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malcolmteller-blog · 8 years ago

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[HORROR] Ryan, and Everything That Happened Afterward

Life is weird. I’ve been through a lot, through my childhood and adolescence, and all the way up to now. One thing all those years have taught me for sure, though: life is weird. It brings joy and tragedy. I’ll never forget that, not after everything that’s happened to me recently. Not after the horrors and bloodshed that engulfed my life.

It all started so simply. So fucking simply.

Well, I should probably start off from the beginning. I’m Rachel, and I’m a librarian. I’m also lonely as hell. It’s weird. I’ve got two Master’s degrees, I’ve got a permanent, full-time high paying job, and I’m a working professional. I’ve got an excellent apartment, decked out just how I want it, and I love myself. I really do. Just, I seem to be the only one, where that last one’s concerned.

Add to that, I don’t have many friends. Though, that’s my fault - I usually keep people at a distance. It’s easier for me to live my life that way.

Then everything changed. Everything. You start to give up hope, you start to think everything will stay the same as it always has been, that nothing will ever change. Then life surprises you.

I first saw him at the comic shop downtown. It was a big one, one of the main comic shops of the city I lived in (for my own reasons, all I’ll say is it’s a major West Coast Canadian one). I was paying for some trades of a particular limited series that was heavily based off of, to the point of being a spiritual sequel, of a lesser known British spy drama from the Eighties. So, there I am, waiting for my debit transaction to go through and wondering where I’m gonna grab dinner tonight. I was making some smalltalk with the clerk as I did so - one who, oddly enough, I didn’t know, as he was new. Just started a couple weeks ago. Real nice guy, though. Really talkative. Then, just as my transaction goes through and I’m about to leave, the guy behind me speaks up.

“Hey, is that the comic based off of The Sandbaggers?” He asks, pointing to what I was buying. I widened my eyes a bit in surprise and, glancing at my comic, chuckled and nodded.

“Yeah, it is. I kinda love the show,” I said, smiling sheepishly. He laughed back. I narrowed my eyes a tad as I got a good look at him. He was cute. Tall, slim body, sharp face, hazel eyes, and dark hair that went down to his chin in waves. He had a soft look to him. Innocent. Sincere. I like those types. I don’t know how to describe it, but I’m very good at picking out those types of people. Very good.

So I wasn’t creeped out when he started chatting with me after I’d finished my purchase. He quickly introduced himself - his name was Ryan - and then got to talking me up. Walking me out of the store as he and the clerk nodded and waved at each other with familiarity - the clerk’s big, gold watch catching my eye - Ryan started gushing over how much he’d loved The Sandbaggers and how much he wanted to try the comic based off of it. I smiled hard - I loved that old show, and thought it was one of the most intelligent shows ever written, and I said so.

“What? That’s nuts! That’s what I think too! It is such a brilliant show!” He laughed hard and a bright, delighted smile appeared on his face. I started to blush - I liked him. He was charming, and he was easy to talk to.

“Yeah, exactly,” I said, nodding as we stood on the sidewalk outside the store. “What I love about it is that it’s just so realistic. Like, it’s what spywork actually is, not some James Bond crap. There’s not enough content out there like that these days.”

His eyebrows rose in surprise as I said that. “Hey, if you want to know what kinda good content is out there, I’m your guy. I have a degree in Film Studies, and I write for this TV website. Editorials, that kinda thing.”

Now I was kind of interested. It did occur to me that this may have been his way of arranging to contact me later - well, come on, that’s exactly what it was. But you know? It didn’t bother me. Not a bit.

“Sure thing! I’d love that. Here, let me give you my number.” Taking his phone as he handed it to me, I entered it into his Contacts database. He was starting to blush as he took it back from me.

“I’ll call you in a couple days… with some TV recommendations, of course.” That last part was thrown on at the end, kind of abruptly. I started to giggle because, like him, it was kind of cute.

So that was that. We said goodbye, and he headed off. I was about to head off, but as I checked my pocket, I realized my wallet wasn’t there. My eyes shot wide open in terror as panic hit me. I calmed down a few seconds later when I realized that my wallet had to be in the store, because I did pay for my comic. Racing back inside, desperately hoping that no one had grabbed it and walked off, I was so relieved to see it lying there on the counter. The clerk there, chatting with his boss, nodded to me.

“Hey, I kept it safe for you. I wanted to go give it to you, but you were busy with that guy.”

“Thanks so much!” I gushed, breathing a massive sigh of relief. I grabbed it off the counter and jammed it into my pocket, and turned to walk out. Then they started talking about something that chilled me to the bone.

“Yeah, apparently the guy was just completely just cut apart,” The clerk’s boss said to his underling in a low voice, but loud enough for me to hear.

“That’s nuts. How many people have been killed that way?” The clerk asked.

“I dunno, a bunch. I have a friend on the police force - says it’s a serial.” His voice was thick with tension and fear.

I was out of there in a second flat and walking - quickly - toward home. What they were talking about terrified me. Why did it terrify me? Well, it wasn’t precisely because I’m afraid of serial killers - well, I mean, who isn’t - but it’s because of an experience I had in the park a week ago. An experience where I nearly got killed.

How do I begin? How do I describe it? I had just finished eating out and was heading home. I was strolling through the park, and I heard something. The sounds of footsteps. I looked behind me and couldn’t see much, but I knew they were getting close. I took off running. Moments later, I felt a rough, hard, cold grip grab onto my shoulder, and that set me off. I took off running faster than I’d ever thought possible. I didn’t stop running until I was three blocks out of the park. I was crying when I got home, and when I climbed into bed, I was shaking.

The next morning it was in the news - a woman had been found, viciously mutilated and disemboweled. In the very park I was in. In the very section I was in.

So I was on edge whenever I heard about stuff like that. How could you not be?

Anyways, what else could I do? I lived my life. I got home from the comic shop, and set the rest of the day to reading through my find. The art and the storyline was amazing, and well worth the purchase. Midway through the book, I started to think about Ryan. I warmed up inside thinking of him. I didn’t know him that well - I was gonna have to get to know him better - but he was a guy showing interest in me. That never really happened. Something about me, right? It gets frustrating. Maybe it’s because I didn’t have good social skills growing up. I grew up in a kind of commune with my family and their friends, outside of ‘civilization’, so even now I was still adjusting to it, you know? Dealing with men, dealing with other people. It was hard, dealing with people. Let’s just say I’m not exactly a people person, all things considered.

But it was alright! I was improving, clearly, if a guy was interested in me.

For the rest of the night I watched TV. On the news, there was yet another report of the serial killer, and again, my blood ran cold. And, again, I tried to ignore what all my instincts were telling me of the news reports. The ways the bodies were torn apart. The deep gouges and incisions into them. The screaming of my logical reasoning telling me that no human could do that kind of damage to another human being.

No, don’t think about it. Don’t think about it. It hasn’t followed you here. Your past is in your past.

I went to bed, trying to bury my anxiety with sleep. It worked.

The call came in the afternoon of the next day. When I heard Ryan’s voice, I… well, I lit up.

“Hi Ryan!” I shot out, brightly and energetically.

“Rachel! It’s so good to talk to you!” His voice was enthusiastic, full of passion. I liked that.

“Yeah, likewise,” I remarked, my voice still happy. “So, yeah, TV shows, what have you got for me?”

“Where to begin?” After a brief moment of silence, he was talking again. “Let’s talk about HBO first - they’ve got such great stuff. You got a pen and paper ready?”

That was the start of a three hour-long phone conversation. The topic quickly drifted away from television into just… life. Who Ryan was, what he was passionate about, that sort of thing. He was born in New York, but had lived in Canada ever since he graduated from university six years ago. He’d been on the East Coast till a year and a half ago, but had moved out here for a ‘change of scenery, change of pace’, so he put it. He loved television and film, and he was working as a Production Assistant on film and television productions here in the city. I’ll be honest - I was smiling the whole way through the conversation. He was so interesting! Thinking back on that conversation now, I feel sad. I know I shouldn’t, I’ve done nothing wrong, but with how things turned out…

Anyways, the next evening we were walking together downtown, chatting, as we headed for dinner. The conversation soon turned to my history.

“So, Rach, where are you from?”

My eyebrows shot up and I looked over at him. “What do you mean?”

He laughed. “You know! Where are you from? Where did you grow up? That kind of thing.”

My brow furrowed and I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came out. How to begin describing my childhood and adolescence?

“Well…” I started, “I grew up in a commune, in this rural area, up north.” His eyes went wide with interest.

“A commune? I’ve never met anyone who grew up on one of those. What was it like?”

“Well… I dunno. It’s weird,” I said, laughing, getting uncomfortable with the conversation topic. “Basically, we were very separated from civilization. It’s what my family and their associates really believed, that… well, it’s better this way for us. We were basically Amish.”

“And you decided to leave?”

“Yeah. It wasn’t for me. I wanted more.” I took a breath, and continued. “And I found it. I love my new life, and as hard as it is, I wouldn’t trade it for anything.” I meant it. I really meant it. This was what I’d chosen, and difficulties aside, it was what I loved. He nodded, and just then, we reached the diner we were going to eat at. Thank God. I mean… I don’t like talking about my old life. I left the commune for a reason, and though I’ll always be part of my family, I’m happier here, in my new life.

A half hour later, we were at our table eating some amazing fettucine. I talked him into ordering pasta instead of steak, because I can’t really eat animals. It just turns me off, doesn’t mix well with me. It’s something that’s been with me since I was a kid - my family’s the same way. Anyways, the place we were in was nice - rundown, but nice. The wallpaper was peeling, the dishes were piled up behind the counter, but it was a place you could learn to love.

“So, you hear about this serial killer stalking the city?” Ryan asked, looking up from cutting up his food.

I groaned. “Oh, God, don’t even remind me. It’s so horrifying, isn’t it?” My heart started to beat faster. I got anxious whenever anyone mentioned that person to me. I couldn’t help it.

“I know, it’s awful. Like, I want to feel safe in this city, but I feel like I can’t.”

“I know, I feel the same way.” I did. I really did. “But anyways,” I continued, “let’s talk about something better than someone who murders people for fun.” Ryan nodded, and we started talking about Christopher Nolan and his films. It was such a good conversation - I always had such good conversations with Ryan, in hindsight - and I was feeling delightfully happy (and tipsy) as I was walking back to my place afterwards.

I mean, it was just so great. It was so hard living in the city. My family told me it wasn’t right for me, that it would be so hard for me, and it was. It really was. Living in the city, being among the people but not really of them. Then Ryan came, and I realized that I could actually have someone - one person - to be close to. To be intimate with. So, yeah, my night was going pretty good as I had all that on my mind as I stumbled home slightly drunk.

Except that it didn’t stay that way. See, I started to feel like I was being followed. Then what I ended up seeing started to back up those feelings.

It was about fifteen minutes after I left Ryan that I had that feeling. I looked behind me, trying to look casual, but didn’t notice much. I did take note of the people behind me, though. That would help me a lot later on.

Fifteen minutes after that, I was walking down an alleyway by myself. I looked behind me - damned near terrified at this point - and I saw someone. Just one person. The same person who was a ways behind me fifteen minutes earlier. He was wearing a dark coat, jeans, and a baseball cap tucked down to hide his face, in addition to his chin tucked down. His hands were tucked into his coat pockets.

There was something about him. Something odd. Something familiar.

But regardless, at this point I wasn’t taking any chances. I took off running, terrified of what might happen. The fear my parents had bred into me of the ‘outside world’ lit up inside of me like a Christmas tree. I didn’t stop until I got back home. As I slammed the door behind me and locked it, my heart was beating like a jackhammer inside of me and I couldn’t stop shaking. This had to be the guy. The guy that grabbed me in the park - it had to be.

I collapsed onto my couch, still shaking just as hard as I had when I stepped through the door. Thoughts started flooding through my head. Fear, anxiety. Most of all, though, what my father had told me when I left the commune. “You’re not ready for what’s out there,” he said to me. “You’ll see. You’ll see.”

I wish I could say I shoved his words out of my head, that I forced them out. But… I didn’t. I dwelt on them. I went over them in my head, over and over and over. I still can’t remember falling asleep. I just know that I fell asleep.

The next morning was fine. I was still terrified, but I just went about my life. Showered, got dressed, went to work. Tried to focus. Tried to put it all out of my head.

That was it. For the next three months. Work, keep your head down, pretend everything’s okay. I didn’t tell Ryan. I couldn’t. Don’t be stupid. I don’t expect you to understand, but to involve him in this would be dangerous for both of us. I couldn’t.

For that time, I withdrew. No more socializing with people at work. Just keep at your job. Don’t let these people into your life. Basically, I had retreated to my comfort zone. I wasn’t willing to let anyone in but Ryan.

On that note, though - Ryan and me? It was grand. It was lovely. I got to know him so much better. I got to see how his eyes would light up when he’d watch Fellini, or when he’d read a screenplay from his filmmaking friends. I got to see how his voice would just get full of energy and excitement when talking about his sister and her kids, or when he was talking about his on-the-side work for a nonprofit fighting sex trafficking. He was passionate and energetic about all the things that mattered, and soft and tender in all the right ways. One night. Okay, goddammit, one fucking night he’s in my bedroom, right. We’d just finished making love, and we were talking. Things turned serious, though. Right after he finished asking me if I always go down this certain route when I’m walking home, he was… oh God, he was telling me these things. He was telling me that he’d never felt this way about anyone before. He was telling me that it was important to him that I know that. He told me he really, honestly, truly cared about me and that I mattered to him.

I mattered to him. I’ll never forget that. Never.

So, naturally, I was spending lots of time with him when I could. Because I was being stalked, I didn’t feel comfortable eating out, so I stayed in and ordered in a lot. You do what you can, right. One night, something happened. Something that would impact everything else that happened afterwards. Ryan and I had just finished eating ordered-in Chinese food and watching a bunch of Shaw Brothers Kung Fu flicks, and then he looks at me with this excited gleam in his eye.

“What?” I asked, my lips curling up in a giggle. I knew when he was up to something.

He put his finger up, telling me as such to wait, and got up and trotted over to his bag. Kneeling down, he dug through it, and then pulled out a box that was gift wrapped. It was rectangular, and not too big, but big enough. My eyes went wide as he walked over to the couch and, sitting down, handed it to me.

“For me?” I asked, my eyes happily wide. He nodded, a huge grin on his face. Excited, I ripped the wrapping paper off only to see that it was a Superman statuette. My face broke out into a look of sheer joy, because I loved Superman. He was my favorite superhero, and for Ryan to get me this… well, it showed what a sweetheart he was. I looked over at him and, grabbing his shirt, gave him a fierce kiss on the mouth. Leaning back, I looked at my new item. In the box, Superman was standing tall and proud, his fists on his hips and his chest thrust out. His eyes had this steely, far-sighted look in them, as if he’s just looking out into all the realms of possibility. I loved it. I really fucking loved it.

“Ryan,” I said, looking over at him and smiling, “you are the biggest sweetheart imaginable.”

“I try,” he said, cracking a grin. We spent the next twenty minutes opening it up, and setting it up just right, where I could always have it in my line of sight whenever I was in the living room. Finally, it was on my TV stand, right next to my TV. It looked wonderful.

Wonderful. Yeah fucking right.

We’ll get back to my Superman statuette later. For now, I’ll go into how I was handling my stalker problem.

I had to switch up my routine, change my activities, to maintain some semblance of security. Like I said, I couldn’t tell Ryan. In the midst of all this, I began planning on how to confront this person - this stalker. I had to trick him somehow, trap him. So, naturally, I put a lot of thought and work into figuring him out as much as I could. A lot of work and thought.

I ended up putting the work in. Getting the resources I needed off the Internet. Studying how stalkers worked, how police and security organizations usually tailed a person. I studied how to figure out if you were being spied on. That kind of deal.

Like I said, I put a lot of thought into this.

It was interrupted, though. Interrupted by what I saw on the news one evening, in the midst of all this. It was the afternoon, and it was breaking news - a leaked confidential police report describing the murders of the serial killer as “not having possibly been committed by a human being”, but rather, “by some sort of animal or beast.” That’s the rub, though - it couldn’t have been an animal or beast, because as the report went on to say, they were too methodical, too planned out - too typical of a serial killer.

My heart went heavy. It had followed me here. My past had followed me here. Everything my parents told me that would happen had happened. The one that looks human, but isn’t. Of course. “You can’t run,” my mother told me. I remembered it as clear as if it were yesterday. “You can’t run.”

But I put that aside. I had to. I had to focus on the now. So, I worked, and I thought, on how to fix my stalker problem for good.

Yeah, I thought. I thought and thought and thought.

Finally - inevitably - my train of thought moved to my stalker, and how familiar he looked. He did look familiar from the glimpse I got of him. There was something about him. His hair, and the shape of his face…

Then it hit me. When Ryan and I were in bed some time back, and he asked me about the route I went down once when walking home. That was a route I invented to dodge my stalker. I’d never told anyone about it. How could Ryan know about it? That dawning realization, it shattered me. Thinking it all through, I started to get suspicious. Very, very suspicious. Then I thought of something else.

Immediately, I got up off my couch and moved over to my Superman statuette. I picked it up and began to closely examine it. Finally, I found a seam in the leg. Grabbing a butter knife from the kitchen, I pried the seam open just a tad - just a tiny little bit. I saw a wire running through it. That was impossible, these statuettes had nothing electronic in them - I knew because I’d read up on them on the Internet because I’d wanted to buy myself one. Prying the toy open a bit more, I saw it. A tiny circular piece of metal — the size of a dime - with a tiny, square circuit board lodged on it.

A bug.

I immediately closed up the toy, put it back on my TV stand, and - my heart pounding so hard - moved back to my couch, sitting down. I had to calm myself down to keep from panicking, because now this was real. Son of a bitch, it all made sense. Me meeting Ryan mere weeks after my first encounter with my stalker in the park. Him knowing my route. Him being too good to be true.

As I thought about this the night it occurred to me, I got up and I started to pace. I paced back and forth and within ten minutes I was sobbing. I was sobbing so goddamned hard, and I couldn’t stop. Of course, it all made sense. It was him. It was him all along. It had to be. Goddammit. I had come out here to the city. I was built - made - by my family to survive. I was made by my family to survive out here, and I let this happen to me. I let this creep up on me.

And I was wrong. I thought I could be close to people. I thought I could form connections - intimate connections. I couldn’t, though. I couldn’t.

I got over it, though. I did. I stopped crying, and I hardened the hell up. I hardened up, and I made a plan. Then I dedicated myself to following it through.

The next day I didn’t answer Ryan’s calls. I decided I’d tell him I was sick and in bed, and so I wasn’t able to talk that day.

The next weekend, I was having dinner with Ryan at an extremely swanky restaurant he’d taken me out to. He was wearing a nice, sleek suit that he’d bought just for the occasion, even though he couldn’t really afford it. He was really dorky that way, lovably so. At least that’s what I thought before I’d figured out his whole game. I was wearing a nice red dress, one that hugged my slim figure and accentuated my auburn hair.

“So,” Ryan said, cutting into his steak, “what would you say about New York?”

“New York?” I asked, raising my eyebrows as I sipped my wine. Looking at him I wondered what happened to him in his life to turn him into such a liar.

He cracked a grin - a grin that looked so fucking fake at the time, knowing what I knew then - and continued. “Well, see, I’ve been saving up for a trip to the Big Apple for years, and I’d love for you to come with me. I think you’d get a lot out of it - especially from seeing the New York Public Library.” He then took a big bite out of his steak and was smiling broadly, his mouth closed, as he chewed on it. Looking at him smiling at me like that, lying to me. I hated him. I hated him and wondered what he’d look like laying in front of me, his neck snapped.

Of course, I didn’t show that I was thinking that. I lit up my face. “I’d love that, Ryan!” My voice was exuberant, full of life. “Okay,” I said, my voice getting playfully firm, “let’s get down to business. We need to hammer out details. When should we go, exactly?”

Ryan laughed out loud, almost choking on his meat. “Whoa, slow down, slow down!” He put his hand up, chuckling. “I figure we’ll see what time we can get off next year, and then we’ll go from there.” At this, he reached out and clasped my hands in his, looking into my eyes. “Rachel Norris, I love you. And I cannot wait to explore the greatest city in the world with you.” Then he lifted my hands and kissed them, his eyes still locked on mine. I smiled back, but as I did so I was wondering things like how I could best neutralize him when the time came.

I got home that night, and I knew the time had pretty much arrived. For the past week, I’d been altering my route, but I was continually being followed. Continually trailed. Sometimes I saw my stalker - Ryan, sometimes I saw Ryan - other times, I didn’t. I caught him, though. I caught him at just the right time.

He was walking down an alleyway, and looking around all puzzled, wondering where I’d disappeared to. He never saw me coming. He never saw me shoot out from behind him, faster than any other person could move, and slam the black bag down over his head. He never had a chance as I got him in the sleeper hold, and felt his mad, rabid struggles very quickly ebb down into nothing. Picking him up over my shoulder, and feeling his big, metallic watch bang slightly against my back, I headed home. I moved through the alleyways, staying out of sight, and finally made it.

Slamming my door shut behind me, I dropped the guy onto the floor. I got his stuff of him, the usual - his gun, badge, cell phone, all that stuff. Then I noticed something. His watch. It was big, and it was gold. Just like the clerk back at the comic shop. The one that, Ryan had later told me, he was close friends with, ever since the clerk had started working there.

So that’s what his cover was.

Turning the unconscious man over and ripping his hat off, it was clear to me it wasn’t Ryan. It was indeed the clerk. Of course. The Superman toy as a listening device, coincidentally sold from his very comic store. Of fucking course. I wanted to break down crying for how horribly I’d treated Ryan in my mind. My man, my baby, and I thought he was some sort of horrible traitor. I - I didn’t want to think about it. I, again, focused on the now. I didn’t waste time. I reached down, gripped the clerk’s neck, and in the next few seconds made sure he’d never be a danger to me again.

Then he came in. Ryan came in.

I only noticed him because I heard him gasp and drop his keys - the keys I’d given him to my place two weeks ago - behind me. I stood up with a start and whirled around, my eyes going wide as I saw him.

“Ryan!” I shot out. “I-I can explain!” My voice was quick, panicked, anxious, scared. His eyes were wide with horror, fear, shock.

“Rachel? Wh-what…what the fuck is going on? Did you kill that guy?” I opened my mouth to respond, but nothing came out. Everything was coming down around me. “You can’t run,” my mother told me all those years ago. Her words playing over and over again in my head.

Before I could answer, he walked over to the body, and slowly reached down and picked up my stalker’s badge. His police badge. Ryan looked up at me - looking into my eyes, the eyes he’d loved so much before, the eyes which tears were streaming out of now - and I could see. I could see in his eyes, there was no love anymore. No more trust. He didn’t know me.

“Ryan,” I croaked through my tears, “please-”

“Stay the hell away from me,” he said - quickly, quietly - cutting me off as he backed away. That was when I knew. I knew it was over. My relationship - the first, most true one I’d ever had - was over, and so was my time here.

“You can’t run,” my mother told me. “You can’t run from what you are.” I remember those words, her telling me through her mandibles, her twenty three eyes gazing down at me lovingly but sadly. My father standing next to her, his six, grey-fuzzed legs stomping around restlessly as he beat his upper limbs against his thick, dark brown carapace.

I was crying as I decided what to do. I was crying as I leapt forward - faster than any human could ever move - and slammed the door shut. I was crying as I turned and started the transformation, and though I wasn’t crying when I pinned Ryan to the floor and began to eat him - because I couldn’t cry in that form - I wept inside. I did. More than I could have imagined I ever would.

It was a simple matter, getting out of town. Three days later, after a hell of a lot of plane and train rides, I was in Central Europe, where I am now. I’m in a part of it that’s nice, a part that reminds me of home. Home. Where my family and my people and I would race through the forests and the fields in the dead of night, feasting on whatever animals we could find, but hungry, always hungry. Always hungry because animals could never compare to human meat. The hunger that drove me to the cities, to the human world, away from my people.

And you know what? I’m still here. I’m still going to live here, amongst human beings, because this is the life I’ve chosen and I’ll be damned if tragedy or an overzealous police hunt for me is going to cause me to throw it all away. I’ll keep finding food, and I’ll cover my tracks better this time, because it’s what I was always meant for.

Life is weird. It brings so much joy, but also so much sorrow. I know now that I can’t ever get close to anyone. All my connections, all my friendships, they all have to be fake. False. Not real. It’s hard, and I know there’ll be times where I’m not sure if I can bear it. I chose this life, though, and you know what? In the end, I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

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malcolmteller-blog · 8 years ago

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[HORROR] The Blanket

Rodney wasn’t having a good life, lately. He just��well, he just wasn’t. Let’s leave it at that, where descriptions are concerned. Where to begin? First Laura tells him that she’s “not happy” and that she “wants to try a different kind of life.” She tells him that After five fucking years of both of their lives spent together. After giving her his heart, and moving across the country to help her reach her career goals. In the end though, he sucked it up, and he tried to realize his anger for what it was - irrational. Typical breakup shit. He wasn’t her boss, and he knew he wasn’t entitled to her love. So, through the mist of the hurt, he watched her pack her suitcase and her bags. He watched her hand in her keys to the landlord, and he watched her walk out the door with her things - helped by her friends - and then he watched through the window as she got into her car and drove off.

As he watched, he felt something that, even to the very end, he didn’t know how to describe, not really. It was a mix of his heart, the emotional core of him, hurting. This dull, constant ache that just got bigger and bigger and more and more concentrated. Later, as he lay in bed that night, that ache had morphed into an all-consuming void of raw hurt, like his heart had been torn out. It lasted into the morning, then into the next week, and on and on after that. Eating his breakfast, getting dressed, going to work, then coming home at night and going to bed - he just lived his life. It was all he could do, even though everything was different now. Everything had changed as she’d left.

Even though he tried not to, he couldn’t help but think of their life spent together, and that made living with her absence all the more painful. How they’d lie in bed at night, entangled in each other’s arms. The way her voice sounded when she laughed. How she was the toughest person he knew, how nothing in the world could put her down and keep her down. How she always had an answer and a plan for every life difficulty that came their way. The way her body felt when they made love, their hearts beating in rhythm, her body draped in sweat as he grasped at her skin.

He remembered all this, and over the course of events - until things took a sudden turn - he would constantly remember it. And it hurt. It hurt so, so bad.

So this was his life.

So, suffice it to say, Rodney didn’t quite know how to feel when he got a package by courier. On that warm, summer afternoon, with the sun shining bright and high in a cloudless sky, he eyed and weighed the large box in his hands. It was from Laura’s grandmother, the courier explained to him - she’d died and the will stipulated that these items (which Laura had inherited) be mailed to her. As this was was her last known address, he was the one who now had to deal with the entire matter.

Fifteen minutes later, Rodney - glancing occasionally at the package sitting comfortably by the couch in the living room - was leaning against the wall, his cell phone pressed against his ear as its ring resounded in his ear over and over. Finally, she picked up.

“Why are you calling me, Rodney?” Laura asked. Her voice was tired and impatient, of the sort where it was clear that she had no time nor tolerance for bullshit. Not today, not from him. Rodney winced inside, and he felt his heart grow heavy and numb inside of him. He wanted to do so much. He wanted to beg her to come back. He wanted to demand to know what it was about him that made their relationship impossible. He wanted to slam the phone down on her. So many desires and contradictions, all of them flooding through him at once. But he didn’t. He stuck to what he called her about.

“Laura,” Rodney said tiredly, rubbing his eyes as he spoke, “there’s something from your grandmother here. She, uh… she died. I’m sorry. She died, and she left you something and it got mailed here.” There, that was it. He’d given her the message, and thus any day now she’d be by to pick it up.

“Rodney, I can’t. I’m leaving the country tomorrow morning.” Her voice was short, impatient - to the point.

“Okay, fine, come by and pick it up when you get back.” He was starting to get pissed off at her by this point. He calls her to come deal with her bullshit that was on his plate, and she was giving him attitude? The fuck?

“I’m not coming back.” The statement was quiet and clipped, and it hit him like a train rushing down the line at full speed. His mouth dropped silently open, and that was the moment where it really hit him that it was over. There was no going back. There was no miracle chance, like in the movies, that they’d get back together. It was over.

He wanted to ask her where she was going. He wanted to ask her if he’d ever see or speak to her again. He wanted to beg her to stay. He didn’t, though. He didn’t because he knew that now - as hard as it was - it was really none of his business where she went or what she did. It also made him aware that he was stuck with the package, because he knew the answer to the question he asked next before it even left his mouth.

“So, I’m assuming you won’t want to give me your address, for me to mail this thing to you?”

“No, I won’t.” Calm and quiet, but to the point. No bullshit. No time for it.

“Alright, fine,” Rodney said, trying to keep calm, to not get emotional. “Have a nice life, Laura.”

You can guess how it ended. She hung up, he hung up. For the rest of the day, he laid in bed, staring up at the ceiling, trying to think of nothing.

It was a week later that he finally noticed the box again. Up to that point, he’d been more or less going through the motions. Wake up, have breakfast, get dressed, work, home, dinner, undress and get into bed. He wasn’t sure why he was going about things that way, not consciously. He just felt, deep down, that it was all he had left. This was life, and how utterly, maddeningly and terrifyingly empty it was.

He didn’t think about much in those days. Nothing except Laura and what they had, to be honest. The more he thought about what they had had and that was now gone, the more he wondered how he’d ever move on, how he’d ever be able to enjoy life, to live. He trucked on, though. He had to. What else could you do?

There was something else, though. It was the box.

It caught his eye in a particularly odd way one day as he ate his breakfast, then as he left for work. When he got home, it was there, same as it always had been. There was something about it, though, that hadn’t been there when he’d left for work. It appealed to him in some way he couldn’t describe. Standing there at the edge of his living room, the front door having clicked shut mere moments ago, he stared at it. He noticed every nook and cranny of the box in a way he hadn’t before. How the cardboard seemed worn and faded, with minor little tears and creases situated all over it. The duct tape was no better, the edges of it peeling upward ever so slightly. Then there was the smell. He hadn’t noticed that before. It smelled musty, like old cotton. It reminded him of his parents attic when he was a child, the dust creating a thick haze as the smell of old times and old dreams percolated in the air.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, he was moving. He was walking over to the box, then he was on his knees, then he was ripping the duct tape off the box and tearing the folds open to see what was inside.

He furrowed his brow as he looked into the now open box. It was… a blanket. Just a simple, ordinary blanket. It was a soft blue, and looked old - slightly faded and discolored here or there - but not necessarily worn. He sat there on his knees for about half a minute, his confusion - and then frustration - rising within him. What the hell was this? It was just a blanket? Finally, out of nowhere, a dam broke inside of him and a furious rage flooded into him. The rage that he’d thought he’d had something good, something he could enjoy, but it turned out to be nothing. Something so insignificant and trivial and not even worth getting upset over, but nevertheless had the sheer anger bubbling forth. He stared down at the blanket inside of the box, and the anger - the sheer anger - bubbling up inside of him, he screamed. He screamed as loud as he could, the rage bellowing out of him, and as he screamed he felt flood into him the abject helplessness and hopelessness flood into him. The helplessness and hopelessness that stemmed from the reality that she was never coming back, that none of it had ever meant anything, not really, and that all those years of his life were gone, gone forever, like a raindrop that’s fallen from the air and into a vast, endless pond.

He screamed that way for a whole minute, and then the tears broke forth. The tears stormed forth down his face as his hurt sobs echoed throughout the apartment. Stumbling into his room, he sobbed into his pillow, feeling like he wanted to die, until finally he drifted off into a mournful sleep.

As he slept, the blanket sat in the living room. Silent. Comfortable looking. Oh, so comfortable looking. Soft, too.

He woke up the next day, feeling like he’d rather be dead. Going through the motions, he brewed himself some coffee. Minutes later, he was sipping the steaming hot black liquid as he moved over to the couch, gently setting himself down on it so as not to upset the cup in his hand. He was still wearing his disheveled clothing from the night before. He didn’t care. He reached over to the remote control on the couch and, picking it up, flicked the TV on. Anything to occupy his mind. Anything to get his mind off of her. As he watched a variety of television shows and news broadcasts, he noticed that nothing really filled the deadened void inside of him, the void that had been there since she left. He felt his heart beat more rapidly, and himself start to fidget in tension and anxiety as he wondered if he would ever get better, ever move past this.

It was a few hours later when he realized he was cold. Later on, even at the end, he wasn’t sure if it was this that caused him to look over at the blanket in the box, or if it was something else. Regardless, he looked over at it. As he stared at it, something happened to him, or rather, his perception of the blanket. It looked softer than it had before. It looked ever so slightly bigger, ever so slightly fluffier than it had. It didn’t look nearly as old as it had before. In fact, now it looked brand new. And he felt cold. He didn’t know how, but now he felt so, so cold.

It wasn’t a hard choice. Really, it wasn’t. He just set his cup down on the coffee table and moved - a bit too quickly, at that - over to the box. As he picked the blanket out of the box, he was utterly struck by the feel of it on his fingers. It was so warm, and soft, and not just that, but inviting, too. Holding it in front of him with both hands, he squeezed it, letting its soft fullness expand within his squeeze to fill his grip, to press against his palms. It was the softest, most wonderful piece of material he’d ever felt. He felt better now. Somehow, the blanket had made him feel like it was alright that Laura left, because stuff like that happens all the time, right? Life happens, what can you do? He pressed the blanket against his chest, feeling its warm fullness.

Rodney yawned, and stretched as he did so. All of a sudden, all he wanted to do was crawl into a nice couch or bed, with the blanket on top of him, and drift off to sleep. It was weird, though - he’d just gotten up, and was more or less up until a few seconds ago. Whatever, Rodney thought to himself. Maybe he hadn’t gotten enough sleep last night and it was just now catching up with him, right? Yeah, that was probably it.

Rodney nodded to himself, stepping toward the couch. He felt heavier now - more sluggish. It was only a few feet, a few short feet, but when he finally reached the couch he fell on top of it, completely drained. The couch’s cushions sinking beneath him, along with the comfortable, inviting blanket laying over top of him, felt so good. Yawning and stretching some more, he knew he couldn’t get up and do things around the house even if he wanted to - he was too tired. Just way too tired. He could hardly get off the couch at this point, even. If he had been thinking more clearly, he would have realized that it didn’t make sense that he would go from functional to completely drained in the span of a few seconds. He wasn’t, though. All that was on his mind was comfort. Sweet, sweet comfort and rest.

By the time five minutes was past, he was fast asleep, his snores filling the house.

When Rodney woke up the next day, at first he didn’t know what time it was. Groggily grabbing for the remote control on the coffee table, he finally felt it. Grabbing hold of it, he switched the TV on and changed to the weather channel. Squinting at the screen, the dull haze of sleepiness still present in his vision, his eyes widened in surprise as they finally registered what was on the screen. It was three in the afternoon - a day after he’d fallen asleep. He’d slept over twenty-four hours… and, well, he felt… great, come to think of it. In fact, as he pulled himself off the couch and thought about it more, this was the best he’d felt in years. He felt refreshed, full of energy, fully charged, and not just that… he felt happy. He felt like all he wanted to do was smile, to go out on the street and build everyone out there up so they could have a sliver of what he felt.

Excitement and energy from out of nowhere coursing through his veins, he realized he had to get out. He had to burn off some steam. Fifteen minutes later, he was wearing some jogging clothes and was out the door, then five minutes after that his feet were pounding the pavement as he ran hard, harder and more joyfully than he ever had. His heart pumping hard and his feet pounding the pavement just as hard, he was on top of the world. He ran for three miles, and then walked home. Getting home, he collapsed onto his couch, pulling the blanket - his new, precious blanket - over him and drifting off to sleep in seconds. As he faded into sleep, all that was in his mind was how warm and comfortable he was. This blanket was perfect for him.

He didn’t think of how absurd it was that he was undergoing such a radical change out of nowhere. He didn’t think about how he no longer even cared to think about Laura, even though she had been such a huge part of his life and how her departure had left such a gaping wound in his heart.

None of these things ever occurred to him.

The next day he spent the day out running, and then exploring the city. Walking down the crowded city streets of downtown, he felt so alive. The energy was pounding through his veins, and at times he felt like he was about to burst. He could do anything, he felt. The sun was shining, and everything seemed so bright and full of life. The people racing to their various destinations, the cars moving down the street, even the buildings. He’d never seen the world like this before, and it left him in starstruck awe.

Later, munching on a bagel as he strolled down a busy sidewalk, he began to make plans for himself. He’d leave his job, that much was certain. He’d travel. Yeah, he’d travel. He’d go to Europe, and Asia, and he’d meet someone. That special someone. And he’d make her respect him. Not like that bitch Laura. That goddamned bitch Laura. Thinking about her, he felt rage build up inside of him, and he felt his heart warm as he imagined himself with his hands around her throat, her life being choked out of her. For a brief moment, a conflicted thought entered his mind. What’s wrong with me? I love Laura. But just as soon as it was there, it was gone, and the image of him forcing her to gasp for breath and life in an utterly futile manner filled his mind yet again.

Getting home, he took his shirt off and threw it on the dining table. Kicking his shoes off, he collapsed onto the couch and pulled the blanket over himself. He felt joy wash over him as he felt its touch again. He’d been looking forward to cuddling up with the blanket and watching some TV, and that’s exactly what he did. For the next five hours, until midnight, the blanket was wrapped about him, keeping him warm, and the TV’s sounds echoed throughout the apartment, the glow of its screen flickering across the walls. As he watched TV, he didn’t notice that he felt a good deal numb across his body. He didn’t notice much recently. As the clock neared one in the morning, he yawned and switched the TV off. Laying down on the couch, he was asleep seconds later.

He didn’t get out of bed the next day. He just lay there, wrapped in the blanket - so warm, soft, pleasurable. There was something about this blanket. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but there was something. Every time he tried to think about it, though, his mind went somewhere else. Oh well, he finally thought to himself. It probably wasn’t important anyway. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, right?

As he lay there on the couch, he couldn’t feel his legs. At this point, he noticed it, but he didn’t care. He honestly didn’t. No one could tell you why, not even him, but for some reason, it just wasn’t important to him. One thing he made sure of, he made sure the blanket remained draped over him. He was too comfortable, too at peace. If the blanket fell off of him, the chill would get to him, and he wouldn’t be able to relax or get comfortable for the rest of the day - this he was certain of. So it was that for the rest of the day, the blanket covered him completely, only his head exposed.

He didn’t wake up for another two days. When he awoke, he was hungry. Hungry and angry. Out of nowhere, as the haze of grogginess receded, thoughts began to run through his mind. Thoughts of how he’d been wronged and betrayed. That miserable fucking bitch Laura, he thought to himself. Just fucking like her to leave, after all he’d fucking done for her. He began to imagine him taking a knife, and taking it to her face and making her feel what he felt. As the thoughts of that filled his mind, his heart began to beat faster and faster, and he began to get more and more worked up. Yeah, he thought to himself. He should go and track her down, and make her understand. Finally, all that he could feel or perceive was pure, raw frothing hatred. He hated everything about her now. He hated how she’d wasted the years he’d given her, and now he wanted to act on that. It didn’t matter that just a few days ago he’d loved her and mourned her loss. That back then, he’d have done anything to have her back. That he’d have done anything to change himself if it meant having her back.

He’d changed.

So it was that he resolved to buy the sharpest, deadliest knife he could find, and then find where Laura was and pay her a visit. Deciding upon this, he tried to get up.

But he couldn’t.

He tried to stretch and swing his legs off the couch, but he couldn’t. Something was stopping him. Confused, and growing more and more enraged, he tried to pull the blanket off his body so he could get a look at his legs and see what was wrong. It wouldn’t work. The blanket clung to his body. Furious, he tried to throw the blanket off of him, and force himself to stand up. As he tried, with all of his strength, he found that he could barely even move. His strength had left him.

A flood of emotions raced through him, primarily rage. Rage at Laura, at his mother, at all the awful and horrible fucking people in the world who used him, who never appreciated him, all those people whose throats he now wished he could slash open.

As helpless, impotent rage built inside of him, he screamed - but even his scream was weak and pitiful, lacking energy or strength. As agonizingly long minutes passed, he sobbed. He sobbed so hard that sleep came quickly and in a bout of surprise.

Later, he wasn’t sure how long he’d been asleep and how long he’d been awake. He shivered. He was always shivering now. The blanket had eaten his legs entirely by this point, and had now eaten through most of the flesh and bone of his arms, in addition to most of the flesh of his stomach. Soon it would devour his internal organs, and then the rest of him. It had now expanded to cover his head, and he felt it sucking away at his skull, licking up his hair and gradually dissolving the bone and flesh protecting his brain. He no longer felt rage, or hatred - toward Laura or anyone else. He just felt fear. Raw, raw fear. He had no idea what would happen to him now, but one thing remained steadfast in his mind: he was thankful - so, so thankful - that Laura hadn’t been here to receive the blanket. Tears coursing down his face as he thought of this, he was thankful that it was him this was happening to, and not her.

Rodney hadn’t been heard from in two weeks, and that wasn’t like him at all. So, his parents, living just a half hour drive away from Rodney, finally worked up their courage, and - being completely ready to bear the brunt of Rodney’s anger and indignation if it turned out it was nothing - called the police. One thing led to another, and before you knew it the manager of Rodney’s apartment was unlocking the door to his tenant’s apartment so the police could search it.

They found nothing out of the ordinary, but Rodney wasn’t there.

One thing they did find, however. A blue blanket - warm and comfy looking, albeit a bit discolored - draped over the couch. There was also something else. Something so small, so out of the way, that no one - not the police, not the manager, not even Rodney’s family when they showed up to collect his things - ever noticed it.

A small - a very small - drop of blood, just beneath the couch.

Rodney was never found.

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malcolmteller-blog · 8 years ago

Text

[HORROR] When Rats and the Internet Collide

Standing in my kitchen, I bit into the rat as it squirmed like a motherfucker. I mean, yeah, it kept saying it was fine with me eating it, but I guess it was some intrinsic survival instinct. The blood began to run down my hand and jaw as I chewed on the meat, and, having swallowed, I took another huge bite. The meat tasted raw, fresh and wet - it was how I liked it, how I’d gotten used to it.

Savoring the taste, I closed my eyes, focusing myself. What was about to happen was sacred and had to be treated as such. Finally, speaking slowly, I uttered the prayer, “To the Rat Lord. May His name be ever honoured.” There. The sacrifice and worship, for tonight at least, was done.

With that done, I went back to my room, climbed into bed, and went to sleep.

I should explain. I’ve followed and worshiped the Rat Lord ever since I got out of college, back in 2012. I won’t go into how I first encountered him - it’s kind of boring, to be honest. Though, ever since I’ve started worshiping him, it’s been nothing but glad tidings for me. I’ve gotten a big leg up in my career in the financial sector, due to a lot of the high-ups also being disciples (you know Wall Street? You wouldn’t imagine how many of us are there). There’s other stuff, too. I have more strength, more speed, more resilience. I can punch through a brick wall, for instance. I can jump from two hundred feet and land on my feet without breaking a single bone. Stuff like that.

It’s not just that. I believe in the Rat Lord. I believe in Him that when He reveals himself to the world, and his children all swarm out of the sewers and the gutters of the world to prepare for his coming, that it will be better for all of us, all those who follow him.

Anyways, I need to get to the matter at hand. What’s been happening to me lately.

I was sitting on my couch a few days ago, watching TV, when I notice something out of the corner of my eye. I glanced over at the kitchen and saw it. It was a rat - standing on its hind legs, just staring at me. Arching an eyebrow, I called out, “What do you want to tell me?” I mean, it obviously wanted to say something to me, just standing there staring at me like that.

“His Holy Eminence has called upon you for a grand vocation.” Its voice in my head sounded shrill and high-pitched, but also kind of scratchy - basically exactly how you’d imagine a rat to sound when it speaks. My eyes going wide, I got off the couch, stepped over toward the rat, and dropped to one knee, bowing my head. Don’t even fucking laugh - you show respect when the Rat Lord calls upon you.

The words left my mouth smoothly, like water, as they had all the other times I’d ever been called upon. “What does His Holy Eminence require?”

The messenger told me. I, as you would guess, obeyed.

Now, before I go any further, I need to explain things more. The Rat Lord isn’t the only deity out there. There’s a lot, and, as you’d expect in a closed community, from time to time they get into spats with each other. The one that concerns me and mine is his beef with this bastard called the Net Apostate. The Net Apostate exists on the Internet - literally, its a deity that lives inside the Internet. It doesn’t really want to rule the world, but it does want everyone to worship him, and he aims to accomplish this through… well, I don’t really know how to properly describe it because it’s honestly convoluted and stupid as fuck, but it involves a lot of ‘viral social media’ bullshit. Anyways, back in the late eighties the Net Apostate had some of his disciples murder one of the Rat Lord’s high priests that lived in the New York City area. Kind of a ‘sending a message’ thing. From then on, it was war.

It had been going on ever since. Murders, divine pronouncements, curses, mystical garbage, all that bullshit. It was at the point where we all couldn’t wait to show that web-based piece of garbage who the real boss was. Fortunately, with the grand vocation, I - me personally - received just the opportunity. Honestly, I was unbelievably thrilled, and so proud because I knew that the Rat Lord’s trust in me wouldn’t be misplaced. I was just the right person for the job, as you’ll see.

For the next week, I went to work. I scouted where the Net Apostate’s people usually hung out - web cafes, computer shops, that kind of deal. Then I went into one.

Walking into this computer repair shop down on Fifth that also doubled as a used book shop (I know, crazy, right?), I walked up to the counter. The guy behind it looked to be about two hundred and fifty pounds (in the fat way, not the well-built way), and he had these big, black, thick glasses. That’s what stands out to me in my mind. He was also balding, which made him look kind of gross, for some dumb reason.

Smiling at him, I started speaking. “Hi, uh… look, I need to inquire about something if you could help me out?” My voice was nervous, hesitant, as I spoke. I was nervous, I had no idea how this would go.

He smiled back in a friendly fashion and nodded. “Sure thing. What do you need?”

“Look… I…” I then chuckled nervously and ran my hand through my hair, “Okay, I’m totally new to this whole thing, but…” I paused, then went for the home run. “I’ve heard a lot about this guy, or thing, on the Internet called ‘the Net Apostate’… I’m wondering if you could hook me up with the next gathering?”

He kept smiling, but I noticed something in his eyes - something very subtle. It was a flashing of coldness in them, suspicion. He then shook his head, “Sorry, never heard of it.”

I nodded. “Okay. Alright. Thanks, though.” I waved, turned around, and walked out the door. I spent the next hour looking around web cafes, computer departments of department stores, taking pictures with my phone, that kind of thing. Then I went home.

The next day I spent all day (it was my day off) combing the Internet for information on the Net Apostate. Nothing. Zilch. Nada. I mean, if it’s a god that lives on the Internet, of fucking course it’ll have control over what information is out there on it. So, having finished my work, I went out for some snacks.

I’m walking through the outdoor parking lot of my apartment building at ten-thirty at night when I hear him coming up behind me.

Fucking jackpot, I thought to myself as he flicked his switchblade out and thrust it toward my back.

I kind of twirled around, grabbed his wrist and squeezed as hard as I could. Sure enough, I heard the bones crack like twigs in the manner of a few seconds, causing this little asshole to scream in agony. These people did have gifts and blessings (all followers of gods did), but enhanced strength and stamina sure as hell wasn’t one of them. I bashed my forehead into his face, causing his nose to snap and for his blood to splash all over my face and shirt. Then I forced him to the ground, and, grasping his throat in my hand and squeezing just the right amount, went forward with what I planned when I deliberately went about raising red flag after red flag.

“Listen. No, listen to me,” I said, trying to calm him down - he was hyperventilating and his eyes were wide with terror. He hadn’t been in this game for long, clearly. “Look. Where’s the next sacrifice? Where is it?”

He shook his head furiously. “I can’t tell you,” he gasped, blood still gushing out of his nose.

I leaned in close until only a couple inches were separating our faces. “You don’t tell me, I kill you and feed your body to the rats. See if your fucking Net Apostate can help you then.” I said that, and I waited, staring into his eyes. I saw the dawning realization awaken in his eyes, and then I saw it replaced by sheer, relentless terror. He knew exactly what’d happen to his soul - his, the soul of a Net Apostate disciple - if it found its way into the grasp of the Rat Lord. Finally, he sputtered out the time and place of the next sacrifice, along with how many disciples would be there. I smiled at him, thanked him in a super friendly and gentle voice, and then proceeded to snap his neck. As I got up and started to walk back into my building, I could see the rats - just a few of them at first - start to come out from all directions, to scurry over to the corpse.

I’ll just state my feelings on this matter before moving on: this is war, the Net Apostate is the enemy, you do what you have to do. Besides, fuck those guys.

So, for the next week, I prepped myself. I went out, got my supplies, and by the day of the sacrifice, arranged all my equipment on a table before me. I ran through the checklist, and everything was there. I put on the body armor, loaded everything else up, and - most importantly - ate about fifteen rats in the span of an hour. I felt like I wanted to fucking puke, but I kept it down. Not the time for it.

It took me about an hour to get there. I took the backroads and the alleys - I didn’t wanna get caught by a passing police officer. That’d be very bad news, and the Rat Lord wouldn’t care to take “I was in lockup for the night” as an excuse. I was positively giddy, though also a bit nervous - I wanted to make sure I did this all completely right. I finally made it to the warehouse belonging to this Canadian import/export company and went to work. I found the rooftop ladder and made my way to the roof. Then I jimmied open the rooftop door and entered the building, gently closing the door behind myself. I - ever so softly - moved down the stairwell until I was at just the right level. I gently opened the door and crept out onto the walkway. Looking down on the main floor, I saw it all.

It was a vast, open space, completely bare except for five human beings - four of them in robes, surrounding the fifth, a dead woman (mid-forties, she looked like) - and all of them before a 52” HDTV that was connected to an active laptop. I saw on the HDTV, the words “I AM PLEASED” flash on it. So the Net Apostate himself was in attendance. Even better.

So these were the disciples, and that was the sacrifice. Simple enough. My next course of action was also quite simple.

I pulled out my pistol (no clue what the model was - I got it from some street level gangbanger), took aim, and opened fire. The bangs of the gunfire reverberated through my body and ears as the three remaining disciple members took off running in all directions as the one I’d hit spasmed in the gunfire and then hit the ground, dead. I started to laugh because it was so funny - these bastards really did think that they could get away when I was a regular down at the gun range and had been for the past five years. Over the next twenty seconds, I gunned each and every last one of them down, their bodies flailing and twisting as they hit the ground.

Walking down the stairs to the main level - and seeing out of the corner of my eye the HDTV now rapidly flashing a variety of images pertaining to war and mass chaos - I calmly approached the sacrifice. I was happy. I was happy that I got to do this great feat, and I was happy that this piece of shit deity was here and was pissed. It’d be even more pissed by the time I was done.

I reached the corpse. I stared down at it, its stomach having been viciously cut open by dagger. Now was the time. I stuck my finger into my mouth, then down my throat - deeper, and deeper, and then it happened. I felt all the rats I had eaten come up from my stomach, into my throat, and then out my mouth. Leaning forward, I vomited a pure stream of rat filth into the open guts of the sacrifice. See, the sacrifice had been interrupted and so wasn’t officially complete, and thus was still in progress. What I was doing was literally that beautiful, as a result. As I vomited, out of the corner of my eye I saw the HDTV flash - more rapidly - even more images, now grotesque ones of murder and torture and gore. Yeah, this fucker was really pissed now.

Finally, I finished vomiting, and the HDTV abruptly switched off. I looked over at the laptop. It was off too.

Staring down at the corpse, an idiot grin appeared on my face, me being filled with such pure glee and energy after having utterly defiled this sacrifice. I then glanced at the HDTV and smiled even wider.

What else is to be said? I went home and went to bed. The Rat Lord’s people on the police force would ensure what happened would never find its way back to me.

So that’s the story. Now, because this is being posted on the Internet, I know the Net Apostate can see it, so, hey, buddy, if you’re reading this? From my God to you: fuck you, you miserable electronic prick.

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malcolmteller-blog · 8 years ago

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[HORROR] A Matter of Time

She grasps the stone as she trains in her apartment, punching forward as hard as she can. As long as she holds the stone, Time cannot age her.

Her body is twenty-two. Strong, young, but not too young - not like she was days ago, barely able to climb into bed.

She spends the day training, and the next day, and every day for the next month - backflipping off walls, running back and forth, mountains of pushups. She has to be ready. One moment - that’s all it will take for Time to get her. One moment.

As she trains, she reflects on how long she’s been here. Forty long years. Forty horrible, cruel years.

One night she stops, exhausted. In bed, clutching the stone, she sleeps. She dreams, and she remembers. She remembers the first day she lived in this home. She was twenty-three. She remembers trying to leave, and ending up on the ground older than one could imagine, utterly infirm. She lay there for hours until she got the hint and crawled away from the door, reverting back to her twenties as she went. Forty years of this. Waking up as a helpless infant. Waking up as a ninety year-old. Everywhere in between, for forty years.

She does not know why Time does this to her. She has a hunch that it’s toying with her. She hates it more than she can comprehend.

Her dreams are filled with memories of sobbing her eyes out in sheer despair, screaming for her mother a year into her internment. Always trying to grab the knife faster and faster, faster than Time can move so she can cut her own throat open before it gets her. She’s never fast enough.

She wakes up. Today’s the day. She grasps the stone and rushes the door, smashing it open with a leaping kick. Before both of her feet hit the ground, she’s off down the hallway - the first time she’s seen it in forty years. Her heart is pounding in exhilaration - she’s made it! She’s smiling as she nears the turn to the stairwell.

Except…

She feels it. She clutches the stone but she feels it. Her skin wrinkling. Her muscles weakening so fast. She screams in rage and despair. She reaches the turn for the stairwell, but slams into the ground as she does, her body now in the mid-hundreds. She can’t move. Soon she’s sobbing hard. It was all a game. A game. It had control the whole time. Soon, there’s just darkness.

She wakes up in her bed. The door is closed, and she is now thirty-one. She glances at the butcher knife on the nightstand. With a single purpose, she grabs at it, fast. She’s not fast enough. Her arm, now old, twisted and wrinkled, flops weakly and helplessly onto the nightstand. Filling up, she sobs bitterly, and as she does, she can sense - somehow - from somewhere beyond eternity, cruel and proud laughter.

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malcolmteller-blog · 8 years ago

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[HORROR] The Good Doctor

Dr. Wilson arrived early for work. He always did. It was hard to make it in this particular day because of the heavy snowfall all over the city. Still, he toughed it out and made it in. He always got to work because it was important to him.

As he entered the office, he was hungry, and his little finger wouldn’t stop twitching.

It was two hours later he was talking Abigail Slate through her session. This one had Anxiety and Depression, and she was presently telling him about how the anxieties were starting to get to her.

“I mean, it’s just like…” she said a bit too quickly, a bit too nervously, “…like I feel that something’s going to get me. One way or the other.” She looked up at him helplessly, despair in her face. “I don’t know what to do.”

He nodded, trying to restrain himself from coming off as too eager. He spoke slowly - carefully. “I do think we should attempt an uptick in your medication.” He paused, then went for it. “I’m thinking, in particular, of a new type of medication.”

She frowned and began rubbing her wrists, thinking it over. Finally, she again spoke. “I’m… not sure. I dunno if I want more meds, you know?”

He looked at her and felt so hungry, and he needed to be fed. He needed it more than he’d ever needed anything in his life.

Still, he stayed calm. “Well, look,” he said casually, in a friendly manner, even, “I know you well enough, from how we’ve talked, to know that you don’t want to live your life constantly worried about every little thing. I know what it’s like for people with anxiety, and it’s a hell. Yes, I’m using that word, hell.” Now to push it to the finish line. “The medication I have in mind will tackle your anxiety head-on. I’ve had nothing but good results from the folks that have signed on to it.”

She looked down at her feet and fidgeted, obviously in thought. As she did so, Dr. Wilson imagined himself racing through the forest, chasing down and then overtaking a deer before ripping it apart as he devoured it.

Finally, after a few moments, she looked up, smiling hesitantly. “Okay. Okay, I’ll do it. What the hell, right?”

Dr. Wilson smiled, working hard to restrain himself and to assure his hunger.

She got on the medication the next day. It immediately had an effect, and she even called Dr. Wilson’s office two weeks later to say how the medication had been life-changing, how it had wiped out her anxiety practically overnight. Dr. Wilson didn’t particularly care how it had helped her, but he did care that progress was being made.

She was dead the next morning. Heart attack. Dr. Wilson knew, as he felt the life leave her body twenty miles away from his home, that the autopsy report would reveal nothing indicating foul play. Of course not. The spores were too good at what they did.

A week after she died, he went to work - as always - and went through a number of sessions with a number of patients. He listened to their problems (which he didn’t really give much of a shit about), and gave suggestions (many of which were meaningless and would do nothing to actually fix the stunning vapidity of their inane lives), and much else. He, of course, prescribed that special medication to the ones he chose, the ones who were full of life and health and vigor. That, and he fed. Oh, how he fed.

He drove home quickly, eager to unwind. As he neared home, he fidgeted more and more as his discomfort grew. He had to get out of these clothes. Out of this form. He finally pulled into the garage and raced into his house. He had barely finished closing the door to the garage behind him when he practically ripped his clothes off and let his body truly transform. He felt his bones crack and break, the pain so exquisite, as his bones radically changed shape and length and his skin began to boil and drip as its character and substance changed at the molecular level. He screamed in joy as the shift continued. Then, just as sudden as it started, it was complete.

He peered at his living room with his multitude of minuscule eyes, skittering across the hardwood floor with his incredibly thin and bony multiple legs. He loved his legs - it was so hard getting used to a mere two of them to get around on in the outside world, even if he’d been using that form for his entire life in the human world.

In his mind, he peered into the consciousness of the spores heavy at work in Abigail’s corpse, now sealed in her casket, buried safely at the cemetery. They were at work - oh, yes. They ate, and they ate, and they ate, filling with sustenance. As they fed, so he was fed. He giggled, it coming out as a harsh, buzzing scratching noise.

Climbing into his nest in the attic - the space completely barren except for his vast web of the all-too-quickly hardening fluid he dispensed from his limbs in this form - he felt it. He felt the spores in his other patients at work, the ones who had taken the medication he prescribed to them. He felt joy rise within himself as he knew how it would all go. They would soon be dead and he would be fed thereafter.

Some days, he was hungry. Other days, he was quite full.

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malcolmteller-blog · 8 years ago

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[HORROR] The Remote

Alex never asked for the family he was born into.

All his parents did was scream at each other. All day, every day, it was how Mom was a conniving bitch, and how Dad was a shiftless deadbeat. Her ending the night with endless sobs, and him muttering about how he had no idea how he ever could have married her.

Every. Fucking. Night.

It was hard enough being a sixteen year old - nobody at school really liked him, he was anxious about college, and he just knew that Allison Mensch would never go out with him even if he did muster up the courage to ask her. Put plainly, life sucked.

Then he found the remote.

It was along the road as he was walking home from school. He was looking up at the sky, imagining the clouds forming into different shapes when his foot kicked into something hard. Looking down, he spotted it skittering across the cement sidewalk. A sleek, thin, silver device that was, for all intents and purposes, a remote control. Stepping over to it, he reached down and picked it up, peering at it closely. It had only two red buttons on the front, and was entirely non-descript all over the rest of its body except for a nearly-completely peeled off sticker on the back. Alex squinted, reading what was printed on each of the buttons. It was simple - one button read PLAY, the other read PAUSE. Glancing at the sticker on the back, he noticed that it read, “DO NOT MISUSE.” Not knowing what to make of this, but thinking that this was a pretty neat find, he shrugged and, opening his backpack, slid it in, and then closed the bag and continued on toward home.

When he got home, there was an upset, to say the least. Alex’s mother was in the kitchen in tears, screaming at her husband that he was cheating on her. Dad was screaming back at her that she was nothing but a crazy bitch.

“Don’t fucking lie to me! I’m so sick of your goddamned lies!” Alex’s mother shrieked at her husband.

“What do you even want from me? I can go out for drinks with whoever I please!” Dad bellowed back.

Alex didn’t make out what was said after that as he quickly hurried upstairs, the pressure of the fight getting to him. It always got to him, in the end. Every day, the screaming and the fights would rattle him so much, chipping away, bit by bit, at his nerves. Not only that, but it was exhausting. He found himself wanting to go to bed earlier and earlier, just to put this day behind him and speed on towards the next one.

So it was that Alex shut himself in his room, and eagerly ripped open his bag to pull out his new find. He held it in his hand, weighing it. It was light. It was also smooth, so smooth that it felt kind of slippery. As he handled it, his parents’ voices rose higher and higher, and Alex closed his eyes, taking deep breaths. It didn’t calm him. His parents’ screaming, furious voices pierced deeper and deeper into Alex’s psyche, until he felt tears welling up in his eyes. Finally, he clenched his fists instinctively, venting the stress and anger he felt. As he did so, his thumb accidentally hit down on the PAUSE button on the remote.

His parents’ voices froze instantly.

Alex’s head jolted up immediately, casting a glance toward the door. Standing up, and then slowly realizing the chain of events, he looked down at the remote control, then - not knowing what to think - slowly back up at the door. Approaching the door, he reached out and gently took hold of the knob, and then slowly - cautiously - turned it.

Opening the door ever so slowly, and stepping out onto the top of the staircase, he listened closely. He didn’t hear a thing. That was unprecedented in his house. He began to step down the stairs slowly, but then fear and angst caught up with him, roaring into his heart like a bulldozer, and he tore down the stairs and then toward the living room, screaming for his Mom and Dad.

When he burst into the living room, his eyes went wide with shock. His mother and father were frozen in place. His father’s hands were up in the air, his eyes wide and bulging. His mother’s hands were covering her mouth, with tear droplets frozen in mid-roll down her cheeks. As Alex stared in shock, he managed to notice something through the window. It was a crow, flapping in the breeze. It too was frozen, its wings stationary in the air, mid-flap, along with the rest of its body.

Alex’s heart was beating so fast right now, and his mouth was parched dry. What the hell was going on here? What was happening? As fear began to slowly overtake him, he slowly looked down at the silver remote control in his hand. He stared at it for a long, long time, and then a thought occurred to him. Glancing back up to his parents, he moved his thumb to slowly hover over the PLAY button. Then, his eyes wide as he watched both of them, he pressed down on it.

Immediately both human beings moved into action, yelling and screaming at each other as if nothing had interrupted them. Alex stood there, stunned, watching all of this play out. Turning and quickly heading back up to his room unnoticed, he closed his bedroom door behind him and went and sat on his bed, staring down at the remote in his hand, working out what to do.

Over the next week, he tested the remote out numerous times. Pause and Play, Play and Pause. It worked perfectly, every time. Not only that, but you know what? He loved it. Finally, he could shut down all the noise, all the anger and vitriol and horribleness from his parents. He could do it, and he did. For the next month, he would routinely freeze them - and the world along with them - for a good few hours straight, basking in the peace and calmness that was utterly devoid of the tension which he had been forced to live with.

It can’t be overemphasized the positive immediate effect this remote had on Alex’s life. He had grown up in a household filled with rage and angst and with no love between his parents. In his childhood, preteen years, and then adolescence, this ate at him. He had grown numb and, yes, broken on the inside. Now he could shut it all out, and have the world revolve around him, just this once.

So he used it, and he used it plentifully. He would stroll around town, sleep in his bedroom with beautiful, blessed silence. After a while, it started to get addicting. That led him more down the path he would go down in the end.

As he was using the remote, it did occur to him that there could be consequences to this. After all, this remote had some vast, unknowable power, and he had found it out of nowhere, not to mention the warning sticker (which he’d long since lost). Maybe it was best to leave well enough alone? Maybe if he kept using it, very bad things would happen? Alex thought about this a great deal, and every time he thought about it, he concluded with ‘Fuck that, this is mine and I get to decide how to use it.’

That attitude stayed with Alex and became entrenched in him, and very soon he got cocky. Well, cocky and arrogant. After all, he’d been given a gift - why couldn’t he use it to get his? After all, he did deserve it, didn’t he? He’d been through so much, so as far as he was concerned, this was what he was entitled to. This drove how he acted from that moment forward.

He started testing his luck. Small things at first. Taking money from an open till at a diner across town, and after that, escalating to taking copies of upcoming exams from his teachers’ desks at his school. No more worrying about college, he assured himself.

Every now and then, as he moved about when the world was frozen, he noticed odd things. The air seeming to ripple. The hairs on the back of his neck standing up on end and this nervous, gnawing feeling eating away at the pit of his stomach. Then, just as he started to focus on them, the odd things would stop and the discomfort would disappear. So it was that he’d shrug his shoulders and carry on with his life and activities.

Now, this had an odd effect on him. It felt liberating! It made him feel powerful. Who could stop him? Who could even know what was happening? Happy and arrogant, enjoying the fruits of his illicit labours, he took it a step farther.

The next week it took him a full day with the world frozen to get the two giant sacks of cash from the bank back to his place, and then to find a place to safely stash it all. He had plans, alright: graduate high school, then move far the fuck away to college, and be set for life.

He was caught up in all this, definitely. He was so caught up that he didn’t notice, not until it was too late, the weird things happening when the world was frozen. The grass and trees swaying ever so slightly, as if something was moving in them. The soft, low grumble of a growl, almost as if from that of a hungry animal.

It was three and a half months into his time with the remote that he started to notice things. By now, he spent more time with the world frozen than not. He just liked it better this way. Fuck everyone else, right? He’d unfreeze the world when he was good and ready.

Something happened, though. Something very, very bad.

Alex was walking home after having smoked cigars in the office of the CEO of a multinational corporation based in his city, when he decided to unfreeze the world. Casually sliding the remote out of his pocket, he absentmindedly hit PLAY.

Nothing happened.

Alex froze dead in his tracks. He looked around and grew increasingly more and more nervous as he noticed that everyone and everything was still frozen. He jabbed at PLAY again and again, harder and faster each time, more and more desperate each time. Soon, he was gripping the remote in both hands, staring down at it in horror. Jesus *Christ, what the fuck did I do!?* he thought to himself in world-shattering panic.

Hours later he was home, in the luxury apartment he’d bought with his ill-gotten gains, pacing back and forth, his nerves wracked and frayed to their breaking point. Tears welled in his eyes and he felt that tense, gnawing worry pulse through every portion of his body. No, no no no, how the fuck could he fuck up this bad? He’d pressed PLAY over and over between earlier that afternoon and where he was now at home. It didn’t work. It didn’t fucking work. He was at his wits end. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t dare try to open up the remote to see if he could fix it himself. For one, there were no seams in it which indicated that there was no way to actually open it short of literally cracking it open. There was no way he would do that - if there were ever any chance of him fixing this thing and getting it working again, cracking it open would wipe that right out.

So he did all that he could do - he tried. He tried again, and again, and again, to unfreeze the world by hitting PLAY. He tried for a full week and a half, every day, multiple times. It still didn’t work. Not once.

Alex did start to come to terms, even if only unconsciously, that he may be stuck in this state forever. That he may well have broken the world. He didn’t focus too much on that, though. He didn’t focus on that because he very quickly had other concerns to occupy his attention.

He started experiencing terrors throughout the day. Terrors were the best way to describe them. He would be walking along, somewhere in town, and then he would get that nervous feeling out of nowhere. The hairs on the back of his neck standing up, chills racing through his body, and then - so, so strangely - images and thoughts of mutilated bodies and animal carcasses flashing through his mind. At this point Alex would start walking more quickly, looking around and behind himself anxiously every few seconds. About half a minute after that, the tension steadily increasing, he would get hit by a very real and raw RUN! feeling. Then he’d be off. He would run across town, his legs pounding into the pavement as he pumped them as hard as he possibly could, the adrenaline carrying him for entire city blocks.

Naturally, Alex wanted to figure out what this was. Thing was, he couldn’t. As the world was frozen, the Internet - and all the various constituent parts that constituted it, both hardware and software - was frozen with it.

So he was stuck. Maybe if he could have learned more about what was happening, he’d have figured something out. Maybe he’d have stood a chance. At this point, though, we’ll never know.

The terrors started happening with increasing severity as he walked about outside, so he started staying inside. That didn’t help, though, because they followed him home.

He’d be laying in bed, his covers pulled up to his chin, terror-fueled tears streaming down his face as his body was wracked with terrified sobs, and they’d happen. Not just the feeling of the terrors, though - remember the thoughts and images he’d have of horrible things? Bloodshed and corpses? They escalated.

One moment he’s in bed, staring at his ceiling, and the next he’s in a dark, wet room, with rusted steel walls stained with dried and rotted blood. Hanging from the ceiling by the wrists is a man, naked and riddled with bloody cuts and gouges. Alex stares at the man in sheer horror, gazing on the agony painted onto the man’s face, and as he stares, he sees an invisible force rip a massive chunk of the man’s side out, causing his organs and blood to gush out like water. As Alex begins to scream, the man’s eyes - both of them individually - split in half, and blood gushes out of each of them. Then Alex wakes up.

That was just one of the visions Alex would have. There were more. Many more.

How did Alex deal with this? Unable to cope, unable to just deal, he found himself a wanderer, keeping on the move just to keep the terrors at bay. They didn’t stop, though. They kept getting more and more frequent, and more and more closer. Terror striking his entire being more and more, until it was near-constant. Not only that, but the things he would see. The places he would be plunged into inside of his own mind. The monstrous dog ripping apart a living corpse, constantly growling. The pristine, beautiful luxury penthouse suite that would appear lovely and peaceful for a few wonderful minutes, until the walls and blinds beginning to bleed blood and a vicious force rushing toward Alex would force him awake, screaming.

This ate at him in a way that can’t be described. He stopped sleeping. He stopped hoping. Every hour of every day and night, he wished that he believed in God so that he could have some hope for rescue. Weeks and months passed, and the terrors and visions never stopped, and with them, the sense that something bigger and far more terrible was coming.

By the time he was in the second month, he’d long since lost the remote, and with it any remaining hope of freeing himself from this hell. His nerves were frayed and broken to the utmost. He would walk through town, his eyes shot wide open as he twitched continuously, stress and anxiousness pulsating through him like the blood in his veins. He would be constantly glancing around himself, always so sure that he had just seen something move, maybe in the wind, or that he’d heard a growl, but always being proven wrong. So it seemed.

It got to the point where the terrors started to come less and less, but only because Alex was constantly expecting them. By now he had more or less come to terms with the fact that he was going to be here for the rest of his life, and that through his arrogance and carelessness he had broken and thus doomed the world. It is not correct to say that he had made his peace with it, because he hadn’t - there was no peace in his life. He was driven near-mad with a twisted combination of sheer, overwhelming guilt and self-justifying rationalizations meant to rid himself of that guilt.

So it was. The terrors came and the terrors went, and the visions came and the visions went. It almost appeared to be routine, later on. Alex certainly thought so. Then the things out there decided to stop playing.

Alex was walking somewhere along the Pacific coast, and it hit him hard. The crushing weight of terror and fear, the overwhelming panic. It all sent him running as fast as he could, running like the devil, desperately hoping to escape whatever it was that might catch him.

Then, before he knew it, he had burst into… a dinner party? A vast, gilded ballroom, with the ceiling as high as anything, and filled with people in exquisite gowns and tuxedos, dancing the night away. There was laughter. There was peace. The soft, gentle music filling the room as Alex’s face were wet with tears of pure despair, he glanced around, not knowing what to expect. Then it happened. A young woman - white, thin figure, short blonde hair done up nice, looked to be in her thirties - in a white ball-gown looked over at him, smiling gently and warmly.

“Hon, are you alright?” she asked, a slight Southern tinge in her voice. As she smiled, it happened. A number of… Alex didn’t know what they were, began to gush out of her mouth. As they did, they swarmed over her body, biting and gouging so, so deep. As Alex looked on, he noticed this happening to all of the other people in the ballroom. What was so odd and insane is that they stood there, just… accepting it, as if this was their fate and they were fine with it. The gouges and bites grew deeper and more numerous, and soon blood was gushing out of everyone from all over, making their suits and gowns slick and wet and saggy with the massive amounts of blood.

Alex focused in on the woman who had spoken to him. Her eyes had been eaten out by the monstrous insects, and one of them was perched in her left eye-socket where the eye had been. Horrifyingly, she smiled even wider, and then, opening her mouth to reveal a veritable horde of those insects that couldn’t be insects, she grasped Alex by the neck and pulled his mouth to hers in an open-mouthed kiss.

Alex woke up on the beach screaming, tears streaking his face. His heart was pounding harder than it ever had before, and the sun was high in the cloudless sky, shining light and heat down onto him. As he looked out onto the ocean, panicked to hell and back, he noticed something. He noticed the ocean rippling. That… that was impossible. Everything was frozen, it was fucking impossible. Then behind him, he heard something. Almost… no, couldn’t be. Shooting up and swinging around, he noticed something… a slight wind, almost, causing the sand grains on the beach to start to swirl around. As they did, he felt the terror come to him. It rose and rose in intensity, the panic hitting his heart, every hair on him standing up, him desperate to do anything to survive, and the rabid, anxious desire to just run. He didn’t run, though. Maybe deep down he knew it wouldn’t do him any good.

Then he heard something. He turned around, and didn’t see anything. Nothing except for the water rippling in a slight wave now. Then it came at him. He never saw it, but it was there, and when it got up nice and close, it opened up, and…

The world unfroze shortly after that. The disappearance of Alex was treated as a serious matter. The police devoted a vast amount of resources to finding him - after all, he was a minor, and it had become a major media item. It in particular became a massive media item when the police eventually located a vast stash of stolen goods and stolen cash stashed at various hideouts of his. Numerous questions abounded. How the hell did he get all this cash, presumably the cash that had mysteriously gone missing from the bank vaults a week or so ago, without getting caught or noticed? How did he get all of these stolen goods without getting caught?

In the end, Alex was never found, and as a result, the case was closed. The matter of Alex’s ill-gotten gains became a peculiar mystery for believers in the strange and mysterious. As for Alex’s parents, it was the disappearance of their only child that broke the ice between them, finally. They finally saw themselves for what they were - two broken and hurting people who had only ever hurt their son in their mad, desperate drive to hurt each other. It was too late, though. The damage was done, and add to the plate what had happened to Alex, and well… Within a year, they were divorced. Alex’s mother moved across the country, his father moved back to Italy, and they never saw or spoke to each other ever again.

The remote was never found. Just as good. As the world unfroze, the things that lurked in the background of the world - of reality - lay dormant. Just as good.

Just as good.

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malcolmteller-blog · 8 years ago

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[HORROR] The Suit

Jared had just finished tying the tie when he reflected on how he came into this amazing fortune. He didn’t believe his luck even then, and he definitely didn’t believe it then when he found the suit in the consignment store down on 5th. He’d been going there for the past while, trying to drown the feelings of inadequacy and despair that had been plaguing him. A year out of university, still couldn’t find anything past retail, and add to that the woman who he wanted to marry leaving him, it wasn’t good. He reflected on how around that time, he’d started thinking about leaving everything behind one day, one way or another. Either by up and leaving this country, or leaving this world through the morgue. Either appealed to him.

The suit, though - the suit. Sleek, black, slim, and practically shining. Just hanging there in the back row of the back of that old thrift store, the one that constantly smelled like the 1970s and that looked about as much. He’d been browsing, idly - no intention of buying anything. Just trying to see all the neat things that were there while he imagined himself buying something. It may sound odd, but it was comforting in a weird way. Then… then he saw it.

Brushing his fingertips along the arm of it, tasting the fabric with his touch, he was struck by how soft and light it all felt. As he looked at it, he imagined himself wearing it, how professional and great he’d look. Try walking into an interview that that on! That was when he knew he had to have it. He felt it, deep in his bones. He glanced at the price tag and cringed. It cost a bunch, way more than you’d expect from a place like this. Still, though…

It took him about an hour to get home on transit with the suit. He headed straight home without making any detours. He was that eager to try the suit on for the first time.

Getting home at around five-thirty in the evening, he quickly got into his apartment, shut and locked the door, and then practically raced into his bedroom. There was something about this suit - he just had to have it on him, had to see what it was like. Within minutes, he had stripped down to his underwear and was then putting the suit on. First the exceptionally thin, black dress socks, and then the pants, that fit him just right, not too tight or too saggy. The belt, with the plain, pure-silver buckle. The dress shirt, with its barely visible patterns woven into the fabric. The tie, with its criss-cross patterns of grey-silver bars, and finally, the jacket - dark, foreboding, intimidating and impeccably professional.

With the suit on, he stood back and looked himself over in the mirror. As he looked on, he felt himself fill up inside with joy and pride. He looked amazing. The suit fit him to a tee, and not just that, but vastly enhanced not just appearance, but - he could just feel - the vibe he gave off. He also felt how he looked. He wasn’t some shmuck who couldn’t get a job with his BA, or who got abandoned by the woman he loved more than anything. He was a real man, a real piece of work who would grab the world by the horns and make it submit to him instead of the other way around.

Anyways, he’d finished trying it on, more or less, so now was the time to take it off, hang it all up, and save it for a special occasion. Unless…

He couldn’t, he found. He just couldn’t. This was just too good a suit to have it just hang in the closet for the next two months or however long it took for him to get a job interview. He had to show it off, really impress the world! Before he knew it, his mind was made up - yeah, he’d take it out for a night on the town.

An hour and a half later, he was strolling down Main Street in the downtown core. The moon was hanging high in the air, with the glitzy and glamorous lights of the street and of the stores aligned along the sidewalks punctuating the darkness. The sidewalks were abuzz with people of all sorts, from all walks of life - hippies, business people, students of all age ranges, and more. The city was alive, and Jared loved it. More than that, Jared was alive, too, in a way he never had been before.

Moving amidst the crowd of people in a brisk stroll through this urban nightscape, Jared felt like a king. The suit made him feel empowered. It made him feel like he could do anything, be anything, accomplish anything. His heart thundering with power and his body pulsing with barely contained energy, the suit made him feel like he was the man he’d dreamed of being his entire life - someone in charge, someone people respected and admired.

If only Marcy had respected him that way.

His thoughts drifted over to Marcy and everything he’d given for her. Her shy, almost nervous look that concealed a powerful self-confidence, and the sheer energy with which she tackled life and everything in it. Their bodies tangled together, naked and sweaty, in the middle of the night as the sound of their breaths filled the bedroom they both occupied.

Then it ended. No fanfare, no drama. She just said she wasn’t satisfied, and left. Word on the street a week later was that she’d already found someone new, a stockbroker named Andrew. Jared had then looked him up on the popular social media network that he liked to use - he was good-looking, had it together. Looking at his photo, he hoped he’d make Marcy happy.

To say he was shattered over the breakup was putting it mildly, but he dealt with it. He didn’t beg her to come back because he knew she never would. He just accepted it.

Now, though, now he was angry, which was odd, because he’d never felt anger toward her before, even with the pain she’d brought him. After all, he wasn’t entitled to her love - he knew that much right off. Even still, with the suit on and him feeling like the champion that he now knew he finally was, he found indignation rise in him. Who the hell did the bitch think she was, anyways? Stealing those years of his life, and for fucking what? Just to run off with some asshole?

As he finished crossing the street on 18th, Jared’s eyes widened and he became vividly aware of the beating of his heart. What was going on? He’d never thought of Marcy that way before. He realized, though, that he was angry. Not even just angry, but furious. Forcing himself to keep walking, it all flooded into him. This world, this miserable fucking world, with all of its bullshit people and its bullshit systems. Maybe it would be good if this whole damned shitpile was drowned in nuclear fire, he thought to himself. So there he was, walking the town, and feeling his fury rise more and more inside of him.

As he walked, he tried to keep himself under control, keep his emotions level. He couldn’t, though. He felt as if he wanted to kill someone. As if he needed to vent this anger somehow. Something was changing him, that much he was sure of, but he didn’t know what. Trembling with rage, he walked and walked, and as he did, something dawned on him. He was realizing that he was hot, just too damned hot. Wiping his brow with the back of his hand, and loosening his tie, his eyes darted around where he was. He needed to get something to drink, needed to cool off. Finally, he spotted it - a bar. Yeah, he could get some water from there, then start to head home.

Half a minute later, he was in the bar and talking to the bartender.

“Hey, could I get some water? I’m fuckin’ parched,” Jared rasped, his throat scratchy. The bartender cocked an eyebrow, but after a moment nodded. As Jared waited, he wiped his brow again. This time it was actively damp. He began drumming the wood of the bar with his fingers as he waited for the bartender to get back with his water. As he did so, he realized that he could barely control his anger. Sooner or later, he’d go off on someone. He needed to, he was realizing.

As he was starting to worry about this, the bartender got back with a damp glass of water with some ice cubes in it. Jared smiled eagerly, nodded in thanks, and grabbed the glass and began to drink from it.

As the cold water hit his tongue, and then raced down his throat in huge, desperate gulps, it was as if Jared’s entire body breathed a sigh of relief. That was it, yes, that was it! Just what he needed. His body started to cool down, as his throat got more and more lubricated, and, oddly enough, his emotions began to level out, too. After another minute or so, the water was gone, and Jared felt himself to be more cooled down, and more level. With that, he turned to leave and began to walk toward the exit.

As he moved, a person coming into the bar - short, skinny, curly-haired and with a mousey face - with a young woman by his side - blonde hair, early twenties-looking, probably the guy’s girlfriend - bumped into him, and as he did so, shoved him to the side with his arm. As he did so, he snidely snapped at Jared to watch where he was going before turning to his girlfriend and laughing with her over it.

Jared had felt level. That changed. He began to think ’Miserable motherfu-’ but didn’t finish his thought before he had deftly reached over to a nearby table, grabbed hold of a wine bottle by its neck, and - as hard and fast as he could - smashed it over the man’s head. The glass exploded as it impacted with his head, and the man immediately tumbled forward and then collapsed to the ground in a heap. As Jared stare down at the man’s body, he noticed it lay motionless. The woman quickly dropped to her knees and began yelling.

“Johnny? Johnny!? Johnny, can you hear me!?” Her voice was fraught with fear and despair. She was really scared she might lose him, Jared thought.

He didn’t stick around to find out for sure, though. By the time half a minute had passed he was a block and a half down the street, his feet smacking the pavement as he pushed himself to run as hard as he possibly could. Finally, when he was a good distance away, he slowed down, leaning against a wall. Panting hard, he glanced back at the way he’d came, an idiot grin on his face. When he had started his night on the town, he felt alive and he felt like a king. Now, he felt like a god. That miserable piece of fucking garbage, Jared thought to himself, try to fuck with me, did he? He replayed the events over in his mind, and as he did so, started to giggle wildly. He was so damned happy! He’d never felt like this before - in charge, powerful, dominating. As he soaked up the power and assurance of these feelings, he - oddly - felt his bitterness rise in concert. His eyes casting a wide glance over the people passing him by, back and forth, he found himself wanting to strangle each and every one of them, and as he did so, he felt something akin to a hunger. He needed to do something, to vent his anger, to be the man this suit had made him into. He had no idea what was causing him to change like this, nor would he ever, even when the change had finished its imprinting onto him once and for all.

It was hard to describe what he was feeling. It was sheer, raw fury, along with a desire to hurt. Very quickly, Jared had decided he would commit some form of harm tonight. Part of him - a very small part - was begging him not to, as he leaned on the wall panting. He didn’t listen to it, though. He couldn’t. He felt the thirst like he never had before. Not just that, but that which was changing him was feeling an even stronger thirst, needing to be fed from Jared - and feed it would.

Jared realized what his course of action would be when he saw a certain someone pass him. White button-up shirt tucked into grey suit pants, cell phone to his ear, grin on his face. It was Andrew. The same Andrew that took Marcy from him. Jared felt rage rise within him, yes, but that wasn’t what filled his mind, filled his being. What filled his mind and being was a singularity of purpose. A conviction, even. Before he knew it, he was following Andrew, waiting for the right moment.

He followed Andrew for seven blocks before Andrew, checking his phone and furrowing his brow, ducked into an alleyway. Jared knew this particular alleyway - it was a helpful shortcut to the nearest subway station. Smiling eagerly, Jared followed Andrew into the alleyway.

What happened in that alleyway is not nice or wholesome in its description. What is worth noting is that Andrew never noticed Jared until it was too late, and that he never even had a chance to scream, Jared was on him so fast. The punches eventually were landing with thick, wet smacks on Andrew’s face. Finally, for the coup de grace, Andrew’s skull split open like a ripe melon with a satisfying crack as Jared smashed it into the cement ground, over and over, as hard as he could. Andrew’s brains collapsed out onto the ground beneath him, resting now in a pool of thick, dark blood.

As for Jared? Jared was panting hard, his heart pounding massively with sheer excitement and joy. It wasn’t just that it was satisfying killing Andrew, it’s that it felt like it’s what he was made for. As well, he now had a taste. He had a taste of he knew not what, but a kind of high that he knew he would need, again and again. This would be repeated, he was sure. What he didn’t know is that it would happen again because what had changed him, what had been changing him this entire night, had been fed, and would feed again.

As he stood up, the front of his suit was stained all over with blood. Nevertheless, it didn’t bother him. He began to move toward the exit of the alleyway. As he stepped out of the alleyway and into the street, there wasn’t a speck of blood on him. Not one.

He got home after about an hour. He stripped off his clothes, got into bed, and slept the best sleep he’d had in years. As he drifted off into dreams, he knew - deep down - that he’d wear the suit again. He had to, he didn’t have a choice in the matter. He was even a tiny bit aware of that.

Then the day would come when it would need to feed again, and he would feed it. Oh, how he would feed it. In exchange? He would feel like the god he knew he was always meant to be.

The suit hung there in his closet, and as it did, inside of its own consciousness, it laughed viciously.

0 notes

malcolmteller-blog · 8 years ago

Text

[HORROR] The Cable Box

Andrew turned on the cable box. It was brand new, straight from the company. He’d read up on this model from the Internet, and being the tech junkie he was, he was absolutely taken in by the rave reviews he read of it from fellow geeks on the Internet. He didn’t know what quite to expect, but he knew he’d enjoy it. It cost a pretty penny, though. It made him grateful he worked at the major company he worked at, which in turn made him grateful that he’d focused entirely on what mattered, excelling in high school, and then, in the Ivy League college he attended.

It took its sweet time to load up. He tapped his knee with his index finger impatiently. Come on, come on, eh thought. What could he say? He was eager to watch his shows.

Only, after an hour, it was still loading. By this point it was midnight, and he was tired as hell from his day at work. Mumbling angrily to himself, he went into his room, changed into his pajamas, and got into bed. It was just his luck that after not just a hard day at work, but the whole week he’d been waiting for the new cable box to arrive, it would go and pull this shit. Oh well - nothing to really be done about it. He was asleep soon enough.

The next day arrived - fucking finally. Getting up, strolling eagerly out into the living room and sitting down on the couch, he grabbed the remote and switched the TV on. Sure enough, it was the news. Now, he’d never been a news guy, so his initial reaction was that this was boring as hell, but something caught his eye. The picture on the TV was amazing, simply amazing! It was like high-def, but better - the image quality was so sharp, and the color so bright and vivid. A wide smile slowly appeared on his face as he kept watching the news, just soaking in the fact that, yes, he’d made an excellent choice buying this.

So there he was, watching the news, just enjoying his new cable box that he’s plugged into his TV, but he noticed something odd happening. One of the main anchors - his eye kept twitching. First just a tiny bit, barely perceptible, but then more frequently, and more noticeably. About twenty minutes after it started happening, he was at the point where he was twitching his neck and jerking his head. Andrew’s brow furrowed with confusion as he watched this happening. This didn’t make any damned sense - why would a news anchor be acting like that on live television? That wasn’t the weirdest thing, though - what was far, far weirder was that his partner didn’t seem to notice what was happening. She kept reading the news, smiling, and when she passed the reading off to him, he sputtered and barked out the news while jerking his head and neck violently. At this, she simply smiled warmly at him, and then back into the camera.

At this point Andrew was getting pretty damned freaked out, so he turned the TV off and decided to go do something else. What the hell was wrong with this? Must be some issue with the station. He did feel bothered, though. Especially given that he spent all this money on the damned thing. Still, he went about his day. He made himself breakfast, did some work on a major report for the Annual General Meeting of his union Local, and then headed out, having remembered that he had to drop off some government forms at various offices around town. So, he left. In his living room, the still-warm cable box sat snugly beneath the TV. As he went about his day, though, he felt chilled - this nagging tension eating at the back of his neck that made his hairs raise on end.

He got home seven hours later. The sun was low and red, shining a soft yet dull orange glow across the landscape outside his home. He got inside, took his shoes off, and casually moved over to the couch and plopped down, switching the TV on with the remote as he did so. What happened to be on was one of his favorite cop shows - the ones where they were rough, tough and gritty, and always got their guy in the end, even if they had to cross all the lines to do so. For the next half hour or so, he watched the hour-long show, enjoying the hell out of it as he did so.

Then something weird happened.

In a tense, serious interrogation scene, the lead detective couldn’t stop giggling and glancing at the camera, an idiotic grin plastered on his face. The interrogation continued as normal - the criminal started yelling that he’d never snitch, the detective’s partner screamed that he’d go away for twenty to life, but by that point, the lead detective was laughing his ass off, staring directly into the camera. No one else in the scene noticed.

At this point, Andrew was getting bothered by this. Way, way bothered. His heart started to race, and subtle yet raw fear crept into his heart and began to nest there. His hand trembling, he turned the TV off. After it was off, he quickly stood up and walked into his bedroom, trying to put everything behind him. Climbing into bed without changing into his bed clothes, he reflected on how this was just an incredibly freaky situation that he had to get away from for the moment and figure out. He didn’t think of what was happening, though. He actively tried to not think about it. In that, he succeeded, drifting off to sleep quickly. Before he fell asleep, though, something happened. His mind drifting to what he’d seen on the TV, through the cable box, he found himself - groggily, so much that he wouldn’t remember when the next morning arrived - giggling uncontrollably at what he remembered from the news and the cop drama. As an odd sort of fog descended over his mind that was in no way related to him falling asleep, he found himself utterly entranced by what he had seen.

Getting up the next morning, he went through the usual morning routine - shower, breakfast, getting dressed, the whole deal. He specifically avoided turning the TV on. He wasn't going anywhere near that damned thing. He'd seen enough horror movies to know you don't fuck with shit like that. Maybe it was an issue with the station, maybe the damned thing was haunted. Even still, he specifically avoided turning the TV on for the next few hours. Just something about it and the cable box kept him away.

That didn’t last. He went about his day, he thought about it, and finally he told himself that he was being ridiculous. After all, it was probably an issue with the station after all. So, that evening, relaxing on the couch with popcorn, he turned the TV on and, controlling the cable box with the TV remote, switched the channel to one of those Golden Oldies stations - the ones that played TV shows from decades back.

He landed on one of those family dramas from the fifties - the kind with the picturesque and perfect upper middle-class nuclear family. This was the one where the Clyde family - headed by Mr. Arnold Clyde, and his wife, Mrs. Jean Clyde, raised their two sons Bobby and Billy (teenager and preteen, respectively) and weaved through the trials (ha!) of middle-class America in the 1950s. Andrew had watched it a number of times - it was wholesome in a way he liked. Anyways, in this episode, Jean Clyde was alone in the kitchen, cleaning the floor. She was wearing one of those fifties dresses with an apron, and had her hair done up in an extremely well-kept style, the kind that only people in fictional TV shows ever had in day to day life. She had a sharp, but kind face - beautiful, in that movie star kind of way. As she cleaned the floor, she was muttering somewhat angrily - but not too angrily, this was the fifties, you see - about being left to do all the work by herself. She then stopped… and stood up, slowly turning to face the camera.

Andrew blinked. This was it, he’d had it. He reached for the remote, grasped it, and lifting it moved his finger to press down on the ‘POWER’ button. He was stopped, though, as the lady on the screen started to speak.

“Hold it right there, hon,” she said, grinning somewhat wickedly as she rested a hand on her hip. Andrew froze, his eyes widening. He blinked a few times, trying to see if he was just dreaming or seeing things. Sure enough, when he opened them again, she was still there.

She laughed a tiny bit as she - apparently - witnessed this, running her free hand through her hair. She then continued speaking. “Now, if you’re done acting like a scared little goose, we can have a nice chat.” She then smiled sweetly, the way an archetypical mother would smile to her five year old.

As Andrew witnessed this, his heart wasn’t beating hard in fear. Chills weren’t running down his spine. Oddly enough, he found himself drawn in by all this. He felt a blissful joy rising up inside of him. He wanted to see this, and wanted to hear her out. Sure enough, that’s what he did, letting out a relaxed sigh as he laid back on the couch.

Jean Clyde clapped her hands together excitedly as she saw him relax himself. “Well ain’t that a nice cold glass of lemonade! Now, where to start?” She paused for a brief moment, her eyes running across the ceiling, and then quickly refocused them on Andrew again. Smiling even more brightly, she said sweetly, but with a dash of fire in her voice, “Alright! See, hon, I’m about to start movin’ on, but before I do, I’d like to get to know you a little more. See, and I’m just gonna be honest here, I like you - a lot. I also think I can really help you out. Show you things you’ve never seen before.”

As she said that last sentence, her voice got lower and huskier. It was at this moment that Andrew, his eyes connected with Clyde’s, noticed that she was staring intensely at him, and breathing very heavily. He then gradually noticed that, and he didn’t know how this was possible, she was staring into him, if that makes sense. He didn’t know how to feel, honestly. A part of him deep down, a core part, was screaming at him to turn the cable box off and get rid of it - drive it out to the ocean, smash it with a hammer into a million bits on the pier, then dump then into the water and get into the car and never look back. He didn’t, though. He didn’t because he wanted to hear what she had to say. As she looked into him, he felt giddy inside. He didn’t know how or why, but he felt that this was good, that she was good, and that this was something he had to see through.

Jean Clyde continued. “Okay. Now we can get started.” She spoke firmly, as if she had a mission. She then casually moved over to the knife drawer - as if she was getting ready to cut a pie into various pieces - and opened it. She deftly plucked a knife out of the drawer and turned to face the camera, smiling at Andrew. She smiled brightly as she held the knife in front of her. She smiled brightly as she lifted it, and she smiled brightly as she began to cut - hard and deep - into her neck, tracing the blade into a wide cut across the entire front of it. As the blade sliced the skin open, just as if it were butter, blood splashed and rushed out of her neck and all over the front of her in a violent cascade. As Andrew watched, the one thing that he couldn’t forget later on - that never left him - was that she was smiling the entire time.

This was too much. There was the part of Andrew that wanted him to keep watching, that made him feel like he needed to keep watching. More than that, he felt a strong urge - a near-overwhelming drive, in fact - to touch the cable box. That’s all it’ll take, that voice inside of him said, Just reach out and touch the cable box. You’ll see then. You will absolutely see. He stared hard into Clyde’s eyes as the pressure built inside of him. Soon, he was thinking that it’d be fine - what harm could there be? Wasn’t it worth it to take the risk to see what this person wanted to show him? Before he knew what was happening, he found himself pushing himself off the couch and taking small, slow steps toward the TV and cable box. Then, out of nowhere, shoving forcefully from deep within him, the part of himself from deep down finally wrested itself into his main consciousness. As Andrew stood there before the couch, his mind screamed ”GET IT OFF” through his entire body. With that, he desperately grabbed at the remote and stabbed his thumb down on the ‘POWER’ button as hard as he could. The picture on the TV disappeared into a sea of darkness, as the cable box’s front lights dimmed as it shut down.

A few moments later, his blood racing and tension tightening his nerves, he got up and paced back and forth. This wasn’t good, this was. Not. Good. What the fuck was that? His mind was racing a million miles a second - why was he about to touch the cable box? As he paced, he felt terrified shudders race through his body - whatever it was in that thing nearly got him. It nearly fucking got him. Tears of pure fear welling in his eyes, he stopped and glanced at the cable box. There it sat - small, black and compact with the company logo on the front-side of it. He knew he had to get rid of it. He knew this.

By the end of the evening, the cable box was dropped beside the dumpster outside his apartment. Good fucking riddance, Andrew thought as he walked away from the box back into the building. He went to bed early that night. That night he dreamed of Jean Clyde, smiling as the laughing detective from the cop show put his gun to her head. As he pulled the trigger and the bang of the pistol firing exploded into his ears, he awoke, his eyes shooting open.

The next day was a work day. It was easy - very boring and routine, to be honest. Andrew spent most of the day going through sales reports, compiling them into a report for his supervisor. In the breakroom during his lunch break, he sat by himself and ate his lunch alone as Brenda and Ryan from Accounting gossiped about Jenny’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy with her boyfriend, and how they had no idea how she’d break the news to her husband. It was that kind of day.

Something ate at Andrew, though. Ever so gradually, as he was working on his reports for most of his day, his mind kept drifting to the cable box. His initial feelings of horror and terror aimed at the cable box were now subsiding, and being replaced by curiosity. He shouldn’t have felt curious, given what he’d experienced - not in the slightest. Yet he did. At first it was just idle curiosity, and he - rightly - shoved it down and ignored it. Then it came back again. Harder, stronger and more fiercely. After an hour, all he could think about was the cable box. Thoughts of what was on it, and what Jean Clyde had to show him, besieged his mind. His mind kept going back to Jean Clyde, and of how wondrous what she had to show him was. This was all quite illogical, but something had seized in his mind, something that even he could somehow vaguely perceive was alien to said mind. By the time another hour had passed, his mind and body flushed with the feelings of giddiness and fogginess that had migrated into his mind the night he watched television on the cable box for the first time, he had left work early to race home, desperately hoping that the cable box was where he had left it.

It was. Jumping out of his car, he raced over to the cable box and, picking it up, checked it for damage. None. Soon after, his car was parked and he was in his living room, reconnecting the TV to the cable box as quickly as he could, his hands trembling with sheer excitement and anticipation as he did so.

Minutes later, he turned the TV and the cable box on, and appearing on the screen was Jean Clyde, smiling lovingly down at him.

“I knew you’d come back, sweetheart. Of course you would have. Now, I need to show you something.” As Andrew stared up at her, he could vaguely feel the tears running down his face as her soft, loving, gentle voice cascaded over him. He knew what he had to do. He knew. He reached forward and laid his hand on the cable box. At that moment, Clyde saw it and her eyes lit up as a wide, excited smile appeared on her face. As he noticed her smile brightening even more with even more sheer excitement, he felt something. Not just the ecstatic joy and bliss that had come to him from Jean Clyde and his connection to her now. Not just that. What he felt most of all was an icy chill slowly migrating from his hand up his arm, and then through his body. At first it was just cold - like an icy breeze in the Arctic. Then it started to turn to pure bliss, as if it were morphine. The beautiful, lovely wave of good feeling radiated throughout his entire body. As he sunk deeper and deeper into bliss, he looked into the eyes of Jean Clyde, seeing her return that same bliss to him in her eyes.

Andrew never showed up to work the next day. Or the next. Or the next. No one else heard from him either. Eventually, a missing persons report was issued. When the police entered his apartment the week after he had disappeared, they didn’t find him there. They didn’t find anybody. They did, however, find the living room carpet soaked with dried, rotting blood. The room stunk to high heaven from it. Also missing, though the police didn’t know to notice this, was the cable box Andrew had purchased some weeks back. The police did launch an investigation into Andrew’s disappearance, and investigated the possibility of foul play, but they could find no evidence of anything, nor any leads, so it went nowhere. Andrew was never found again.

A week later, in Moscow, Russia, Aleksandr Korolev, a nineteen year old hacker taking a break from phishing credit card numbers from gullible Americans, was leaning back in his chair, his feet on his desk. In his lap was a bowl of chocolate ice cream as one of his favorite episodes of his favorite program finished downloading. As it started, he smiled in a satisfied fashion. Jean Clyde was angrily cleaning the floor.

Then something weird happened. Stopping abruptly, and then standing up and facing the camera, Jean smiled. Speaking in perfect Russian, with a sweet, kind-natured voice, she said, “Hello Aleksandr. We need to talk.”

0 notes

malcolmteller-blog · 8 years ago

Text

[HORROR] Love Potion X150

Sprinkle the powder into the juice. Hand it to him.

Then wait.

A week passes.

Nothing.

Anxious, rapid beating of the heart. Even tears. Can’t conceive of life without him. My last shot. My last shot. This was it.

Then the call comes.

He’s shy. Awkward. He asks for a date.

Victory.

The date is meaningful, deep. A night filled with conversation and not a single awkward moment.

The sex afterwards is passionate, deep, furious in a positive way. Hands roaming and groping all over tangled, sweating bodies, gasps of ecstatic glee filling the air. She pants for a full hour when they’re done.

The next day he makes her breakfast, and he just needs to be around her, for the whole day. She loves it.

At first.

Another week passes.

He’s loving her. He’s showing her with love. He does everything for her - cooks for her, buys her things, spends all day cuddling next to her, listening to her complain, everything. But something starts to change. He starts to get a bit too inquisitive, a bit too demanding.

Another week passes.

By now she can’t take it. He’s always dogging her heels. He can’t stand to be apart from her. At first it was cute. Then it got annoying. Then it got scary. The tears, the screaming, the threats to kill himself if she didn’t love him back.

Then, the subtle threats. The constant phone calls whenever she was out. The same cold, steel-like look in his eyes whenever they glance at each other. He doesn’t trust her, and she can kind of tell, he’s even growing to hate her.

By the time five weeks have passed since she spiked his drink with the love potion, she’s ready to go to the police. She has to leave. She has to.

She’s packing her bags in the living room, certain he’s still fast asleep, when he creeps up behind her and smashes her in the back of the head with a hammer. Knocked out cold, she hits the ground. Then he pulls out the gun.

Seconds later, the remnants of her head are splattered across the floor. A minute later, with shaky sobs echoing in the room, a loud bang!, and then he’s on the ground, too, blood slowly pooling beneath him.

Love Potion X150. Effectiveness guaranteed.

0 notes

malcolmteller-blog · 8 years ago

Text

[GENERAL] The Game

The game was afoot.

The other player was in play, so naturally, she had to be the same.

She started operating a piece, moving it into position. The other player would be crafty, so she would have to counteract and predict his moves. Gaining the resources - including the difficult to obtain ones, ones that would attract unwanted attention - she retreated back to her home-square and waited.

He struck quickly. Three college students - two males, one female - found dismembered and bled out from their throat in the forest near their university. Suspect was believed to be a young, white male, with a cleanshaven face. That was odd. He didn’t usually pick those pieces. He was of the type to use young women, college-aged, as his means of operation - he had a thing for using the innocent. He liked the contrast.

Moving into action, she acquired her resources - including her Smith and Wesson, the particularly hard to obtain one - and had her piece - a fifteen year old boy from Omaha visiting family - set out onto the streets. The hunt was on.

She hunted through the woods and the landscape of the city. No luck. Walking her piece back home, she felt him near her. Stopping and perking his ears up, she quickly ducked him into a nearby alleyway. She just barely saw him coming.

Bodies smashing against the walls, gunshots ringing out, a knife cutting flesh. It was frantic, hectic and chaotic. Both of the pieces blood was pounding, and her piece fired off his pistol madly as the other player’s piece took off running.

It was relatively difficult getting him back home. She managed to have him hide his injuries from his parents well enough. As she had him drift off to sleep, she reflected on the endless drama of this. How they had first discovered each other at the apex of Mesopotamia, back when she had first started to search for the Diamond, just as he was searching for it. Then, how he would continually bait her with the murders across the eons, trying to get her to expose herself so he could get to her playing piece of that particular moment, and through the focus, track down her location and get to her. She reflected on how she would continually force herself to play this absurd game, so that she could do away with him once and for all and focus entirely on the Diamond.

The game was complicated, confusing, and tiring.

It was fine, though. She was close. She could feel it. She’d narrowed its location down. Stuck somewhere between serendipity and eternity, and at the apex of hope, there it was. Soon, soon the Diamond would be hers.

She never expected what would happen next.

Her piece was laying peacefully in his bed, when the other player’s piece practically burst in. Kicking the door open and waltzing in with a submachine gun, he fired a steady and rapid stream of bullets into the bodies of her piece’s mother and father as they raced to confront the intruder. She had her piece bolt up out of bed and desperately reach for his pistol. Grasping it just as the other player’s piece entered the bedroom, her piece ran at his piece and slammed him into the wall. The struggle was fierce and frenetic. Very quickly, two gunshots rang out. Staggering back, her piece saw that his piece had half his head blown off as its body lay there, still and unmoving. Unfortunately, she couldn’t do the work to track the other player down. He was already well on his way putting distance between him and this space, not to mention her piece’s side being mostly blown open with blood gushing out of it in a large and rapid stream.

Disconnecting from her piece and leaving him to die there, peacefully and alone, she mused on her predicament. The other player was still out there, and he would strike again.

Nevertheless, she would be ready. The game was still afoot.

0 notes

malcolmteller-blog · 8 years ago

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[GENERAL] Love Across the Lifetimes

Love.

He died for love. So did she, and then the whole dance was done all over again.

Then they died again. Again, and again, that cruel and lovely cycle of death and rebirth and trauma and joy and then death again.

Then something happened. A quirk. A twist of fate.

She wasn't there anymore.

He was born. He lived. He strove, he fought, he conquered, all the things every person experiences in a variety of ways in the course of life.

But she wasn't there.

He wasn't aware of this consciously, but it ate at him. For all his days, he felt this nagging feeling deep in his gut. The feeling that something wasn't right.

The sense that something was missing. Something important.

Then he died. Then he was born. She didn't show up. Not then, and not for the next thousand cycles. Every time, he felt that nagging feeling. That sense of loss.

Then one day, in one lifetime, he started getting the dreams.

Oh, the dreams.

It was of him in a long, dusty, ancient stone corridor. Lining the right side were statues of him. All the hims that he had been before. The left side, statues of her. All the hers that had been before.

In the dream, he understood only vaguely, only partly. You see, there isn’t supposed to be any memory between the cycles. The closest thing is a lingering connection. It is this that he felt.

Wandering down the corridor, then walking quickly, then running, then racing, his heart beating like mad and his temples throbbing, he wondered what was happening. Before he knew it, he had slammed into a sealed stone door. Then he heard it, behind the door, soft but still audible.

A voice. Her voice.

For a brief, brilliant moment, he knew. He knew who she was.

Then he woke up.

In the waking life, going to work at the office and then doing his volunteer work at the homeless shelter, he tried to make sense of the dream. It made no sense to him. He couldn’t remember that flash of thought that blazed through his mind the moment he heard her voice, despite his numerous tries, again and again, after each iteration of the dream. Finally, he decided to consult an old friend of his, from college. She’d become involved in the occult, and was doing various work to that end to make a living.

The meeting was short. She gave him his message right away.

“She’s waiting for you, and she needs you.” His friend paused, weighing the weight of her next words. Then she continued. “You need to go. You need to. It’s your destiny, basically.”

It didn’t make sense, and she wouldn’t explain any further, telling him that she’d given him all she could make sense of with regard to the whole mess.

So, life went on. As well, the dreams increased, and increased, and increased.

It finally got to the point where every time he closed his eyes he’d see the corridor and the stone door, and hear the faint whisper of her voice.

Something had to give, and it did.

It was no trouble to get high-strength sleeping pills. Laying in bed, he downed a few with a glass of water, and before he even fully finished closing his eyes, he was there.

He walked down the corridor with purpose. As he did so, he tried to think of her voice, to hear it, and to grasp what had blazed through his mind at the sound of that voice and then disappeared the moment he awoke in the real world.

Approaching the door, he heard her. Calling to him, from beyond eternity, even. Feeling the faint trace of memory, he grasped for it. Harder and harder he tried. Finally, lighting his mind up like a Christmas tree, it was there.

Pressing himself against the door, desperate to reach his love after so, so long, he tried to see what could be done. Thinking of all that they’d endured and enjoyed together, he felt his fingers dig into the door’s material a bit. He stopped. He thought. Then, he thought some more, and more particularly.

Memories racing through his mind of countless lifetimes, and with each one, shards and chunks of the door falling away. More and more memories, racing harder and faster with his heart beating so fast, and more and more stone falling away. Finally, in a loud crash, the door broke apart and collapsed. Standing there, before him, was her.

Not her as a human would see another human, but her as she always was, always had been, across lifetimes, across eternity, radiating pure beauty as she stood there. As he saw her, he knew that as she saw him, he was the same way.

They spoke without words. He learned of her desire, lifetimes ago, to see the secret of existence, what was beyond eternity. She dove deep into her dreams, unlocked the secret memory within that had called her there to begin with, and then… got trapped. Now he was here, and all was well.

She didn’t need to say the last part. He understood. He knew he would never see the material world again. He was too far gone, had come too far. Now, only forward remained.

Grasping her hand in his, they turned. Uttering the words that finally arrived in her mind now that he was here - the only way it could ever be - the soft blue tint appeared. The one she had striven for eons ago. Stepping forth into it, they stepped into what lay beyond what mere mortals could conceive of. They stepped out of what they knew, and stepped into the next world through oblivion.

In the material world, the man never woke up. Overdose of sleeping pills. Tragic.

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malcolmteller-blog · 8 years ago

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[HORROR] The Farm

Donny had never really known a home. First it was his parents dying when he was three - before he could ever even develop real, lasting memories of them - and then him being thrown into the system. A bunch of foster homes, foster parents - including ones that liked to kick the shit out of him - and police encounters, with some convictions, later, he was eighteen years old and hitchhiking across the country with not a damned thing to his name. At that point, he was just pissed - at everything and everybody. He’d had it with everyone’s bullshit, and was liable to knock you the fuck out if you even looked at him the wrong way.

Then he found the Farm.

The Farm was a commune set up by a guy named Jonas. Just Jonas. Love and acceptance was the name of the game - putting your past behind you, starting over fresh. For a guy like Donny, well, that was a good message, so he decided to give them a shot. He settled down, got to work pulling his weight in the community, and before you knew it, he’d found the first home he’d ever known. The grass was green and the wind smelled like flowers in the morning, and the people were the most loving, kind and open people he’d ever known in his life. It gave him hope.

Then things started to change.

First, there descended on the community this cold, foreboding feeling. Like they were being watched. Like something bad was gonna happen. Donny, and others, would get this icy, chilled feeling running down their spines at various points, but especially at night, with their hearts racing and their blood pulsing. Jonas said it was just the negative energies from the outside world. That was enough for the others. For Donny, he just did what he’d always done - he manned up and ignored it. Later on, he chalked it all up to what started happening to the Farm with Jonas, which we’ll get into now.

Later, it gradually became an informal rule that no one could dispute anything Jonas said. One guy, named Phil, tried to argue with one of the leaders that what Jonas was saying didn’t make sense, and that he thought Jonas should have to answer for that. A day or two later, Phil ends up with a broken arm and two broken ribs. Everyone around him - Phil included - swears that he just tripped and fell down a hill. Sure.

Jonas started to become more and more important in the eyes of everyone. The way people started talking about Jonas - with Jonas letting, and low-key encouraging them to - you’d imagine he was Jesus Christ himself. Pregnant women asked him to bless their unborn children, men asked his permission to marry women in the community, that sort of thing. Donny even noticed, one night, a woman he’d talked to every now and then - her name was Paige - go into Jonas’ tent late at night. When he got up for an early morning smoke a few hours later, he saw her stumble out, bleeding, bruised and with tears in her eyes. He never said anything. At this point he was too damned scared to.

This all was happening, and Donny took it in stride. Did he want to leave? Sure. He didn’t know how, though, plus the fear. Finally, though - and you could say inevitably - Jonas started giving the sermons. The sermons about the real state of the world, and the God that loved them. Oh how he talked up God. How they were the chosen few. How they’d have to leave someday. Really leave, if you catch my drift.

Now, this was what convinced Donny that was enough was enough, and that he had to get the fuck out while the getting was good. So, he worked up his courage and started to make plans. He delayed, though. He wanted to get some of the other folks out, too. Particularly this woman Sarah whom he’d been seeing. It was the oldest story in the book - he liked her, she liked him, he thought they could have a life together. Maybe if he’d chosen to just get out by himself things would have ended differently. We’ll never know.

Around this time some folks started having nightmares. One couple cut their throats open and bled out right in front of their kid. Kid was so traumatized he went straight catatonic. Never said a word after that. The authorities were never informed. Of course not. Jonas said it was a sign of the corruption of the world - all the more reason to leave.

It was around this point Donny, purely by accident, overheard Jonas talking to an assistant of his. Kool-Aid. Cyanide. You can guess the rest. Well, Donny went into overdrive and convinced - so he thought - Sarah to leave with him. You can probably guess what happened next. One thing led to another, and the night Donny thought he and Sarah would be leaving, he was instead met by Sarah and Jonas.

In the end, as everyone else is drinking the Kool-Aid, Jonas has Donny on the ground with a handgun to his head. Jonas is about to pull the trigger, yammering on with some bullshit about how “negative influences must be removed,”, and then…

It happens.

It appears. God appears.

God in the flesh, true as I’m standing here telling you this. With his multiple limbs that looked like a cross between tentacles and legs, and the multiple rows of teeth and the multitude of eyes that just peered right into your fucking soul. Right there, boom.

Jonas just about shit his pants, because he never imagined that all the shit he was spouting was real. Donny? Donny didn’t know what to think, but he was fucking terrified. He could feel his blood run cold, but that was all he managed to do, because neither he, nor Jonas, nor Sarah or anyone else had time to scream.

The authorities cut through to the Farm weeks later, spurred on by complaints by concerned family members of those in the commune. They didn’t find a single person. Not one damned soul. No sign of a struggle, either. As far as anyone was concerned, everyone just up and disappeared. No leads, case closed - kinda story that happens everyday all over.

This much, though, is true: when the Farm got forcibly shut down the way it did, someone wasn’t hungry anymore.

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malcolmteller-blog · 8 years ago

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[HORROR] Finding A Hurt Angel

It was a late April evening when he found her in the woods, a mile from his cabin. She was laying in the field, one of her two huge wings clearly broken. His eyes widened as he approached, seeing how her wings - her entire body - glowed. As he approached, he could hear her mutter in pain - in a language that sounded sweet and beautiful, yet was utterly incomprehensible.

It took him an hour to get her home. He laid her on the guest bed, stomach down, and did what he could to bandage her many cuts and wounds, gold-yellow liquid - was it blood? - seeping out.

He was cooking her soup when she awoke the next morning. Smiling, with joyful tears falling down, she - in English, and a voice too beautiful to truly comprehend - thanked him. On behalf of Heaven, she thanked him. He shrugged - he was only doing what any Good Samaritan would have.

She didn’t leave then. She couldn’t. She was too weak. So, they bonded. He fed her - a fair bit, trying to get her strength up, he had told her - and they talked over his dining table. She learned that he had been out here in the woods for the past six years. Society hadn’t been good to him. An orphan and vagrant his whole life, he’d grown to despise human society, and society felt the same way toward him. It was alright, he said, he had everything he needed here. Besides, he’d left his old life - that he didn’t like talking about - behind, back in the cities.

She told him God loved him, that he’d always been loved. He listened, but didn’t. He just fed her, and nursed her back to health. Eventually, he started to feel things for her. She was truly lovely, and truly divine. With her long, slightly curled golden hair, and her brightly lit eyes that dripped with love, he almost began to reconsider his plan. Almost.

The day she stepped outside, stretching her wings and readying for take-off, was when he smashed her in the back of the head with a hammer, making her drop like a ragdoll.

It wasn’t difficult cutting her up - really, it was no different from all the people he’d done it to. Though, he was not disappointed when he bit into the first batch of cooked meat. It was amazing. He’d never thought that this could exist. Human meat was nothing compared to this, nothing. Hours later, he was finished eating, and a month later, he had eaten up all the meat he’d cooked of her.

Hanging her wings’ bones up on his wall as a trophy, he looked on them with pride. Yes, he’d left his old life behind, but something - providence? - had given him this delightful treat, where he could refresh his old activities.

For the rest of his life, he never forgot the taste of angel meat.

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malcolmteller-blog · 8 years ago

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[HORROR] The Pen and the Paper

Albert found the pen in a pile of mud as he was walking to class. It was just laying there, in the muck that he’d managed to barely avoid stepping in. He noticed it, shining bright, just laying there, despite being covered in dirt and filth. It was ornate and gaudy—looking, gold and fake gems all over. Something about it drew him to it - told him that he had to have it. So, he picked it up, put it in his bag, and carried on his way.

It was just his luck, he thought, finding a nice find like that - and at such a time, too! Truth be told, he was finding grad school to be dull at this point in his life - pointless, like everything else. Yes, it was a dream program - a PhD in International Relations, at an Ivy League school, no less! Yet… there was no joy to it. No passion. Getting up, going to class, and coming home - going through the motions to the extreme, that was his life. He had begun to reach that crucial point of enlightenment that only honest nihilists ever really reach - the one where you realize that, if you look at the world in just the right way, you see that there’s no real point in anything.

So, needless to say - anything that could distract him from this existential conundrum he had found himself in, well, that was more than welcome.

When he got home, he cleaned it off in his bathroom sink, and very quickly, it looked just like new. Bright, shining gold, the fake gems glittering in the fluorescent light. Satisfied, he sat it down on his shelf - right above his computer monitor, where he could look at it - and then, smiling at it for a moment, got to work on a paper.

Nothing happened for the first few days. He went to class, graded papers of the undergraduates he taught, and traded e-mails with his teenage sister, still living with Mom and Dad back in Vermont.

As the days went on, and shifted into night, and then back into day, he took stock of his life. He remembered how eager he’d been to get to where he was now, how he’d been such a keener his whole life. Student Council president in high school and then university. Recipient of a number of prestigious scholarships. Not just that, a joy to be around - happy, oh God, how he’d been happy, and passionate too - for the love he felt toward his parents and his sister, and the desire he’d had to make an impact on the world.

But now… now things were different. He’d wake up in the morning and feel so incredibly low, like he’d rather not even be alive. This, combined with the revelations he’d had of recent months, was gradually shattering him. You see, like has been said, he had found that he couldn’t escape that, if you saw the world in just a certain way, it was increasingly evident that there was no point in anything. Eventually, everyone would die, and they’d be forgotten. Everything done would pass away. Humanity would go extinct someday, as would the universe. Even worse, once you’d seen the world that way, you couldn’t unsee it. Everything was futile, and it was driving him mad. He would wake up in the morning and stare at the ceiling for hours, wishing he would die - that he’d had the courage to do it himself, just getting everything over with and abandoning this absurd game once and for all.

Then, something odd happened. Only a few short days after he found the pen, out of nowhere, he felt moved to write. Out of the haze of the dull, horrible greyness surrounding him, he found that urge - that bolt of energy - to write. So, sitting down one morning at his desk, and carefully - almost giddily - picking up his new pen, he put it to the pad of yellow paper before him and started to write.

By the time nightfall came, he was still writing. Stopping and looking over what he had composed, his eyes brightened as he smiled. It was beautiful. The stories, the poetry, the language - it all flowed together as if it were a lovely, righteous symphony of words and language. He never could have imagined he had this in him. Satisfied, he set his pen down, then changed, and got into bed. It took him three hours to fall asleep. He had never felt so alive! He hadn’t felt like that for at least a year.

Waking up the next morning, he felt like a changed man. He was full of energy and life, and he had seen something that he had failed to see a long time ago - the beauty in the world. The glint of the sunlight as it shined through his windows and squeezed through the cracks of his blinds. The smile of a laughing undergraduate student on her phone as she walked across the Quad. The way clouds looked in the air. Smiling as he went through his day, he felt so alive, and was certain he’d moved past the fog he had found himself trapped in for so many months.

Though… the next week he felt odd. Aggravated, adrenaline pumping, temper hot with heart pounding and blood racing. Going through his day to day life, he found himself getting angry at the weirdest things. His supervisor sneezing funny. The sounds his students’ laptops would make as they typed. The way he’d see birds fly in the air. He tried to suppress it, to grasp back at what he had before, the day he woke up after having written, but he couldn’t find it. It was gone, and deep down, he thought he knew that it wasn’t coming back anytime soon.

Finally, one day, he got home, brimming with rage from he knew not where. Sitting down and, almost unconsciously, he grabbed his pen, and began to write.

Five hours later, he looked over what he’d written. It was grotesque. Words of murder, of death, of gore and cannibalism. It was the kind of thing that might get the police looking in on him, if they knew. Above all else, though… it was a relief. It made him feel so good, and calm. It wasn’t quite what he’d had before, but it was enough. By God, it was enough. Giggling uncontrollably to himself as he climbed into bed, he drifted off into a sleep better than any he’d ever had for years.

Life went on. For the next month, he went to class, did his graduate work, and came home. Something was different, though. He couldn’t give his complete and total focus to anything else but what he had written, and had the urge to write. So, he started writing again - relieving his stress, unloading everything he had within him. He wrote, and wrote, and wrote - writing in exquisite detail about his supervisor getting cut up by a five-star chef and fed to dining high-class patrons, the meat still raw. He wrote about schoolchildren morphing into small werewolves, and sweeping through the undergraduate class he taught, ripping everyone apart, blood running like water.

Like before, him taking up his pen and using it to write everything out brought such a load off his soul. It unburdened him. Not just that, it brought him so much more.

It wouldn’t be enough to say that writing this brought him joy - that he found himself madly, desperately wishing, yearning, for it to all come to life and happen. That he had found a sweet nexus between rage, hatred, and bloodlust, with joy - oddly, absurdly - connecting the three. It wasn’t just that. It was that he was living in the darkness now. He dreamed of what he wrote, and of so many other things. Night after night, throughout his dreams, he waltzed in the midst of a dance of bloodshed and knives, gnashing teeth and barking beasts and demons.

At this point, it was clear to him that he had changed, and sometimes - just sometimes - he caught a glimmer of thought as to how. Then, he’d think about something else, not focusing on the change, not seeing it as important, because it wasn’t important to him, not really.

So he kept living his life, no longer communicating with his family because of the sheer antipathy he’d started to feel toward them, and feeling as if he were barely able to restrain himself from strangling his supervisor to death whenever they met to discuss his thesis. Above all else, he wrote. He wrote, and wrote, and wrote, and wrote.

By the time three more months had passed, he had started to change more and more - his mind was expanding, and how he saw the world was shifting as well. You must understand - what he had been writing with his pen had been evolving continually. Now - oh, now - the words in the stacks and stacks of yellow lined paper, littering his entire apartment in piles, spoke of things terrible and unknowable. He had written things dark and horrifying, secrets of the universe that no human being would dare look into, answers to questions that no one would ever dare ask.

Like was said, he had changed. Now he saw the glory and beauty in the destruction of the universe. The beauty of the mass extinction of life. Laughing to the point of orgasm every night, he wondered why it had never before occurred to him that true joy could only ever be found in hopelessness.

More than this, he saw the beauty of what was to come. Of certain arrivals.

Writing of things that no other person would be capable of comprehending - his special, lovely pen gripped tight in his hand - he would also listen. He listened very closely, very carefully, to his companion in his bedroom that only he could see. The special friend telling him of things to come, and very recently, of what to write. The friend, his four limbs lanky and dark green, boney ridges lining his neck and his chest, the multiple eyes peering out between two rows of teeth that were far too sharp. Albert would write, peer over at his guest, and giggle joyfully.

So it went for the next week. He stopped leaving his apartment. He stopped sleeping. He just wrote, and let his mind open and unfold and widen and take in everything that was being fed to him - from his own insight, from beyond, from his guest, and from everywhere else. Reaching the point of climax in his writing, the point of ultimate completion, he saw so much. He saw the point and meaning of life, as dark and hideous and funny as it was. He saw how the universe would end - and the beings waiting on the other side. Most of all, he came to know something very clearly, and just before the end, wrote it in Arabic on a piece of paper and slid it into his desk.

Eventually the police opened up his apartment after he was reported missing, having cut off all contact with everyone in his life. They found no one there. Everything was where it was supposed to be, except - oddly - that special pen Albert had found months before. They did, however, find the floor covered in ashes and burnt remnants of paper. His entire manuscript - what he’d been working on for months - was gone, sucked away into that nebulous vortex of heat and flame. They also found a smiley face, drawn in blood - Albert’s blood - on the bathroom mirror, in addition to a piece of paper in his desk drawer, with something written on it in Arabic.

The police opened up an investigation, suspecting foul play, but it went nowhere, and so it was closed.

Thus ended the story of Albert. The rest of the story wasn’t over, though.

Jenny Roberts was a happy thirty-two year old ad exec, living the high life in New York City. With a wedding a month away, and a promotion that would up her salary considerably, she was happy. She also had an amazing family, that had always been loving and supportive. So it struck everyone as a surprise, to put it mildly, when she was found hanging by the neck from the ceiling of her penthouse apartment after having cut her stomach open, her organs peeking out through the gigantic gash in her midsection.

Natalya Rhyzkov was only twelve years old in Moscow when it all started. One day she’s living a happy life - a wonderful single mother, her abusive father nowhere in sight after he’d run out on them, and a group of rock solid friends at school - and the next, she can’t sleep. She couldn’t sleep because she saw them whenever she closed her eyes - the things from beyond. The things too terrible to be described, too terrible to even be named. Worst of all, she knew - and she couldn’t ever un-know - that one day, they would come get her. This she was certain of, even after she was put on anxiety medication. Even after she was committed to a psychiatric hospital at the age of fifteen because of her multiple suicide attempts that were driven by her mad, desperate desire to escape what is coming.

Many such cases occurred around the world after Albert’s odd disappearance. A fifteen year old Japanese student cutting his throat open in the middle of an exam. An English professor shooting himself in the head in the middle of class. A woman in her seventies having a heart attack and dying promptly, pushed to her ultimate limit by the horrific things she sees every night when she closes her eyes. On and on this went, increasing more and more as the time approached.

As for Albert’s last message to the world, it sat in the evidence locker at the police station for years, until it got brought out for a certain case. Apparently one of the officers that investigated Albert had been on the take from the Italian mob for the past two decades. Who knew? So everything he had touched - figuratively speaking - got pulled. Albert’s piece of paper ended up being looked over by an Internal Affairs officer that happened to know Arabic. Reading it over, he furrowed his brow, thought to himself, “Fucking weirdo”, and put it back where he found it, closed the file cabinet drawer, and forgot about it.

It didn’t occur to him why he should care. It didn’t occur to him why anyone would write that kind of stuff in Arabic. So, he carried on his rounds, and the piece of paper Albert had written on laid dormant in the file cabinet in the police station. Sitting safely there, it read - to no one in particular - “They are coming. They’ve been looking for a long time, and they are coming, and when they arrive, everything ends and begins.”

The suicides and visions increased. With them, did the rising fruition of ultimate destiny.

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malcolmteller-blog · 8 years ago

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[HORROR] Sickness and Mom Issues

March 1

Okay, where to start? Hey. I’m Sean. This is my journal. When my mother called me and invited me back into her life (under the guise of helping her out as she’s battling the flu - I know, right?), I decided I should keep a journal about it. It’s… well, my Mom and I don’t have the best relationship. Left home at eighteen, right? Here we are now, nine years later. We’ll see how things go.

I’m keeping this journal to not just record how I help Mom recover, but to kind of chart how this all goes for me. I left home for very clear, specific reasons, and I stayed away for equally clear and specific reasons. Coming back here has unleashed a ton of emotions and thoughts inside of me, so I’m trying to not just keep everything organized, but to sort of discover myself through what I write here, if that makes sense. I want to understand the mess that’s been going on inside of me for the past nine years.

See, I’ve been struggling with the after-effects of the way Mom raised me. She was strict. Oh God, was she strict. She did provide, yeah. But, aside from that, she didn’t give a damn. Too busy with her own stuff. Too tied up in her own dreams, and the bitterness that she always felt from how they failed to materialize. I kind of wonder if me reminding her of my father is why she never got close to me, why she never showed me any real love.

I feel empty a lot of the time, not to mention unhappy. I can’t connect well with people. I’ve had relationships, but they always end after a while. My last girlfriend told me, “You just can’t seem to let anyone in. Not even me. I can’t live in that kind of relationship.” I’ve had long, long talks with my therapist about this, and we’ve narrowed it back down to Mom. He kept telling me I should go see her, and, as fate would have it, as I was really considering it, I got a call from Mom. Said she was sick, needed me to look after her. I figured, here’s my chance. I go, look after her, and maybe - hopefully - get some closure on what’s been going on.

I’m also gonna write this in a kind of weird way. This is very emotional and personal for me, and I want to keep a detailed record of everything so I can go back to it and use it to really get into myself. So I’m going to be very detailed, and maybe even literary, with my entries. Hope that’s alright by you.

Anyways, let’s get started.

I got into town a bit past noon. It was a sunny day, and everything was really bright. Driving past everything… well, it brought back memories. The old mall where me and my buddies use to hang out in when we were ditching class. The ravine where I got my ass kicked at fourteen for flirting with the school bully’s girlfriend. Oh God, Jack Lu’s house, where I vomited my guts out, drunk out of my mind, at my first house party at sixteen.

It felt so bittersweet. I had such good times here. I knew such great people. This really was home, and more than that, it never stopped being home.

But I couldn’t forget the pain that existed here those years too.

After taking my time cruising through the town, I drove up to Mom’s house. Honestly, the house still looked as it always did - paint that was chipped in various pieces and places across the house, and windows that no matter what you did with them looked as if they hadn’t been washed. Rust was visible from the metal frame of the screen door. Typical, I thought. The house looked dull and old - as if it was dying, if houses could die.

I got out of my car after I parked, got out and closed the car door. Then I stood there. I stood there for a good five minutes, trying to work out how to feel about all this. In a lot of ways, I hated my mother. Really hated. I wish I didn’t, believe me on that, but in various parts of me, deep down, I did. It was a kind of unconscious thing that had developed over time - both as I lived under her, and as I lived my life after I left home and moved to America-lite up north. That wasn’t it, though, not entirely. I loved her. Really, I did. If I hadn’t, I never would have come back. When she tracked down my phone number, called me and told me she was sick, out of nowhere, and didn’t know what to do, and that she had nobody… I couldn’t abandon her. I couldn’t. Not like that. She was still my mother.

Like I said before, a mess.

Finally, I mustered up my courage and I walked up to the front door. I gave three good, loud knocks. I waited, and soon I heard some shuffling noises, and then footsteps. Then the door opened, and there she was. Mom. So different, but at the same time, just as I remembered her. A thin, sharp face, with big, round dark green eyes, and short auburn hair tied back so it didn’t get too messy. She had more wrinkles than she did when I left, and her eyes looked more tired. Way more tired. I could also tell right away that she’d been sick. Her eyes were red and puffy, and she looked exhausted, like she’d spent a ton of sleepless nights tossing and turning, completely stuffed up.

After she opened the door, she squinted at me for a moment, trying to recognize who I was. After a few seconds, her eyes widened as it clicked inside of her head, and she smiled.

“Sean! You’re finally here!” Her voice was bright, excited. My heart lifted, and I really started to think things might finally get fixed between us.

She waved me towards the inside of the house. “Come on, get in! God, have you eaten? Here, I’ll get something.” As I stepped inside and closed the door behind myself, she rushed into the kitchen and, opening the fridge, began to rifle through it. Leftovers, of course. She was a big believer in leftovers - always had been. “Why waste perfectly good food? It’s stupid,” she’d always say.

Finally, a few minutes into me sitting at the kitchen table, she marched over with a steaming plate of meatloaf and peas. She set it down in front of me and then, folding her arms on the table in front of me, looked into my eyes, smiling at me slightly - though in a tired, weak fashion.

“So, how’ve you been? What have you been doing? Jesus, it’s been too long.” As she smiled, her face twisted and she quickly brought her hand up to cover her mouth, just before a harsh, hacking cough forced its way out of her throat.

I was concerned - I mean, why wouldn’t I be? My Mom was sick as a dog. I decided that I’d answer her question first, though.

“I’m a journalist! Mid-sized paper, up in Canada, on the West Coast.” I said, a wide smile beaming from my face. Her eyes went wide - in fascination, and… pride? I hope it was. It had been hard work to get where I was - a degree from one of the best universities on Canada’s West Coast, and a reputable and stable job at the paper.

“A journalist?” Mom whispered. She laughed, wheezing interspersing her chuckles. “I always knew you’d land on your feet. You had that drive in you. Just like me.”

I nodded, and then got down to business. Leaning in, I asked, “So, what do you need me to do for you here? I took enough time off that I can be here for around three months. That should be enough to get you well, right?”

She looked around, with this look of despair on her face, somewhat. “Well, you being able to go and get my groceries for me would be great. Just being here is a big help. It makes me feel safer when I know someone else is in the house with me, someone I trust.”

Getting the information I needed for that part of things, I decided to switch to another line of questioning. “What’d the doctor say? You mentioned it was just a bad case of the flu, right?”

She nodded. “Yeah. He said I just need lots of rest and fluids, and I’ll be fine.” I squinted slightly looking at her as she told me this. It was odd that the flu could debilitate her enough that she’d need me to look after her, at least judging from how she laid it out to me over the phone. The constant vomiting, the shivers, the fatigue and burning fever. Well, whatever, I was there, now.

We talked a lot for the next few hours. She told me about her life, how things had been since I was gone. She’d kept working at the post office, just as she had my whole life, until she had to take time off because she got sick. She gushed about her friend Betsy’s trip to an archaeological dig in Saudi Arabia, and how she’d sent back a rock that was taken direct from one of the subterranean caverns that had been excavated, a cavern dating back some ten millennia. One thing that stood out to me was that she said that when she received it, the rock still had some moss on it - fresh, as if it had never died. Odd, but, whatever, right?

So we kept talking. But all through it, she never brought up what it was like raising me. I did wanna bring up the things I’d wanted to bring up, about what it was like living with her when I was growing up. I didn’t, though. I could sense it wasn’t time.

For the rest of the night, we watched TV together in her bedroom. Eventually, she fell asleep, I tucked her in, then I pulled out the bed from the couch in the living room and here I am writing this.

I really think things will work out for the better between Mom and I. I mean, I don’t know how she’ll react when I bring up my own concerns, but I do think she’s willing to make a fresh start, so we’ll see what happens.

Anyways, that’s it for now. G’night.

March 3

So, second journal entry. Hopefully not as long as the first.

Mom was sluggish and fatigued, blowing her nose a lot, told me she ached here and there. Still, we got a lot done today. I went out and got her groceries for her. Took me about a few hours from leaving the house to getting back with everything. Had to find the damned place cause the store moved since I’d left nine years ago, but that went well. All in all, it was pretty routine.

Now, here’s where things get…I wanna say interesting, but frustrating. Laying on Mom’s bed with her in the evening, watching a rerun of one of her favorite crime shows (the one that started in the early nineties and ran for a couple decades - go on, guess), I decided now was as good a time as any to broach the subject of what I’d been dealing with on my own for so long.

“Mom?” I asked, looking over at her. She was nestled comfortably into the bed, above the covers but with a quilt covering her. She looked over at me, her eyebrows raised.

“Hm?” she asked.

I took a deep breath, then started. “Mom… we need to talk about some stuff.” I paused. “Basically, our relationship. How things were when I was growing up.”

“I don’t see that there was anything wrong between us when you were here,” she said quietly… sweetly. Like this kind of innocent tone someone adopts to make people feel sympathetic toward them. I felt a flash of anger at that, kind of irrationally, but I suppressed it.

“Mom, you were so cold and distant. It felt like I had to be my own parent. It felt…” I stopped myself as I felt my words to come out quicker, like a floodgate had been opened. Controlling myself, and looking into her eyes, I continued. “You never said you loved me. You never said one way or another that you were proud of me. In the entirety of you raising me, you never acted like you gave a damn.”

I was about to stay more, but Mom sighed angrily and rolled her eyes, looking back at the TV. “I did the best I could,” she muttered angrily.

Now I was angry. I snapped at her - loudly. “Look! I still haven’t had a healthy relationship with anyone! I have a hard time connecting with people! You need to recognize th-” I was cut off - by her screaming.

“If you want to come here and blame me for all of your problems, then just leave and I’ll take care of myself!” Her voice bellowed throughout the room. I just laid there, silent in shock. I’d never heard her scream at me before. She stared at me, her eyes wide with rage as she breathed heavily, her chest heaving up and down.

I could tell that we weren’t going to get anywhere, so I muttered something to her about how I was going to bed, and headed back to the living room. I’m upset. I am. I deserve better than this. I dunno how I’m going to fix this. I’ll figure it out somehow, I’m sure.

Something else. I think I’ve caught what she has. As I started writing this entry, I felt myself mildly stuffed up, in addition to the roof of my mouth being dry, no matter how much water I drink. Goddammit.

I took a Tylenol just now, and I’m gonna try to sleep this off. I can’t very well look after Mom if I’m down sick too, can I?

Signing off for now.

March 4

I didn’t even try to bring that whole other business up with Mom. I could tell it was pointless.

I don’t know how to feel. I’m trying to make things work, but it’s not getting anywhere. Further, I’m making her miserable, which is the opposite of what I’m supposed to be doing here.

But how do I feel about this? I’m not sure. I feel so, so fucking angry inside. I feel helpless, too. I think I’ll have to resign myself to the fact that whatever I’m looking for, I won’t find it here.

I’ll try to give it another shot, though.

But on more important and central issues, Mom isn’t doing well. She’s also acting strange. Keeps muttering random things, in between lengthy naps. I’ve set up an appointment with the doctor to get it checked out, because it’s not normal. As for me? I feel fatigued and completely stuffed up, and I’ve been blowing my nose a bunch. I’m not gonna bother going to the doctor - if it’s just the flu, it’ll pass. Besides, her health is what matters most.

Something stood out to me, though. Near the start of the day (before it blew up) she was talking about the rock her archaeologist friend brought her from the dig in Saudi Arabia. She mentioned the day she got it, and I did the numbers in my head - she got the rock about three days before she got sick. I’m probably being crazy, I know there’s nothing to it, but it just stood out to me.

That’s about it for now. Signing off.

March 5

Well…where to begin? Mom and I barely spoke today, so I decided I had to clear the air. It was the mid-afternoon. Mom was coughing and sneezing a bunch, and while I kept bringing her Tylenols and vapor rub and kleenex, she refused to speak to me. Finally, I stood in front of her and tried to fix things.

“I know you did the best you could. I do. I just…” My voice got weak - strained. “I just have a lot of issues, and I need to talk them out with you, y’know?”

She looked up at me defiant, her arms crossed. “I put a roof over your head, I put food on your table, and I was here.” Her voice cracked at this, and I could see that her eyes were shinier than they were before. “I was here, even when it was hard. Not like your deadbeat father.” My father, who’d run out on her when I was five.

I’ll need to think on this more.

Regardless, I don’t think I’m gonna find what I’m looking for here. I’ll have to work out my issues on my own.

Mom isn’t getting better. She’s getting worse. She’s starting to act more and more odd, too. She’ll stare into empty space for long stretches of time, her eyes wide and mouth dropped open as if she’s completely enthralled. Sometimes she’ll start muttering about stuff. I’m not sure what. Something about ‘the hive’. No clue what that means, but I’m not okay with it. I’ve scheduled an appointment with the doctor for tomorrow, in the late afternoon.

March 7

Really rough day today. Mom spent most of the morning vomiting, and I thought I saw a hint of blood in her vomit. I couldn’t tell, really, though. She was weak - real weak, she needed to hold onto me and be led around the house to get around because she couldn’t make it around herself. How the hell can the flu do all this?

We ended up getting to the doctor, and… my God, what an asshole. I tried to impress upon him what she was going through, what was happening to her. He wouldn’t hear it, though. Couldn’t get me out of the room fast enough.

Thus, we’re back at home.

Mom and I watched a lot of TV in her room today, as she was resting while periodically drinking large gulps of water from her water bottle on the nightstand. She told me that she ached all over. It breaks my goddamned heart. As I write this, I realize that caring for her like this is changing me. I never knew I’d feel this strongly and this warmly toward her.

I’m thinking on myself, and her role in what I’ve been going through. I’m gonna leave the past in the past. Look ahead to the future. I’ll try to, at least. I have a real chance with Mom. I don’t want to waste it.

I’m getting concerned for Mom. We’ll be watching TV, and she’ll just look at me and start rambling on about ‘the hive’. “It’s old, you know, the hive. It’s spread is inevitable. The hive.”

“What? Mom, you’re not making any sense,” I said through a stuffed up face. She looked at me in a daze, and then had a look of sudden realization.

“Oh. I don’t know,” she said, before looking back at the TV.

I don’t know what’s going on with her, but I have to find out. As for me, I’m feeling worse and worse, and I find myself thinking of the strangest things. I don’t even know how to describe them. I’ve been vomiting a lot, and I ache all over. I should go to the doctor.

March 14

Mom is bedridden. She’s about to die, I think. The gauze and bandages are wet and moldy now from when she tried to carve symbols into her arm and stomach a few days ago, and from when she tried to eat her flesh to alleviate the hunger. The hive will live.

I vomited some blood today. That was fine. For the past couple hours I’ve been focusing on the flies buzzing around the house. Some are from the garbage bags that haven’t been out for the past week, and some are from Mom. Flies flies flies. The flies carry the hive.

March 17

I don’t know if I can keep track of time anymore. Looking at people outside through the window, I get so hungry. So hungry. The hive is hungry, and so am I. To lower the tension, I cut my arm open and sucked the blood down. It helped.

Mom keeps moaning what they tell her to moan. It’s good, and I understand her. She’ll be gone soon. This much is certain.

March 19

Mom’s dead. I think she died a day or two ago, I’m not sure. I stared at her body for an hour today. The smell was sweet. Why do I think that? I wouldn’t think that before. So many things are different.

She looked ugly and bloated. Looking at her, I got hungry. Real hungry. I knew what I wanted, but I knew I couldn’t get it from her, so I went about getting it from somewhere else.

It didn’t hurt. I didn’t really expect it to. Lots of blood. The smell of it sizzling in the pan on the oven was sweet. It tasted so good, chewing on it and swallowing it down. I finished it all so quick and it was just what I needed. The breadbasket of the hive is the world. I wrapped my arm - the part that didn’t have skin on it anymore - up with gauze.

My head hurts, but not much. The hive likes me differently than her. That’s why I feel differently. At least that’s what I think in my head. Sometimes I don’t know where these thoughts come from.

I vomited blood into the toilet today. Looking at it, I saw something swimming beneath the surface of the water, obscured by the red fog of the blood. Multiple things. I giggled at it.

March 23

Consumption is imperative. Reproduction is imperative. After a long time, both are necessary. My stomach is grumbling and so is everything that I am. The hive is hungry, and so am I.

The symbols I cut into my chest are pretty. Very, very pretty. Old, too. The hive is telling me what they mean and I’m laughing.

I feel it. Buzz, buzz, buzz inside my mind, the hive goes.

March 24

I forced myself to go out because the hive wanted me to. It didn’t take long to find someone. College student, he looked like. Apply some force to the head, and he’s out cold. It was harder than I’d expected to get him back inside.

His heart was so good. The liver, too. The taste was so, so rich. I needed it so bad. But the hive was still hungry. It is still hungry. It will always be hungry, even when everything on earth is gone.

March 26

I can’t move much anymore. I hurt so, so much. The buzzing of the hive is inside my mind. It’s like a sound that I’m thinking of. Still so hungry.

Mom’s body burst open today. Flies flooding out of her corpse and out of the house. The flies carry the hive. Soon it’ll be in the air, in the water, and then nothing will stop it. The hive, the hive, the hive. Soon it’ll be nothing but.

My mouth is parched dry. I can’t move. The pain is all throughout my body, but the hive is there. The hive will always be there.

I’m tired. I’m going to let myself fall asleep now. I don’t know if I’ll wake up.

But it’s fine. It’s all fine.

I can’t stop laughing.

0 notes

malcolmteller-blog · 8 years ago

Text

[HORROR] The Day of the Dog

I’ve seen dogs my whole life.

Now, when I say “I’ve seen dogs my whole life”, you’re probably thinking that I just happen to run into dogs a lot. Not so. I mean I’ve seen them even when they aren’t actually there.

Alright, let me explain.

All of this, the unbearable horror that ended up entering my life, it all started when I was ten. I was sitting at my desk at school, writing one of my class journal entries. I’m scribbling down why George Washington was my favorite historical figure of all time, when I feel something watching me. You know that feeling you get, when you’re being watched? That. I looked over near the door, and sure enough, there were three dogs - a doberman, German shepherd, and a pitbull. Just sitting all bunched up together, their tongues hanging out of open mouths, which were open in that way that makes it look like a smile. They were panting, the way dogs do, and staring at me.

Just staring at me.

Getting excited, I laughed and pointed at them. Then I looked over at my teacher, Ms. Sangha, seated at her desk.

“You never said we’d get a dog visit!”

She looked up, looking surprised - and then, slightly confused - as she looked over to where I was pointing. She frowned, looking back at me. “Jeremy, I’m sorry?” she asked, confusion evident in her voice.

“The dogs! Right there!” I said, louder and more excitedly, the smile on my face growing even wider.

She glanced back at where I had been pointing, then looked back at me and just stared. After a moment she sighed.

“Jeremy, go to the principal’s office.”

I frowned. “Why?” I shot out, hurt in my voice. As we were talking, the rest of the class was all staring at me as if I was pulling some odd sort of prank that only I saw the humor in.

“Disrupting class like this is not funny, and I won’t tolerate it. Now get to the principal’s office. Do not make me have to ask you again.” This time there was hard steel in her voice.

Hurt, I got up and started to move toward the door, but what I saw - or rather, didn’t see - froze me in my tracks. The dogs were gone. They’d just been there a few seconds ago, out of the corner of my eye. I was standing by my desk, in shock, trying to figure out what was happening.

“Jeremy!” Ms. Sangha’s loud voice, almost at the level of a yell, jolted me out of my daze, and as I looked over at her, she was pointing toward the door with a very angry look on her face.

I ended up getting sent home from school after I refused to ‘admit’ to the principal that I’d made it all up for fun. My parents didn’t know what to make of it at first, and they especially didn’t know what to make of it when I started seeing dogs at home that weren’t actually there.

They took me to a number of medical professionals, and I got questioned a lot as to what I was seeing, as well as what I was feeling and the like. All the while - through the long car rides to the doctor, to the interviews themselves, to the long car rides home and the ordinary days and everything in between - I kept seeing dogs. All kinds. Poodles, Dobermans, Daschunds, German shepherds, and more. They’d just… be there, staring at me, constantly, with that dog-ish kind of grin on their faces. It was so odd to me, and I had no idea what was happening or going on. At the time, I just trusted that my parents and the doctors would ‘fix’; me eventually.

I got put on medication. Thing is, it didn’t work. Nothing changed. So my doctors decided to up my dosage. Still nothing. I still believed I’d turn out alright, that eventually - as long as I was honest with my parents and my doctors about what I was seeing - that I’d get set right, and that everything would be alright in the end.

Then something happened that changed how I approached this whole matter. I overheard my parents talking one night, when I had started to sneak downstairs for a glass of milk near midnight.

“What do you want from me?” my mother snapped at my father.

“Look, Shannon, you know as well as I do that something isn’t right with the boy.” My father sounded frustrated, as if he was at his wits end.

“Dammit Henry, don’t you think I know that?” Mom yelled. She sounded as if… as if she had hit a limit and couldn’t take any more.

For a few moments, except for the sound of my parents pacing around the kitchen, there was silence. Tears were threatening to break forth out of my eyes and roll down my chin, and for the first time since this had ever started happening, I was scared.

“Shannon,” Dad said softly, pleadingly, “I don’t want him to end up in some… some institution any more than you do. But if this keeps up, well…”

“I understand,” Mom said back quickly, quietly.

I didn’t need to hear any more. I silently crept up back to my room, crawled into bed, and started to sob. This was serious, way more serious than I’d imagined it, and my parents - the two people who kept me feeling like everything would be alright in the end - were at the end of their rope and didn’t know what to do. What hope was there for me then?

Then my mind shifted to how to live with what I had while not getting locked away. I very quickly decided that if the next round of meds worked, great! Amazing! If they didn’t, though… well, nobody needed to know in that case, did they?

The next round of meds came and went. No change. Though, my parents and doctors didn’t know that. From what I told them, everything miraculously changed. My parents were over the moon, and so was I, even though nothing had actually changed. I guess their joy rubbed off on me.

So it went in my life. I grew more and more, graduated from elementary school into junior high, and then into high school, then out of high school into university, and then out of university into a basic office job. All the while, though, the dogs never left me. More than that, more and more of them kept showing up over time. I’d be walking down the sidewalk and the street and lawns on either side of the sidewalk would be filled with dogs. All of them standing silently still, their mouths hanging open with them panting, all of them staring at me. Every single one of them.

There was something else, too. During the day, they wouldn’t make a sound. During the night, though? They would all bark their heads off. That part started in high school, and though I couldn’t sleep for the first couple nights, I got used to it and was soon able to sleep through it all.

Now, you have to understand, over the years I’d learned to live with it. Seeing all these dogs all the time? Didn’t bother me. It became just an ordinary part of life to me. The way I’d come to look at it, I was sick, and this would be with me for my entire life. While that did suck, at least I was able to live with it in a way that you just couldn’t with other mental illnesses.

But it did have an effect on my life and how I lived it. For one, I’d never had a girlfriend in my life. I couldn’t think of how to let them into my life and explain what I was going through, what all this was like. I didn’t really have any friends, either. When I wasn’t working, I’d pretty much be at home watching Netflix and playing PC games as the dogs in my place sat on the floor and collectively stared at me. It was lonely, and yeah, it hurt. There were times when I sobbed my eyes out in bed out of sheer frustration at the loneliness and isolation I suffered, and there were times when I - in a panic - wondered how I was even gonna make it to my senior years living like and with this. It was hard, but, you know, I dealt.

Then when I was about twenty three, doing data entry at an office job, everything changed. Everything.

I was walking to work one day, and of course there was the sea of dogs surrounding me, panting and staring, as they usually did. Something odd caught my eye, though. First I saw it out of the corner of my eye, then - it was literally this jarring - I stopped and turned to get a closer look. It was just off to the side, on the sidewalk opposite to me. It was a dog - looked kind of like a German shepherd - but with snow white fur, and very, very bright blue streaks crisscrossing all over its body fur. On its face, there was a black circle surrounding its right eye, and its eyes… well, how to describe this. They were very, very bright green. To the point where they stood out to me, even from across the street. It was almost as if they were two tiny, ball-shaped emeralds stuck in its eye sockets.

For a few moments, I just stared at it, furrowing my brow and wondering if this was my disease getting worse, or if I should just shrug this off. As I did so, I felt like… how do I put this… I felt like it was staring into me. Eventually, I guess it reached too deep into me, because I got very - very - unsettled, and quickly broke eye contact, moved my line of sight so the dog was no longer in it, and kept moving.

On the rest of the way to work, for some reason that strange dog just stayed with me, and more than that, started to kind of really creep me out. There was just something off about it, you know?

I made it into the office, and once settled into my cubicle, I went about catching up on my backlog from yesterday. I’d had a number of work projects that were starting to weigh me down, so as one does in that sort of situation, I’d been doing triage - focus on the most important stuff first. So, that’s where my mind and focus was as I got into the office - just focus entirely on this gigantic project that had a deadline three days from then, and then get the rest done in their order of how urgent they were. That’s why I was working my ass off for the next four hours, my eyes not leaving my screen and my hands not leaving my keyboard except to sip from my coffee mug. It’s why I didn’t notice that, gradually, bit by bit, all the dogs had left my cubicle. It’s why I didn’t notice that by hour four, for the past two hours there had only been one dog left, staring at my back as it panted from behind me. A dog with emerald green eyes and blue streaks all over its fur.

By the time I finished the major project, I realized - before realizing that I really needed to go to the bathroom - that I felt uneasy. Very uneasy. I turned around and, sure enough, there it was - the dog that had been stalking me on my way to work. Haunting me on my way to work. For a moment, I was unable to look away from it, as it stared into me - deep into me. What the hell was this? What kind of trick was my mind playing on me? I was confused, and but mainly bothered. Why the hell did my mental illness have to start messing with me like this? As I stared at the dog, I got more and more aggravated that I now had this curveball to deal with.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but this was the start of the road to my whole “I’m mentally ill” idea and assumption getting blown to bits.

Staring at the dog curiously for a few moments, I finally turned around and got back to work. Stupid hallucination, I thought to myself, It’ll go away soon. But it didn’t.

For the next month, this dog kept stalking me. There was no real consistency in the kinds of dogs that would populate the dogs that stalked me in my day to day life - except for this one. When I went on vacation to Toronto to see family, it was there waiting for me as I got off the airplane. When I was eating dinner with my boss on a company trip to Tokyo, it was sitting next to me in the restaurant. When I was doing anything, this dog was there. Sitting still. Smiling at me. Panting the way dogs do. Never even blinking.

This started to have an effect on me. I didn’t know why at the time, but this dog, this dog in particular, there was something about it. Like, I knew - or at least I thought I knew - that it wasn’t real, along with the other dogs I saw. I really was convinced it wasn’t real, but it… it felt real. It felt as if all the other dogs may or may not be real, but this one, this one was different. That was why I felt more and more unsettled the more I saw it. It was why my heart would race more often, and I would feel the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and I got to the point where I wasn’t able to really do my job anymore out of the panic and anxiety that would set in. It was all because no matter where I went, I was never out of this thing’s sight.

It all came to a head one night, a month after this dog first appeared. I was laying in bed at around midnight, trying to fall asleep as I was already quite groggy. Nothing out of the ordinary for me.

Then it spoke to me.

“Jeremy, do you want to see something?” The voice was slow - a bit too slow - and deep. It sounded kind of friendly, honestly - just this kind, inquisitive tone to it. Still, it shocked the hell out of me.

I shot up and looked over at it, my eyes wide open. Its impassive, emerald green eyes stared back at me. My heart was racing, and I did feel somewhat afraid. Like I said, this dog wasn’t like the other dogs, and at that moment I wasn’t thinking of it in terms of a hallucination, but as an actual real life entity. That line of thought wasn’t logical, but with my mental state deteriorating for the past month, it was what it was.

Not knowing how to respond or react, I stayed silent. I guess it took this as permission to continue speaking, so it did.

“It won’t be anything bad. I just need to show you something. It’ll be fun. You’ll like it.” It paused, then continued - and this was the real kicker for me. “If you let me show you it, I’ll go away once we’re done. Promise.”

I don’t know why I decided to trust it. Maybe it was me being groggy, maybe it was my mind and mental state having been worn down enough by that point. Maybe I just wanted to believe it, even if it didn’t make sense to. So, what can I say? I took it up on its offer. What happened afterward has haunted me ever since.

“Okay. Show me.”

Everything changed the moment those words left my mouth.

Immediately, I was racing through a vast expanse of a field, with bright red grass under a dark green sky, and I felt great. The air slicing past me, my heart pumping more rapidly than I’d ever experienced before, and my legs feeling like they could run forever, I’d never felt more alive. I felt more energy than I’d ever felt in my entire life. Though, apart from that, I didn’t really know anything at that point, just the fact that I was racing through the grass very, very fast while feeling like a million dollars. As I ran, I examined myself. Glancing down at myself, I saw… paws? Dog legs? Son of a bitch… I was a dog. Looking up again, I cast a glance to both my sides. There were other dogs - dogs I’d seen during my day to day life, for years - running alongside me, just as fast, just as furious. Looking up in the sky, I saw not just planets - a number of them, I counted at least five, looming close and huge in the sky - but odd structures. One looked something like a mishmash of medieval castles, though not an asteroid - jagged in shape and as big as a moon in size, floating high up in the sky, somewhere in sub-orbit, if I had to guess.

That wasn’t all, either. Looking ahead, I finally noticed odd, wavy, coloured lines, intersecting with each other in the air. Focusing in on them, I noticed them running into the earth and into the sky, and following them with my eyes I saw… man, how do I describe it? I saw them running and interconnecting through the earth and across the sky. I saw flashes of energy pulse through them, and then I saw that energy flow through the air and the ground, and I felt the power from those lines run through me and fill me. This was it, I realized. This had to be some… some kind of set of connections, of power and energy. Did it power life itself? I didn’t know, but I had a strong feeling, maybe even a direct understanding, that the life and being of where I was depended on these lines.

This was amazing. I felt the sheer power of where I was and what I was, and it was better than I could have ever imagined. As I ran, laughing out loud in loud, ragged barks, I felt the strange dog - the one that brought me here - run up beside me. Looking over at it with a gigantic smile on my face, it met my eyes and asked me, “Do you want to see more?”

I couldn’t say “Yes” fast enough.

God, why did I say yes?

It was so fast. One moment, I was feeling like a god, and the next… Cold. So, so cold. An empty expanse of darkness. It was like I was floating in space, except it couldn’t have been space because there were no stars. Hugging my - I now realized naked - body and shaking violently due to the cold, I tried to get some measure on where I was. No luck. After floating in the darkness for a long while, I started thinking, what was this? What was that dog getting at? Was it good, or evil, or something else? I started to get very anxious and worried, very fast, and my heart started throwing itself against my chest hard, over and over, as I tried to work out how to get out of this situation.

Then… then I felt something. This creepy, weird feeling as if something was examining me. As if I was being watched. Not just that, either. It felt like something out there was looking into me. Floating there in the darkness, feeling utterly naked and vulnerable, I started to feel real, actual, raw fear, as whatever it was that was out there peered inside of me, rooting through my innermost aspects. I felt that my thoughts were naked and exposed, even being combed through by what was out there, and so I felt very uncomfortable even thinking anything conscious or deliberate. Tears of shame and vulnerability started to well in my eyes as I felt that my innermost emotions, and fears, and desires, were deeply and utterly known. It’s hard to describe, but I felt like I was utterly and completely exposed.

Then, what was out there stepped forth.

Floating in the darkness, something started to fade into being. Then, after a few moments, I saw it fully. It was a beast. Tall, large, and twisted in form and shape. So many limbs and teeth. It was unlike any animal I’d ever seen in my life, or that had ever even existed on earth, I think. Its claws, jagged and sharp, shiningly wet and dripping with… god, was that blood? Its teeth… so, so sharp.

Horror and terror simultaneously rose within me as I gazed on this being as it approached me, staring at me with an icy coldness that stunned me to my core. I knew immediately that this was the being that looked inside of me. Then, I - by accident, mostly - gazed into its eyes.

That was what started everything else.

Its eyes locked with mine, and I really saw. I saw vicious hunger, wild ferocity, and horrible coldness. I saw, as it looked over me, something that didn’t regard me as a being of any worth — at best, I was something not worth its time, and at worst, something to be devoured. The way it was looking at me, though, I could tell immediately that it was the latter. Fear overtook me and I started shaking even more violently, tears running down my face as I desperately, madly wished I was anywhere else.

Something weird happened at that point. All this time, I was looking into its eyes. Then, it started to intensely gaze into mine. As it did, I saw so, so much more.

What I saw kept me up at night for months afterward. A wild montage of images and visions. It’s hard to describe. The blood. The flame. A woman, dressed in what appeared to be ceremonial garb, smiling serenely as she took an ornate-looking dagger and sliced her throat open, falling to the ground as a pack of dogs trotted over and started to lick at and drink the blood flowing from her neck. Beings like the beast I saw feasting… my god, the feasting… Hordes of dogs ripping apart and eating men, women and children, laughing in high-pitched barks at their victims’ screams. Not just those, either, but more, so much more.

The images and visions moved faster and faster, switching from one to the other. Near the end of it I was screaming at the top of my lungs for it to stop, but I knew that the only things that heard me scream were the ones causing it to happen. Then, as quickly as it moved, it stopped. I was back in the empty void, floating. The beast was no longer there. A dog was. An ordinary, simple looking dog. A German shepherd, it looked like. Our eyes matched. What I saw horrified me.

I saw what I saw in the eyes of the beast. It was the same.

Everything started to sink in. As it did, I started to scream uncontrollably as wild fear and panic overtook me.

As I was screaming, I noticed that I was back home, sitting up in my bed. Catching myself, I stopped, and noticed that my heart was beating wildly as tears ran down my face, vicious sobs overtaking me. Looking over to that strange dog, I noticed something. It was… laughing. Laughing, joyfully and gleefully. This little fucker had put me through hell and it was laughing.

“What the hell did you do to me!?” I yelled at it, rage boiling up inside of me.

It stopped laughing and gazed at me. “You saw.” It said it happily, as if it’d done something great.

I breathed heavily, not knowing what to say. It continued. “What existed before, long before this universe was born, will come again. After all, we’ve always been around, haven’t we?” I understood its meaning. The eyes of the beast. The eyes of the dog.

Immediately after it finished saying this, it turned around and trotted casually out of the room. I didn’t sleep that night.

After I headed outside the next morning, I noticed something immediately that jarred me. There were no dogs. I mean, outside I’d see actual dogs, that were real, but the ones that only I could see? None of them. They were gone, every single one of them.

So it turned out that I wasn’t mentally ill. I wasn’t sick. I never was. What the truth turned out to be, though, was far, far worse.

What I saw and experienced that night stayed with me. I couldn’t shake it. From that night on, for months afterward, there was this constant feeling of anxiety - this tightness in my chest and nervous fear, both of which never left. I started to see life as pointless, because in the end, it was. I knew what would happen, I knew what would come, so what was the point?

Then there were the dogs.

I’d see, every now and then, people walking their dogs, or stray dogs crossing my path. Every single time when I caught them looking at me, I saw that they were, in their own way, smiling at me. As if they were laughing. They were in on the game, and so was I.

It’s been a year since that night. I’m now in my garage, and the noose is tied and ready for me. I’ve thought long and hard about this, and I’m satisfied in the choice I’ve made. Life still does have beauty in it, but I’m not willing to stick around to see how it ends. I don’t want to be around on the day that those things show up.

I don’t want to be around for the day of the dog.

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