Alleyways are always filled with doors, many of which never seem to lead anywhere. Once in a while, you may find a door that seems completely out of place and out of time. These old wooden doors look like they could be centuries old and have very delicate and ornate designs carved into them. These are the One Way Doors.

Now one day, you might find yourself down an alley, staring at one of these mysterious doors, overcome with curiosity.You approach the door and test the copper doorknob, surprised to find that the door has been left open. You swing the door open slowly, finding that it’s extremely dark. Despite it being rather bright in the alley, you’re unable to see anything past the doorway. Still bugged by the possibilities of what lies behind the door, you go against your better judgment and step into the pitch darkness.

You blink a few times, allowing your eyes to adjust to the brightness, and you realize that you’re standing back in the alley, facing the door. You try the doorknob again, except that this time, it’s locked. The last thing you remember doing is going through this old wooden door, except now, you’re standing back out in the alley. You shrug it off as some memory lapse or déjà vu moment, and seeing as the door was now locked, you decide to head home.

As you turn around, you see a man heading towards the door, clearly just as curious about the door as you were. “Don’t bother, bro. It’s locked,” you tell him. He doesn’t mind you and keeps walking towards the door, going straight through you.

“Wait, what the fuck?!”

You stare wide-eyed as the man continues to make his way towards the door. “How did he -?! Is that guy a ghost?! Unless, I’m the -”

The man reaches for the doorknob and opens the door. He pokes his head into the darkness before fully stepping though the doorway.

As the man steps into the room, his foot doesn’t find any ground. He falls 30 feet down to the bottom of the pit inside the room. He dies the instant he hits the pile of dead bodies at the bottom of the pit; his body lies neatly next to yours.

Credit To – Andrew Kim

It was always a treat for the three Levine children when they got to visit Gran’s house. Gran’s house was big, with plenty of rooms for hide-and-seek, and a pond in the garden filled with fish and frogs. For the Levines, who crammed together in a four-bedroom apartment, Gran’s house was a fairytale castle. It was also a veritable treasure-trove of toys; bags of shiny marbles, ebony dominoes stacked neatly in their boxes, striped hoola-hoops and skipping-ropes, boxes of coloured chalk that the children could use to draw on the flagstones around the pond, teddy-bears in all shapes and sizes, and a plethora of dolls with curly hair and frilly dresses.
Then there was the box.
Some days it was in the front room, proudly displayed on the mantel above the fireplace, other days it was in the dining room, hiding among myriad framed photographs, and other days still it was upstairs in Gran’s bedroom. Sometimes it wasn’t on display at all but just sitting on the floor or halfway up the stairs.
The youngest child, Vivian, once asked, “Why do you always move the box, Gran?”
Something dark flitted across Gran’s face like a storm-cloud blocking out the sun. “I don’t. That box has a mind of its own.”
“You mean it moves by itself?” This wasn’t incomprehensible to a six-year-old.
“The box does what it feels like and I don’t interfere,” Gran said.
Vivian’s sisters were more interested in the dolls. They’d spend hours brushing their hair or rearranging their clothes, but nothing peaked Vivian’s curiosity like that box. She was never allowed to touch it, no matter where it moved itself to. Every time they went round, Vivian would look at the box and wonder. What was its secret? Why wasn’t she allowed to touch it?
Years passed and visits to Gran’s house became less and less frequent. The girls were growing up; they had their own lives to live. When Vivian was twenty-two she moved to the heart of London and that was the last she saw of Gran for a while. She’d stopped thinking about the box a long time ago.

Until Gran died.

The wake was held in Gran’s house – it was the only one big enough to fit everyone in. Gran had made a lot of friends in her lifetime.
Vivian felt a sharp pang in her chest when she stepped over the threshold. It had been years since she’d been in this house yet everything looked the same. Older, perhaps, more faded, but still igniting the potent memories of childhood.
Everyone wanted to offer platitudes and condolences but all Vivian wanted was some time alone. It would probably be the last time she was in the house she’d loved as a child, and she wanted to indulge in a memory-lane trip. While the guests congregated at the buffet table, Vivian quietly slipped upstairs. Everything was as she remembered it, the carpet patterned in various purples, the off-white wallpaper and the paintings of Gran’s old dogs that lined each and every wall.
Somehow she found herself in Gran’s bedroom. The shelves on the walls were still lined with glassy-eyed dolls but their curls were limp now, covered with a grey film of dust. And on the dressing table, surrounded by pots of powder and lipstick tubes, was the box.
Vivian froze when she saw it. All her childhood curiosity came flooding back. Gran’s mysterious box that no one had ever been allowed to touch. Looking at it now, Vivian didn’t even know it had fascinated her. It was a plain wooden box, thirteen by six inches, the brass catch fastened by a padlock. It was nothing pretty, nothing special but Vivian could swear it was calling to her. It wasn’t a voice as such, more like a tugging sensation as if invisible hands were trying to pull her towards it.
She took a tentative step forwards and picked up the box. Suddenly she felt six years old again, breaking Gran’s most stringent rule. She half-expected Gran to come into the room and start scolding her. But Gran wasn’t here anymore.
Vivian made up her mind there and then. She was taking the box. She slipped it into her handbag and didn’t think about it again until she got home.
It was ten o’clock by the time Vivian arrived back in London. Her flat was located above a butcher’s on the corner. She hated walking past the butcher’s during the day when all the slabs of meat were on display, sitting in pools of blood. At least at night the windows were dark, the meat stored away.
Up in the flat, Vivian took the box from her handbag and placed it on the freestanding bookshelf by the side of her bed. She didn’t plan to keep it there permanently but she was too tired to find a proper home for it now. Kicking off her shoes she flopped into bed. Sleep crept over her in minutes.
Vivian dreamed she was standing in a field, waist-deep in grass. There was nothing around her but green, an endless countryside. The sun was setting; it looked like spilled blood on the horizon. Dread prickled up her spine. There was something wrong with this place. She couldn’t see it but she could feel it, some bone-deep sense of self-preservation that kicked in when danger was close.
She started to run. Somehow she had to get out of this field. She hadn’t run more than a few metres when a hand broke through the ground, scrabbling blindly at her ankles. It was grey-skinned, the yellow finger-nails gnarled and broken. Vivian screamed and kicked the hand away but another punched through the earth. It caught her foot and she pitched forward onto the ground. More decaying hands broke through the ground, fumbling over her body, pinning her down. She fought and kicked and writhed but the hands were too strong. A pair closed round her throat. Vivian tried to scream but she couldn’t even breathe.

She snapped awake, clutching at her throat, gasping. Her lungs ached as if something really had been trying to choke the life out of her.
Gran’s box was sitting on the nightstand next to the bed. Vivian frowned. She was sure she had left it on the bookshelf. Gran had told her the box had a mind of its own but that seemed like such nonsense to Vivian now. Besides, that had just been some story for Gran to tell the children. She hadn’t actually believed it…had she?
By the time the sun was up, Vivian felt thoroughly silly for allowing a dream to frighten her so much. Dreams were nothing but the workings of the unconscious mind. True, she hadn’t had a nightmare in years but on the night following her Gran’s funeral, she was hardly going to be dreaming about rainbows and candy-canes. And she must have moved the box to her nightstand without realising it. It was the only explanation.
Still, Vivian felt a twinge of unease when night fell. The shadows shifting through her flat seemed more menacing now, as if grey-skinned hands might burst forth at any second. Her nightstand was empty now except for the lamp; she’d moved the box into the kitchen. It didn’t look quite right there either.
The nightmares were worse this time. Instead of grasping hands, whole skeletons climbed out of the lonely field, their eyes empty and blind but all turned in Vivian’s direction. The air was heavy with the stench of blood and meat. The skeletons opened their mouths to speak but all Vivian could hear was creaking bone.
This was a dream. She had to wake up
Vivian lurched awake gasping. The blood stench still clung to her nostrils, so strong she could taste it. It was like someone had slaughtered a pig in her flat and she could smell everything spilling out of its body.

Take me back

The sibilant hiss slithered through her mind. Vivian bit back a scream. Gran’s box was sitting on the nightstand, angled towards her. The wood-whorls looked like eyes glaring out at her.
This time Vivian knew she wasn’t imagining things. She had left that box in the kitchen. There was no way it could have got in here unless…what if Gran had been right? What if the box did have a mind of its own? All those years Vivian had visited Gran’s house and been forbidden to touch the box. What if Gran had a good reason for keeping it away from people?
The next morning Vivian took the box and threw it in the bin. It was silly to be frightened by a piece of wood but every time she looked at it, she got the feeling there was something sinister luring just at the corner of her vision. She was never fast enough to see it but it was there, a presence.
She hoped that with the box out of the house that would be the last nightmare she’d have, but that third night they were worse than ever.
It was raining in the lonely field, fat red blood-drops falling from black clouds. The creaking sound of skeletons trying to talk scraped against Vivian’s ears. In the distance she could see a house and she started running towards it. As she drew nearer she recognised the front door with the lion’s head knocker, and the flowers overflowing from their window-boxes. It was Gran’s house.

Take me back

The voice lashed the air, deeper and angrier than it had been the night before.

Take me back to my house

Vivian gasped and clutched her chest. It felt like something had just hit her with a baseball bat. She fell to her knees as her lungs constricted. There was a dead weight on her chest, like something was slowly suffocating her.
When she opened her eyes Gran’s box was sitting on her chest. Vivian screamed and threw the box across the room. The lid rattled as it hit the floor and that terrible voice came spilling out.

Take me baaaaaaack

Gran’s house had been in the nightmare. That was where the box wanted to be.
Vivian grabbed her car-keys. She didn’t want to touch the box and wrapped it in an old towel. As soon as she was in her car, the smell of blood and meat filled the air. Vivian opened all the windows but it didn’t make any difference. Gran’s house was three hours away from London but Vivian made it there in less than two, violating every speeding law known to mankind.
Gran’s house stood dark and empty, the windows like sad eyes. When Vivian lifted the box from the backseat, it seemed to tremble in her hands. Like it knew it was coming home.
Vivian didn’t have a key and the box wouldn’t fit through the letter-box, but she couldn’t explain that to it. So she did the only thing she could think of – she threw the box through the window. Amid the noise of shattering glass she thought she heard a deeply satisfied sigh as the box thudded on the carpet.
Vivian got in her car and drove away. She didn’t look back.

It was years before she was in the area again. Despite everything she couldn’t resist walking past Gran’s house again. The flower-boxes and the lion’s head knocker were gone. The door had been painted red. Vivian’s steps slowed as she tried to peer through the window.
On a coffee table in the living room was the box. It didn’t have a face but Vivian sensed that it was deeply content. It was back where it belonged.
Vivian never visited Gran’s house again.

Credit To – Bella Higgin

I tried not to notice it. I pretended it wasn’t there. I wore long sleeve shirts, and I never looked down. If I didn’t think about it, I hoped, it would cease to exist.

But I couldn’t forget it. At night my arm would throb in bed like the stain in the Scottish play. Spots don’t come out.

Wednesday I decided to actually look at my arm for the first time a little over two weeks and, upon close inspection, any thought of a future as a non amputee ended. The thick black circle I had been trying to pretend wasn’t there just was, was actually completely there, in a very present kind of way. Inches below the center of my bicep, it was the size of a Krispy Kreme donut with same sort of strange shine to it. A slightly raised appearance almost suggested it was swelling inside. The edges were rounded, not erratic like the pictures melanomas I had found on that evening’s increasingly ragged image searches. But what else would it be?

I didn’t want to call my doctor. I didn’t even have a doctor. Just a clinic, where I saw a rotating cast of semi qualified residents who toiled for low wages, solved mundane problems and lost sleep. I didn’t want to make an appointment there and have to talk to somebody.

I didn’t want to see what someone’s face looks like when I’m being told I’m going to die.

Hopelessness has limits, so I finally called to make an appointment. The scheduler asked me why i needed to see the doctor and, in a moment of horrified honesty, I mumbled that I had a growth on my left arm. Like a black donut. Giant.

She interrupted me- “Which arm? Left or right?”

“Left.”

“Please hold.”

The line went to something classical. Cellos and violas and a feeling of disconnect.

“Still there?”

“Still here.”

“Look, the doctor has a recommendation for you. A specialist for things like this.”

The oncologist’s office was right on the edge of a bus line, on the edge of gentrification. The elevators in the lobby had cones in front of them and signs suggesting they were no longer working. The lights flickered, making it feel like a stop motion movie. I took the stairs to the 3rd floor.

The waiting room was crowded, with barely enough seats for everyone, and the temperature was insane. High 50s? I thought I saw someones breath.

I looked at my phone mindlessly while waiting to get called back. I thought I would have had issuance forms to fill out, so I hadn’t brought a book, but I wasn’t given anything. I just said who I was and they told me to sit down. I didn’t sign a thing.

My arm kept spasming. I was in long sleeves to cover it up, which was awful. The Fourth of July was only two days away.

Everyone else, I realized, was wearing long sleeves too. I told myself they had simply dressed appropriately. The place was arctic, after all. They all knew that. Except the girl behind me, at the desk, she said it was her first visit…

I looked over at her, trying not to be noticed. She was wearing a cardigan.

My name got called. I stood and followed the nurse to the examining room.

It was standard white, with the scale and the table and the biohazard trash. There was a mirror and a window behind me. My arm was pulsing, like a second heart.

The nurse barely spoke to me, just told me to sit on the table and the doctor would be in soon. She was starting to walk out and she hadn’t asked any questions. I asked if she wanted to see my arm.

She looked– repulsed. “No. The doctor wil look at that,” and she hurried out, into the room almost directly across the hall.

She didn’t close the door completely shut behind her. I could see her walk into the room across from mine in the reflection of my room’s mirror. In the other room was the girl in the cardigan. Except she had taken it off.

I couldn’t see everything in the room, but I could see scraps of image, the nurse walking back and forth, the girl’s shoulders. Her arm. And the growth on her left arm.

It was like mine. The same size, the same deep black almost purple color, that jelly like seeming consistency. I could feel it throbbing like mine.

I heard footsteps down the hall, watched as a lab coat slid into her room. I expected to hear that low HPPA murmur as soon as he stepped in but, no. Nothing. I heard her start to talk and then in the mirror I saw a knife.

It was bright and shiny and he moved so fast before she could even cry out. I saw the knife go up and down and up and down and a sprinkler turned on for a moment, a dizzy spray of bright scarlet that splashed out in clear, brilliant streams.

And the black thing on her arm opened. An eye was there. Red vein laced, pupils dilated, fluttering back and firth like a seizure patient.

The blood stopped and the blackness returned over the eye, like a lid closing for sleep. I heard the harsh sound of old pipes as a faucet was turned on.

I rushed to the door and pulled it closed. I couldn’t bear to look my arm. It felt like it was trying to run away underneath my sleeve. I grabbed the biohazrd trash can and pressed it against the door, then the examining table.

Someone outside pushed, confirming my hope the door opened inward instead of out. The doorknob rattled; noise mingled with panicked cursing.

It was the third floor, but looking out I could see a dumpster nearly directly under me. I tried the window. The door started slowly opening behind me. The window raised. And I was gone.

The dumpster was full of red bio bags, lumpy, and horrifying. The alley smelled like rot. I climbed out and ran without looking back. I remembered my myths.

I caught a bus 3 blocks away and rode it blankly for almost an hour. I got off in a neighborhood I didn’t know and almost immediately pulled up my sleeve. The growth twitched and flexed. Bright white glimmered and then a strange pink forked thing appeared, moving up and down. And I realized: I didn’t have an eye.

I had a mouth.

And it was hungry.

Credit To – O.H. Manchester

“Donate Blood. Save Lives. We Pay High.”

On any other day, I wouldn’t give much concern about this sign, but today was especially bad. All I sold today were a handful of packs of cigars. I haven’t had anything to eat all day. It was getting late, and helping save a life should make me feel a bit better.

The sign pointed into a 3-story hospital. The facade of the building was faded, probably a decade old. The interior was well-lit, and nothing seemed unusual about this place. The receptionist seemed glad to see me, and I felt a sense of hospitality, so I entered.

The receptionist, Heather, asked what I was looking for. “I’m looking to donate blood. The sign said you pay high?” I asked, quite excited.

“Yes, sir. 100 dollars a pint. I feel you’re interested. What’s your name, sir?”

“Jose. Jose Mendoza.”

“We’ll be done in under half an hour. Come this way, sir. We’ll get you prepped.” She said as she started walking down the hallway. Happy for a chance of easy money, I followed.

The hallway was empty, but for a late night shift in a small town like this, I guess this was the usual. The walls were painted with a faded shade of red, which was quite appropriate for a procedure like this. Empty rooms lined the hallway left and right, which pointed to a blood bank at the end of the corridor. Large swinging doors closed the room off from non-employees.

Heather led me up a staircase into the 2nd floor. It was like a carbon copy of the 1st, save for the blood bank exchanged for a blood testing room. Again, no sign of human life. We walked through the swinging doors into the blood testing room.

“Jose, this is Dr. Noah and Dr. Williams. They will guide you through the blood donation procedure. You’ll be safe. Take care.” Heather left, not before making an eerie half-smile. I was just thankful to see a bit of legitimacy to this hospital. These doctors seemed to be veterans in the business.

“Mr. Mendoza. Please sit. This won’t take long. We promise.” Dr. Noah said. The man had straight, flowing hair extending to his neck, with a deep, reassuring voice.

“So…Mr. Noah. You need my blood type, medical history, anything? I think I’m a Type C.” I was clueless about these things, not like I was ever able to afford to go to a hospital.

“Oh, don’t worry sir. We’ll figure these things out later. Right now we want you to relax. Feel at home.” Dr. Williams said. She put her arm over Dr. Noah’s shoulder. The two must have been long time co-workers, since they were pretty comfortable with each other.

I took my seat on the blood testing area, which had a left and right hand armrest attached to it. Next to me, on the table, was the biggest syringe I’ve ever seen. Good Lord, I could have fainted right there and then.

Ms. Williams seemed to trace where my eyes gazed at, as she tried to calm me down.

“Sir, don’t be afraid. This would feel like nothing more than a pinch of the skin. Here, put on this blindfold. It should help.”

She wrapped a black piece of cloth around my eyes, snugly fit at the back of my head. Suddenly, all my other senses started to kick in. The smell of iron seemed to be stronger now. This room must have had thousands of donations in the past.

My fingers could feel the dents and scratches on the metal armrests – signs of struggle. This is going to be painful. The touch of cold metal didn’t make me feel any better either.

“Mr. Mendoza, we shall procure the rest of the tools needed for your procedure. In the meantime, sit back and relax. We won’t be out for long.” Ms. Williams said. The two walked out of the room.

A sense of eeriness started to befall upon me. I have no idea how this procedure should go. No personal information was asked from me either. Those half smiles, giggles, signs of excitement, are making me think twice of my decision to enter. But the thought of pocketing 100 dollars and eating a nice Big Mac always counter my doubts.

Wait, did I hear crying?

The entrance door to the area creaked heavily. My ears focus hard. A child, male, seemed to be bawling as he walked in the room.

“Who’s there? What’s happening, kid?” I say, as dread and worry washes over me.

“I..I…I’m thirsty. I think I’m dying.” The child’s voice, was dry, raspy, almost like an elderly man.

“Wha…wha…why don’t you go to any of the doctors?” My fear grew ever higher.

“They can’t help me, only you can.” He was pleading, tugging at my jeans.

“What do you want, kid? Get this blindfold off me, and I can help you.” Not only was I keen on helping this kid, but also on getting out of this eerie place.

“Okay, sir. You promise to help me?”, joy finally accompanied his childish voice. He skipped behind me to remove the knot on my blindfold.

“I promise. What do you want anyway?”

Right before he could answer, the blindfold fell out of my eyes. The 2 doctors walked in. One was holding handcuffs, and the other with dozens of syringes. Then the child whispered into my ear:

“A pint of blood, ice cold, freshly drained. You can give me that, right?”

The monster behind me sneered. The shock froze me on my seat. Paralyzed in fear, the syringes pierced deep, up until every ounce of blood was drained from my body.

The last thing I heard was the monster slurping his delicious drink of blood.

Credit To – Brian Tan

“Come play with me.” That line…it’s a cliché for the horror genre, is it not? You all know what I mean, the unsettling apparition of a child, or maybe just the voice, beckoning to you. What is it about children that gives them the ability to be so damn creepy? Maybe…maybe it’s the fact that, generally speaking, children are helpless and anyone with a nurturing side to their personality wants to help them and care for them. I mean, if any one of us saw a child in trouble, I’m sure we’d rush to help in whatever way we could…and in normal circumstances, if a child said “come play with me” someone might just pass a ball around for a minute or two, maybe play hopscotch. Children are innocent, right? Safe enough to play with a child, right? I’m telling you you’re wrong.

This isn’t something I like to tell people, in fact it’s something only my mother and I know, but over the past few months it’s been building up inside of me…this urge to tell…someone. I need to tell someone what happened, even if it was nearly thirteen years ago.

This isn’t a story I’d consider telling people, but not because I’m afraid they’d think me crazy. I couldn’t give a damn about that. I don’t tell people this because it brings back some pretty painful memories for me, and even now as I’m writing this, it’s hard to talk about.

Anyway…I’ve avoided this long enough, it’s time. When I was a small girl, I lived in a trailer park with my mom and dad. I was an only child, and I had a normal life, for the most part. I don’t remember much. As I said, I was a small child. What I do know is that one night, my mother and father got into a big fight over dinner which resulted in my father throwing whatever my mother had cooked outside the back door and yelling at me, kicking me across the room at one point. The man had a temper, that was no secret, but he wasn’t usually like this, at least not around me. I don’t blame him or hate him for any of this, and to this day I’ll do anything to defend him. I love my father. However, this incident was a turning point for my mother. The next night when my father went to work, my mother told me we were going on a trip. She packed a small bag of my clothes, one of hers, and told me to grab anything else I might want. All I took was a small stuffed cat named Buttons that my father had given me for my first birthday. She called a cab and we went to a motel room for a few days. After that, she told me that we’d be moving into a new home called a “shelter.” She said there’d be other kids there, probably some of them around my age, and that I’d like it there.

She was right about there being other kids my age, and the house was beautiful. It was huge, with a playground out back and lots of room to run around. What I remember most though was the staircase.

I made friends quickly with all the kids there, but the one I liked talking to most was Sarah. Sarah was quiet and she always wore a dress and always stood at the top of the stairs and talked to me. She never did anything else really, and she didn’t talk to anyone else. I never went up to her, I just stood at the bottom and we’d talk like that. Sarah didn’t really like the other kids very much because she said they weren’t like us. She said they didn’t know what it was like to think like us. She didn’t really like that I played with the other kids, but she didn’t try to stop me either. She said she only wanted to play with me.

Not long after moving in, I met three kids that lived in the house next door. One of them was my age, the boy, and the two sisters were a little bit older. My mom said it was a good idea to get out of the house and go play with them for a while, so I did. They invited me to come inside and see their playroom, so of course I did. That sounded awesome! I’d never had a “playroom” of my own…a room especially made for playing? It sounded great!

The room itself was fairly empty except for a toy chest in the corner and several toys strewn on the carpeted floor. The walls were bare white, like the rest of the house, and the windows stood without a curtain just opposite the door. When we were in the playroom, the oldest sister walked over to the window and stared out, shaking her head. “Do you know what happened over there?” she asked. I walked over to where she was and looked to where she was pointing. She was pointing at the shelter, right in the window facing the one in the playroom. I shook my head. What did she mean? What happened there? “Do you wanna know?” She asked me, her brother and sister silent now. I simply nodded, keeping quiet so I could hear the story. “A long time ago, there was a little girl named Sarah who lived there…that was her room,” she said, pointing to the room across from where we stood. “Well…one night there was a fire. No body made it out. She almost did…they said they found her body at the top of the stairs, and that’s where she died.” I felt like I couldn’t move. I didn’t want to look out the window anymore. I couldn’t. “They remodeled the building a couple years ago,” she said, matter of fact.

“Stop being a know it all with your big words!” her brother said.

“Oh…” I said. That’s all I could say. Lucky for me, it was starting to get dark, and my mom came over to bring me back with her. I didn’t want to tell her because she might not let me play with my new friends again. I didn’t want to tell Sarah either. I stayed as far away from the stairs as I could.

The next night, the other family who lived in the house told us she and the kids would be gone for a couple of days. This meant that mom and I were, more or less, alone. I wasn’t feeling well, so a little break from other people would be nice. I laid down on the couch and mom turned the tv on for me, sitting at the other end of the couch. She asked me if I wanted to go upstairs to our room…I said no. I wanted to stay downstairs.

I must have fallen asleep. I can still remember that breathing was hard, my nostrils feeling crusty from running so much during the day. I woke up in the middle of the night to the fire alarm going off. Mom woke up around the same time I did and picked me up, carrying me outside. I heard sirens of fire trucks in the distance. I was pretty out of it when they got there, but I still remember what they said to my mom after they’d gone inside. They’d said “we couldn’t find anything out of the ordinary…I don’t know why the alarm went off.” How could it have been set off by just nothing? My mom said it was “probably just the weather” and took me back inside. I remember as she carried me back to the couch that I saw Sarah standing at the top of the stairs, watching me. I started to cry.

A week later, my mom said she found a new place for us to live, she said it would be our own apartment, not like the shelter. I was relieved…I hadn’t talked to Sarah since those kids told me about her, and I wouldn’t go upstairs alone. I hadn’t seen her since the incident with the fire alarm. However, I would hear her voice sometimes as I lay in bed at night. It was like she was calling out just to me. “Come play with me.”

The new apartment was close to the school I’d be going to kindergarten at and, like mom said, we had our very own place. There were three floors, each with one apartment per floor, and ours was on the very top. For several months, my mother and I lived peacefully in our new apartment, and I began to forget about Sarah. For several months, we were happy. I missed my father and thought about him all the time, but for the most part I was happy here.

Then the nightmares started. Each and every one were the same. It started as simply me lying in bed at night. This made it initially difficult for me to tell if it was a dream or real. In the dream, I would start to drift off…until the smell of smoke came to my nostrils. At this point, I would jump out of bed, coughing slightly, and looking around. I would cry out for my mom and I could hear her calling for me, but I couldn’t get to her. I stayed in the room for the longest time, waiting for my mom or the firemen to come save me. After a while, it became obvious that no one was coming to get me, and I was starting to get light headed. I managed to get out of my bedroom door to see that most of the apartment was engulfed in flames. In the dreams, I only made it to the top of the stairs before I passed out on the floor from breathing in too much smoke. The last thing I hear over the crackling of the fire before I wake is a voice. “Come play with me. I will find someone to play with me.”

The summer before I was to start first grade, my mother announced that we would be moving, yet again, to another town altogether. I wasn’t excited. This meant I’d have to make new friends and start over again. Secretly, part of me hoped it would make the nightmares go away. Mom said that we had until the end of July to move in to the new apartment, but that she wanted me to see it before we moved in. She took us both on a road trip to a town totally unfamiliar to me, and what seemed to be a long way away from what we called home. The town was bigger than what I was used to, and I remember being excited because we passed three playgrounds on the way to the new apartment. She took me inside and we looked around. This place was my favorite of all of them. It had windows everywhere that made it look bright and sunny and above all, happy. I couldn’t wait to move, and I was sad that we couldn’t move in right then and there. After a while, mom said we had to go back home, so we went and the car and drove back the way we’d come. As we pulled onto our street, it didn’t take long to notice that something was wrong. Lined up in front of our building were two fire trucks and a police car, all with lights flashing. My mom parked on the other side of the road and went over, telling me to stay in the car. I couldn’t hear what was being said, but I remember staring up at the black smoke still faintly smearing the sky and feeling my blood turn cold. It was coming from our apartment. When mom came back to the car, her face was drained of all color and she couldn’t speak right away. When she finally spoke, it was more to herself, and she could only get three words out. “Why just ours?” I thought I saw Sarah up in the blackened window of our former home.

Today, I sit at my computer writing this and thinking about her. I’m shaking, and I don’t know why. It’s months before my nineteenth birthday and I’m living with my dad, attending a community college in the area. My dad remarried years ago and now has a little girl from his second marriage. She’s quite a bit younger than me—six—and she reminds me a lot of myself at her age.

I guess she’s the reason I started to write this. I haven’t been able to get the events of yesterday out of my head. I was watching her while my dad was at work and I was outside with her while she played on the swing set. I heard the phone ringing inside, so naturally I went to answer it. This isn’t the part I can’t shake off. The thing is…when I went back outside, Rebecca looked at me and said “we have to go inside.” When I asked her why, she only said four little words before running back up the steps and in the house. Four little words, but they were enough to bring chills up my spine.

“Sarah wants to play.”

Credit To – Ashleigh Margaret

There are three men standing at the intersection of a sewer. One of them is very lean and very tall. In fact he looks too tall and seems to sway on his feet, as if ready to topple at the whim of a strong gust. He grips a burlap sack in his left hand. The tall man has provided the firepower.

Next to him is a greasy mustache. The mustache belongs to a stocky Mediterranean-looking fellow with shifty eyes. He digs into his backpack with concerned intent. The mustached man has provided the intelligence and the tools.

Standing apart from the first two men is the clown. Wrinkled columns of green-yellow-blue support an ashen face of sweat and greasepaint. He wears a white glove on each hand. Thick locks of crimson explode from his head, aggravating the sweating. His face is on the verge of melting. The clown has provided the distraction, but he does not look happy.

The three men face a brick wall with a hole in the center. It is less a hole than a black gaping chasm, maybe a couple feet wide and stretching to infinity. Mustache maintains that this will lead them directly beneath the bank.

Clown is not so sure. He questions the men’s collective planning. Tall Man did not bother to load any of the handguns, ensuring them that a show of force will be more than enough. Mustache has apparently forgotten to bring a single flashlight, and curses. And Clown himself wonders why he chose to dress in full clown regalia <i>before</i> venturing into the sewers.

The sewers are filthy, as sewers ought to be. A noxious gas of human excrement floods each nostril with every breath. Layered above this stench is something more, something sickly sweet. Barely noticeable, but there. Pale green light bounces from the drainage channels as rats and other scurrying things patter along the rim. Clown stumbles on the walkway in comically oversized shoes.

Tall Man avoids the sight of Clown. He harbors a lifelong distrust of clowns, a distrust so deep it ventures into the realm of irrational fear. To make matters worse, this particular clown’s breath smells like sour milk. It’s nauseating so he keeps his distance. From the corner of his eye he thinks he sees Clown glaring at him. Glaring, or smiling? Tall Man can’t be sure in this dreary dungeon. He, too doubts the wisdom of Mustache’s plan.

Mustache defends the strategy. There were bound to be setbacks, he says, but the hole in the wall still offers the best chance for a clean escape. They will have to enter one by one and crawl on hands and knees to see the other side. Once inside the tunnel, turning around will likely be impossible. Tall Man asks how long it goes. Mustache answers that it should be long, but not too long. Tall Man asks how they are supposed to see anything in the tunnel with no flashlights. Mustache answers that they don’t need to see anything, they just need to crawl. All the same, he does have a book of matches which he offers to Tall Man.

Tall Man interprets this as his cue to go first. Something about the tunnel bothers him, but he would rather get on with it than suffer the continual glares (or smirks?) of Clown. He accepts the matches and faces the hole.

A soft breeze and low howl whisper from the opening. Behind him, Clown stares while Mustache runs some fingers through his oily hair. Tall Man teeters for a moment, turns around, and retrieves three 9mm pistols from the sack in his hand. Easier if you take these now, he says. All three men tuck the weapons into their waistbands. Not weapons, Clown reminds himself. Merely a show of force.

Tall Man turns back around. The bricks in the wall are the color of money. The water flowing through the channels is the color of money. Even the stripes in Clown’s suit are money-colored. Tall Man sees money everywhere, except in that black hole yawning before him. That is the only way to the actual money. Lots and lots of it, the kind you can touch and smell and trade for things that make you happy. Money is the prime motivator for Tall Man, for all of them. It is worth crawling through a slimy stinking hole for, he must tell himself.

Still, he hesitates. The black circle is so sharply defined it seems to hover in front of the wall, detached from its surroundings. Tall Man stoops. And stoops…and stoops some more. He stoops down until the black circle frames his face. He raises a wiry leg until the knee can rest on the lip of the hole. With a push from the other leg he slowly enters.

Funny: when the whole of his lofty body finally wriggles its way inside, the gentle breeze dies. The low howl changes too. Earlier it was constant, but now it pulses rhythmically in his ears. Low, deep, like a distant generator. The hum-hum-hum tickles Tall Man’s brain. He crawls on.

The ground is cold, chilling to the fingertips. His knees scrape along the smooth surface. His blind hands grope their way over cement and puddles and slime and gloom. All around drip invisible drops. Drip, hum, drip, hum, scraaape: the only sounds here in the belly of the sewers, intensified by the utter lack of visual stimuli. When that word, belly, comes to mind, Tall Man begins to perceive his environment as a living organism. He begins to feel like a piece of chewed meat sliding down a giant’s intestines. Drip, hum, drip, hum, scraaape: an organic symphony of endless digestion. He crawls on.

The air grows stale. Tall Man’s knees are wet and aching. He has lost track of time and can’t tell how long he’s been crawling. A good five minutes, at least. Still there is no light at the end of the tunnel. How much further? He needs to rest just a moment. He stops crawling.

The air is heavy, stagnant, waiting. The drips and humming sound muffled now. Tall Man retrieves the matchbook, tears off a match, and tries to light it. Nothing – it’s a dud. So is the second one, and the third. Tall Man starts to panic. He wants light, needs light, <i>now.</i> He fumbles with the fourth match, anxiously swipes it along the striking surface. A fizz of sulfur spells success. But that magic spark of life reveals something astonishing.

Mere inches from him stares a pallid face, smeared with gruesome makeup. Blood-red worms burst from the head. No…not worms but curls of hair. It is Clown’s face, lurching from the darkness disembodied, every muscle locked in rigor mortis. The eyes are dim and cloudy, but fixed upon his own. The match’s flame throws drunken shadows across the peaks and valleys of the ghostly visage. It alternately smiles and scowls at Tall Man, without really moving at all. Tall Man is stiff with incomprehension. Fear tip-toes down his spine and snuggles into his guts. He feels sick. The two faces stare frozen in silence for a brief eternity.

Suddenly the clown face leans forward and blows out the match. A whiff of sour milk fills the air. The abrupt return to total blackness shocks Tall Man’s senses into operation. He immediately scuttles backward, away from the face in the tunnel. His pants begin to shred at the knees but he doesn’t care. The only thought is retreat. Faster, faster, retreat. Hands and knees splash and scrape against concrete. He imagines the clown head gliding silent through the black tube after him, smiling yet scowling. The splashes and scrapes become a frantic staccato as he goes faster, faster. His knees must be bleeding now but he doesn’t care. Retreat, only retreat matters.

And then Tall Man finds himself falling backward out of the hole in the wall, landing at the feet of Mustache and Clown. Clown, who was in two places at once. They ask what happened, and when Tall Man finally calms down he raises himself on two shaky legs. Teetering, he blurts out his story but the two men do not understand. Mustache laughs while Clown regards Tall Man with suspicion. Impossible, they say, you only spooked yourself and were seeing things that weren’t there. But Tall Man insists there is a second Clown in the sewer tunnel.

Mustache strokes his namesake with two fingers. Fine, fine, he says, I’m going through and I’ll show you there’s no damned clown in there. Tall Man almost protests, wants to tell Mustache not to leave him here with Clown, but keeps quiet.

Backpack hoisted onto both shoulders, Mustache scrambles up and stuffs his body through the opening. He begins crawling. His speed is surprising in these tight quarters. They watch his figure rapidly dissolve in darkness down the tunnel. The instant he disappears from view, the sound of his crawling stops short. After a moment of silence, Clown and Tall Man hear a steady scraping, like something heavy being dragged across concrete. The sound quickly fades down the stretch of the tunnel.

Clown got him, clown got him, mutters a wide-eyed Tall Man. Clown tells him to shut up. Then what the hell was that, squeaks Tall Man, what was that sound? Clown doesn’t answer. The two men wait there in the sewer for any sign of Mustache. None comes.

After many minutes pass, Clown has grown eager and starts to fidget. Enough of this, he says. He must be on the other side waiting for us – I’m going through. The lust for money and a penchant for rational thought have clouded his intuition. He remembers he is mildly claustrophobic, but this fact also gets swept aside by his greed. Tall Man pleads with Clown not to go, says they should call the whole thing off and leave now. Don’t be ridiculous, replies Clown. I’m going through and you better not lag far behind me. He grabs the matchbook and faces the wall with the hole. He struggles with his big shoes but finally gets a good grip and hoists himself through. Tall Man does not follow.

What greets Clown in the hole are drippy wet echoes, a hum-hum-humming, and an uninterrupted dark. Clown crawls on. The humming and dripping are a hypnotic beat in his ears. The blackness is disturbingly uniform. It is a blackness smothered in blackness ad infinitum. It tugs and tugs at the eyeball that would try to pierce it, coaxes it from the socket with false hopes of a murky shape just ahead. The only respite is to close one’s eyes, for at least then smoky phantasms float beneath the lids. This blackness is a solid wall upon which nothing floats. So he closes his eyes as he moves forward.

Clown wonders if he might indeed meet his doppelganger in this strange subterranean place. He hopes not and crawls on. Gradually he becomes aware that the drips and humming have changed. They sound duller, muffled. The air has changed too. It hangs with the dead weight of a dozen corpses and sticks to his skin. He crawls on. Clown’s white-gloved fingers detect a third change. The ground no longer feels like solid concrete. It is softer, putty-like. His fingertips seem to sink in ever so slightly.

When he thinks he hears a faraway scraping sound, Clown’s eyes snap back open. They throb in their sockets with anticipation, starving for some speck of light to materialize in the distance, but it never comes. As his bloodshot eyes go hungry, his mind wanders.

He thinks of hordes of rats carrying a lifeless, mustached body down the tube before him. He thinks of thousands of little teeth gnashing into greasy flesh. He thinks of soiled clown suits clogging sewer drains. He thinks…he thinks he needs to stop thinking and start crawling. But he can’t. He advances no more than two feet before hitting an obstruction.

It feels like a wall. He fishes the matchbook from a striped pocket and tears off a stick. Three failed swipes later, he tears off another. It ignites on the second attempt and shows him a solid brick wall blocking the way. This isn’t supposed to be here. How is it possible he never ran into Mustache? The sight of the bricks is unnerving. Clown bangs his fist against them, tries to wriggle one loose. They do not budge. They stand there in the orange glow quietly mocking his proud logic, daring an explanation. Clown has no explanation. The match is almost spent so he drops it and moves backward. It is the only thing he can do.

Progress is slow and awkward. The ground is more malleable than he remembers. It feels like his knees are leaving small impressions behind. He crawls as the tunnel drips and hums at him. When his feet touch another wall, Clown gasps. He draws another match, lights it, twists his head around to look. What he sees isn’t a blocked path but an intersection. Two new passages branch off to the left and right, where before there was only one straight tunnel.

It makes no sense. Then comes incoherence. Anger. Most of all, indecision. Clown must choose a path. But which one? Which one? The right. It’s as good as the left. The match dies as he scoots back to face the new chasm, then crawls ahead. The dripping, the humming, the putty floor, the breathing…the breathing? Yes. Clown swears the tunnel is breathing now. He can feel the gentle inhalation, exhalation all around him. Somewhere far off the scraping sound comes again. He crawls, and crawls, and hits his head against another wall. Another match, another intersection revealed. This one looks smaller. He squeezes his way into another right turn.

The breathing changes now. Longer and slower. And there’s the scraping again, a little closer this time. He crawls. His body sinks into the gummy floor. A few paces forward, and another intersection, another match, another right turn. A few paces more, and another. The junctions keep coming, and soon Clown runs out of matches. He always chooses to go right, but it keeps getting smaller. At one intersection Clown turns around to retrace his path and try to find a wider opening. The maze does not care. It continues to breathe and compress. As Clown crawls blind through the network of tubes, the roof begins to scratch his back. It matches every movement with a downward push, regardless of his direction.

Incoherence. Anger. Most of all, claustrophobia. Before long Clown finds himself sliding on his belly. He slithers through endless corridors even as they threaten to crush his body. He has to keep going. Keep going, it makes no sense but keep going and get out. Hopeless. The ground is sticky and holds him in place as the walls close in from every side. Clown grits his teeth.

Tall Man stands alone at the intersection. He gazes at the black hole in the wall, transfixed. Every muscle quivers with expectancy. Yet he sees nothing and hears nothing save for a low steady howl. He blinks. Shakes his head. Looks up toward a grate in the high ceiling. A sinking sun casts down shimmering motes of dust which drift in odd patterns. Tall Man sways on his feet, covered in filth and bleeding at the knees. That sickly sweet scent from before is stronger now. He turns and bolts out of the sewers. He does not look back.

Postscript

The story doesn’t end there. In the next several years Tall Man will abandon his life of crime. At first he will try to make sense of the events in the sewer. He will research a variety of paranormal topics: everything from ghosts and cryptozoology, to bilocation, to the hypothetical existence of “hot spots” on Earth where alternate dimensions are said to bleed into one another. The search for answers will yield nothing but further questions.

In a strange twist of fate, Tall Man will eventually get a job at the very bank he tried to rob. Before closing one day he’ll be asked to fetch some old documents kept in the basement. He will walk down the rickety stairs and search through boxes of poorly-kept files. Amid his searches he is going to find a rusted iron trapdoor hiding under a box. Curious, he will lift the squeaky door and discover a ladder descending into a small concrete room. He will feel compelled to climb down to this space which the basement light struggles to reach.

Once there, he’ll find a bricked-over hole in the wall opposite the ladder. The implications will come in a flurry of breathless recognition. My God, he’ll whisper. At last, the other side. The mortar will be crumbling, the bricks loose. Without quite knowing why, Tall Man will begin to remove them, exposing the black hole little by little.

The fear will be gone, replaced by his long-lost thirst for answers. Tall Man will be surprised to find himself crawling through the tunnel with nothing but his lighter to guide the way. He won’t remember climbing in. It will be like a dream, with the dripping and humming ringing in his ears as before, asking him how he can be sure he ever left at all. He will crawl on.

Only when the air in the tunnel becomes leaden, only when the sounds deaden, only when the sour milk wafts through his nostrils will the creeping chill return. Then the lighter’s timid flame is going be snuffed out with a sudden rush of wind. Peals of crazed laughter will erupt from somewhere in the dark and rattle through his skull, so loud he’ll have to cover both ears. It’s so completely unexpected that he won’t be sure the shrieks weren’t his own, or an outright hallucination. Nonetheless, it will be enough to send him scurrying backwards.

The tunnel will seem different – sticky, sighing, angry. Tall Man will feel it contracting around him as he moves in reverse. Faster, faster, as before, as in a dream. Looking behind, he will finally see the dim light of the aperture. It will be closing.

At this point Tall Man’s memory will muddle. He’ll vaguely recall his escape from the writhing hole. It will feel more like being disgorged than anything. A regurgitated piece of meat, he’ll think. Tall Man will run to the ladder, turn around for one last look, and see something that will haunt him for the rest of his life. Witnesses will later tell him that he ran from the bank screaming a blood-curdling scream unlike anything they’d ever heard. He won’t remember that part.

He’ll pray that what he saw was the product of temporary insanity. He’ll try to forget the whole thing ever happened. But every time he closes his eyes, every time he dreams, the same image will come to him with terrible clarity: the hole in the wall shrunken to the size of a quarter, from which a single white-gloved finger pokes, squirms, points – and beckons.

Credit To – alapanamo

It all started when I got fat.
I had been wanting to lose weight for a while, but being a not-exactly-starving-starving artist, I didn’t have the money to join a gym or buy equipment of my own. Yeah I could have gone running, but who want’s to do that? Not me! Never could run as a kid so I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to as an adult.
That was when I decided to check out Craigslist to see if there was any free equipment that wasn’t too ancient. I didn’t want to end up with one of those “shake the fat away” machines. You know, the one with the belt? Yeah. No thanks.
Anyway, I was lucky enough to find an elliptical that someone was giving away for free! What luck! Right? From what I saw in the pictures it looked to be a few years old. One of the speakers on it was busted but I didn’t have an MP3 player to hook into it anyway. I decided to give the “seller” a call.
After talking on the phone to a woman named Jeanette, a time was set for me to go to her home and pick up the elliptical. She sounded strangely relieved to be getting rid of the equipment but I was too excited to be getting it for free that it really didn’t phase me at the time.
So, that Friday, I borrowed my dad’s truck and some rope and headed out to get my new treasure. On the way I thought of how in a few short weeks I would be on my way to a swimsuit season bod. I already had my mind set that I would buy a cute bikini.
After driving for around a half hour, flipping a couple u-ees and stopping at stop signs long enough to be honked at, I made it to Jeanette’s. Surprisingly, she was waiting outside. I thought it was a little odd, but again, I didn’t pay much attention.
Jeanette looked to be in her mid fifties and about 5ft 6in. Her skin was a bit pale and she had dark circles under her eyes. Her hair was a little unkempt and it sort of looked as if she had just then thrown on whatever clothes she could find.
“Hi! Jeanette?” I held out my hand to shake hers.
“Yes, hello.” She said quietly.
Her handshake was soft and reserved, and she had a bit of a worried look in her eye. “Please come in.”
I followed her into the house and then into the living room. There it stood in all it’s free glory.
“Niiice.” I said, eying up the elliptical.
“Okay then. Would you like me to help you out with it?” She asked quickly and nervously.
“Oh, uh, yeah sure thanks.” I was a little surprised that she hadn’t offered any kind of reason why she would be getting rid of the machine for free, so I asked.
“Oh.” She said nervously. “It just takes up too much space and I don’t really need the money. I can’t see getting much for it anyway.”
She kind of half smiled and began to try and lift the back end of the machine. I rushed over to assist.
After a few minutes and a lot of heave hoeing we eventually got the elliptical into the bed of the truck. I thanked her once again and headed home.

The machine sat in the bed of the truck until my boyfriend made it over to my apartment. It took a few tries and some remembering of high school geometry but we successfully got it through the door and into the living room. I looked it over and, like I saw in the pictures online, the only thing wrong with it was the one broken speaker. Other than that it was absolutely perfect! Here I come beach body!
I jumped on and started pressing buttons. “Oh ok! This one tracks your heartbeat, this one shows how many calories you burn…”
My boyfriend laughed at me and told me I looked like a kid at Christmas. After a little while, he left for work and I was left to play with my new toy. I had apparently worked out a little too hard because by 9:00 pm I was pooped and collapsed on my bed. The next thing I remember was waking up to a strange noise.
In a daze, my brain tried it’s damnedest to figure out what the sound was. Was the faucet on? Was it raining outside? I opened one eye and looked at my window. I could see the moon. No clouds.
The more I came out of my slumber, the clearer the whooshing sound got, and I realized what it was. The elliptical.
“Uhhgggg! John what the hell!? I am trying to sleep!” I said, assuming my boyfriend had come back over and decided to fool around on the machine.
The whirring didn’t stop. “JOHN!” I yelled.
It still didn’t stop.
I decided, groggily, to get up and throw something at him. JOH…” I stopped mid name as I turned the corner into the living room.
No one was there. The machine wasn’t moving at all and the whirring had stopped.
“John?” I said quietly and confused.
No one answered.
I decided it must have been some kind of goofy dream. I went to my front door to make sure the lock was still on, it was, and then went back into my room. The rest of the night was quiet.

The next morning I woke up with the sun on my face. I instantly remembered the night before but decided to shrug it off. I stood up and moaned. I was so sore but I needed to keep a tight exercise schedule if I wanted buns of steel by May.
I changed out of my pajamas and into my workout clothes, blasted some music and hopped on the machine.
As I went to press the button to turn on the machine, I noticed that there were steps logged in the system. I knew I had cleared it out the night before and shut it down. I figured it was probably a glitch; one of the reasons it was free. But in the back of my mind I still held onto what had happened the night before.
After my workout I once again cleared the screen and turned off the machine. I went into the bathroom and was about to step into the shower when I, again, heard the familiar whooshing sound.
In a towel, I ran into the living room and came around the corner just in time to see the machine moving. I froze. “What the hell did I just see!?” I thought to myself.
I gathered my courage and walked toward the machine. It was still.
I looked at the screen and it was lit up with a log of 10 steps. I couldn’t believe what I was witnessing. Was there some kind of speed setting or something? I checked the screen, still in my towel, and tried to find anything that would be an auto setting. As I figured, there was no setting other than resistance. No speed. It was all manually powered.
I turned the machine off, and a bit shaken, went back into the bathroom and took my shower.

Later that evening, my boyfriend, John, came over after work. We had a nice meal and decided to sit down in the living room and watch a movie. I believe it was called “The Shrine”. As I recall it was a pretty freaky movie, but that could be because I was on edge all evening from my mishap with the machine earlier that day.
As we sat, cuddled up on the couch, I started to smell something. I kept sniffing to the point my boyfriend asked if I needed a tissue. I said no, of course, and told him I smelled something. He sniffed to and made a face.
“Jeeze! I know you have been working out and that is great but you really need to take showers afterword.” John laughed.
“It isn’t me!” I paused the movie.
“Well it isn’t me either!” John said.
I sniffed around the couch. It didn’t seem to be coming from that area so I got up and as Toucan Sam would say, I followed my nose. The stench brought me to the elliptical.
“What the hell?” I said softly.
“What is it?” John said from across the room.
“It is coming from the elliptical!” I said.
Just as fast as the smell came on, it was gone. I sniffed and sniffed and couldn’t find a trace. The incident from earlier and this phantom smell got me to thinking of Jeanette. She seemed so shifty. Maybe there was another reason she wanted to get this cursed gym equipment out of her house.

The next day I decided to pay an unexpected visit to Jeanette. She answered the door with a smile. She looked well rested and much less frazzled than before. As soon as she saw me, however, the happy, rested look turned into a look of worry. “Oh, hi. Can I help you?”
“Hello again,” I said smiling politely, “I was just wondering if you had a moment. I just have a couple of questions about the machine that I picked up the other day. May I come in?”
She hesitated, then reluctantly welcomed me in. “Is the machine not working? If not just take it to the junkyard. I don’t want it back.” She said quickly.
“Oh no no no.” I said, still trying to be as polite as possible, “It isn’t that at all.”
The worried look on her face turned to dread and a knot began to form in my stomach. Something wasn’t right. “Would you mind if we sit for just a moment. I really don’t mean to intrude.”
Jeanette seemed to partially snap out of her funk and said, “Of course! Let’s sit in the dining room. I’ll put on a pot of tea.”
She showed me into the dining room and told me to have a seat while she put the tea on. I sat for a few moments and then my attention was grabbed by a photo on the wall. It was Jeanette and a man about the same age. I assumed it was her husband.
A few minutes later, Jeanette shuffled into the dining room with two cups of hot tea. “Good to have on a cold day like this.” She said, trying to hide her nervousness.
I smiled and took a sip. “Is that your husband?”
It almost seemed like she jumped at the question. “I’m sorry?”
I pointed to the photo on the wall. “Oh! Oh Yes. Sadly, he passed away a few months ago.” She began to look even more nervous.
“Oh, I am so sorry to hear that.” I said, trying my best to look sympathetic. “How did he pass, if you don’t mind me asking.”
She closed her eyes, I thought she was going to start crying. I was about to say never mind when she let out a sigh. “Well,” she said. “He had gained some weight and the doctor said it would be a good idea to start getting some exercise into his schedule. You see his weight was effecting his blood pressure.” She sighed again and paused for a moment.
“He actually had a heart attack and died while on that elliptical.”
I dropped my tea.

Credit To – J.L. Kempen

Today’s pasta is actually a collection of super-short video pastas from the Frosted Mini Fears channel on YouTube. If the embeds are not displaying for you (a known issue for people on some types of phones), I have included links to each video below their embeds – click said links to go directly to the video pasta’s page on YouTube.

The Age of Information

The Snipe Hunt

Window (Recut)

Window (POV)

The Strange Woman

Reffugio Lake

Locks

Signal Unknown

Credit: Frosted Mini Fears

This is the third installment in the Tower of Sorrow series.
Part One: Yon Black Edifice Hath Called Me
Part Two: First Steps
Part Three: Tight Spaces
Part Four: The Driver

-

I lie in the now open trunk, peering up at the dark figure standing over me. He drops his smile and sighs heavily, “Here, let me help you.” He reaches his hand out to me and I cringe back into the trunk. His skin is a sickly grey and his fingers are long and gnarled.

“Seriously guy?” he huffs.

“F-fu-fuck you,” I mutter just above a whisper.

“I hate this fucking job,” he grumbles, snapping his fingers.

Before I even have the chance to process what he’s just said, I’m standing on the road next to him. He reaches out his ugly hands and starts brushing off my clothes. “There now,” his grin returns, “much better, and no worse for the wear I suppose.”

“How did you – ,“ he shoots up his hand and waves a finger lazily at me.

“There will be plenty of time for questions. As for right now, I have a job to do and we need to get going. There are some very impatient individuals awaiting your arrival.” With a wave of his hand the passenger side door swings open.

“No! Not just no, but fuck no!” I growl. “I’m not going anywhere near that rusty hunk of shit until I get some answers. Who are you? How did I get here? Who’s waiting for me?” I can feel my hands curling into fists as my anger rises to overtake my fear.

“Look, we don’t fucking have time for this okay? There are things in this world and others that your feeble human mind just couldn’t possibly understand. Some of those vile things are right on our fucking heels. We have to go now! Just trust me!”

“Why in God’s name would I trust YOU? For all I know you’re some kind of psychotic serial killer, or some shit!”

He barks laughter, “God? Really? What exactly do you think you know about God? That motherf-” His sentence is cut off by an impossibly loud clap of thunder. It shakes the ground and causes my ears to ring. Looking up, I see a long shimmering blue line zig-zagging its way across the night sky. As I watch it begins to expand outward, exposing an orange and yellow light. In the distance I can hear inhuman shrieking and growling. My gaze is broken when I feel a hand squeezing my shoulder. I look back to the dark figure only to see him standing exactly where he was before. I whirl around and am face to face with the rotting corpse of a woman. The top left portion of her head is missing; her left eye hangs limply on her cheek as the socket that once contained it is no more. Her skin is pale and patches of it hang off of her like peeling paint. Violently her head snaps one hundred and eighty degrees and she is flung away from me into the desert. I look back to see my kidnapper’s hand raised and upturned with a violent smirk covering his face.

“CAR! NOW!” the figure bellows. This time there is no hesitation. I break into a mad dash and slam the car door behind me. The figure ducks into the car throws it in drive and peels out onto the highway. Screeching down the road he swerves this way and that to avoid even more of the ghastly walking corpses that are trying to overtake the vehicle. In the rear view mirror I can see swarms of black winged creatures pouring out of the now enormous hole in the sky. They claw, bite, and attack each other trying to get into our world. Their bright green eyes pierce the night sky as they swoop, dive, and tumble towards us.

“What the fuck?!” I shout over the screaming engine of the car.

“You just had to say His fucking name, didn’t you?! Fucking humans!” he yells, smashing his fists on the steering wheel.

Credit To: J. Brown

“It’s not too bad, is it, sweetie?”

Humbly dressed and brown haired, Wilbert Snow smiled at his daughter, and Mary gently smiled back from the living room. Mary’s father, Wilbert, was searching for a home set on a few acres of land that he could potentially build a vegetable garden on, and after a tedious hunt, he found one that would hopefully please Mary’s taste. It was a dreary journey for both Mary and her father. Mary’s father had his own difficult times, but he made sure that Mary would always have her mind on something joyous and kind. When Mary’s mother passed away a few years ago, she was devastated. Since Mary’s mother passed away from an unknown illness in their old house, Mary’s father decided it would be best for both of them to leave and move to a new home. A new garden with lots of land for Mary to play in, and a new place to start fresh memories is what Wilbert wanted. It would definitely take both of them some time to get used to Flyde. The nearest village, Hambleton, was only a few miles away.

“Dad, this house seems so old. Why here?” Mary scoffed. Mary’s father glared at her from the doorway with packed boxes in both hands. “Are you going to complain, or are you going to help your dad get stuff out of the car?” Mary’s father returned. Mary shrugged and proceeded to help unpack the boxes. She didn’t really like the thought of moving to a place where houses weren’t present for miles, nor did she like the thought of living on a big piece of land partially surrounded by forests. The only thing she did like had nothing to do with the house, but that summer was just beginning. Mary had just finished her second year in high school, and she couldn’t wait to relax at home. She was longing to see her friends that she’d left behind when she moved out of her previous home. She only ever had a few friends, but they were true friends.

Mary peaked out of the window in an attempt to see why her father was taking so long to bring in more boxes and saw him talking to a woman. Mary stepped out the front door and onto the porch to observe her father closely. “Hey, Mary, come say ‘hi’ to your aunt Tori for a second.” said Mary’s father. Mary was quite shy, even if it was family she was going to greet. “Oh, wow! You are just so gorgeous, aren’t you?” Mary blushed at her aunt’s kind remark. Mary didn’t really see herself as pretty, although; she did appreciate her aunt’s compliment. Without a doubt, Mary was quite lovely. Curly orange locks of hair fixed around her face, and she was undeniably smart for her young age. Coping with a family death kind of puts a sense of responsibility on the people who experience the loss, and that’s most likely how Mary carried through such difficult times.

“So, aren’t you just loving the new house, Mary?” Tori inquired.

Mary was hesitant to give an honest opinion of how she really felt about the old, two-story Victorian- style home. “Um, well…I think it’s pretty, but it might take some getting used to.”

Her father let out a soft chuckle. It was great to see her father happy again. He had spent all his savings on this house; the least Mary could do was be grateful. “You are just so clever, aren’t you? Now, you can run along and explore. I’ll help your daddy put away the rest of the boxes.”

Mary felt relieved that she could take a break from unloading what seemed like a thousand boxes. Exploring wasn’t really on Mary’s mind, but she figured it would be good to know where she could plant that apple tree she had been wanting to plant ever since she was little. She kissed her aunt, hugged her father, and set off to roam her new surroundings.

The land was mainly flat with a few hills sparse in between. Medium stalks of wheat occupied most of the plains; although, the lush white flowers were visible from a great distance away. There were small clusters of trees that were subtly separated by a few hundred meters or so. The closest patch of trees to the home was standing on top of a small hill. It wasn’t too far from the home, but far enough that Mary could feel safe in the event that a tornado struck. She hated the thought of a tree falling on top of the house. Other than that, she loved trees. In fact, this patch of trees would be perfect for her to plant her apple tree in. Making her way up the steep slope, Mary noticed the silence and serenity as she stared up at the aged trees. The wind blew softly, revealing a rustle of the leaves above, and the smoky smell of moss that swayed from the branches.

She made it to the top of the slope, turned to face the field she traveled, and saw her aunt and father still unloading boxes from her father’s car in the distance. The house was closer than she had originally thought. With the sun at the highest point in the sky, Mary wanted to take advantage of the light and search the woods for a nice planting spot. She didn’t want her father to find out about her apple tree; she wanted to make the best apple pie for her father. Mary made her way between the porous-barked trees and into a small area. It could have been the perfect place to plant a tree, but there was hardly any sunlight passing through the tangled branches above. Mary steered around searching for a substantial spot to plant her apple tree, and she began to notice oddities in the environment.

Mary stepped back to examine the wall of trees that stood around her. It was quiet. There wasn’t any chirping of birds, any buzzing of bugs, no flowing of air, and no sound of any kind. It was a different kind of silent. “I’d better get home.” She thought to herself. She worried about how her father was feeling. “Maybe he thinks I got lost and called the authorities to come find me.” With this in mind, she walked back the way she came from. As she brushed through the path she created earlier, she couldn’t help notice a subtle interruption in her mind. She peered through the gloomy darkness, but could not see anything other than trees and shade. Only a soft touch of light existed here. Even though she could not see anything, she felt like someone was there. She hadn’t felt this feeling in a long time, not since her mother passed away.

She hastened her way out of the woods, down the hill, through the fields and to the house. It was dark out. Mary wondered how long she had actually been in those woods, and why she hadn’t noticed the time. She banged on the back door afraid to look behind her. “You’re finally home from your adventure? You had me a little worried.” Mary’s father opened the door and patted Mary on the head. Mary didn’t know how to reply. Her mind was still being interrupted by an odd feeling. With her father at the doorway, she gained the courage to look back at the woods and noticed nothing but a perilous view of the land she traveled. She stepped inside, and her father closed the door behind her. As soon as he closed the door, the strange feeling went away; she felt safe. She couldn’t wait to go to bed after such an exhausting day. She had noticed that everything was unpacked minus a few boxes of utensils in the kitchen. “Dad, can you show me which room is mine?” Mary requested. Mary’s father was excited to show her the new room he had Mary’s aunt decorate for her. “Oh, Dad, I love it!” Mary gave her father a big hug. It had various shades of nature painted throughout the room, and a bed with lace comforters centered the space evenly. The walls were painted a neutral olive color; her favorite color. The thing Mary really liked about the room, though, was that it was on the second floor. She had always wanted to live in a two-story home ever since she was a little girl. “Good night, Dad.” “Sweet dreams, Mary.” The two exchanged hugs and Mary’s father left the room. With the lights out and moonlight shining in, Mary expected to feel uneasy, but she felt safe. It wasn’t long before she fell asleep.

The next morning, Mary woke up to bright sunbeams peeking through the sheer curtains. She could smell breakfast cooking and heard the laughter of her aunt and father from downstairs. Mary combed her hair, put on a clean, simple dress, and went down to the kitchen. “Look who’s finally up. You got a good beauty sleep in?” Mary’s father teased. “Dad, you know sleep just makes your face all puffy and unflattering.” Mary’s aunt chuckled and prepared a plate for Mary. “Well, Mary, I’m leaving back to the States tomorrow night, so I want us to do something together before I go, okay?” Mary’s aunt placed Mary’s plate of food on the dining table and slipped her twenty pounds. “Happy Birthday, Mary.” Mary had forgotten it was her birthday and couldn’t believe she was turning 16. She wanted to go into town, but she didn’t think her father would approve. Quickly eating her breakfast, Mary slipped the money into one of the front pockets of her sundress.

“Dad, can I please go into town with aunt Tori, please?” Mary begged.

“Now, you know I don’t want you going into town getting influenced by those city kids.”

“But, Dad, please? Tori will make sure I’m only looking around. I’ll be good.” Mary smiled. Her father returned the smile. “Oh, fine. You’d better behave yourself, okay? And another thing, I need you to do me a small favor.” “Dad, on my birthday?” Mary whined. “Yes. It’s not anything tedious. I just need you and your aunt to get some of those flowers from the back and bring them to me; I want to make your cake look special.”

“Okay, Dad. I like how you make it a surprise.” Mary stated facetiously.

Mary’s aunt giggled as they made their way outside. Walking through the short stalks of wheat and to the lush green grass, Mary began to ask Tori a few questions. “Tori, how come my dad picked this place of all places?”

“Well, you see, the price was very low, and for the size of the land, it was a price your father couldn’t ignore.”

“But what about school and stuff? How is that going to go? Like, does a bus come here?” Mary’s aunt laughed. “No, girl, I was told by the land owner that buses stopped driving through this area around the time your mother moved away from here with your father.”

“Wait. So my mom lived in that house?”

“Yep; she grew up there, but when she found out about her pregnancy, she couldn’t bare facing her parents with the news. She was too young to have a child in her parent’s eyes, so she left with your dad to America. She told me all about it.”

“Wow. That’s why Dad came here. It was probably because she had good memories here before she got the sickness when we lived in the city.” Mary began to remember her mother’s humble smile and soft rosy cheeks.

Mary’s aunt didn’t want Mary to feel sad about her mother, so she quickly changed the subject. “I wonder how many flowers your dad wants.”

They began picking flowers and chattered the details of city life until Mary noticed something in the corner of her eye. She looked up the hill and in the clear daylight stood a baby sheep atop the crest. “Tori look, it’s a lamb!” Mary shouted with excitement. “Oh my, isn’t it cute?!” Mary’s aunt replied.

Mary ran towards the top of the hill to greet the baby sheep. “Mary, don’t run after it; you’ll scare it off.” To no avail, the lamb walked towards Mary. Mary was taken aback since she considered the logic that her aunt was instilling in her. Mary stopped in her tracks and watched the little lamb prance its way down the hill. The little lamb stopped a few feet away from Mary and looked as if she was familiarizing herself with Mary’s scent. Mary began to slowly walk towards the lamb with her hand out. She knew that animals had to get familiar with scents. With the lamb only inches away, she placed her hand on its snout and caressed gently. The lamb scooted in closer. It liked the attention.

“It looks like a girl, Mary. Her mom might be looking for her and you don’t want to be around for that.” Mary’s aunt said jokingly.

“Can we bring her back and introduce her to my dad?”

“Mary, you know your dad isn’t very fond of animals. He won’t approve of it being near the house.”

“Okay, fine. Let me tell her goodbye.” Mary demanded.

Mary turned to the little lamb and said, “Don’t worry, okay? I’ll come back here soon.” She then smiled and walked toward the house. Mary couldn’t help to look back at her new found friend. She wanted to see where it was going, so she turned around and noticed the baby sheep was still standing where she had left it.

Mary’s aunt decided to take Mary’s father’s car because she was going to need the gas left in her own vehicle to drive to the airport the next day. It was about a ten minute drive before she saw the village of Hambleton, Lancashire. The village wasn’t as much of a city life as her old home in the United States, but it definitely had more life than the new place she called home. There were houses with neatly trimmed lawns and towns’ people walking the sidewalks in front of the stores. They had stores like any other well-developed town had. Mary and her aunt went for decorations to spruce up her room a bit more. Mary’s aunt insisted that Mary save her money and let her do the spending. It was Mary’s birthday after all. Tori was a pretty laid back aunt and let Mary wander off into the store to look for things that she liked.

With a small shopping basket in hand, Mary toured around the shop searching for seat cushions that would fit in nice with the theme of her bedroom. Dabbling the comforters and bed sets, she spotted a boy walking her way. “Hello, Madam, is there anything in particular you’re looking for?” A young boy in his late teens approached Mary in what appeared to be the shop uniform. His name tag read “Daryl”.

“Um, well…I don’t know exactly what I’m looking for?” replied Mary timidly.

“I can certainly help you with your search. Do you have a certain colour you like? We’ve got bed sheets, comforters, pillows, and curtains of all sorts!”

Mary couldn’t help but blush at Daryl’s enthusiasm. “I would like to know if you sell these pillows separate from the bed set.” Mary asked while picking up a mousse colored pillow trimmed with lace.

“I’m sorry; Madam, but we only sell that with the complete set.”

Mary frowned slightly and Daryl saw her dismay. He was charmed by her chocolate-hazel eyes and red hair. “I know that it would be expensive to purchase it this way, but I know of a place a few shoppes down that has almost the same design and specialises in pillows specifically.”

Mary chuckled at the thought of a store that only sold pillows, but it sounded like a great place to get exactly what she wanted. “That sounds great! I’m gonna let my aunt know. Which way is it?”

“I could show you. I’m almost off of my shift, and plus, I need to get a few pillows for my mum.”

Mary was nearly embarrassed on how straight-forward Daryl was being. It was quite obvious he liked her. Mary was not used to this kind of attention, so she reacted how any other girl would act; she ignored him most of the time. She didn’t want to be shy, but it was in her nature, especially around boys. She planned on leaving to the pillow store with only her aunt, but as soon as they stepped foot out of the shop’s exit, Daryl came running out. “You two ladies almost left without me.” He said with a chuckle.

“Who is this young man, Mary?” Mary’s aunt questioned.

“Tori, this is the guy that told me where the pillow store was, and Daryl, this is my awesome aunt. You can call her Tori.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Tori. Shall we see this shoppe? It’s just up ahead.”

Both Mary and Tori snickered at Daryl’s loudness. He was a very enthusiastic teenager. They arrived at the pillow shop a few moments later and noticed it was closed for the day. Mary’s heart sank. She wanted to go in and find the mousse colored pillow that would have gone great with the olive walls she had in her room. “Well, we can always come back first thing tomorrow before I leave, Mary.” Suggested Mary’s aunt. Mary nodded with agreement and began to walk away. Something in the window caught her eye. It was a pillow that was split into the two solid colors: Sky blue and green. It had an apple tree in the center that was fully blooming with apples. “I have to come back, Tori. You mean it?”

“Of course I mean it. We’ll come back here tomorrow and hopefully we’ll have Daryl here to give us a tour of the shop.” Mary’s aunt winked at Mary. Mary hid her face with embarrassment. Mary and her aunt said their goodbyes to Daryl and made plans on when to meet the next afternoon. Daryl went in for a hug, but Mary quickly put out her hand for a polite handshake. She wasn’t used to that kind of culture. That’s how the towns’ people greeted and departed from each other here. Everyone was so friendly. With that, Mary and her aunt got into the car in front of the shopping strip and drove home.

Once they arrived to the house, Mary dashed inside to put away the few antique findings in her room. She was placing Chinese-inspired tea pots on her windowsill while admiring the clear sky. It was getting dark and only a few stars were beginning to reveal themselves. She looked down to notice the little lamb was still standing where she had left it. Mary grabbed a coat and headed for the field. She walked up to the little lamb and sat beside her. “See. I told you I would be back. Sorry it took so long, though.”

The lamb laid next to her and released a small sigh. “I know I took so long, but there was this boy, and he was just so charming. He gave me this feeling that I’ve never felt before.” Mary laid down to look up at the sky fading to an indigo. She spoke of her day to the little lamb and how she had moved here. She caressed the lamb’s soft wool and began to feel sleepy. The stars were plenty now.

“Mary!” yelled her father. Mary woke up on the couch to her father cursing up a storm. “Why in the hell were you sleeping outside?!”

Mary looked around to notice that it was daylight. “I didn’t sleep outside, Dad, chill out.”

“Chill out? You were outside, in the goddamn field with your fucking clothes off! How the fuck do you want me to react, Mary?!”

“What are you talking about?! What, in my right mind, would I be doing outside naked, huh?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe having sex with that boy from in town! I knew I shouldn’t have let you go. You’re already turning into a town slut.”

“Dad, I didn’t do that, and you know it!”

Mary let out a loud cry. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing from her father. She could see her aunt in the background with a worried look on her face.

“Now, Wilbert, you can’t say she was doing that with that boy. You didn’t see her doing that did you?” Mary’s aunt defended. She had been confused as to why Mary was in the field with no clothes, but she knew that Mary wouldn’t have had sex; she was too timid and very respectful to her father. “I have to leave today, but I will not leave you two like this. I will be damned if what’s left of my family gets torn apart by an accident.” Mary’s aunt sat on the couch beside Mary and wrapped her tighter in the covers.

Mary was shocked at the whole situation, and she wondered why she had fallen asleep outside. She knew she had clothes on when she went outside that night because it was cold. In fact, she even grabbed a coat on her way out. Mary’s aunt grabbed and hugged her all the way to the car. She promised Mary she’d take her back to the pillow shop.

“We’re going to go get that pillow you wanted so much, but I want you to avoid that Daryl boy if you see him, okay?”

Mary nodded her head. Everything that her father said to her was still racing through her mind. She didn’t even want to look at that boy, let alone talk to him again. They arrived to the shopping strip and nearly power walked to the pillow shop in an attempt to avoid Daryl. As they approached the entrance, Mary could see Daryl inside. He looked up and spotted her through the display window. He waved enthusiastically, but Mary didn’t return the gesture. Entering the store, Mary and her aunt went directly for the pillow with the apple tree art and immediately to the check-out counter. Mary glanced over her shoulder to check if he was following her, but he wasn’t. He just had a confused, but focused look on his face as he browsed the pillows.

“Hello, Madam; that will be 25 pounds.”

Mary had just enough, but Mary’s aunt quickly pulled out some money and paid for it. As the woman handed Mary the bag with her pillow inside, she dropped it. She bent down to pick it up.

“Oh, I got it, Mary.” It was Daryl.

Mary snatched her pillow away from him. “Go away! You are ruining everything.”

“What did I do?”

“My dad hates me because of you!”

Daryl stood there puzzled as Mary and her aunt walked out to the car. Mary had a guilty feeling for yelling at Daryl that loud in public, especially in a peaceful village like Hambleton. It couldn’t be changed, though. The drive home was quiet. Mary stared out the window and examined the breathless sky. A thick, gray haze spread over the horizon. The sun peeked through and revealed itself as only a slightly glowing spot. With the weather like this, it was sure to rain that night.

The drive seemed much longer than the last time, but she was home. She was quite sluggish from the ordeal with her father and Daryl, but she felt a little better now that she had the pillow she wanted. Making her way up the stairs, she heard the sound of rustling coming from her room. Scared that her dad was going through her things, she swung the door open. Mary’s pillow fell to the ground. She was in awe. Her room was destroyed. The walls cracked, curtains torn, cloths thrown from corner to corner, and there stood the little lamb in the center of the room. It was wearing one of Mary’s sundresses. Although the lamb destroyed her room, she had an idea of who was behind letting the animal in.

“Dad, why did you bring that animal in my room? I told you I did nothing wrong!” yelled Mary.

“What are you talking about? You know damn well I don’t like animals. You think I would let one in this house?!”

Mary took consideration of this, but still believed her father wanted to get some sort of revenge on her behavior. Mary took her father by the arm and pulled him towards her room.

“Look! Why did you put my dress on an animal? That’s gro…”

Mary couldn’t believe her eyes.

“Mary, what are you talking about? Are you trying to upset me again? You’ve done enough of that already.”

Mary’s father walked off, leaving Mary alone in confusion. Her room wasn’t destroyed, and the dress that the lamb wore was neatly placed on the bed. She didn’t know what to think anymore. She was relieved her room wasn’t destroyed, but worried about her mental health. With the smarts of most adults, she knew she could tell if she was going a bit mad, but that wasn’t the case at all. Maybe it’d been the rough day. Maybe she needed to get some rest. She turned on the night lamp and fell in bed. Her eyes got weary the more she grew tired, and eventually she could focus on sleep rather than the events that occurred earlier that day.

TAP~TAP!

Mary immediately opened her eyes and focused them at the window. She couldn’t see a silhouette, rain, hail, or bugs. Her heart began to race. TAP! The sound was a little louder this time. With all curiosity, she had to take a look outside. Pulling the curtains back quickly, nothing was there to surprise her. TAP! It was a tiny rock. Mary looked down and saw the cause of the noise. There was Daryl standing with a mousse colored pillow in one hand and a pebble in the other. Mary was relieved, yet confused at the same time. Mary opened her window and whispered to Daryl.

“What are you doing here? How do you know where I live?”

“I just saw you and your aunt leave in this direction, so I knew this was the only house closest to Hambleton for miles. I wanted to give you this pillow as an apology. You know, for not selling you the one from the bed set.”

Mary smiled. She couldn’t help herself from noticing his effortless charm. She debated on the thought of letting him in, but knew that was a bad idea. It would only confirm her father’s belief that she was with Daryl. “It’s okay if I can’t come in. I just really wanted to apologize. I can toss you the pillow if you know how to catch. I know how well you Americans are at catching with baseball and all.”

Mary was slightly offended, but took it as an insulting joke. She chuckled anyway.

“Well, thank you. I’ll catch it, but I don’t know if you’ll able to throw it this high, though.”

Daryl smiled. He was enamored by her sharpness. With Mary’s challenge accepted, he tossed the pillow toward her window and Mary caught it.

“Good night, Mary.”

“Night, Daryl.”

Daryl waved goodbye and Mary shut her window with a sense of accomplishment. Oddly, she didn’t feel quite right. She looked out the window to watch Daryl make his way out the backyard. The presence now interrupted her feelings. As she heard a vehicle drive away from the front yard, she looked up and into the distance. Against the purple sky were the dark hills that rolled along the surface of the earth. Peering into the horizon, she noticed a white figure standing on a hilltop. Her temples began to flutter. She knew the lamb had wanted to spend time with her. Maybe this was guilt she was feeling. Seeing the lamb earlier was only a figment of her imagination built up by frustration, right? Mary shook off the feeling and went back to bed.

Knock-Knock.

Mary woke to a soft knock at the door. It was her aunt Tori. She missed her flight and had to reschedule a new one for another time.

“Are you awake, Mary? I got you some orange juice.”

“Yep, I’m kinda awake.”

Mary’s aunt handed Mary a small coffee mug filled with orange juice. This was a good day already. It definitely was better than the day before. Mary sat up in her bed only to discover a small painting on her wall in the very corner. Small, but visible, the painting was slightly similar to Mary’s apple tree pillow, except the tree had no leaves.

“Tori, I think you forgot to paint the leaves.” Mary giggled.

Mary’s aunt looked over to the far corner and stared back at Mary. She stared at Mary for a few moments with what appeared to be a confused look on her face.

“Yeah, I guess I did.” Mary’s aunt replied hesitantly. She patted Mary on the head and fluffed her pillows.

“Good night, Mary. You try to get some good sleep now. I have to leave early in the morning. I want you to be there when I leave.” Mary hadn’t realized that it was still only a little past midnight. She began to wonder why her aunt randomly gave her orange juice in the middle of the night.

“Tori, thank you for the orange juice, but what was it for?”

“I’m surprised you didn’t ask for more. I assumed you were thirsty. You’ve been asleep for an entire day.”

Mary was taken aback by this. She never liked to miss out on a day’s event, even if recent days had not been so well. With the darkness outside, she couldn’t help but to feel tired. She’d slept a whole day, yet the gloomy weather had reinforced her sleepiness. Mary’s aunt closed the door and went to her bedroom to get some rest before her flight in a few hours.

Staring at the ceiling fan, Mary began to dose off. She had various things on her mind: Daryl, the apple tree painting, her father, how things would be if her mother hadn’t passed away. Suddenly, a shuffle from the end of the bed abruptly interrupted Mary’s thoughts. She was frozen in fear, not able to move. She began to move the covers closer and closer to her face and as slowly as she could. She didn’t want to see who was there. The rustling stopped. Mary halted her movement in fear that she had been spotted moving. The figure made its way to the side of the bed. Mary’s mind racing through thoughts of how to escape, but she couldn’t think of anything that seemed plausible. I have to turn that light on somehow. As the figure leaned in closer, she could see what looked like a woman’s silhouette peeking from the edge of the bed. Mary had to do something and do it quick. She jolted out of bed, straight for the light switch and turned it on. There stood the little lamb wearing one of Mary’s dresses.

“Why the hell are you in my room, and why are you wearing my dresses?!”

The little lamb stared back in silence.

Mary had yelled in frustration.

“Get out of my house now!”

She attempted to open her bedroom door, but it wouldn’t budge.

As Mary began to build up more anger, she thrashed at the door hoping for it to open.

Abruptly, the lamb let out a loud cry.

Baaa baaa baaa baaaaaa baaaa

Mary thrashed harder at the door, yelling for someone to help her.

Baaaai baaa biiii baaaa ooooo

Mary became helpless and resorted to self-defense. She never wanted to hurt an animal, but it would be the only way to stop this.

Baaaaiii baaanna biiii baaik oooo

Mary grabbed the iron off of the dresser just by her bedroom door and raised it. She swung down as hard she could. The little lamb’s eyes stared up at Mary with anger. The lights went out.

Aaii wannaa bii like yooou

The iron hit the ground. Mary looked into the darkness. She backed away slowly to her bedroom door staring at her bed with the figure beside it. The figure rose from its crouching position. A wiry presence stood tall, facing Mary. Mary’s eyes began to water as the figure stepped closer. Long nails softly ran across Mary’s face and down to her neck. The figure leaned in closer. Mary closed her eyes. Even though she couldn’t see its face, she knew it was menacing. As the presence grabbed a hold of her neck, Mary’s father broke into the room.

“Mary, are you alright?!”

He flicked on the lights and discovered Mary lying on the ground nude crying every last tear she had. He quickly grabbed the bed sheets and covered her up. He yelled for Tori to come and watch Mary as he called the police. The room was a complete disaster. Piles of feces smothered the carpet floor, curtains torn, mirrors broken. The only thing that wasn’t tampered with was the bed and the sundress that lay on it. Mary pleaded with Tori to take her back to the United States with her. She wanted to leave this place behind. Mary’s father was standing in the corner shedding a few tears with a somber look on his face.

“Tori…” Wilbert began. “Please take care of my daughter; she doesn’t have much time.”

“What about you, aren’t you coming with, Wilbert?”

“I can’t. My life is here in this house. This is where it all started.”

“What do you mean, Wilbert?”

“…her mother acted this way since her pregnancy. I thought it would end when she died.”

“Wilbert, she was sick. You couldn’t help it.”

“People don’t just eat away at their own flesh, Tori! She didn’t have a disease! Oh, God. I thought they killed that sheep a long time ago. Take Mary far away from here!”

Tori kept silent. She was shocked by her brother’s breakdown. He was losing everything he worked so hard to get. She grabbed Mary’s clothing and packed them into her luggage. She gave her older brother a kiss on the forehead and made her way outside to the car with Mary close by. As she packed the luggage in the trunk, she could hear her brother weeping a pain that very few have ever felt. A pain he had kept in for a very long time. Mary was still in a daze as they drove to the airport, but came back to her senses as they pulled up to the entrance. Tori checked in her luggage, bought Mary a ticket, and traveled to her flight. Several hours flew by as they rode the plane into the United States. They made it to New York City. The dark curtain of brown and blue covered the sky, not one star present, the streets were vacant with only a few cars passing by Tori’s apartment complex every hour or so.

“I’m glad I got to move in with you. I hope Dad can come here soon.”

“Yeah, Mary, hopefully he will. You’ll need to get some rest. You’ve had a long night.”

Mary lived through the years going to high school and making new friends. She appreciated the life she had now. A doctor’s visit once in a while and even going on university tours in order to see what her future plans were. It was quite difficult to think that she had left Daryl and her father behind, but she was coping pretty well. Her life was better now. Things were slowly getting back to the way they used to be. Every now and again, she discovers only a few dresses missing from her wardrobe.

Credit To – Alexander Contreras/YakuYabai