held it in front of her, showing it to the camera. Then, she placed the jagged blade on the side of her cheek. I cringed at what I was seeing. Slowly, she began slicing into her right cheek. Blood drizzled down her neck as she did it. Slowly, the side of her teeth began to show after about 10 seconds. As the saw went lower on her face, more of her teeth began to show on the side. Blood covered almost the entire right side of her face. She eventually got to the bottom of her jaw bone, and sawed a tiny piece off of it too. Her cheek fell to the ground with a small thud, and she put the saw in her lap and continued to stare at the camera, emotionless. I couldn't take much more of this and tore the battery out of the laptop - but the video continued to play. Then, the next cut began. The girl screamed in extreme pain. I almost fell out of my seat, it was so loud. She screamed, and put her hands over her now absent cheek. She continued to scream in agony for about 10 seconds, then a knocking was heard from the side. It was a woman, yelling in a language I couldn't understand. She was pounding the door, but not opening it. The girl must have locked it. I tried to unplug the monitor from the laptop but it was stuck in. I didn't want to see what happens next! The screaming and the yelling continued up until the next cut. She was back in her emotionless state again, but her cheek was still missing. The woman at the door was pounding and yelling still. It must have been her mother. The girl then raised the saw up to her right shoulder, and began cutting just as slowly as last time. I gagged at the sight of this. It was a holocaust of wrong. The blood began to stream out in all directions. The yelling behind the door fell silent. I guessed the other woman was trying to get someone to help her, either the father or brother or what not. When she hit the bone, an awful grinding noise could be heard. I covered my ears, but I could still hear it vividly through my hands. I noticed that a piece of her muscle got stuck on one of the steel teeth of the saw. This cut ended a lot faster than before, and the next cut was the same thing except the color from her face was draining, and her pain ridden screams became quickly weaker. Her clothing was completely red with blood on the right side. Then, she became emotionless again. Oh god, what is she going to cut off next? The mother returned with what sounded like 2 other people, and they were all yelling in the same language as before. She raised the saw, and began cutting the right side of her head off. Loud thuds were sounding at the door. They were trying to knock it down. She continued to work her way down, with blood going in all sorts of directions. The thuds still repeated themselves on the door. I was mostly confused as to how she kept going, even after she went through her brain with the saw. Her right eye rolled into the back of her head. Blood began leaking out of it. She eventually made it to the top of her mouth, where she hacked her way through bones and teeth. It was the single worst sound I have ever heard in my entire life. I still hear it in the back of my head some days. The thuds continued, and deep in the back of my mind I hoped they wouldn't be able to break the door down so they wouldn't have to see such an awful sight. She finally made it through, and with that, the right side of her head fell to the side of her neck, held on only by a piece of skin. I remember the chilling sound of her jaw being unhinged when it was tugged violently by the force of the top half of her head. She put the saw down to her side. The cut ended, and in the next cut, she simply fell face down onto the desk. Half her brain fell out onto the desk on impact, and her eye popped out of its socket. Blood pooled on the desk. The people trying to break down the door finally made it in, and they were hysterical at what they saw. Their daughter was in pieces. The mother vomited and ran out of the room. The father ran to the daughter, put her head back together and cried, holding her head at the side of his. The other man, presumably the girl's older brother, simply stared in horror at what he saw. The horrifying self mutilation finished with that cut, and the screen cut back to the empty room with the bed. With a sigh of relief that it was over I sat there, breathing heavily and sweating. I didn't realize that the room was so hot until now. I had so many questions to ask. How was all this possible? It frightened me, and I spent a good 30 minutes sitting in the chair, and finally, I got the courage to get up. I looked back at the laptop for what I hoped was the last time. The room with the bed glared on the screen. Then, it cut to something else. It was a cut of my face, in the basement, using the laptop.
[b]The Stairs and The Doorway[/b] I don’t feel like I’m a nosy person. No more nosy than the next guy. I just have what my Ma would call an unhealthy amount of curiosity. I was the kid who climbed to the top of the big oak in the back yard, just to see what was in the crows’ nest. I was the kid who dug a hole in the back yard so deep that I hit groundwater because I was convinced there was a cave under our house, and I wanted to see it. To see. My folks aren’t dirt poor, but they’re pretty close. They’re part of that missing middle of America, the people who work forty hours a week until they die, with no savings to speak of. I got my first job at a horse stable when I was fourteen. It didn’t last very long. I knew I needed to get a job, because I knew we needed the money, so I bounced around for the next few years, washing dishes, waiting tables, until I graduated high school. Pop was really tough on me about college. He never went — nobody in his family had — so there were a few fights about where I would go after school. It was a huge shock to me when, just after graduation, he drove me down to the Uni. He’d been classmates with the Dean and they’d come up with an arrangement where I’d get a full scholarship, provided I made good grades and worked for the University. I never felt like a scholar. In high school, I kept my head down and did enough to get by, pulling off B’s and a few C’s. I wasn’t interested in learning, because learning wasn’t interesting. Uni was different. I took mainly core classes, math-English-history-science, but they were fascinating. For one thing, nobody cared if I showed up or not. It was entirely up to me to succeed, so I did. In exchange for my education, I worked security and did some light maintenance duties. Maintenance was a no-brainer. I’ve always been handy, and most of the fix-it jobs were the type that could be solved with a liberal application of WD-40, or elbow grease, or both. Security was a different story. Security gave me super powers. The job itself was pretty easy. I got a uniform, a badge, a flashlight, and Ma gave me some keychain mace for my birthday. No, I didn’t get a gun — they weren’t allowed on campus anyway. I worked mostly nights and weekends, and doubles during long holiday breaks. I was to walk around the full campus twice in a night, checking the labs, computer center, and library. The rest of my time was pretty much my own. There were two other guards, Jake and Al, but they worked different shifts from me. We had “overlap nights” on Wednesday nights, where we’d get together for about an hour to discuss any major events or changes. There might have been some beer at those meetings, but I’m underage, and you can’t prove anything. Jake worked mostly dayshift, and Al worked swings and some overnights during the week. Jake was a younger guy, training to be on the local police force, so he took his job pretty seriously. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure Al mostly slept during his shifts. Al was two years older than dirt, so he deserved his rest. Remember that bit about super powers? My first night on the job, Al gave me a huge keychain with about a thousand keys on it. It weighed nearly five pounds, and was secured to my belt with a heavy-duty metal chain. “Don’t lose that keychain, kid,” Al said. “You got the keys to the kingdom right there. Any door that don’t open, you don’t want to go in it.” My work hobby, the thing that kept me awake on those long cold winter break nights, was exploring. I made it a point, every night, to open some door that I’d never opened before. I started in the new section, where the library and computer center were, opening each room, each closet, making a map in my head of where everything was. Some nights I might explore two or three rooms. Some nights I might not have time for anything more than an odd, out of the way broom closet. The Uni is actually a pretty large campus, for having a full student body of only twelve or thirteen hundred. It was built as a Methodist college in 1896, and became state-owned in the thirties. There were three main sections. The ‘Old School’ housed the Administration offices and a few unlucky classrooms —unlucky due to the lack of central heat and air, and the three-story building had no elevators. The ‘Labs’ were a Brutalist horror of poured concrete slabs and tiny windows, built back in the 70s when buildings that looked like Soviet radiators were in style. The “New Library” was steadily losing its “new”, built in the late 90s boom, and made in that unique red-brick-and-glass style like everything else during those years. When I think back to those early days, those days before, I think how stupid I was. How naive. I should have thought about winter. I should have thought about the solstice. By December of my sophomore year of college, I had cleared every room in the New Library. I had opened every door, checked every closet, and had a good mental map of the whole building. It was, ultimately, pretty unimpressive. I found no buried treasure, no secret stash of missing computer supplies cached in a forgotten closet. I did find a small, sweaty stack of bad porno mags in a supply closet in the basement level. “Wicked, Wicked Cowgirls.” Who was I to judge? December is a slow time for the Uni. After the mad rush of Finals, the campus was suddenly deserted, the remaining few staff seeming lost. The buildings stood silent, and dark, in the thin winter breezes. We had a steady series of snowstorms, but none bad enough to close the campus. I made sure the sidewalks were clear and the entryways salted, and otherwise tried to stay indoors. Besides, I had the ‘Old School’ to explore. The main ‘Old School’ building, Downing Hall, was a four-story V-shaped building. It had no elevators, tiny stairwells, and was only exempted from ADA compliance due to its “historical importance”. It had no air-conditioning, save for sporadic window-mount units that were only permitted to be installed on the rear of the building, so as not to spoil the building’s historic charm. The building’s heat came from a massive, ancient boiler in the basement. As far as I knew, Al was the only person who knew anything about the boiler, and he must have kept it in good shape, because I never heard of any complaints about it. I spent the second week after Finals Week poking through the top floors of Downing Hall. I didn’t have a lot of time for exploring every night, as the snow gave me more than usual upkeep chores, but I made steady progress. I discovered a small room in the attic on the Left Wing that must have been an old Dean’s office, complete with a beautiful antique desk and wardrobe. I checked both, thinking I might find something “historic” to give to the Dean, but the wardrobe was empty save for a moth-eaten wool scarf, and the desk’s contents were limited to a few old newspapers and some tax forms from the 1950s. A level below, on the building’s fourth floor, I found two dozen small, empty classrooms. In my handyman mindset, I checked the windows for loose glass panes, and for water or rodent damage. I fully expected to see rat-droppings, or at least some insect damage, but I found none. The second and third floors were much the same, except the rooms on the rear of the building were air-conditioned and thus actively used for classes when school was in session. The main floor was Administration, and included the Dean’s office. I thought it wise not to snoop around in my boss’s office, or in Payroll, so I skipped a lot of these rooms. I made my way to the stairwell to the basement, used my superhero keychain, opened the heavy door and went down. The basement of Downing Hall was different from that of the New Library. For one thing, it was a lot more cramped. The hallway was narrow, and the ceiling was low, with doorways leading off at regular intervals. I checked every room, flipping the old two-button switches to ON, using my flashlight on the dark corners. I had carried a few packs of spare light bulbs — the fancy new CFC bulbs — in my satchel, thinking to replace any that had burned out, and save the environment while I was at it. The little rooms mostly contained junk — spare desks, filing cabinets full of forty- and fifty-year-old papers, old holiday decorations, and so forth, lit by naked hanging bulbs. I’m not an imaginative kind of guy. I guess I’m pretty smart — I’d made straight A’s in my college courses. It never occurred to me to be scared. I didn’t think, “I’m alone in a creepy old basement.” This was my place, my job, my hobby, and it all seemed so normal. By the night of the 20th of December, I had made my way to the boiler room. The furnace was a massive monstrosity of iron and rivets, pipes and gauges. It was hellishly hot in that room, and equally loud. It was, however, neat and very clean. Al kept it that way, because he said “a clean boiler lets you get more shuteye.” The furnace had been converted from coal to gas at some point, but the soot had stained the walls of the room, and the old coal chute still opened in one of the corners. I had no intention of giving the boiler room more than a glance — I’d been there dozens of times, and there was nothing to see, just a workbench and the furnace itself — when I noticed a small door to the back and left behind the furnace. “That’s weird,” I thought to myself. I had never seen that door before. But then again, I had never stood in that particular spot, beside the workbench, and I had never really looked. The door was smaller than a normal door — maybe five feet tall, painted in the same non-color drab grey-brown of the walls, and was made of metal, just like the other doors in the basement. I went over to the door, and touched the handle. I think the body knows sometimes when things are wrong. Have you ever had that feeling, like you’re being watched? When you know you’re totally alone, and nobody can see you, but you feel eyes on you? Have you ever gone left instead of right, because you got a feeling that you just shouldn’t go to the right today? It didn’t work that way for me. When I touched that doorknob, nothing felt any different. My head didn’t hurt, my neck-hairs didn’t stand up, and I didn’t hear an inner voice saying, “Don’t do it!” The doorknob turned, but the door wouldn’t open. I looked more closely, and saw a small keyhole. I checked my magic keychain, and found three possible matches. Struck out on the first two, and the third worked, of course. Of course. The hinges squealed like they hadn’t been used in a long time (decades.) My handyman instincts noted it. “WD-40,” I mumbled. I hauled open the door and stepped through, into another small, cramped hallway. The light switch worked, and the single bulb blew with a crack! “Dammit!” My hackles did raise then. I flicked on my flashlight, and quickly swapped out the hallway bulb with a new one. I looked around, and saw this hallway was narrow, straight, and ended a few yards away at another door. That door opened easily, onto another stairway. “What the hell?” I said. Nobody had ever mentioned a sub-basement for this building. The hairs on the back of my neck were still standing out. I shook it off as nerves from the blown bulb, and walked to the stairwell. It was a standard stairwell, and looked pretty much the same as the others in the building. I walked to the bottom, and met another door. I pushed through it, to see another long, narrow hallway, with doors leading off to either side at regular intervals. The first door to my left was unlocked, and opened fairly easily, onto a storage closet. There were stacks of late Sixties-era books, a few desks, and a decaying mop in its bucket. The door across from it was unlocked, but did not open so easily. I hauled the door open to find a larger room that looked to have been used as a classroom. There were desks, a blackboard, anatomical diagrams, and posters on the walls. Everything was covered in an inch of dust, and appeared to have not been touched in a long time. “Why would anyone put a classroom down here?” I mumbled to myself, “How would they even convince students to get down here in the first place?” I remember thinking, at that point, that I must have somehow discovered a back way into the other wing of the V-shaped Downing Hall. “Maybe this is where the old Science classes were held, before the Labs were built.” I moved on to the next set of rooms. They were both classrooms, abandoned, dust-covered, and mostly empty. So were the next pair, and the next. I saw a total of twelve disused classrooms in that hallway, and a small breakroom, complete with a lonely coffee pot. I also found two small restrooms. I didn’t spend much time checking them out, as the lights didn’t work and I didn’t feel like replacing those bulbs. I found myself getting slightly nervous — I was in a strange section of the campus, and I was working alone that night. In the back of my mind I just couldn’t truly justify the existence — the waste — of a whole floor full of unused classrooms. When I got to the end of the hallway, I met another steel door. I opened it, and saw another stairwell. I was fully expecting this stairwell to go up, to connect to one of the other main stairwells in Downing Hall. The stairs only went down. This was the point, I remember, at which I began to get scared. “No way. There’s no way these stairs go down. How would anybody get down here?” “Here. Here. here,” the stairwell echoed at me. I should have checked the time. I should have been concerned with finishing my rounds. I should have been hungry for lunch. I should have run. I started to climb down the stairs. This stairwell was unlit, and appeared to be much older, and in much worse condition than the others. It was also longer. Much longer. After a few minutes of walking down the steps, I began to count them. At every twelve steps, there was a small landing, a turn, and another set of steps. Down. After ten landings, I reached another door. It was unlocked, and opened easily. The hinges squealed, and the echoes died like lost things in the dark. I groped against the left wall for a light switch, and there was none. I checked the right, and the wall was equally smooth. I cast the flashlight around, but saw nothing. Nothing forward, nothing to either side, and nothing above. I snapped my fingers, listening for the echo. I may or may not have heard one. I slowly came to realize that the room into which I had entered was enormous, cavernous, possibly the biggest room I had ever physically experienced. I shrank back to the doorway for a moment. “This room can’t be here,” I said to myself. I started to think about going back. But I also started to think about wanting to know what was in there. I took a step forward, and another, until I was walking steadily into the room. I kept a steady pace, counting my steps. I looked over my shoulder every few yards, using the light from the open doorway to orient myself. I walked, slowly, for a hundred yards, two hundred yards, until I saw a dim glow ahead. The glow got faintly brighter and larger as I walked toward it. Another hundred yards, and another, and three more passed until I could make out a small dim light bulb near a door. That door was of a different type entirely. It was huge, fourteen feet tall at least, and half again as wide. The surface was black metal, studded with rivets and bolts, mounted on huge hinges. Across the face of the door, graved into the metal, were words in some strange looping script that I could not recognize. Every surface was carved with that script, or with strange diagrams made of splayed circle-ended lines. In the center of the door was a large spoked wheel lock, and in the center of the lock was a tiny keyhole. Above the keyhole was a sigil, enclosed in three circles. I looked behind me, and could not see the light from the stairwell. I couldn’t see anything at all. I held the Superhero Keychain to the dim light, and flipped through the keys. Of course, there was one small, battered key that looked as if it might fit. I inserted it into the lock, and turned it. I heard a click, and a thud, and a sound from within the door like pouring pebbles. Or dry teeth. I pulled the key from the lock, and grasped the spokes of the wheel lock. My heart was racing, and sweat was dribbling into my eyes. I turned the spokes to the left, counterclockwise —widdershins, some buried memory in my head said — and kept turning, until the wheel stopped. There was another THUD and a CRACK, and then silence. The darkness behind me no longer felt empty. In fact, it felt positively crowded, as if I had an audience, watching me. I stepped back from the door and flashed my light around. Still nothing. Dry empty floor. I turned back to the door, grasped the large cast-iron handles, and pulled. Nothing. I tried harder, putting all of my weight into the pull, and at the last moment, at the end of my strength, I heard another CRACK! and the door groaned open on a draft of cool, stinking air. The smell was heavy, moist, and musky. I had a flash memory of my mother taking me to the zoo as a child, and the smell of the Cat House, with the lions. At the thought of the lions, I let go of the handles and stumbled back a bit. I carefully shone my light into the yawning black crevice of the open door. I saw a short hallway that opened into a small, cramped room. I saw a filthy, rusted metal chair. I saw bones. Small bones. I saw — or heard, or smelled — a form so black it seemed to suck in the light of my flashlight. I saw a black form rushing towards me, running towards me, filling the hallway, howling and laughing and speaking, in a voice that sounded like mountains collapsing. I remember fangs, and words that turned my bones to rusted glass. I remember feathers, and a hand with too many fingers, jeweled with something unspeakable. And the smell, the stink of something long caged. I remember wings. I don’t know how long I wandered in the dark, alone under hundreds of feet of rock. There was no light. There was no way to judge time. My flashlight was dead, and my cellphone, and even the small specks of luminescent paint on my cheap wristwatch were dark. There was something wrong with my right leg. It hurt, but I couldn’t see enough to find out why. I kept hearing my audience, there in that cavernous room. I screamed at them. I felt one of them touch my face, and I threw my flashlight at it. The flashlight bounced and rattled and became still, somewhere that I was not. Something laughed, later. I raved and screamed but didn’t throw anything else. I found the doorway after hours or days of crawling. There were no lights in the stairwell. After years of climbing, I crawled into that first forgotten hallway. I sliced my fingers on the crushed remains of the light bulbs I had packed in my satchel. I crawled down the hallway, and reached the next stairwell. I hauled myself up them, and finally out into the boiler room. When I staggered out of Downing Hall, two full days after going in, it was into dim winter daylight and a full police presence. Five people had been found dead on and around the campus. All had been brutally, savagely murdered, bodies splayed open, viscera missing. The teeth marks suggested a wild animal, but the murder scenes and body positioning also displayed a certain intelligence to them. There was also the writing, carved into the flesh when it was not yet dead meat. The cops wouldn’t talk about the writing. The cops wouldn’t talk to me, either. Not afterwards. When they first saw me stumble out into daylight, covered in blood, they assumed I was the perpetrator. They quickly changed their assumptions when the medics pointed out the greenstick fracture, the dehydration, the concussion and the obvious shock. The cops asked a lot of questions, and I answered as best as I could. I told them about the door in the boiler room. They couldn’t find it. They showed me the bare smooth wall from where I had crawled, dazed and broken. My tracks stopped at that wall. Two cops tried breaking through the wall in that spot, only to meet old brick, and older earth past that. The cops wanted to know where the long, black feathers came from, stuck to my clothes by dried blood. I didn’t know. I didn’t want to know. The cops, the medics, nobody, would look at me any more. The scars on my face, the deep, gouged-out writing, was not a sight that most would want to see. I was marked. Whatever I had let out, whatever had killed and eaten five people, and a week later six more, had marked me as a friend.
It's not creepy, but certainly gets you thinking. Well it was creepy, but I'm not paranoid about it right now.
Sorry, you need to Log In to post a reply to this thread.