u/LovecraftLukeRitchie

(Pt. 2/?) (Pt.1)

You drop your keys and run, the car is of no more use to you. The trees now surrounding you on all sides offer no easy escape. The torrent of snapping branches and logs grows as you sprint through the underbrush. Your vision is impaired, little light breaks through the canopy and, what small amount that does, remains dim and red. 

You run at a dead sprint, unable to fully observe any of your surroundings. Trees, red, dark, all blur. You have difficulty distinguishing between the black void of darkness and the trees just in front of you. After a couple of near misses, you run face first into a tree and feel an agonizing crunch. Blood gushes from your nostrils as you fall. When your body hits the ground, you feel a sharp, piercing pain in your abdomen. A fallen stake is impaled in your lower back. 

Adrenaline keeps you from fully concerning yourself with the pain of your fresh injuries. From the ground, you are able to glimpse your pursuer. Dimly lit, as everything else, you see shadow like figures. Shrouded, unable to completely discern them, you see a pack, no, a stampede of bloodthirsty hounds uprooting trees in their pursuit of you. There is nothing visible behind the stampede. As they torrent, they leave a void of darkness behind where the light should be breaking through.

Standing, painfully, you try to run. The stake in your side screams in agony and you falter. You know that removing the stake will only lead to more blood loss. You stubble into a half jog, half hobble and make your way through the forest. You are no longer outrunning the stampede behind you, not even keeping your distance. They are nearly upon you now. You don’t turn back, you focus on forward motion. A determination I did not expect.

As you falter once more, you trip over a dead log. It is much thicker than the rest of the trees around you, its hollowed center offering a refuge. As you crawl into the fortunate sanctuary, the stampede overtakes you. Crashing through trees and knocking against the log you hide in, you see the true form of these beasts. In the dim light, you believed you saw the shadow of wolves, but being this close you see you were mistaken. 

The stampede is not quite that, rather a single, massive beast. An amalgamation of all creatures of the woods. The wolves’ heads at the front of the pile of flesh look skyward in silent howls and at you with silent snarls. The bodies of rabbits, deer, birds, frogs, mice, snakes, innumerable animals jut out from the creature and let out silent wails in agony or bloodlust.

The amalgam of flesh beats itself against the log protecting you. You crawl backwards, away from the beast, deeper into the dead tree. It is dead and hollow, but retains enough structure to pose a challenge for the amalgam. It stops slamming against the tree and begins to squeeze its massive body into the log after you. You watch the heads and bodies of the outermost creatures pop and bleed like pimples as the weight of the entire mass pushes against them. The gore splatters across the walls of the tree and over your body. In the dim red light you cannot tell the difference between your blood and its. 

As you backpedal deeper into the tree, you place your weight onto a hand that does not meet solid ground. You fall through an unseen hole and out into a large creek flowing through the forest. You land softly on the muddy banks and look at the amalgam above you. Half of its mass is shoved into the log, a sludge like meat begins oozing out of the hole you fell from. Eyes, now disconnected from any semblance of an animal, open and gaze at you from above. The gore drips down on you and chunks of meat around you open eyes of their own. Then teeth. 

You stand and hobble. The blood loss is getting to you. Your mind goes numb, your vision grows hazy. You only make a few feet of an escape before you collapse. You hear the tree begin creaking, then snap as the amalgam breaks free. This is it. You close your eyes for the last time… 

…except, you open them. The pain is gone, the amalgam is gone, the forest is gone. Beyond panic by now, you sit up in confusion. 

What-?

It’s a reasonable confusion. You have woken on a catwalk suspended over an infinite blackness, all that surrounds you is void. 

Where-?

But you could not know the answers to your questions. Your mind doesn’t even attempt rationalization. 

This is a nightmare, or hell, or whatever. Something without logic.

You rub your hands over your face and side, checking where your wounds were. In their place, unfelt until now, are leeches. The ones in your nose are not large, small enough to be deep in your nostrils suckling at the broken cartilage. There is only one on your side, massive and pulsating. It drives you to nausea. You grab the large leech and attempt to remove it, but the pain you feel at pulling leads the nausea to an unbearable level. Your sickness falls away into the void below. You never hear it hit a bottom. You chuckle, a defeated, inane chuckle. 

The only light offered is from sporadically hanging ceiling lamps. Red, of course. Their cables extend far off into the unknown above. They are only hanging down one direction of the catwalk. The path behind you is as dark as up or down. The forest may very well be just there, hidden in the veil of that void, but you don’t want to return. Some providence pulled you from the forest, from certain death, and placed you here. There’s only one path to go. 

At the far end of the lit side of the catwalk, you can see the light shine on something. It’s at a distance, you can’t make out any details specifically, but it seems to be a wall. The leeches don’t seem to hurt if you leave them alone, and you don’t think you could make due with the wounds under them. A necessary evil. You can walk unimpeded, not reduced to hobbling and crawling.

The catwalk creaks as you walk. You worry it will fall and send you into the void, but that means nothing at this point. There’s no logic left, you follow the light out of instinct for survival. Instinct is such a funny thing. You have ideals of grandeur, ego and pride that you make your own decisions. You follow your instincts more than you could ever know. It was the instinct to celebrate, after all, that brought you here. Instinct to ritualize and worship. You called upon no gods, but you gazed at the stars. It may not have been religion, but it was worship. You contemplated the universe, and you blamed the universe for the tides of your fortune. You had no conscious spirituality, but when the stars called your name, you looked. 

Ah, once again I distract myself. Instincts and religions, all of no importance to your story. I apologize.

The walk to the wall was uneventful, and now you can see the door at the end of the catwalk. The sign above it reads “exit.” You have reached a nihilism in your mind. Your goal is forward, and nothing more. The door is a simple metal door with a push bar. It reminds you of the doors at school.

You push it open and it swings wide. Beyond the threshold is more void. Then, in rows, large industrial lights flick on. The noise is louder than you could have expected. Your ears still ring as machines whir to life when the light floods over them.

(Pt. 2/?) (Pt.1)

You drop your keys and run, the car is of no more use to you. The trees now surrounding you on all sides offer no easy escape. The torrent of snapping branches and logs grows as you sprint through the underbrush. Your vision is impaired, little light breaks through the canopy and, what small amount that does, remains dim and red. 

You run at a dead sprint, unable to fully observe any of your surroundings. Trees, red, dark, all blur. You have difficulty distinguishing between the black void of darkness and the trees just in front of you. After a couple of near misses, you run face first into a tree and feel an agonizing crunch. Blood gushes from your nostrils as you fall. When your body hits the ground, you feel a sharp, piercing pain in your abdomen. A fallen stake is impaled in your lower back. 

Adrenaline keeps you from fully concerning yourself with the pain of your fresh injuries. From the ground, you are able to glimpse your pursuer. Dimly lit, as everything else, you see shadow like figures. Shrouded, unable to completely discern them, you see a pack, no, a stampede of bloodthirsty hounds uprooting trees in their pursuit of you. There is nothing visible behind the stampede. As they torrent, they leave a void of darkness behind where the light should be breaking through.

Standing, painfully, you try to run. The stake in your side screams in agony and you falter. You know that removing the stake will only lead to more blood loss. You stubble into a half jog, half hobble and make your way through the forest. You are no longer outrunning the stampede behind you, not even keeping your distance. They are nearly upon you now. You don’t turn back, you focus on forward motion. A determination I did not expect.

As you falter once more, you trip over a dead log. It is much thicker than the rest of the trees around you, its hollowed center offering a refuge. As you crawl into the fortunate sanctuary, the stampede overtakes you. Crashing through trees and knocking against the log you hide in, you see the true form of these beasts. In the dim light, you believed you saw the shadow of wolves, but being this close you see you were mistaken. 

The stampede is not quite that, rather a single, massive beast. An amalgamation of all creatures of the woods. The wolves’ heads at the front of the pile of flesh look skyward in silent howls and at you with silent snarls. The bodies of rabbits, deer, birds, frogs, mice, snakes, innumerable animals jut out from the creature and let out silent wails in agony or bloodlust.

The amalgam of flesh beats itself against the log protecting you. You crawl backwards, away from the beast, deeper into the dead tree. It is dead and hollow, but retains enough structure to pose a challenge for the amalgam. It stops slamming against the tree and begins to squeeze its massive body into the log after you. You watch the heads and bodies of the outermost creatures pop and bleed like pimples as the weight of the entire mass pushes against them. The gore splatters across the walls of the tree and over your body. In the dim red light you cannot tell the difference between your blood and its. 

As you backpedal deeper into the tree, you place your weight onto a hand that does not meet solid ground. You fall through an unseen hole and out into a large creek flowing through the forest. You land softly on the muddy banks and look at the amalgam above you. Half of its mass is shoved into the log, a sludge like meat begins oozing out of the hole you fell from. Eyes, now disconnected from any semblance of an animal, open and gaze at you from above. The gore drips down on you and chunks of meat around you open eyes of their own. Then teeth. 

You stand and hobble. The blood loss is getting to you. Your mind goes numb, your vision grows hazy. You only make a few feet of an escape before you collapse. You hear the tree begin creaking, then snap as the amalgam breaks free. This is it. You close your eyes for the last time… 

…except, you open them. The pain is gone, the amalgam is gone, the forest is gone. Beyond panic by now, you sit up in confusion. 

What-?

It’s a reasonable confusion. You have woken on a catwalk suspended over an infinite blackness, all that surrounds you is void. 

Where-?

But you could not know the answers to your questions. Your mind doesn’t even attempt rationalization. 

This is a nightmare, or hell, or whatever. Something without logic.

You rub your hands over your face and side, checking where your wounds were. In their place, unfelt until now, are leeches. The ones in your nose are not large, small enough to be deep in your nostrils suckling at the broken cartilage. There is only one on your side, massive and pulsating. It drives you to nausea. You grab the large leech and attempt to remove it, but the pain you feel at pulling leads the nausea to an unbearable level. Your sickness falls away into the void below. You never hear it hit a bottom. You chuckle, a defeated, inane chuckle. 

The only light offered is from sporadically hanging ceiling lamps. Red, of course. Their cables extend far off into the unknown above. They are only hanging down one direction of the catwalk. The path behind you is as dark as up or down. The forest may very well be just there, hidden in the veil of that void, but you don’t want to return. Some providence pulled you from the forest, from certain death, and placed you here. There’s only one path to go. 

At the far end of the lit side of the catwalk, you can see the light shine on something. It’s at a distance, you can’t make out any details specifically, but it seems to be a wall. The leeches don’t seem to hurt if you leave them alone, and you don’t think you could make due with the wounds under them. A necessary evil. You can walk unimpeded, not reduced to hobbling and crawling.

The catwalk creaks as you walk. You worry it will fall and send you into the void, but that means nothing at this point. There’s no logic left, you follow the light out of instinct for survival. Instinct is such a funny thing. You have ideals of grandeur, ego and pride that you make your own decisions. You follow your instincts more than you could ever know. It was the instinct to celebrate, after all, that brought you here. Instinct to ritualize and worship. You called upon no gods, but you gazed at the stars. It may not have been religion, but it was worship. You contemplated the universe, and you blamed the universe for the tides of your fortune. You had no conscious spirituality, but when the stars called your name, you looked. 

Ah, once again I distract myself. Instincts and religions, all of no importance to your story. I apologize.

The walk to the wall was uneventful, and now you can see the door at the end of the catwalk. The sign above it reads “exit.” You have reached a nihilism in your mind. Your goal is forward, and nothing more. The door is a simple metal door with a push bar. It reminds you of the doors at school.

You push it open and it swings wide. Beyond the threshold is more void. Then, in rows, large industrial lights flick on. The noise is louder than you could have expected. Your ears still ring as machines whir to life when the light floods over them.

(Pt. 2/?) (Pt.1)

You drop your keys and run, the car is of no more use to you. The trees now surrounding you on all sides offer no easy escape. The torrent of snapping branches and logs grows as you sprint through the underbrush. Your vision is impaired, little light breaks through the canopy and, what small amount that does, remains dim and red. 

You run at a dead sprint, unable to fully observe any of your surroundings. Trees, red, dark, all blur. You have difficulty distinguishing between the black void of darkness and the trees just in front of you. After a couple of near misses, you run face first into a tree and feel an agonizing crunch. Blood gushes from your nostrils as you fall. When your body hits the ground, you feel a sharp, piercing pain in your abdomen. A fallen stake is impaled in your lower back. 

Adrenaline keeps you from fully concerning yourself with the pain of your fresh injuries. From the ground, you are able to glimpse your pursuer. Dimly lit, as everything else, you see shadow like figures. Shrouded, unable to completely discern them, you see a pack, no, a stampede of bloodthirsty hounds uprooting trees in their pursuit of you. There is nothing visible behind the stampede. As they torrent, they leave a void of darkness behind where the light should be breaking through.

Standing, painfully, you try to run. The stake in your side screams in agony and you falter. You know that removing the stake will only lead to more blood loss. You stubble into a half jog, half hobble and make your way through the forest. You are no longer outrunning the stampede behind you, not even keeping your distance. They are nearly upon you now. You don’t turn back, you focus on forward motion. A determination I did not expect.

As you falter once more, you trip over a dead log. It is much thicker than the rest of the trees around you, its hollowed center offering a refuge. As you crawl into the fortunate sanctuary, the stampede overtakes you. Crashing through trees and knocking against the log you hide in, you see the true form of these beasts. In the dim light, you believed you saw the shadow of wolves, but being this close you see you were mistaken. 

The stampede is not quite that, rather a single, massive beast. An amalgamation of all creatures of the woods. The wolves’ heads at the front of the pile of flesh look skyward in silent howls and at you with silent snarls. The bodies of rabbits, deer, birds, frogs, mice, snakes, innumerable animals jut out from the creature and let out silent wails in agony or bloodlust.

The amalgam of flesh beats itself against the log protecting you. You crawl backwards, away from the beast, deeper into the dead tree. It is dead and hollow, but retains enough structure to pose a challenge for the amalgam. It stops slamming against the tree and begins to squeeze its massive body into the log after you. You watch the heads and bodies of the outermost creatures pop and bleed like pimples as the weight of the entire mass pushes against them. The gore splatters across the walls of the tree and over your body. In the dim red light you cannot tell the difference between your blood and its. 

As you backpedal deeper into the tree, you place your weight onto a hand that does not meet solid ground. You fall through an unseen hole and out into a large creek flowing through the forest. You land softly on the muddy banks and look at the amalgam above you. Half of its mass is shoved into the log, a sludge like meat begins oozing out of the hole you fell from. Eyes, now disconnected from any semblance of an animal, open and gaze at you from above. The gore drips down on you and chunks of meat around you open eyes of their own. Then teeth. 

You stand and hobble. The blood loss is getting to you. Your mind goes numb, your vision grows hazy. You only make a few feet of an escape before you collapse. You hear the tree begin creaking, then snap as the amalgam breaks free. This is it. You close your eyes for the last time… 

…except, you open them. The pain is gone, the amalgam is gone, the forest is gone. Beyond panic by now, you sit up in confusion. 

What-?

It’s a reasonable confusion. You have woken on a catwalk suspended over an infinite blackness, all that surrounds you is void. 

Where-?

But you could not know the answers to your questions. Your mind doesn’t even attempt rationalization. 

This is a nightmare, or hell, or whatever. Something without logic.

You rub your hands over your face and side, checking where your wounds were. In their place, unfelt until now, are leeches. The ones in your nose are not large, small enough to be deep in your nostrils suckling at the broken cartilage. There is only one on your side, massive and pulsating. It drives you to nausea. You grab the large leech and attempt to remove it, but the pain you feel at pulling leads the nausea to an unbearable level. Your sickness falls away into the void below. You never hear it hit a bottom. You chuckle, a defeated, inane chuckle. 

The only light offered is from sporadically hanging ceiling lamps. Red, of course. Their cables extend far off into the unknown above. They are only hanging down one direction of the catwalk. The path behind you is as dark as up or down. The forest may very well be just there, hidden in the veil of that void, but you don’t want to return. Some providence pulled you from the forest, from certain death, and placed you here. There’s only one path to go. 

At the far end of the lit side of the catwalk, you can see the light shine on something. It’s at a distance, you can’t make out any details specifically, but it seems to be a wall. The leeches don’t seem to hurt if you leave them alone, and you don’t think you could make due with the wounds under them. A necessary evil. You can walk unimpeded, not reduced to hobbling and crawling.

The catwalk creaks as you walk. You worry it will fall and send you into the void, but that means nothing at this point. There’s no logic left, you follow the light out of instinct for survival. Instinct is such a funny thing. You have ideals of grandeur, ego and pride that you make your own decisions. You follow your instincts more than you could ever know. It was the instinct to celebrate, after all, that brought you here. Instinct to ritualize and worship. You called upon no gods, but you gazed at the stars. It may not have been religion, but it was worship. You contemplated the universe, and you blamed the universe for the tides of your fortune. You had no conscious spirituality, but when the stars called your name, you looked. 

Ah, once again I distract myself. Instincts and religions, all of no importance to your story. I apologize.

The walk to the wall was uneventful, and now you can see the door at the end of the catwalk. The sign above it reads “exit.” You have reached a nihilism in your mind. Your goal is forward, and nothing more. The door is a simple metal door with a push bar. It reminds you of the doors at school.

You push it open and it swings wide. Beyond the threshold is more void. Then, in rows, large industrial lights flick on. The noise is louder than you could have expected. Your ears still ring as machines whir to life when the light floods over them.

A solitary set of footsteps echoed down the dark city streets. A young man navigated the spiraling boroughs, unfamiliar with this side of town. His appointment was scheduled for a half hour past, and he was becoming increasingly agitated at his correspondent’s choice of meeting place. Some God forsaken bar on the God forsaken side of a God forsaken town. The smell of dead fish and fresh piss marked the whole district of docks and factories. 

The young man wore a white collar to work, and he could be bothered only to scoff at the men on docks or lines. Under any normal circumstances, he would not set foot within miles of his current whereabouts, but he had paid good money for what information his correspondent could provide. 

The young man, known to many as Mr. Tweed, was a pursuer of the macabre, the dark, and the esoteric. He made a hobby of searching for knowledge long forgotten to the popular histories. His correspondent was a purveyor of relics and artifacts of long forgotten civilizations, and, more importantly, a purveyor of their stories. He never signed his name, nor his initials, in their correspondence, rather signing simply as “The Storyteller.” 

Mr. Tweed finally found his way to the designated meeting place. The bar sat in squalor, relative even to the surrounding district. A leak dripped profusely in the center of the room, a puddle growing wider and wider, to the point you could hardly make your way across the room with dry soles. The floorboards creaked with each step and groaned even without such a disturbance. The stairs leading up to the inn rooms had multiple steps missing and no hand rail.

The bartender may have once been called a man, though his present appearance would not have given such an impression. An unkempt beard covered skin so wrinkled and sore-spotted that a squinted eye might have mistaken him for a sufficiently hairy swine. The stench of the district left on the man would only enhance the illusion.

Worse than in the streets, the stagnant air of the room left the smell of drunken piss and vomit festering, to the point of overwhelming nausea for Mr. Tweed. Coughing, and with tears in his eyes, he asked, “Can we open a window in here? Or prop the door? The smell,” he gagged, “it’s unbearable, is it not?”

The man behind the counter grumbled something unintelligible, a strong Cajun accent guarding his words from sojourning ears. Despite being born and raised in the same city, Mr. Tweed could not understand the dialect even slightly. His upper class family had hidden him from the harshness of the dock workers’ tounge. 

The bartender made his way to do as Mr. Tweed asked, and as he pulled a chair under the door handle, Mr. Tweed heard a clicking noise from the corner of the room. Sat, at a table under a broken light, was a man dressed in black. His features were indiscernible. What little lighting reached his nook was blocked from his face by the wide brimmed hat he wore.

Still wearing your hat indoors, are you? I would have expected more gentlemanly like behavior, Mr. Storyteller.

Mr. Tweed recognized his correspondent, despite this being their first meeting in person. The mysterious man had an esoteric aura about him, befitting the manner of his writing. 

He clicked again and gestured his hand, beckoning Mr. Tweed to his corner of the room. The bartender watched with an unreadable expression. Mr. Tweed took the chair opposite the mysterious figure. This close, the air smelled of expensive, quality tobacco, a refreshing aroma for the agitated man. The figure across from him held a pipe to his mouth and puffed grand clouds of smoke over the table. 

Mr. Tweed began the pleasantries, “I thank you for endeavoring to meet me in person. I know you to be a busy man, after all. Evidently so, by the requested time for this meeting. Your days must be absolutely full so that we may have only met at night? I must say, I would have preferred if you could have come to me, visit my estate, where I would have prepared a nice dinner for your time, rather than I venture into the… underbelly… of our city, at this hour.” 

His words dripped with hardly concealed contempt, not directed at his correspondent but rather the whole setting and circumstance. Despite his irritation, he did respect the man opposite him, and he extended his right hand. In turn, a gloved hand reached across the table and clasped his.

Mr. Tweed felt the other hand squirm and squeeze under his grip. It felt as if the other man had no bones in his hand. Before he could comment on the oddity, the light struck the other man’s face. Across the table sat no man, the thick volume on its face held not a beard, but a mass of writhing tentacles.

Aghast, Mr. Tweed pulled his hand back, degloving the beast in his haste. There was no hand inside the glove, instead long, skinny tendrils wrapped around themselves operated like fingers. The skin of the beast held a violet cadence and each tentacle was lined with green suction cups. An unnatural coloration. Its eyes were covered by brass coated goggles, but a dim green light shined through the lenses.

Mr. Tweed’s nausea reached its limit and he evacuated the contents of his dinner onto the floor. The bartender hollered, something containing colorful swears, and left to retrieve his bucket and mop. This floor was well acquainted with vomit, and the bartender well acquainted with his mop. The beast calmly donned its glove again and sipped on its drink.

Mr. Tweed collected himself the best he could and confronted the beast, “M-monster! Where is the Storyteller, what did you do to him!?” His voice broke and small, quiet tears rolled down his face. He crawled backwards, scooting away from the beast. It took a long drag from its pipe and exhaled slowly, not neglecting to enjoy the flavor, and answered the groveling man in a wet, inhuman voice, clicking hard with its beak as it spoke.

“You assume wrong, Mr. Tweed. I am the Storyteller. You have insulted me greatly tonight. You have arrived quite late to our meeting, and you are right to call me a busy man, as this is not my only appointment for the night. You insult my friend’s establishment, then you grow sick? I did not take you to be such a rude man from your letters.”

Mr. Tweed backed into the puddle in the center of the room, ruining his finely tailored slacks. The bartender grumbled under his breath as he cleaned the vomit on the floor.

“I’m real sorry about that, Bill. I expected a more refined conversation tonight. Had I any expectation of this reaction,” it waved in Mr. Tweed’s direction, “I would not have invited him here.” As it spoke, it produced a wallet and pulled out a few substantial bills. It handed them to Bill, who offered what was likely a thanking, but Mr. Tweed couldn’t concentrate on deciphering the words. His mind reeled. 

How can this man, Bill, sit so nonchalant? A beast beyond reason sits here among…

His thoughts were cut short by a terrifying conclusion.

He must be one as well.

Mr. Tweed realized why he couldn’t stand the working class of the docks, why they seemed so unbothered by the stench of dead fish and piss, why the spoke in this indiscernible tongue. They were all as this beast. They all hid amongst humans, wearing false, no, stolen skins and faces. An even more terrible realization crossed his mind. He certainly must have been duped, his skin was to be this beast’s disguise. His correspondent, the Storyteller, whom he came to consider a friend, of which he had strikingly few, had planned on this betrayal from the very beginning. 

With his sanity lost to the wind, Mr. Tweed stood and screamed, running from the bar. He was not safe in this part of town, but neither would he be at home. The beast knew his address from their letters. Aimless, he ran down the spiraling streets of the city, lost. The echoes of his own footsteps indistinguishable from those of a mob swarming him.

The street was dark and the moon covered by clouds when Mr. Tweed mistook open air for solid ground, and fell screaming into the sea.

He had never learned to swim.

The Storyteller left Bill’s bar in an irritated mood. He had made time in his busy, busy schedule to meet a frequent correspondent, only to be gravely insulted by the man. Not only himself, but poor Bill as well. He shook his head in dismay as he walked the late night streets. He would have to be more careful with whom he chose to work with.

He found his way quite easily through the winding streets. Though not his home town, he frequented the area. He strolled down to the pier and climbed up on a railing overlooking the sea. He began undressing. He packed his wide brimmed hat, goggles, gloves, longcoat, and boots into his bag. 

In the nude he truly resembled a beast, the long tendrils and tentacles all unwinding and his posture sinking until he couldn’t rightly be mistaken for human at all. He dove into the ocean and headed on to his next appointment. Not long at sea, however, he spotted a body floating in the water. He quickly swam up to examine and was disappointed to discover Mr. Tweed’s corpse, floating in the sea foam. Small fish had began eating at the man’s flesh. 

He shooed the fish away. Despite his crassness, the man deserved more dignity than this. The Storyteller brought the body back to shore and buried it shallow in the sand. Before fully burying the face, however, he slid tentacles into the ears, eyes, and nose of his late acquaintance. The gray matter melted and was absorbed through the small mouths within the hundreds of small, razor sharp, suckers. He would treat the man with as much respect as he could, but the Storyteller collected stories.

He stole a bed sheet from a clothesline and covered the burial site. Someone would come looking for the cloth and discover the body, which would then be dealt with rightly. He said some words for the man’s soul, which were heard by no one but those above, and went back to sea. 

A busy, busy schedule and many stories to tell. Many stories to tell and many more to collect.

A solitary set of footsteps echoed down the dark city streets. A young man navigated the spiraling boroughs, unfamiliar with this side of town. His appointment was scheduled for a half hour past, and he was becoming increasingly agitated at his correspondent’s choice of meeting place. Some God forsaken bar on the God forsaken side of a God forsaken town. The smell of dead fish and fresh piss marked the whole district of docks and factories. 

The young man wore a white collar to work, and he could be bothered only to scoff at the men on docks or lines. Under any normal circumstances, he would not set foot within miles of his current whereabouts, but he had paid good money for what information his correspondent could provide. 

The young man, known to many as Mr. Tweed, was a pursuer of the macabre, the dark, and the esoteric. He made a hobby of searching for knowledge long forgotten to the popular histories. His correspondent was a purveyor of relics and artifacts of long forgotten civilizations, and, more importantly, a purveyor of their stories. He never signed his name, nor his initials, in their correspondence, rather signing simply as “The Storyteller.” 

Mr. Tweed finally found his way to the designated meeting place. The bar sat in squalor, relative even to the surrounding district. A leak dripped profusely in the center of the room, a puddle growing wider and wider, to the point you could hardly make your way across the room with dry soles. The floorboards creaked with each step and groaned even without such a disturbance. The stairs leading up to the inn rooms had multiple steps missing and no hand rail.

The bartender may have once been called a man, though his present appearance would not have given such an impression. An unkempt beard covered skin so wrinkled and sore-spotted that a squinted eye might have mistaken him for a sufficiently hairy swine. The stench of the district left on the man would only enhance the illusion.

Worse than in the streets, the stagnant air of the room left the smell of drunken piss and vomit festering, to the point of overwhelming nausea for Mr. Tweed. Coughing, and with tears in his eyes, he asked, “Can we open a window in here? Or prop the door? The smell,” he gagged, “it’s unbearable, is it not?”

The man behind the counter grumbled something unintelligible, a strong Cajun accent guarding his words from sojourning ears. Despite being born and raised in the same city, Mr. Tweed could not understand the dialect even slightly. His upper class family had hidden him from the harshness of the dock workers’ tounge. 

The bartender made his way to do as Mr. Tweed asked, and as he pulled a chair under the door handle, Mr. Tweed heard a clicking noise from the corner of the room. Sat, at a table under a broken light, was a man dressed in black. His features were indiscernible. What little lighting reached his nook was blocked from his face by the wide brimmed hat he wore.

Still wearing your hat indoors, are you? I would have expected more gentlemanly like behavior, Mr. Storyteller.

Mr. Tweed recognized his correspondent, despite this being their first meeting in person. The mysterious man had an esoteric aura about him, befitting the manner of his writing. 

He clicked again and gestured his hand, beckoning Mr. Tweed to his corner of the room. The bartender watched with an unreadable expression. Mr. Tweed took the chair opposite the mysterious figure. This close, the air smelled of expensive, quality tobacco, a refreshing aroma for the agitated man. The figure across from him held a pipe to his mouth and puffed grand clouds of smoke over the table. 

Mr. Tweed began the pleasantries, “I thank you for endeavoring to meet me in person. I know you to be a busy man, after all. Evidently so, by the requested time for this meeting. Your days must be absolutely full so that we may have only met at night? I must say, I would have preferred if you could have come to me, visit my estate, where I would have prepared a nice dinner for your time, rather than I venture into the… underbelly… of our city, at this hour.” 

His words dripped with hardly concealed contempt, not directed at his correspondent but rather the whole setting and circumstance. Despite his irritation, he did respect the man opposite him, and he extended his right hand. In turn, a gloved hand reached across the table and clasped his.

Mr. Tweed felt the other hand squirm and squeeze under his grip. It felt as if the other man had no bones in his hand. Before he could comment on the oddity, the light struck the other man’s face. Across the table sat no man, the thick volume on its face held not a beard, but a mass of writhing tentacles.

Aghast, Mr. Tweed pulled his hand back, degloving the beast in his haste. There was no hand inside the glove, instead long, skinny tendrils wrapped around themselves operated like fingers. The skin of the beast held a violet cadence and each tentacle was lined with green suction cups. An unnatural coloration. Its eyes were covered by brass coated goggles, but a dim green light shined through the lenses.

Mr. Tweed’s nausea reached its limit and he evacuated the contents of his dinner onto the floor. The bartender hollered, something containing colorful swears, and left to retrieve his bucket and mop. This floor was well acquainted with vomit, and the bartender well acquainted with his mop. The beast calmly donned its glove again and sipped on its drink.

Mr. Tweed collected himself the best he could and confronted the beast, “M-monster! Where is the Storyteller, what did you do to him!?” His voice broke and small, quiet tears rolled down his face. He crawled backwards, scooting away from the beast. It took a long drag from its pipe and exhaled slowly, not neglecting to enjoy the flavor, and answered the groveling man in a wet, inhuman voice, clicking hard with its beak as it spoke.

“You assume wrong, Mr. Tweed. I am the Storyteller. You have insulted me greatly tonight. You have arrived quite late to our meeting, and you are right to call me a busy man, as this is not my only appointment for the night. You insult my friend’s establishment, then you grow sick? I did not take you to be such a rude man from your letters.”

Mr. Tweed backed into the puddle in the center of the room, ruining his finely tailored slacks. The bartender grumbled under his breath as he cleaned the vomit on the floor.

“I’m real sorry about that, Bill. I expected a more refined conversation tonight. Had I any expectation of this reaction,” it waved in Mr. Tweed’s direction, “I would not have invited him here.” As it spoke, it produced a wallet and pulled out a few substantial bills. It handed them to Bill, who offered what was likely a thanking, but Mr. Tweed couldn’t concentrate on deciphering the words. His mind reeled. 

How can this man, Bill, sit so nonchalant? A beast beyond reason sits here among…

His thoughts were cut short by a terrifying conclusion.

He must be one as well.

Mr. Tweed realized why he couldn’t stand the working class of the docks, why they seemed so unbothered by the stench of dead fish and piss, why the spoke in this indiscernible tongue. They were all as this beast. They all hid amongst humans, wearing false, no, stolen skins and faces. An even more terrible realization crossed his mind. He certainly must have been duped, his skin was to be this beast’s disguise. His correspondent, the Storyteller, whom he came to consider a friend, of which he had strikingly few, had planned on this betrayal from the very beginning. 

With his sanity lost to the wind, Mr. Tweed stood and screamed, running from the bar. He was not safe in this part of town, but neither would he be at home. The beast knew his address from their letters. Aimless, he ran down the spiraling streets of the city, lost. The echoes of his own footsteps indistinguishable from those of a mob swarming him.

The street was dark and the moon covered by clouds when Mr. Tweed mistook open air for solid ground, and fell screaming into the sea.

He had never learned to swim.

The Storyteller left Bill’s bar in an irritated mood. He had made time in his busy, busy schedule to meet a frequent correspondent, only to be gravely insulted by the man. Not only himself, but poor Bill as well. He shook his head in dismay as he walked the late night streets. He would have to be more careful with whom he chose to work with.

He found his way quite easily through the winding streets. Though not his home town, he frequented the area. He strolled down to the pier and climbed up on a railing overlooking the sea. He began undressing. He packed his wide brimmed hat, goggles, gloves, longcoat, and boots into his bag. 

In the nude he truly resembled a beast, the long tendrils and tentacles all unwinding and his posture sinking until he couldn’t rightly be mistaken for human at all. He dove into the ocean and headed on to his next appointment. Not long at sea, however, he spotted a body floating in the water. He quickly swam up to examine and was disappointed to discover Mr. Tweed’s corpse, floating in the sea foam. Small fish had began eating at the man’s flesh. 

He shooed the fish away. Despite his crassness, the man deserved more dignity than this. The Storyteller brought the body back to shore and buried it shallow in the sand. Before fully burying the face, however, he slid tentacles into the ears, eyes, and nose of his late acquaintance. The gray matter melted and was absorbed through the small mouths within the hundreds of small, razor sharp, suckers. He would treat the man with as much respect as he could, but the Storyteller collected stories.

He stole a bed sheet from a clothesline and covered the burial site. Someone would come looking for the cloth and discover the body, which would then be dealt with rightly. He said some words for the man’s soul, which were heard by no one but those above, and went back to sea. 

A busy, busy schedule and many stories to tell. Many stories to tell and many more to collect.

Fragile, fragile, fragile am I
A glass case protecting
A precious crystal mind
In a world of sticks and stones

The case is cracked routinely
Threatening the safety of the crystal
The cracks may build
But have always been patched
Before too late

A handful of times
The case shattered completely
Laying the crystal bare 
Naked for all threats

The case is cracking now
And the crystal fears
Should the crystal break
I will die

Fragile, fragile, fragile am I
A glass case protecting
A precious crystal mind
In a world of sticks and stones

The case is cracked routinely
Threatening the safety of the crystal
The cracks may build
But have always been patched
Before too late

A handful of times
The case shattered completely
Laying the crystal bare 
Naked for all threats

The case is cracking now
And the crystal fears
Should the crystal break
I will die

(Pt. 1/?)

Halloween was always your favorite holiday. It’s in autumn, which is your favorite season. As a child you loved the costumes and candy, and as an adult those still bring you a happy nostalgia. The burdens of life have beaten you down and left you a husk of that joyful child, a man who simply is. You partake in the rat race of life, a productive employee and worthwhile friend to those you know. Yet in this you feel unfulfilled, unsatisfied, uninterested in your daily life. You take great joy in the sojourns of holidays, not out of a particular devoutness to the holy but rather to the celebration of anything unordinary. The reason for celebration, the holy of the day, slips your mind as you devour feast and partake in festival. You adore it, the utter gluttony of your soul let loose upon food and drink, your animalistic urges brought to the forefront by the persuasion of drunkenness. Of course, this is only natural. Man’s natural instinct is to delight to an excess… 

I apologize. I get ahead of myself. None of this crosses your conscience, nor even your subconscious. I speak of your instincts and forget your story. 

Your favorite part of Halloween is the vestige of a pagan origin, the Harvest Festival. A carnival of the season, a celebration of success. “Again, this year we shall not starve but eat!” The sentiment has lessened in recent times. You take for granted there will be a surplus of food or other necessities. You do not worship the gods of harvest with a fear of famine, you celebrate using any excuse possible. You are not alone, many of your people do. If those gods lived and watched, they would certainly rage at your flippant disregard. The gods of old are dead, luckily, and you can blaspheme their holy days all you wish. Candied apples, plastic pumpkins, false corn, and costumed children all litter this field as you partake in festivities. 

A mobile ferris wheel, carousels, and even a short coaster are among the sources of joyful shouts filling the night air. Your friends drag you onto the rides, laughing and joking all the while. You find these all enjoyable but as the night drags on you tire of the socializing and the constant entertainment. You move away from the more overstated festivities. You make your way to your true desire, your absolute favorite tradition, almost ritualistically. You enter the corn maze. 

Most overlook the maze. It’s a novelty, seemingly. They navigate the halls of grain once and the novelty wears off. Very few enjoy the simple satisfaction of finding their way through the series of turns and dead ends. You are among that few. The small traditions are important to you, in some ways more important than the large ones. Every year, just before midnight, you find your way to the center of the maze, sit in the peaceful quiet, and watch the moon. Distant voices are drowned out by the droning of crickets, cicadas, bullfrogs, and night birds. 

As you round the corner, you find the central clearing. A square cut just slightly wider than the passages of the maze. Expecting the same stone bench and humorous attempts at spooky decorations that you see every year, you are confused to find a slab. A stone slab roughly half your height and much wider. You stand puzzled. In your decades of coming to the harvest festival you have never seen this decoration. Always the same stone bench is wheeled out into the center of the field. You are irritated, your personal little tradition a casualty of this strange change in decoration. No, not a casualty. You walk towards the slab, as even though it is but a small tradition, it matters to you.

You lie down on the slab. You place your hands behind your head and cross your legs, attempting to lie comfortably on solid stone. A fortunate coincidence is that you are facing directly upwards, so you have no need to crane your neck watching the moon and the stars. They really are beautiful, this far out from any large populace you can see countless speckles of light. You are lost in their majestic beauty, so lost you don’t recognize the silence getting louder. One by one the creatures of the field and woods grow quiet. First the birds cease their night calls, followed by the frogs, then even the insects grow still. 

When the silence is utter and definite, you are jolted out of your meditation. It is an unnatural silence, a foreboding silence. You stand up tall on the slab trying to see the rest of the carnival but all you can see is darkness. The spotlights showing the way through the maze have gone out, as well as seemingly the entire carnival. You hear no screams, no commotion. Your panic keeps rising. It is a full moon and a clear night, so you still have some limited visibility. You can see the vague outlines of what are possibly the ferris wheel and coaster, although, those could also just be trees. You spin in a circle and can not discern anything properly in the darkness. 

As you are searching, the darkness grows, over the treeline stars begin to blink out. An impossibility, to be sure, but they indeed begin to fade and die. You watch in dumbfounded awe as every little beautiful speck of light dies, one by one, until all that is left is the moon. You, a sea of darkness, and one shining symbol of hope in the sky. Then the moon grows dim, and it too dies. You are left in perfect darkness.

An indiscernible amount of time passes as you sit in partial sensory deprivation. You can still feel, although there is little to feel. There is the stone slab and the corn surrounding you. An indescribable dread fills you when you determine that there is no longer an opening in the corn. You are fully surrounded and closed in. You could try running through the field, but where would that get you? You reach an absurd conclusion, a state of denial. You are sure this is some elaborate prank, some reality prank show has selected your maze at random for their Halloween special. How unfortunate you are to be wrong.

The moon comes back to life. Slowly the world around you begins to light up, however it is not the light you expect. As you look into the sky you can see a small spot of red. Blood red. As you watch, the spot grows. It spreads slowly, just as the stars and moon grew dim slowly. It grows to the size of the moon and does not stop. Slowly, the whole sky is covered in a blood red light. It is dim, you can look directly upward without blinding yourself. The world around you is colored shades of red and black. There is red where light reaches and blackness in the shadows. 

You realize that while you were sky watching, an opening returned to the corn. You leave the clearing at the center of the maze and journey into the corridors. Every step you take crunches a husk on the ground, a violent sound in the otherwise deafening silence around you. You stop every few steps and listen, there isn’t so much as a breeze blowing through the corn. The only noise is coming from you. 

You creep through the turns and find dead end after dead end. The desperation is getting to you, tears stream freely down your face. You whimper, but every noise that leaves your mouth makes you jump. Paranoia. You are certain something\* \*stands in the corn, watching. Every hair on your body stands, your blood runs cold despite your heart’s rapid beating, but you continue onward. A brave soul you are. Eventually you come to an exit, elation overtakes you and you break into a dead sprint. May your stalker be damned, you are getting out of this corn. 

As you break into the clearing outside the maze you see it is the festival, just as you left it, only now abandoned. Your joy flees from you and dread once again holds your soul tightly. You walk through empty stalls, carnival games stand half played. A large plush prize sits on the counter next to a set of knocked over bottles. The ferris wheel sits still, as does the carousel. The coaster rests atop a peak, unmoving. You walk, desperately searching for any sign of life. Any sign of normalcy. You find neither. 

You walk towards the parking lot, aimlessly wandering in the direction of your car. Maybe it can offer you freedom. The rows of spots, loosely marked by strings tied to sticks, remain full. No one left the festival, not in their car. Your mind is not racing, you are in a paradoxical calm. You ask yourself questions that you don’t want answers for. “Aliens? The Rapture? Hallucinations?” You pull your keys out of your pocket and reach to unlock your car, and a twig breaks to your right. 

Your eyes jerk to the treeline, scanning every detail of the red and black landscape looking for what just moved. You hear your heartbeat throb in your ears, your vision blurry around the edges. You see no movement, and, after agonizing moments of staring at the static trees, you turn to get in your car. When you turn back to your car, it is a rusted and broken corpse. All other cars in the lot are gone, the carnival is gone, and you stand alone in the woods. From the silence, you hear more twigs snapping. Quiet, but growing louder. Growing louder and faster, closing in.

Every time she’s brought up in a post nowadays people have to talk about how they don’t like her writing and that she’s overrated. Shes not overrated anymore, if anything the amount of people calling her overrated has almost turned back around into making her underrated. She had two bad episodes, which both started with solid stories and only fell off with the unnecessary sequels. Mayhem mountain is fun, Room 733 is actually really solid, Whitefall is super cheesy but it sticks the landing better than most of her stories. Borrasca remains a top ten if not top five for me. Even considering part V. Deepwoods is the only absolute stinker in her lineup.

Moral of the story: yeah, she deserves a spot on someone’s Mount Rushmore, even if she’s not in yours

Especially bad with no sleep stories, using the stupid “this isn’t some horror movie” or “I felt like I was in a horror movie” type of line. There is no quicker way to break my suspension of disbelief tension than to remind me that I am listening to a horror story. It happens so often and it pisses me off every time. Whatever the author’s intention is with using that sort of line always fails. Yeah, I get it, your protagonist isn’t stupid, you can avoid the millennial writing of calling that out.

(Pt. 1/?)

Halloween was always your favorite holiday. It’s in autumn, which is your favorite season. As a child you loved the costumes and candy and as an adult those still bring you a happy nostalgia. The burdens of life have beaten you down and left you a husk of that joyful child, a man who simply is. You partake in the rat race of life, a productive employee and worthwhile friend to those you know. Yet in this you feel unfulfilled, unsatisfied, uninterested in your daily life. You take great joy in the sojourns of holidays, not out of a particular devoutness to the holy but rather to the celebration of anything unordinary. The reason for celebration, the holy of the day, slips your mind as you devour feast and partake in festival. You adore it, the utter gluttony of your soul let loose upon food and drink, your animalistic urges brought to the forefront by the persuasion of drunkenness. Of course, this is only natural. Man’s natural instinct is to delight to an excess… 

I apologize. I get ahead of myself. None of this crosses your conscience, nor even your subconscious. I speak of your instincts and forget your story. 

Your favorite part of Halloween is the vestige of a pagan origin, the Harvest Festival. A carnival of the season, a celebration of success. “Again, this year we shall not starve but eat!” The sentiment has lessened in recent times. You take for granted there will be a surplus of food or other necessities. You do not worship the gods of harvest with a fear of famine, you celebrate using any excuse possible. You are not alone, many of your people do. If those gods lived and watched, they would certainly rage at your flippant disregard. The gods of old are dead, luckily, and you can blaspheme their holy days all you wish. Candied apples, plastic pumpkins, false corn, and costumed children all litter this field as you partake in festivities. 

A mobile ferris wheel, carousels, and even a short coaster are among the sources of joyful shouts filling the night air. Your friends drag you onto the rides, laughing and joking all the while. You find these all enjoyable but as the night drags on you tire of the socializing and the constant entertainment. You move away from the more overstated festivities. You make your way to your true desire, your absolute favorite tradition, almost ritualistically. You enter the corn maze. 

Most overlook the maze. It’s a novelty, seemingly. They navigate the halls of grain once and the novelty wears off. Very few enjoy the simple satisfaction of finding their way through the series of turns and dead ends. You are among that few. The small traditions are important to you, in some ways more important than the large ones. Every year, just before midnight, you find your way to the center of the maze, sit in the peaceful quiet, and watch the moon. Distant voices are drowned out by the droning of crickets, cicadas, bullfrogs, and night birds. 

As you round the corner, you find the central clearing. A square cut just slightly wider than the passages of the maze. Expecting the same stone bench and humorous attempts at spooky decorations that you see every year, you are confused to find a slab. A stone slab roughly half your height and much wider. You stand puzzled. In your decades of coming to the harvest festival you have never seen this decoration. Always the same stone bench is wheeled out into the center of the field. You are irritated, your personal little tradition a casualty of this strange change in decoration. No, not a casualty. You walk towards the slab, as even though it is but a small tradition, it matters to you.

You lie down on the slab. You place your hands behind your head and cross your legs, attempting to lie comfortably on solid stone. A fortunate coincidence is that you are facing directly upwards, so you have no need to crane your neck watching the moon and the stars. They really are beautiful, this far out from any large populace you can see countless speckles of light. You are lost in their majestic beauty, so lost you don’t recognize the silence getting louder. One by one the creatures of the field and woods grow quiet. First the birds cease their night calls, followed by the frogs, then even the insects grow still. 

When the silence is utter and definite, you are jolted out of your meditation. It is an unnatural silence, a foreboding silence. You stand up tall on the slab trying to see the rest of the carnival but all you can see is darkness. The spotlights showing the way through the maze have gone out, as well as seemingly the entire carnival. You hear no screams, no commotion. Your panic keeps rising. It is a full moon and a clear night, so you still have some limited visibility. You can see the vague outlines of what is probably the ferris wheel and coaster. Although, those could also just be trees. You spin in a circle and can not discern anything properly in the darkness. 

As you are searching the darkness grows, over the treeline stars begin to blink out. An impossibility, to be sure, but they indeed begin to fade and die. You watch in dumbfounded awe as every little beautiful speck of light dies, one by one, until all that is left is the moon. You, a sea of darkness, and one shining symbol of hope in the sky. Then the moon grows dim, and it too dies. You are left in perfect darkness.

An indiscernible amount of time passes as you sit in partial sensory deprivation. You can still feel, although there is little to feel. There is the stone slab and the corn surrounding you. An indescribable dread fills you when you determine that there is no longer an opening in the corn. You are fully surrounded and closed in. You could try running through the field, but where would that get you? You reach an absurd conclusion, a state of denial. You are sure this is some elaborate prank, some reality prank show has selected your maze at random for their Halloween special. How unfortunate you are to be wrong.

The moon comes back to life. Slowly the world around you begins to light up, however it is not the light you expect. As you look into the sky you can see a small spot of red. Blood red. As you watch, the spot grows. It spreads slowly, just as the stars and moon grew dim slowly. It grows to the size of the moon and does not stop. Slowly, the whole sky is covered in a blood red light. It is dim, you can look directly upward without blinding yourself. The world around you is colored shades of red and black. There is red where light reaches and blackness in the shadows. 

You realize that while you were sky watching, an opening returned to the corn. You leave the clearing at the center of the maze and journey into the corridors. Every step you take crunches a husk on the ground, a violent sound in the otherwise deafening silence around you. You stop every few steps and listen, there isn’t so much as a breeze blowing through the corn. The only noise is coming from you. 

You creep through the turns and find dead end after dead end. The desperation is getting to you, tears stream freely down your face. You whimper, but every noise that leaves your mouth makes you jump. Paranoia. You are certain something\* \*stands in the corn, watching. Every hair on your body stands, your blood runs cold despite your heart’s rapid beating, but you continue onward. A brave soul you are. Eventually you come to an exit, elation overtakes you and you break into a dead sprint. May your stalker be damned, you are getting out of this corn. 

As you break into the clearing outside the maze you see it is the festival, just as you left it, only now abandoned. Your joy flees from you and dread once again holds your soul tightly. You walk through empty stalls, carnival games stand half played. A large plush prize sits on the counter next to a set of knocked over bottles. The ferris wheel sits still, as does the carousel. The coaster rests atop a peak, unmoving. You walk, desperately searching for any sign of life. Any sign of normalcy. You find neither. 

You walk towards the parking lot, aimlessly wandering in the direction of your car. Maybe it can offer you freedom. The rows of spots, loosely marked by strings tied to sticks, remain full. No one left the festival, not in their car. Your mind is not racing, you are in a paradoxical calm. You ask yourself questions that you don’t want answers for. “Aliens? The Rapture? Hallucinations?” You pull your keys out of your pocket and reach to unlock your car, and a twig breaks to your right. 

Your eyes jerk to the treeline, scanning every detail of the red and black landscape looking for what just moved. You hear your heartbeat throb in your ears, your vision blurry around the edges. You see no movement, and, after agonizing moments of staring at the static trees, you turn to get in your car. When you turn back to your car, it is a rusted and broken corpse. All other cars in the lot are gone, the carnival is gone, and you stand alone in the woods. From the silence, you hear more twigs snapping. Quiet, but growing louder. Growing louder and faster, closing in.

(Pt. 1/?)

Halloween was always your favorite holiday. It’s in autumn, which is your favorite season. As a child you loved the costumes and candy and as an adult those still bring you a happy nostalgia. The burdens of life have beaten you down and left you a husk of that joyful child, a man who simply is. You partake in the rat race of life, a productive employee and worthwhile friend to those you know. Yet in this you feel unfulfilled, unsatisfied, uninterested in your daily life. You take great joy in the sojourns of holidays, not out of a particular devoutness to the holy but rather to the celebration of anything unordinary. The reason for celebration, the holy of the day, slips your mind as you devour feast and partake in festival. You adore it, the utter gluttony of your soul let loose upon food and drink, your animalistic urges brought to the forefront by the persuasion of drunkenness. Of course, this is only natural. Man’s natural instinct is to delight to an excess… 

I apologize. I get ahead of myself. None of this crosses your conscience, nor even your subconscious. I speak of your instincts and forget your story. 

Your favorite part of Halloween is the vestige of a pagan origin, the Harvest Festival. A carnival of the season, a celebration of success. “Again, this year we shall not starve but eat!” The sentiment has lessened in recent times. You take for granted there will be a surplus of food or other necessities. You do not worship the gods of harvest with a fear of famine, you celebrate using any excuse possible. You are not alone, many of your people do. If those gods lived and watched, they would certainly rage at your flippant disregard. The gods of old are dead, luckily, and you can blaspheme their holy days all you wish. Candied apples, plastic pumpkins, false corn, and costumed children all litter this field as you partake in festivities. 

A mobile ferris wheel, carousels, and even a short coaster are among the sources of joyful shouts filling the night air. Your friends drag you onto the rides, laughing and joking all the while. You find these all enjoyable but as the night drags on you tire of the socializing and the constant entertainment. You move away from the more overstated festivities. You make your way to your true desire, your absolute favorite tradition, almost ritualistically. You enter the corn maze. 

Most overlook the maze. It’s a novelty, seemingly. They navigate the halls of grain once and the novelty wears off. Very few enjoy the simple satisfaction of finding their way through the series of turns and dead ends. You are among that few. The small traditions are important to you, in some ways more important than the large ones. Every year, just before midnight, you find your way to the center of the maze, sit in the peaceful quiet, and watch the moon. Distant voices are drowned out by the droning of crickets, cicadas, bullfrogs, and night birds. 

As you round the corner, you find the central clearing. A square cut just slightly wider than the passages of the maze. Expecting the same stone bench and humorous attempts at spooky decorations that you see every year, you are confused to find a slab. A stone slab roughly half your height and much wider. You stand puzzled. In your decades of coming to the harvest festival you have never seen this decoration. Always the same stone bench is wheeled out into the center of the field. You are irritated, your personal little tradition a casualty of this strange change in decoration. No, not a casualty. You walk towards the slab, as even though it is but a small tradition, it matters to you.

You lie down on the slab. You place your hands behind your head and cross your legs, attempting to lie comfortably on solid stone. A fortunate coincidence is that you are facing directly upwards, so you have no need to crane your neck watching the moon and the stars. They really are beautiful, this far out from any large populace you can see countless speckles of light. You are lost in their majestic beauty, so lost you don’t recognize the silence getting louder. One by one the creatures of the field and woods grow quiet. First the birds cease their night calls, followed by the frogs, then even the insects grow still. 

When the silence is utter and definite, you are jolted out of your meditation. It is an unnatural silence, a foreboding silence. You stand up tall on the slab trying to see the rest of the carnival but all you can see is darkness. The spotlights showing the way through the maze have gone out, as well as seemingly the entire carnival. You hear no screams, no commotion. Your panic keeps rising. It is a full moon and a clear night, so you still have some limited visibility. You can see the vague outlines of what is probably the ferris wheel and coaster. Although, those could also just be trees. You spin in a circle and can not discern anything properly in the darkness. 

As you are searching the darkness grows, over the treeline stars begin to blink out. An impossibility, to be sure, but they indeed begin to fade and die. You watch in dumbfounded awe as every little beautiful speck of light dies, one by one, until all that is left is the moon. You, a sea of darkness, and one shining symbol of hope in the sky. Then the moon grows dim, and it too dies. You are left in perfect darkness.

An indiscernible amount of time passes as you sit in partial sensory deprivation. You can still feel, although there is little to feel. There is the stone slab and the corn surrounding you. An indescribable dread fills you when you determine that there is no longer an opening in the corn. You are fully surrounded and closed in. You could try running through the field, but where would that get you? You reach an absurd conclusion, a state of denial. You are sure this is some elaborate prank, some reality prank show has selected your maze at random for their Halloween special. How unfortunate you are to be wrong.

The moon comes back to life. Slowly the world around you begins to light up, however it is not the light you expect. As you look into the sky you can see a small spot of red. Blood red. As you watch, the spot grows. It spreads slowly, just as the stars and moon grew dim slowly. It grows to the size of the moon and does not stop. Slowly, the whole sky is covered in a blood red light. It is dim, you can look directly upward without blinding yourself. The world around you is colored shades of red and black. There is red where light reaches and blackness in the shadows. 

You realize that while you were sky watching, an opening returned to the corn. You leave the clearing at the center of the maze and journey into the corridors. Every step you take crunches a husk on the ground, a violent sound in the otherwise deafening silence around you. You stop every few steps and listen, there isn’t so much as a breeze blowing through the corn. The only noise is coming from you. 

You creep through the turns and find dead end after dead end. The desperation is getting to you, tears stream freely down your face. You whimper, but every noise that leaves your mouth makes you jump. Paranoia. You are certain something\* \*stands in the corn, watching. Every hair on your body stands, your blood runs cold despite your heart’s rapid beating, but you continue onward. A brave soul you are. Eventually you come to an exit, elation overtakes you and you break into a dead sprint. May your stalker be damned, you are getting out of this corn. 

As you break into the clearing outside the maze you see it is the festival, just as you left it, only now abandoned. Your joy flees from you and dread once again holds your soul tightly. You walk through empty stalls, carnival games stand half played. A large plush prize sits on the counter next to a set of knocked over bottles. The ferris wheel sits still, as does the carousel. The coaster rests atop a peak, unmoving. You walk, desperately searching for any sign of life. Any sign of normalcy. You find neither. 

You walk towards the parking lot, aimlessly wandering in the direction of your car. Maybe it can offer you freedom. The rows of spots, loosely marked by strings tied to sticks, remain full. No one left the festival, not in their car. Your mind is not racing, you are in a paradoxical calm. You ask yourself questions that you don’t want answers for. “Aliens? The Rapture? Hallucinations?” You pull your keys out of your pocket and reach to unlock your car, and a twig breaks to your right. 

Your eyes jerk to the treeline, scanning every detail of the red and black landscape looking for what just moved. You hear your heartbeat throb in your ears, your vision blurry around the edges. You see no movement, and, after agonizing moments of staring at the static trees, you turn to get in your car. When you turn back to your car, it is a rusted and broken corpse. All other cars in the lot are gone, the carnival is gone, and you stand alone in the woods. From the silence, you hear more twigs snapping. Quiet, but growing louder. Growing louder and faster, closing in.

(Pt. 1/?)

Halloween was always your favorite holiday. It’s in autumn, which is your favorite season. As a child you loved the costumes and candy and as an adult those still bring you a happy nostalgia. The burdens of life have beaten you down and left you a husk of that joyful child, a man who simply is. You partake in the rat race of life, a productive employee and worthwhile friend to those you know. Yet in this you feel unfulfilled, unsatisfied, uninterested in your daily life. You take great joy in the sojourns of holidays, not out of a particular devoutness to the holy but rather to the celebration of anything unordinary. The reason for celebration, the holy of the day, slips your mind as you devour feast and partake in festival. You adore it, the utter gluttony of your soul let loose upon food and drink, your animalistic urges brought to the forefront by the persuasion of drunkenness. Of course, this is only natural. Man’s natural instinct is to delight to an excess… 

I apologize. I get ahead of myself. None of this crosses your conscience, nor even your subconscious. I speak of your instincts and forget your story. 

Your favorite part of Halloween is the vestige of a pagan origin, the Harvest Festival. A carnival of the season, a celebration of success. “Again, this year we shall not starve but eat!” The sentiment has lessened in recent times. You take for granted there will be a surplus of food or other necessities. You do not worship the gods of harvest with a fear of famine, you celebrate using any excuse possible. You are not alone, many of your people do. If those gods lived and watched, they would certainly rage at your flippant disregard. The gods of old are dead, luckily, and you can blaspheme their holy days all you wish. Candied apples, plastic pumpkins, false corn, and costumed children all litter this field as you partake in festivities. 

A mobile ferris wheel, carousels, and even a short coaster are among the sources of joyful shouts filling the night air. Your friends drag you onto the rides, laughing and joking all the while. You find these all enjoyable but as the night drags on you tire of the socializing and the constant entertainment. You move away from the more overstated festivities. You make your way to your true desire, your absolute favorite tradition, almost ritualistically. You enter the corn maze. 

Most overlook the maze. It’s a novelty, seemingly. They navigate the halls of grain once and the novelty wears off. Very few enjoy the simple satisfaction of finding their way through the series of turns and dead ends. You are among that few. The small traditions are important to you, in some ways more important than the large ones. Every year, just before midnight, you find your way to the center of the maze, sit in the peaceful quiet, and watch the moon. Distant voices are drowned out by the droning of crickets, cicadas, bullfrogs, and night birds. 

As you round the corner, you find the central clearing. A square cut just slightly wider than the passages of the maze. Expecting the same stone bench and humorous attempts at spooky decorations that you see every year, you are confused to find a slab. A stone slab roughly half your height and much wider. You stand puzzled. In your decades of coming to the harvest festival you have never seen this decoration. Always the same stone bench is wheeled out into the center of the field. You are irritated, your personal little tradition a casualty of this strange change in decoration. No, not a casualty. You walk towards the slab, as even though it is but a small tradition, it matters to you.

You lie down on the slab. You place your hands behind your head and cross your legs, attempting to lie comfortably on solid stone. A fortunate coincidence is that you are facing directly upwards, so you have no need to crane your neck watching the moon and the stars. They really are beautiful, this far out from any large populace you can see countless speckles of light. You are lost in their majestic beauty, so lost you don’t recognize the silence getting louder. One by one the creatures of the field and woods grow quiet. First the birds cease their night calls, followed by the frogs, then even the insects grow still. 

When the silence is utter and definite, you are jolted out of your meditation. It is an unnatural silence, a foreboding silence. You stand up tall on the slab trying to see the rest of the carnival but all you can see is darkness. The spotlights showing the way through the maze have gone out, as well as seemingly the entire carnival. You hear no screams, no commotion. Your panic keeps rising. It is a full moon and a clear night, so you still have some limited visibility. You can see the vague outlines of what is probably the ferris wheel and coaster. Although, those could also just be trees. You spin in a circle and can not discern anything properly in the darkness. 

As you are searching the darkness grows, over the treeline stars begin to blink out. An impossibility, to be sure, but they indeed begin to fade and die. You watch in dumbfounded awe as every little beautiful speck of light dies, one by one, until all that is left is the moon. You, a sea of darkness, and one shining symbol of hope in the sky. Then the moon grows dim, and it too dies. You are left in perfect darkness.

An indiscernible amount of time passes as you sit in partial sensory deprivation. You can still feel, although there is little to feel. There is the stone slab and the corn surrounding you. An indescribable dread fills you when you determine that there is no longer an opening in the corn. You are fully surrounded and closed in. You could try running through the field, but where would that get you? You reach an absurd conclusion, a state of denial. You are sure this is some elaborate prank, some reality prank show has selected your maze at random for their Halloween special. How unfortunate you are to be wrong.

The moon comes back to life. Slowly the world around you begins to light up, however it is not the light you expect. As you look into the sky you can see a small spot of red. Blood red. As you watch, the spot grows. It spreads slowly, just as the stars and moon grew dim slowly. It grows to the size of the moon and does not stop. Slowly, the whole sky is covered in a blood red light. It is dim, you can look directly upward without blinding yourself. The world around you is colored shades of red and black. There is red where light reaches and blackness in the shadows. 

You realize that while you were sky watching, an opening returned to the corn. You leave the clearing at the center of the maze and journey into the corridors. Every step you take crunches a husk on the ground, a violent sound in the otherwise deafening silence around you. You stop every few steps and listen, there isn’t so much as a breeze blowing through the corn. The only noise is coming from you. 

You creep through the turns and find dead end after dead end. The desperation is getting to you, tears stream freely down your face. You whimper, but every noise that leaves your mouth makes you jump. Paranoia. You are certain something* *stands in the corn, watching. Every hair on your body stands, your blood runs cold despite your heart’s rapid beating, but you continue onward. A brave soul you are. Eventually you come to an exit, elation overtakes you and you break into a dead sprint. May your stalker be damned, you are getting out of this corn. 

As you break into the clearing outside the maze you see it is the festival, just as you left it, only now abandoned. Your joy flees from you and dread once again holds your soul tightly. You walk through empty stalls, carnival games stand half played. A large plush prize sits on the counter next to a set of knocked over bottles. The ferris wheel sits still, as does the carousel. The coaster rests atop a peak, unmoving. You walk, desperately searching for any sign of life. Any sign of normalcy. You find neither. 

You walk towards the parking lot, aimlessly wandering in the direction of your car. Maybe it can offer you freedom. The rows of spots, loosely marked by strings tied to sticks, remain full. No one left the festival, not in their car. Your mind is not racing, you are in a paradoxical calm. You ask yourself questions that you don’t want answers for. “Aliens? The Rapture? Hallucinations?” You pull your keys out of your pocket and reach to unlock your car, and a twig breaks to your right. 

Your eyes jerk to the treeline, scanning every detail of the red and black landscape looking for what just moved. You hear your heartbeat throb in your ears, your vision blurry around the edges. You see no movement, and, after agonizing moments of staring at the static trees, you turn to get in your car. When you turn back to your car, it is a rusted and broken corpse. All other cars in the lot are gone, the carnival is gone, and you stand alone in the woods. From the silence, you hear more twigs snapping. Quiet, but growing louder. Growing louder and faster, closing in.

Obviously Iron Lung is his largest success and is a great game but a Wendigoon video covering Dusk, Squirrel Stapler, and all of his lesser known short horror games would be peak. There’s a little bit of overarching lore to them too

Disclaimer: I have not listened to Tommy taffy in, what like 2 years since it came out? I pretty much read a summary of it to jog my memory. So correct me if I’m completely wrong somewhere.

When Tommy Taffy first dropped, people hated it. And that’s fair. I disliked it, and I have no true desire to listen to it again, read the novelization, or to watch the upcoming movie. This isn’t a matter of blind hatred of the work or author, but taste. The problem I see is that many people look at Witherow and do the “check his hard drive” meme. I find this unfair and frankly just doesn’t drive any discussion or literary value. Your dislike of a work is as valid as someone else’s like of a work but if you just call the author a pedophile you don’t contribute anything of value to the conversation of the story.

My issue with Tommy Taffy was not the subject matter, it is clear Witherow went through childhood trauma and uses his stories as a manner of coping with that. This is a healthier manner of coping than most, I think, and I cannot blame the man for that. My issue resides in the natural conclusion of this idea.

Tommy Taffy, the character and the larger story, is clearly a metaphor of abuse. Parental abuse, creepy uncle, childhood sexual assault, (debatably neglect) are all covered. A heavy topic, absolutely, but definitely not one off the table for discussion. Borrasca, Penpal, and multiple other great stories they’ve read contain one or more of these elements. Hell a lot of stories I want to write contain some of these elements and I had great parents so I don’t even have the excuse of using it to cope. However, many people I know and care about have experienced some form of parental trauma. So I approach the subject thinking about them.

The moral of the story, as I see it, is that you cannot break the cycle of abuse unless you just don’t have any children. Tommy Taffy is the immortal pedophile of r/nosleep. You cannot kill him, you cannot stop him from doing what he wants, and he wants to do the most depraved shit he possibly can. The father’s father from the prequel story dies because he tries to fight Tommy. What does this mean? Metaphorically, what is this supposed to say about the cycle of abuse? An abusive father trying to fight his abusive nature will kill him? A father who had no desire to harm his children has to sit there and watch his wife and children be beaten and raped because the nature of his abuse is immortal? This is my problem. There’s seemingly no purpose for the graphic points of the story outside of shock and coping.

Once again I would like reiterate that I do not think lowly of Witherow’s character, I simply do not appreciate his writing. I have similar feelings about Feed the Pig, Tall Dog, and honestly do I need to even bring up Something’s Wrong With Dad. They don’t have any particularly poignant themes or resolutions for their heavy subject matter, they simply exist as heavy subject matter.

Extreme Horror and Splatterpunk have their places in pop culture. Not every story has to have a fantastic narrative. Stories, especially horror stories, can be written with the single and simple intent to unsettle, disturb, or scare the audience. I think Witherow is very skilled at writing horrific situations, but I do not like the manner in which he seems to half ass his metaphors. Really I have more criticisms for the fans of these genres and stories that try to make them out as literary masterpieces that you just wouldn’t get.

TLDR: if you’re gonna make a monster that represents the cycle of abuse, don’t make the monster immortal thus implying you can’t break the cycle.

Please feel free to criticize my criticism, as is the nature of discourse

My mom only made my favorite meal once. When I was a kid, really young, we had an unexpected and unusually strong blizzard hit our state. We lived out of town down a gravel road near a state forest, really in the boonies. We had a few neighbors, not right next door but within reasonable walking distance. None of us were very well off, mostly living in trailer houses. So when this blizzard hit, and since nobody was prepared in general, we got hit extra hard. Nearly an entire foot of ice and snow was violently dropped out of the sky. Needless to say the roads were undriveable but more importantly we lost both power and water. Our pipes froze solid and of course the power lines were toppled by wind, snow, or ice weighing them down. The situation became desperate overnight. In town they were able to recover fairly quickly, not three days passed before interstate traffic was rolling along undisturbed. Out on our gravel road, however, it took over two weeks. We didn’t have power to call anybody, and even if we had they were probably more focused on the hundreds of other small communities and neighborhoods scattered throughout the county to focus on a small handful of trailers down by the river, 15 minutes out of town. Like I said earlier, we weren’t well off. In fact we were dirt broke. My dad was the sole income and he had an uneducated factory worker’s salary. Within the first week we had run our pantry dry. I guess my parents should have rationed it out better but my brother, sister, and I were all kids. They must’ve expected the whole ordeal to only last a day or two. Well on about day 8 of being stuck and without any food for an indeterminate amount of time, my dad decided to go to one of the neighbors and see if they were fairing better. He intended to drive the  minute down the road but his car was still completely stuck in the ice. He didn’t have 4 wheel drive so it might as well have been buried under it. He decided to brave the woods on foot and walk. It wasn’t a far walk, but it did take me a few minutes on a good day, running with the enthusiasm of an energetic child. About the time night fell and he hadn’t made his way back is when my mom got worried. She left us kids by the fireplace, where we’d been burning magazines and books after we ran out of dry firewood, and left to look for my dad. She came back an hour or two later without dad. She told us he had gotten really cold, too cold to walk back and that he would stay the night at the neighbors. “The good news,” she said, “is that daddy found us some food for dinner! Who wants spaghetti?” We were thrilled, of course we wanted spaghetti. She told us to wait by the fire while she cooked. The smell of cooking meat wafted though the house, meatballs to go with the spaghetti. Except when she served us our plates, there were no meatballs. I asked her why she didn’t put the meatballs on and she looked at me confused. “There weren’t any meatballs, honey, just spaghetti.” Confused why we had smelled meat, we just dug in anyway. We hadn’t eaten for a day or two. Who cares if she kept the meatballs for herself, the spaghetti and sauce was good as it was. And damn was it good. I still remember how good it was to this day. It wasn’t normal spaghetti, the noodles were hollow and bigger than normal. There were also some that were bigger and others that were smaller. Just some fancy spaghetti the neighbors had splurged on, we figured. We finished our plates and greedily asked for seconds. I realized now I don’t even remember my mom having any. She sat watching us eat with this distant look in her eyes. Like she was watching clouds on an overcast day. Turned out dad ended up dying at the neighbors, he never ended up getting properly warmed back up after his frostbite. We took it pretty hard, which, of course. He was our dad. But also mom had to become the sole income of the house, also uneducated, without a high school diploma, and without any work experience. We managed, and I admire her for that.

For years I would beg her to make that spaghetti again, and she always refused. She said it was too expensive of a brand and we wouldn’t be able to afford it again for a while. Eventually I forgot about it and stopped bothering her. I recently remembered, and God would have been merciful if He had let me remain ignorant. I’ve grown up and moved out, done better for myself than I really expected to as a kid. I’ve got enough money to invest in a little rifle to hunt with. The first time I shot a deer, I tried to butcher it myself. I failed miserably and pretty much ruined all the good bits of meat. I ended up trying to use most of that deer as fishing bait and for traps. The second one I shot I did better. I actually managed to salvage most of that one and have some nice dinners out of it. When I was cleaning it, I dumped most of the organs in a bucket. You can eat some of the organs, like heart tissue is really quite good if you don’t shoot it, but for most you just toss them out or use it as bait. I looked in the bucket full of guts and noticed something. Those intestines kind of looked like my mom’s spaghetti, the spaghetti she made only once. I took the guts out of the bucket and cooked them up for dinner that night. I was horrified to find that they tasted just like mom’s spaghetti, the kind she only made once. A little gamier, but certainly the same flavor. I called my mom and I asked her if dad had ever actually made it to the neighbors house that day. She never answered and after a quiet sob, hung up the phone.