#*cues screaming and panic from mark and wade*

[morkiplier]

“…can I control the nutcracker?”

[forbidden-creepypasta]

Dis-Row-Roth, or: Our Vacation Did Not Go As Planned

It was my senior year of college more than a few summers ago, and I wanted to do something special to mark the end of my last semester. I came up with the idea of a camping trip. I'd never been camping before in my life, so why not. I talked my friend Caleb, our friend Matt, and Matt's girlfriend Sarah into going with me. My parents have six acres of coastal land just outside of Lompoc, a small city in California northwest of Santa Barbara, where they stay for the winter. Our campsite was at the edge of a ten-foot crag about 100 yards inland, overlooking the beach and ocean. They had an old truck camper there set up on stilts that we could use. Not exactly roughing it, but hey I never liked tents. Too flimsy. A path runs alongside the cliff edge for a while before gradually winding its way down to the shore. The only downside to the site was having to hike half a mile to reach it. After parking at my parent's house, we strapped as much crap to our backs as we could manage and hoofed it. Our first night there was pretty chilled out. Plenty of drinking, swimming, relaxing. The view was awesome, with the stars and crescent moon twinkling on the ocean. Matt and Sarah had turned in for the night around 3am but Caleb and I, still basking in the glow of a good buzz, waded along the shore. We were discussing our less-than-ambitious plans for after college when we made an unexpected find. “Whoa, is that natural?” he asked. We got closer. They were these crazy drawings someone had made in the wet sand. Nope, definitely not natural. And I'm not talking hearts or smiley faces or anything like that. This shit was intricate. Fancy-looking stars, triangles, cubes, and other shapes I could probably identify if I hadn't flunked geometry, all arranged into a giant symmetrical pattern. The detail was insane. And judging from the super-fine lines in some of the shapes, it was obvious they hadn't just used their finger to draw them. Underneath the pattern were initials: “D.L.I.” A signature? Caleb smirked. I hate it when he smirks. He looks like such a goofy asshole. “What the fuck? Matt or Sarah do this?” He half-drunkenly kicked his feet through the sand, ruining the design. “Hey man, not cool! Someone spent a lot of time on this shit!” Caleb kindly reminded me that if it wasn't any of our doing, then this anonymous “someone” was on my parent's private property. Good point. Good, sobering, point. We decided to head back to the camper. Caleb muttered along the way. “Must've been recent too. Seriously, who does that? Scribbling in the sand with, like, rulers and compasses and shit. Just gonna get washed away...” He trailed off, and stopped walking. When I asked what was up, he asked if I heard music: “Like this faint piping? And bells?” I stopped to listen, but heard only the ocean. He swore there was music coming from somewhere. There was nothing in sight though -- no people, no boats -- to explain it. I told him he was hearing things, and he shrugged it off. “Gone now anyway.” We walked the trail back up to the camper. We wanted to show Matt and Sarah the drawings next morning, but the surf had taken them by then. Matt was curious but Sarah thought we were making it up. That day went by same as the first, except we kept an eye out for any possible trespassers. When night came, things got weird. The four of us were lounging on the beach when Sarah suddenly got real quiet. Normally she's the kind of person who shares every last thought that enters her mind, as it enters, no matter how trivial. A nonstop mental broadcaster. So her silence didn't go unnoticed. Matt nudged her. “Honey?” “Where's that coming from?” Caleb and I looked at each other. “Where's what coming from?” “Those voices.” She cocked her head. “Sounds like 'dis...row...roof.' Or 'roth?' Dis-row-roth?” We're all staring at her like she's crazy when Caleb bolts upright. “There! It's back! The music!” “The fuck are you guys talking about? It's just the ocean. Or the wind or something,” I groaned. “Does the ocean have fucking bells? You hear that too, Sarah? That piping? Hm-hm, hmmm-hmmm.” He hummed out the tune with alternating high and low pitches. But Sarah was lost in concentration, straining to listen for voices nobody else could hear. Finally she stood up, said she wasn't feeling well, and headed back to the camper. Matt shrugged his shoulders and followed after her. “Aaand it's gone again. This is driving me nuts.” Caleb sat back down. Our third and final night there...well fuck. I don't even know how to describe it. We were all cooped up in the camper shortly after the sun had gone down. The three of us guys were playing blackjack on the overhead bed. Sarah was fiddling with her camcorder at the dining table, trying to explain the significance of her phantom sounds. She kept insisting it was one word, Disrowroth, that she'd heard her grandfather say before. Said it was a name from one of his made-up stories he used to tell her at bedtime. She couldn't remember much about the story aside from one phrase connected with it: “His mantle trembles under the horned moon.” “Well thanks Sarah, that clears things up,” said Caleb, flashing his stupid smirk. “I'm going down to the beach. Anybody wanna join me?” Matt and I took him up on the offer but Sarah had a headache and wanted to stay inside. We took a shortcut to the beach by climbing directly down the rock face. It's a pretty easy climb, going down anyway. I jumped the last few feet off the cliff. “Holy Christ, this sand is cold!” Should've brought shoes. We didn't do much. Made a fire, roasted some hotdogs, cracked beers. Then stretched out on the sand, just shooting the breeze. I want to emphasize that none of us were drinking enough to get blackout drunk. That's why the missing time makes no sense. That's why it was such a shock to wake up and feel water lapping at my feet. I looked around. We were still on the shore. To my right, Caleb and Matt were passed out. Sarah had come down from the camper and was furiously shaking them to wake them up. No idea what time it was. Right away, I was hit with this overwhelming sensation of “wrongness.” Everything was wrong. Sarah wasn't talking but I could tell she'd been spooked by something. The look in her eyes and her clenched teeth said it all. My two friends jerked their heads around, confused. Sarah's panic seemed to rub off on us. It was as if we'd woken up from a dream to a surreal nightmare. The ocean had grown louder, almost deafening. The landscape looked gray, glassy, alien. And it was too dark. The others noticed this too. “Where's the moon?” blurted Matt. “Where's the fucking stars and moon?” I looked up to a black void, and stammered something about cloud cover. “What clouds!” he shouted back. Then I heard it, or thought I heard it. Those three syllables, layered on top of the wind: Dis-row-roth. Over and over, like distant chanting. And I swear the roar of the ocean now, the ebb and flow of the crashing waves, had a disturbingly musical quality. Maybe what Sarah and Caleb said earlier was getting to me. Whatever the case, I felt an unconscious, primal urge to leave the shore. As in, caveman-about-to-be-pounced-on-by-sabertooth type of primal. My legs were doing the thinking now, and they were screaming RUN. They got the go-ahead as soon as Sarah pointed toward the water and screamed. Deep, guttural, a scream that peeled my skin. I looked back for only a split second. I don't know what I saw. An undefined, undulating mass -- debris washing ashore maybe? Some kind of fish? Nothing? It doesn't matter. I didn't need to see anything. We all bolted on cue, running from some vague, possibly imagined threat. I remember how the sand sloughed and sighed beneath our feet. It felt sticky, and I tripped constantly. “What?! What are we running from?” yelled Caleb. Sarah shrieked something in reply I couldn't understand. We took the same shortcut back up the cliff. In hindsight I'm not so sure it was much of a shortcut. It's only ten feet, but going up is harder than descending. The rock face bit at our feet and we struggled on the near-vertical slope. Finally we pulled ourselves over the lip and piled into the camper. Not much was said after we'd calmed down a bit. What could we say, really? I almost felt childish, although that sense of “wrongness” lingered. It's hard to describe (and I can't speak for the others), but it's like the beach, the path, the camper -- it was all there just for show, not meant to be used, and we were breaking some unwritten rule simply by being there. You know how people say “someone walked over my grave?” Well in this case, we were the ones doing the walking. Anyway, I'm not sure when the thunder and lightning started. I know it wasn't raining. When I first noticed it, I got the impression it'd been going on for a while already. Caleb had been looking out a window facing the shore when, after a bright flash, he gasped. “Oh fuck. Oh fuck.” We crowded around him. “Now what?” He told us to wait for another flash of lightning. We did, and in the next burst of light saw a row of murky figures far out on the shore. There were maybe a dozen of them, and they were just standing there. Couldn't make out any details. “Oh shit. Where'd they come from?” squeaked Matt. Sarah retreated to the corner of the bed and tucked her knees to her chest, rocking back and forth. I can't tell you how vulnerable I felt, holed up in that little camper at the edge of the cliff. At least it wasn't a tent. We talked over each other: “Are they looking at us?” “Should we leave?” “I can't tell if they're moving.” “Wait for another flash.” With the next few lightning strikes, the figures seemed to have moved closer to the shoreline. Another flash showed they were in the water. We watched as they marched further into the sea in slideshow-like progression. Flash. Water up to their waists. Flash. Water up to their heads. Flash. Then they were gone. They weren't swimming, they walked into the goddamned sea and just disappeared. The storm died out a little later. We stayed awake as long as we could before succumbing to exhaustion, one by one. I was the first to wake up at the crack of, well, about 12:45 in the afternoon actually. The floor was strewn with water, sand, and blood. Guess our feet got shredded pretty good on the cliff. There was no sign of anyone on the beach. We found traces of a few footprints in the process of being washed away, but that's it. Hell, some of them were probably ours. After the hike back to my parent's (we made incredible time, I gotta say), our little ordeal was officially over. Well, almost over. If all that weren't enough, there's one more piece to the story, and this one creeps me out the most. Matt and Sarah broke up a few months later. She'd left a box of her stuff at his place and never bothered picking it up. Among the contents was her camcorder. Never did use the thing. But apparently, that night she was fiddling with it in the camper, she must've pushed the record button at some point without realizing it. For the rest of our trip it sat on the table seat facing the wall, recording until the tape ran out. Matt played back the video for me. Nothing to see, but the audio was all there: the thunder, our shouting, Sarah's whimpering, everything. “What exactly am I listening for?” I asked. “Wait for it...” he said, fast-forwarding the footage. It was only by chance, skimming through the rest of it, that he'd found something else, something while we were all asleep. Matt, Caleb, and I maintain that none of us got up during the night. Matt had even gotten in touch with Sarah again to ask her. She said she was out like a log until waking up with the rest of us. Which means either one of us sleepwalks, or someone came into our camper. Because you can hear the door opening. The door I locked. You can hear someone shuffling around. You can hear...I don't know what the hell it is. Something squishy? And then you hear one of us -- I think it's Caleb -- talking in his sleep. Guess what he's saying? Those three fucking syllables. The magic word that got inside all our heads. And the way he says it. It almost reminds me of backwards speech (he'd later tell me he was having dreams of drowning). The shuffling resumes, the door closes, and it's back to silence until the tape runs out. So there it is. The one time I decide to go camping and it's a total clusterfuck of mystery and terror. Should've gone to Disneyland. *UPDATE: OK, sooo... this is kind of amazing. Good-amazing or bad-amazing, I'm not sure. (ever hear of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon?) Before I was prompted to write this whole account down, I tried doing some research to shed some light on Sarah's Disrowroth story. And came up with zilch. BUT, one of my contacts finally emailed me back with a hit! They found a relevant poem in a book of collected poetry called “Near and Dear, Far and Faceless: Favourite Verses.” The book has a copyright of 1956, published by Cresset Press. This could very well be the basis for Sarah's grandfather's story: Paean to the Star-Flung God From far He heard our prayer and came -- 'Twas sweet to ear; Our music, same. To ageless depths they sank, alight And stirred His dreams of Sothic nights. For long the blessings ceased to cease Till mem'ries crumbled piece by piece. Now mist at best to all but few, Our vigil lights the way anew. His tide shall taste the graven call And thirst for more ere back it fall. 'Neath crescent moon His mantle quakes -- Alas, again, what's dead awakes! Disroroth! Luna invictus! Luna invictus! Disroroth! Disroroth! Luna invictus! Luna invictus! Disroroth! Has anyone EVER heard of this name Disroroth before? Please let me know, something's come up and it's very important. Whoa, ghost town in here. If anyone's reading, I'm trying a more conversational tone for this one. Would also like to mention the name Disroroth was actually pulled straight from a dream. Does it have some as yet unrealized significance? Or is it dream-gibberish? Who knoooooows

Credit to: alapanamo