Coma

Coma


Our house was dark and quiet. I can’t really remember a time when it wasn’t. Always dark, and always quiet. I expected nothing less, even when I returned to the place twenty years later. I knew it would be silent, even after I broke down the boarded window and climbed in yesterday afternoon, I knew, deep down, somewhere, despite my hopes, that nothing had changed.

There were always weeds in the yard, and now they were just wild, like the death of my mother and father was fuel for them to shoot up and claim dominance over everything else. They spread through the gravel driveway, flanked the edges of the house, and spread up the hill to where I used build snow-forts. They climbed through the chain link fence around the property, and stopped at the tree-line of the massive forest surrounding it. They were as tall as the fence itself. They were everywhere.

I heard nothing as I climbed through the broken window yesterday afternoon. I didn’t hear my foot crunch down on the rubble, and I didn’t hear the murmuring of the the past in the air. Everything was silent, and I guess I had a reason for it. I was deaf, among other things.

After what he called 'my little accident' my father used to call me deaf, dumb, and blind. It was mostly true, except, unfortunately for him, I wasn't blind. I could see what he did. I saw the things he brought into the house. The paper bags that leaked from the bottom, dripping blood on the kitchen floor, the boxes of clothes he’d haul down to the basement. I saw them. My mother didn’t. My mother was blind, perpetually blind. She's probably still blind. As time wore on my mother grew worse, literally, blacker: her eyes sunk into her dead, day after day, until eventually they disappeared completely, and her features blurred until she became part of the shadows on the wall. She's blind, like me, but she's not dumb. She's one clever bitch. Her ghost probably haunts this house, a sightless apparition, striking out blindly with a fevered insanity, listening to everything but reason, if reason still enters this place at all.



When I first entered the house, I felt a vibration from the walls, and I saw the shadows move like water across the edges of the yellowed wall paper. I saw shadows everywhere- I guess they were more than shadows, more solid in form, more tangible, more touchable, possible to see when not a thing was being struck by the sun. I saw a shadow that looked much like a human. It walked. I know they're watching me, and perhaps they have been waiting. I do not know if they wait like we wait. But I know what It wants. I have an advantage. I am deaf, dumb, and blind.

Our house was big, and I was the only child. I was sensitive, and I was scared. Of everything. Of my mother. Of the demons that would dance in front of me all afternoon, and all night: terrified of the huge shadow people that hung over me with hunched backs, with long, slender fingers that reached for me, beckoning me to follow them. Green tentacles that slid underneath my doors and wrapped around my leg. These could have been mere imagination, the nauseating kind a child has. But I’m not sure.

My father had a crucifixion statue that would bleed and drip on the floor during the night, pooling around my crib, and this was the most terrifying of all: but, on the whole, I was tormented by these apparitions. My father would hit me if I asked plead to him, and my mother blamed it on my “devilish imagination.” When you're deaf, dumb, and blind, you relate to things differently. Your perception is different. Maybe you are insane. Maybe I’m insane.

They say that insanity brings you closer to god, and if that's true, god is as black as the night and just as terrifying.

God showed me who my father was. I was mostly terrified of my father: my paternal bond with him never developed, it more or less died when I peered out of my crib as he would walk down the creaky stairs, not once paying mind to his child, his only son. He resented me, and I feared him. Then, one day when I was no more than six, I saw him bring home a small package. I followed him, for the first and last time in my life, up to his study, and I saw him tear away the brown paper. I hid behind the door and watched through the cracks. He opened up a small, shining, golden key.

I walk up the stairs now, the one he used to tread up and down, up and down, endlessly, without purpose. I’m naked, spare the cane in my hand, the cane my father used to use to beat my mother. I'm hitting the walls, using the vibrations as they travel to find the hollowed out panel under which he kept that small, golden key: the key to his kingdom, the key to what god has shown me. God told me that when I find the key, I'll finally be free.

I can't find the key on the stairs, so I move up the stairs, toward my parents bedroom. I don't hear anything, and if I could I'd go mad, but I've slipped so far into the void that my tolerance is literally infinite. The dark shadows that move peel of the walls and walk toward me, and I walk towards them, a game of chicken. The room gets colder. They stop. I stop.

“Hello,” I say. I can't hear my own voice.

“Hello.” the demon says. It's my voice. I can hear it...and that's never happened before, my mind has always been a fortress against their hateful words.

“What-” I say, to no one, shaking, falling, my confidence drowning in fear.

“You're looking for the keys, aren't you?”

I nod, my body trembling as the shadow glides closer to me. I can see into it's blackness, it opens up like a mirror into the reality I was born from: and I see the memories. I see the real world. Mary, she calls herself, my real mother, crying over my unconscious body, talking to a man in a coat.

When I was a boy I used to dream of a different life, a life where I had a mother, and a father who lived in a house on a hill with big windows. I had a dog named Buster. I had a sister named Georgia. But for years, they were just dreams, and I would awake, in tears, screaming for my mother I could not remember. I told my real...or false mother about it once. She told me I had to pray, that I was a devil. So I did. I used to think it was real, that I didn’t belong to this hell...and I guess I was right.


I've heard the doctors talk in my dreams. It's been sixteen years, it's time to pull the plug. They are going to pull the plug and leave me flowing down the drain, the drain into this sewer of infinity.

If I find the key, I can wake up. I can wake up. But I have to find the key before they kill me, leave me to die in this pseudo-reality my dying mind created. But I'm trapped. I can't find it. I look into the blackness....the blackness has never failed to give me at least some kind of clue.

“Mrs. Howards, you are a brave woman. Do you want to be...in the room?”

“No.” My mother's face is unnaturally straight, blank. It contorts slightly as she turns her back and a sob escapes her. The memories of her rush back, and I try my hardest to somehow convey that I see her, she's right there, and if she would just give me a second I could escape this self created hell-

I see the doctor embrace my mother and escort her out of the room. I can't peel my eyes from the shadow's blackness. I see the doctor put on gloves, hovering over a computer. I rip my eyes away, at last.

“No,” I shout, scrambling backwards. “This can't be forever-”

The shadow splits into two. My mother appears again, smiling, naked, her body gray and squalid, rotten, melting.

My father appears for the second time, and it was always him I was scared of. He has needle fingers and a big black smile and teeth painted red and when he talks he has my voice, but it wasn't really mine: it was the voice of who I was going to become. I was going to turn into him. Daddy's little boy, right?

“We thought you we're going to get away from us and find the key. But you're dumb, kid. Deaf, dumb and blind. We let you have your fun when they...your real parents still influenced you. You could have destroyed us, but you didn't realize you could. We didn't try to turn you into us. This transformation is inside of you, is it not? We didn’t encourage this. You’re stupid, you’re stupid now, and you were young and stupid. Do you want to know how you got into the coma in the first place?”

“No...no..no.”

My fathers face flashed a grotesque, contorted smile, his cheekbone rising to his ears and his smile glimmering like melting plastic.

“To bad, you're fucked Jeremy, your fucked! You were driving Jeremy, and you crashed. You crashed. And now your own mother is giving you up! You were so close, and she doesn't even recognize it, Jeremy! Your father is dead. She doesn't even care about her only son.”

He stepped towards me, his arms outstretched.

“We're the only family you've got, Jeremy, and you created us, whether you admit it or not. Maybe the deepest, hidden part of your soul leapt at the opportunity, but it was still you. You still did it. I hope you're ready, Jeremy. Eternity is a long time.”

“No, not forever, not forever-”

I sink to my knees, and the shadows on the wall start moving, and shrieking, and laughing, and in a million voices, a million different voices, screaming. They form the story of my life, like blackbox actors portraying the suicide of a forgotten god. I look at my hands for the last time.

I'm going to become my parents. I'm going to become my parents.

Doctor Ellis always whistled when he had to do shit like this. Not necessarily out loud, but always in his mind, playing l like elevator music. He whistled as he walked down long hospital corridors, about to tell a parent their child died. He was whistling when he said;
“I'm sorry Jeremy, but it's time to pull the plug.”

He could have sworn he saw Jeremy twitch for a second. He shrugged it off.

“Goodbye, Jeremy.”

We Might Make it, After-All

As he talked from across the fire, the light it cast illuminated his face. I stared into the dancing flames as he chewed on his tongue, a little nervous habit he picked up recently. I was waiting for him to talk, say something, but I doubted he would. There was nothing to say, and I wasn’t about to spark a damn conversation.

A tiny ember floated through the air and landed on my bare arm and absentmindedly snubbed it out with my thumb. It was cold. I had left my jacket back there somewhere, and he had lost his fucking shoes back there as well. We weren’t going back for it. I’d have to fucking freeze to death and he’d have to go barefoot.

We stared into the fire, both of us now. He stopped chewing his tongue. We looked at the dancing flame, and I didn’t blink once, I just stared. I saw the thing back there, dancing with the smoke, smiling in the orange, and I’m sure he did too because neither of us looked up from the fire for a long time. The damn Thing was talking to us. It never stopped.

I was still staring at the fire when he stood up. He coughed, and spat mucus out on the ground. I looked up at him, and his wide, sunken eyes were bloodshot as hell. He was bleeding a little bit from the side of his mouth and his flannel shirt was ripped in the front, like some huge hand tried to rip his fucking stomach out.

“We need to move.” His voice was gravelly, deep, and rough.

I stood up, and nodded.

“Leave the fire.” he said. “Doesn’t matter anyway. It knows where we are.”

We walked away from the light and into the darkness.

---
“HOLY FUCK,” she screamed. He saw what she saw, and before he could really think, the breaks squealed against the tar and his head jerked back as the car abruptly stopped. Almost before the car stopped moving she threw the driver’s seat door open and bounded out of the car. He followed her, slowly, staring at what she was running towards.

On the right side of the road an old, beaten tree with thick branches that hung over the sides of the road, held a special present. Swaying like some kind of perverted tetherball of human flesh, hung two young men.
---

As the dawn slowly lit up the sky, him and I were on the grassy, mud banks of some river, walking slowly, squelching through the thick mud. I ditched my shoes, threw them in the river, half because they were falling apart and half to try and give him some consolation for his loss last night. I wouldn’t need them, today, anyway. We’d probably end up following the river for the rest of the sunlight hours.

It had been a good night- the flashlight hadn’t died yet and we made some good distance. No sign of the damn thing- no broken trees, no splotches of blood in the trees, and no fucking teeth. The thing left teeth everywhere he went, human teeth, like some kind of territorial sign. I’d started to collect some of them. I had 4, he had 5.

He stopped for a second, and turned towards the water. It was a lazy stretch of water- we had passed some currents a little while ago, but it calmed right down. Without a word, he bent down and picked up a stick half buried in mud. He threw it in, and we watched it slowly float for a minute. It went downstream, eventually.

He started to take of his shirt and pants, and so did I. We stripped naked in the morning light, and began to walk down the mud bank.

We sat on the banks of the river once again, our asses in the mud, the early afternoon sun warming our bones. I was starving. We were always starving. He had a can of Chef Boyardee left, and we split it. I was sad to see it go.

“If we keep following the river, maybe it’ll turn into a lake.” he said.

“With people.” I added.

“Yeah, with people.” he agreed.
“Do you think we’ll see It again?” I asked.

“I pray to god not,” he said. “But you never know.”

He stood up, and walked towards our clothes. It was time to go. I was tired, and exhausted, but I still had some running left in me.

We didn’t talk much, but I knew he was thinking what I was.
That we might make it, after all.
----

“Call the fucking police,” she murmured. He didn’t hear her. He was still staring. Staring at the way their bare-feet swung like pendulums, like the breeze was swaying them around like a waving flag. One was wearing a necklace of what seemed to be human teeth, white against the dead man’s torn flannel shirt. He looked up and down the tree, and half by chance he looked to the side of it, where he caught a glimpse of It.

“Call the fucking police,” she said, a bit louder. He shook his head, and kept staring, his mouth agape, his eyes wide and dilated.
“ Call the-”

“I see it.” he muttered.

“What?”

“Look. It’s behind the tree. It’s watching us.”
Her gaze met where his was pointing, and she saw it. He could tell. She saw it too.

“Get in the car,” he said.

“We need to get away,” she muttered.

“Run.”

As if they shared the same mind, they both turned on their heels, dashing towards the car. The Thing didn’t follow, and all at once he knew that this was a game. Maybe she didn’t have a chance, but he did. He could run forever.

We might make it, afterall. He thought.

As he opened the door, he glimpsed at the cup holders through the window, and he saw the white enamel of human teeth.
-----

Hey hey hey

You got a job working the closing shift at your local clothing retail store, and tonight you’re alone, the yellow light filtering from the tiles in the ceiling and illuminating the individual flakes of dust floating in the artificial air. It’s mostly silent, a far cry from a few hours ago. The only sound is that of a distant machine, like a generator or an air vent, humming deeply like the building’s lungs, and occasional clangs of pipes as the generator sings a metallic song.
There’s three of you who normally go around and fix things up at night, refolding shirts and hanging misplaced articles back up while making sure nothing got stolen or defaced, but you’re on your own tonight. The chick, Amanda, had to leave early and Ben, the other guy, took the night off. It’s just you. You look down at your watch. It’s 12:30. You still have a good hour and a half before you can call it a night.
You look around, and you’re astounded at how empty a massive clothing store can be at night. Nothing moves. There’s no aggravated customers demanding a full refund. No toddlers screaming as their retarded mothers talk loudly on cellphones, no kids knocking down stacks of novelty tee shirts and no light jazz elevator music played in the background of such chaos. It’s almost calming.
You make your way to the men’s section, and you pass one of those mannequins that has sample outfits on it. For a second, you stop and stare at him. His name is Goddfrey. You and the rest of the night crew pose with him sometimes and take Facebook pictures of him doing hilariously inappropriate things. Goddfrey Gone Wild. The night shift can be boring. Not tonight, though.
You salute Goddfrey, the normal greeting. He doesn’t salute back, and you stare at him, his white skin milky and plastic. For a second, you swear to god you see him twitch, but after a quick heartbeat you tell yourself it was nothing.
‘Damn,’ you say, “These things are fucking creepy at night.”
You turn your back on Godfrey and journey deeper into the men’s section, until you reach one of those godforsaken “novelty t-shirt!” stands. Those things take forever because they were constantly out of order. ‘People need to learn how to put shit back,’ you think. You bend over and put the ‘I’m Next to Stupid’ shirts back in the right place, and after about five minutes you’re done. You stand up, and survey the area. Everything is fine. You head back toward Goddfrey, and as you pass him you stop dead in your tracks.
You swear to god that Goddfrey’s head is cocked a little bit to the right, and the hat on his hat is now on the floor. As you stare into Goodfrey’s dark, black eyes, you suddenly start to feel uneasy. You hurry as you bend down and place the cap back on his head, and as you turn your back to him your heart starts to beat faster and you can feel eyes peering at the your back.
You turn around. It’s just Goddfrey. Good old Goddfrey the Fuckbuddy. You turn around again and walk quickly until you reach the ladies section.
As the feeling wears off you convince yourself it was just the paranoia of being in the store alone. It’s kind of a creepy place.
You scan the ladies section- it’s a fucking rough tonight. Blouses cover the floor, and one by one you place them back on the racks. As you’re putting the last skirt back on the rack, you catch something out of the corner or your eye.
A flash of white.
You know the general direction of where it happened, and your heart pounds heavily in your chest as you slowly rise to your feet, eyeing the area intently.
All you can see is the left side of a woman’s mannequin. Sarah, you guys named her, or as Ben liked to say “Fucking bitch.” Slowly, you walk to her.
You’re standing in front of her. Her left foot is a little bit farther ahead of her right.
‘She probably just lost balance,’ you say out loud as you stare at her.
‘Too much stuff on her head or something.’ You say to yourself in a hushed self affirmation. You turn around, and you hurry to the front register. As you turn your back to her, you can feel her black stare burn into your back.
The last thing you have to do is lock down the registers. One by one you go through and press the ‘power down’ button on the digital cash register, and it shuts off. As you’re doing this, you tremble a little, and as your brain tries to convince you it’s alright, and that you’re being retarded, and that you’re just frightened because of the nightshift. By the third register, you feel almost normal.
You see a small, children's shoe underneath the counter to the last register, so you pull on it.
You pull out a whole infant mannequin. You stare at for a spilt second, into the tiny, beady eyes, and you swear, just for one instant, that the thing fucking blinks.
You let out a cry as you drop the thing to the ground, the plastic resonating on the marble floor. From the men’s section you hear a light crash, and the same plastic rattling. You hear creaking plastic. Tiny plastic footsteps.
You run to the front entrance, and go to the security system.
You try to remember the code to lock the front door.
Plastic rattling from the women's section. With trembling fingers you punch the password- 409423.
Access denied.
You yell out in frustration and fear as you hear tiny footsteps. You refuse to look at where they are and your heartbeat climbs and your head feels like it’s going to explode from terror. The footsteps echo through the silence, plastic hitting tiled floors.
Another attempt with the password: 4019423.
Access denied.
‘I’m going to die holy shit I’m going to fucking die’
Only when you hear the singing do you abandon trying to lock the store. You can hear one of them, a robotic, inhuman, terrifying voice, singing something like ‘Hey hey hey, hey hey hey’ over and over and over and over again, and it grows nearer with every tiny, plastic step. You scream “FUCK IT” fling open the side door, and run to your car.
You’re halfway across the parking lot when you hear the side door open and you hear a faint, horrible chorus of ‘Hey hey hey’ echo in the still, black night. You run faster, your feet blasting against the pavement, and when you reach the front door of your car you struggle in your pockets, flinging your cellphone and wallet onto the pavement as ‘Hey hey hey’ grows closer, the robotic voice locking into the night with some kind hypnotic, horrible melody. You can see a dark humanoid figure, a dark shadow in the distance moving at a steady rate, hobbling and shaking. You flash your eyes to the side door again. More humanoid shadows. More robotic voices. More plastic steps against the pavement.
More ‘Hey Hey Hey’ choruses.
The car opens for you the first time, and you nearly dive into it. You refuse to look behind you as your fumbling hands struggle with the ignition. You hear gentle tapping on the window, and against your better judgement, you look up at it.
The plastic face seems to be smiling in the darkness, it’s plastic mouth moving in a tiny motion but a motion all the same. The dark eyes are so close to humanity but so horribly inhuman. They stare into your soul, plastic hand raised, knocking into the glass of your window. She’s mouthing words
“Hey hey hey. Hey hey hey.” You can hear it in your mind, and you start the car,and the radio turns on. You accelerate wildly you turn the radio on full volume.
‘We danced like spirits in the night’
As you speed forward, your headlight catches a group of them, all stumbling along with distinctly inhuman steps, rigid and without an ounce of flexibility or grace. Even with Springsteen Blaring you can hear the damn things.
‘Hey hey hey, hey hey hey,’
You’re store is next to another retail clothing store. As you pass at 70 miles an hour, you see a stream of them stumbling out of the store, an army of mannequins, some without heads, some without arms or legs, but all of them singing. You try to crank the radio up more, but it won’t, it’s maxed out. You scream and press the petal to the floor, peeling out into non-existent traffic.
It’s a long drive home. You go fast, and you don’t think. You’re mind is too clouded and exhausted for rational thought. You don’t notice the complete absence of traffic on the way to your house. You force the song out of your head. ‘Not the song, not the song.’
As you pull into your driveway, slamming the door behind you, you run to the front door and fumble with the key. Every shadow has a plastic face, every whisper of wind sings ‘Hey, hey, hey.’
The door opens. You lock it. You run through the house and make sure everything is locked. You close all of the curtains, and you move the living room couch in front of the stairs that lead to your bedroom. You leap over it, run into your bedroom, and move your dresser up against the door.
Your girlfriend let sleeping pills on your bed stand. You take a handful, and soon you pass out, face first, onto your bed.
You don’t hear them, at 5:30 in the morning. You left the side door leading into the garage open. You left the door leading from the garage into the kitchen unlocked.
They climb over the stair-blockade.
By six, your surrounded. At seven they start to sing.
At 7:05 you wake up, and you are silent as they sing the infinite chorus of ‘Hey hey hey,’ and it’s loud, at least one hundred robot voices singing the same thing, and you sit on the side of your bed, staring at the door handle.
It slowly turns. The door gradually opens.
A white leg steps into your room. You don’t move as it invites itself in.
Your last rational thought is ‘Oh my god it looks just like me’ as the white body moves toward you, his arms outstretched.
‘Hey hey hey, hey hey hey...’
When he sings, it’s different.
He has your voice.
As he embraces you like a long lost friend and you feel your skin harden, turning milky white, you discover why mannequins are nestled so deep in uncanny valley.
‘Hey hey hey,’ you sing in reply.
END

Rat Trap

It is a maze, you are the rat, and if you reach the prize in the center, something special will happen.
(you scramble through the crude maze walls, and almost at once you reach the carrot laid out for you. You wonder if you will be able to go home soon, if you have won the game and can go back to sleep.The men in white coats reach in and soon there's darkness.)
Day two. You awake to a white light, hungry, half dazed. However, you are promised great things if you reach the center of the maze.
(You claw at the air but your senses sort themselves out and soon you are standing at the beginning of a new maze. It is the same maze as before, but something tells you there is something wrong and as you scramble around the same path you smell the danger in the air. You use your whiskers and the powerful intuition they hold to skirt around the concealed mouse trap. You reach the prize in the center, the carrot which you nibble on, but without much vigor. Will you see your family after this, will you see your children, you don't know where they are- blackness.)
Day Three. You awake again to the maze, but you are hungry so hungry and you don't know how much time has past. They promise nothing. They mean business, now.
(You smell cheese, strong, delicious cheese, and you madly scramble to where it is coming from, but you seem to be in luck: it is doubled, doubled, two pieces of cheese:
You reach the cheese, and next to the cheese is another piece but they are both on machines, big wooden metal machines. You don't know what they are but they smell like death, but mixed in with the cheese you can almost forget. You forget about your family as you move closer to the bigger cheese, and cautiously you sniff the air.
You hear the rats in the cages around the maze squeak, screaming for their families, and suddenly you know that in a separate room different men are doing the same things to your family. You know what has to be done, there is no hope. You are just a rat lost in a maze, and even if you outsmart them it will be like Pandora's box until you die, forever growing and growing with promise and betrayal and cruelty.
You back up, to get a running start, and throw yourself at the death-machine. You hear your bones crunch as you thrash wildly in pain, and the last thing you hear is a scream, a voice you barely recognize, from the beginning of the maze. You hear the voice scream "Daddy, daddy, where are you?" They told me you were here" before the white light consumes you and you know no more.)

Red Dead Redemption Creepy Pasta

In the game Red Dead Redemption, in typical Rockstar Manner, you cannot swim, and when you go over your head under water, you drown instantly, just like in any Grand Theft Auto game up to San Andreas. In Vice City, a major part of the gameplay was boats, so it seemed silly to not be able to swim, but in Red Dead Redemption, so much of the game is played in so many different environments that it’s not noticeable unless you actually drown. I’ve drowned many times in that river in Tall Trees, mostly from overshooting corners and forgetting that river ever existed.
One mission and a couple of side missions have boats in them, but other than that, there are no boats on any waters, other than those harbored in Thieve’s Landing, and Black Water. But there is the Wreck of the Serendipity, in the Northern region of the great plains, and this is where our story takes place.
Tumbleweed Manor, when the timing is right, appears to be haunted. There is a video on youtube in which a player hears voices in the manor, and glitches the game to where the voices are: in a room of the manor previously unavailable to the player, filled with spawned NPCs. They are normal characters, they are just trapped, and once you shoot them all silence falls on the house once again.
In the early stages of Red Dead, the Serendipity was designed the same way: a unreachable room where normal characters would spawn and make “ghostly” noises to un-nerve the player and satisfy those who spent 4 hours looking for big foot in San Andreas, and those who swore to god they saw a UFO in Vice City. It was cut, though, and I don’t even think the Tumbleweed manor was supposed to stay that way, and it’s rare enough that players can just pass it off as a normal spawning glitch, but it’s not.
It’s kind of the same thing as blue hell in San Andreas and Vice City, and the Hospital Room in GTA IV- you propel yourself nothing-ness. Well, that can happen at the Serendipity as well, but it is rare. And it’s not just a room: it is an entire level. Very rare indeed: if you don’t capitalize on the moment it happens, or if you just don’t know the signs, it will pass and it will never happen again...perhaps for the better.
It has to be late at night, and music previously unheard but remarkably similar to the whistling in “The Shootist” will play for three seconds, out of tune and eerie. You will know it when you hear it. Then, you must run to the top deck, take out dynamite, and let yourself explode. Your sacrifice will not go unnoticed, believe me.
You will respawn in Armadillo, no matter where your last save point was, and things will seem different...because they are. The tint of the game will take on a very subtle yellowed-tone, and John or Jack will feel much nimbler and quicker than usual, and will be able to jump significantly higher that they could before. Next to your Red Dead Meter you will have another gage, a black rectangle filled with black. The game will never tell you directly, but this is your health. The regenerative health system is gone, but bullets cannot hurt you, and no one in Armadillo be hostile to you.
You cannot walk past the edges of Armadillo, or you will be glitched back to the center of Armadillo in a pixelated mess of graphics. You can only walk, and kill, for you have all your gun, and infinite bullets. If you do not kill, and only walk and listen, you will, after a time, see some pedestrians walking that just seem to fade away, like dust kicked into the breeze, and some that stop to engage in normal banter will talk of odd things, mostly trivial, but with constant reference to “The Train.” After the Train is mentioned the pedestrians talk in deep, harsh and suppressed voices and say “It is coming.”
You can kill without any remorse in this level- if you can handle the screaming. Everyone has the same, high and clear scream that pierces the silence of the otherwise slow town. It is a scream of agony; and if you can picture in your head every woman’s and man’s screams, then it is a blend of all, a universal scream from the depths of the soul. Most kill one and stop, but some simply turn the volume down and finish clearing out the town. If you clear out the town of all NPC’s, a single train whistle is heard from the train station, and if you’ve been playing as John Marston, the character to model suddenly morphs into Jack’s. If you’re playing as Jack, you stay the same, and you continue the long walk, in complete silence, to the train that awaits you.

If you do not kill, or kill once, you will notice that your life bar has been depleting at a steady rate for the entire level. Once it reaches zero the screen turns red like it does when you die, and it shows you walking to the train, slowly, almost as if you are watching a dream. You will stay as either John or Jack, depending on who you started the level with, and as you board the train you will notice the residents of Armadillo streaming in behind you. As the train leaves the station, the camera pans and the word “Redemption” in white flutters across the screen. You resume the game at your last respawn point.

If you clear the town, you will wait in silence, for the train whistle, as if it is a cue to the next world. Jack will move, by himself, to the base of the platform, of the train. You control Jack at this point. You can either step on the train, or you can run back into Armadillo, but you cannot do anything else.

If you run back into Armadillo, the train will leave the station and the desolate town, void of life, will be open to you. Shadows will dance on the forgotten ground and move across the walls, but you will be alone, so very alone. If you sleep in a bed, however, you are opening up a whole other door.

You will awake to a completely normal world, a completely normal Armadillo, with hookers waiting outside your bedroom and drunken tavern customers down stairs. You can continue with the game at this point normally, but the next time you die, you won’t respond at the last saved point. You will respawn in the Empty Armadillo. Every time you return darkness will fall heavier until there is nothing but black, and then, you have let the emptiness consume you and there is no escape. You will have to delete your game, or start a new one.

Animal Crossing Creepy Pasta

This pasta was also published here: http://inuscreepystuff.blogspot.com/2010/12/animal-crossing.html
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Hey /x/, did you ever play Animal Crossing?
If one gamed defined my childhood, it was Animal Crossing. It was like having a second, idyllic life. When most people play the game, unless they have something important to do, like complete a festival or do some heavy-duty remodeling, they usually only play for 15 minutes- check the mail, do routine stuff. I always played that game for hours and hours at a time: I had a insanely lucrative fruit growing operation. My town's name was Town (I was such an original little 10 year old) and the native fruit was Apples. The entire lower section of my map, from the sea to the police station and up near the rock cliffs, were all Oranges, pears...and money trees. I even got it with that special gift NES game that came with the original memory card. I loved Animal Crossing, but games just slip away sometimes like real-life friends, and I guess that's what happened. Animal Crossing and the Gamecube just became background dust, and when we got the Wii, the Gamecube disappeared completely. I only got 12 dollars for it when I traded it in, and that made me a little bitter. Animal Crossing wasn't worth much at all, like 6 dollars, and I wish I'd never traded it, for both sentimental reasons, and for my sanity's sake. But, now the 360 has taken the Wii's place, and it's the Wii's turn to take up dust along side the lost Gameboy Colors and the obscure gameboy advance.
Today I decided to dust off the Wii and play a little Starfox Adventures. I normally keep that game in a large box filled with games, wires, controllers and memory cards, but I couldn't find it today. I must have looked for at least 15 minutes, digging around through Tony Hawks and Grand Theft Autos and Pokemon- I was about to give up and just play the 360 when I dug up something from the very bottom. It was an unmarked game-case that I'd never seen it before, but upon opening it up...I saw Animal Crossing, and in the little slot where you can store your memory card was the original grey one that contained the free NES game. I figured it must have been my sisters town, or a copy that a friend had left at my house, so I shrugged and put it in, mostly for old times sake.
You can notice when certain things are off pretty quickly, even more so when you grew up with the thing in question. The discrepancies are amplified, and right from the get go, I knew the theme music was off. I didn't know what- but something was off. In the very beginning during the title screen, the music starts off with the steady drum beat, and then the piano comes in. There was no drum beat, it just cut to the piano, and in a few seconds, the drumbeat came in...but it was off. Just by a little bit, enough to make me notice and cringe, almost like someone had taken the drums and tweaked the rhythm by a hair and took piano part and changed the pitch. The bright yellow, happy logo letters came were normal, but the white letters underneath, with the copyright and the 2001, 2002 Nintendo was missing altogether, instead, there was this weird symbol that looked like a sideways 8. At this point, I thought the game was just a little weird- the graphics looked fine, and everything else was normal, so I pressed the start button.
Normally there's this whole loading scene when you talk to one of the animals in your town and select your character. This was there, but it was weird: it wasn't a character I recognized., He was a dog with the same head-shape as K.K Slider, but he was completely black and had glowing, yellow eyes. The character had no name at all in that little green bubble, but I placed him. He was an altered version of Lucky, that freaky ass dog wearing the bandages in both Wild World and the Gamecube version. Another thing was wrong: the language. Instead of being cute gibberish, it was deeper and more pronounced, so it didn't sound like gibberish: it sounded like some kind of legitimate, foreign language, and just something about the tone made it seem like it was more sinister and intense then I ever remember any aspect of that game being. The dialogue was pretty normal, but when you start a new town or play on a new memory card, K.K Slider is supposed to introduce you.Obviously, that wasn't the case, and the weird Lucky went through K.K's normal speal, till the very end. He said that life on your own was lonely, but with friends, it could be even funner, especially when you're friends with someone...FOREVER. I don't know if you've ever reset your game before, but when Resetti, that fucking mole, gets pissed at you for reseting, the font is huge. Forever was just as big as Resetti at his angriest. I mentally put two and two together: the symbol in the green name bubble was the infinity symbol. I was a bit unsettled, to tell you the truth, but before I could freak out or anything, it cut to the train scene.
I'm not going to say that I wasn't freaked as fuck, but I WAS LIVING in a creepy pasta! I mean, come on, this kind of thing happens once in a lifetime! I thought, "what harm can a game do? It's Animal Crossing." I know in hindsight that I was being extremely fucking retarded. The train scene started alright. Rover came out normally, went through his thing: he asked me the date, I confirmed it, he called me a big help, laughed at his own joke, and then did the rest of his speech exactly how I remembered. It seemed normal, and it got me feeling better about this situation.
Until I noticed that old Boar lady, Joan, I think who sells the turnips on Saturday morning.
If you were attentive when you played Animal Crossing on the Gamecube, you'd notice that she sits behind you on the train, snoozing, and randomly waking up and looking around...well, first of all, Joan had noticeable bags under her eyes, and they looked much more sunken in, like she had take up meth or something. Every time she opened her eyes...they were fucking bleeding. The blood, and her pupils, here hyper-realistic: it looked like someone had videotaped someone with bloody eyes and pasted it onto her sprite. I fucking screamed and nearly dropped the controller: the game went on by itself.
Rover asked my name. I didn't type a response, but...something told him my name was Lucky. The little gamecube-controller keyboard thing on the screen was moving by itself. Normally, he'll laugh at your name...but he was silent. He just stared. He then asked me (or whatever the FUCK was playing at that point) if I liked my name. The cursor moved to "Isn't it cool?"
There was no text at this point. Rover just stared. I couldn't move: the background music, which had been normal up to this point, started humming and screeching and overpowering everything else. I was transfixed: I couldn't look away as Rover blinked. When his eyes opened again, they were just like Joan's, except closer up, and you could see the blood running down his face and into his mouth. The music got to a point when I had to cover my ears before it stopped.
Everything fucking stopped. There was no noise: not the music, not the train whistles. Nothing. Rover started to bleed more in the silence, blinking and just staring. Blood started to pool on his lap, and trickled down to the floor. You could hear it hit the ground, even over the music. Plic. Plic. Plic.
Then the screaming started. I've never heard anything like it: long, hideously drawn out screams that filled my head and butchered every though inside. Rover started to melt away in front of me: his mouth just kind of bled into his face, his ears bled into his head, and his eyes bled through everything and coated everything in blood as the screaming grew louder and infinity symbols, of extremely low resolution, flashed in random places all over the screen, and then, as quickly as it started, the horror stopped. It was black. Everything was gone. I forced myself up off the ground, and I think i might have vomited. It took all I had to fling myself at the wii and shut that thing off. I must have laid there for 15 minutes.
Before I shut the damn thing off, I saw something. It had eyes, and the eyes were waiting for me at the end of my bed last night. I woke up to him, just huddled there. I can see him now out of the corner of my eye. He's waiting for me to do this.
This is my suicide note.
Goodbye.

Crybaby Lane Creepy Pasta

Posted on /x/ in January 2011

In 1999, I was twenty-two, and I had just graduated from Emerson University in downtown Boston, majoring in Screenwriting. I focused specifically in cartoons and children’s programming, and I was an intern at PBS when I got the offer. I wish I never accepted it, but my debt was pretty bad. When Nickelodeon Studios offered me a paid internship at the studio in California, I accepted immediately. Boston was cold, and the snow was dirty, and after spending five years of my life there, I jumped at the chance. My dead end job as Benjamin Franklin tour guide wasn’t exactly the best.
Many of you ask to see Cry Baby Lane, but if you want to see the original Cry Baby Lane, the one that the fuckhead Lauer shot in Ohio, you never will. You never will. I have the video, hidden in my basement underneath yellowed National Geographic Magazines and hardened mouse shit. Even if Nickelodeon somehow consents to releasing it to you. you won’t even be seeing what was shown on TV.
I don’t even think Nickelodeon HAS the original cut of the movie anymore, and if they do it’s in only back-up copies, and if the back up copies exist they must be locked away in some vault along with all the deleted episodes of Ren And Stimpy and the never-before-mentioned episodes of SpongeBob Square Pants. I’ll get to those later. I’m pretty sure the director, Peter Lauer has the original copy, and it’s probably on his mantle next to his snuff films, that creepy fuck. I’m pretty sure no one knows about my copies, and if they did I would probably have my feet tied to a concrete block, rotting like a skeletal balloon far underneath the Golden Gate Bridge.
Anyway, I was hired in 1999, and immediately I was put on a creative production team for the Movie Cry Baby Lane. It would be almost a year before the movie was broadcast: all in all, it was a pretty low effort kind of thing. There were only four people on the creative team, and I was the only steady one, and the only sane one. Lauer would replace them on a whim, with other people that were just as brainless as the ones that were replaced. He said it was to keep it fresh, to get fresh opinions. I thought it was because he was hiding something...and I was right.
We had a little over a year to make a made for TV movie- not just to write it and cast it but to film and do the normal shit. Lauer didn’t work fast at all- after the first three weeks we only had the ideas for the first 15 minutes of a 85 minute movie. Lauer, even at this point, was a weirdo. He was tall and lanky, and he carried himself awkwardly- he stuttered when he talked, and sometimes, when you were hunched over a piece of paper during those endless ‘brainstorming sessions’ you’d look up and he’d be staring at you, smiling. He’d look away when you caught his eye, and I guess that was the creepiest part- he always looked like he had something to hide, and it wasn’t like he was trying to hide it that well. He wanted you to feel uncomfortable, he fed off of those times when I was walking into the conference room and he’d just be standing with his back toward us, turning around only when everyone was there, twirling pens and crinkling water-bottles impatiently.
The brainstorm sessions, at first, were alright. We got the premise of it down pat: two bothers unleash a demon and they get into mischief trying to get everything back to normal. Not exactly daytime Emmy stuff, but you know, it was an alright start to a made-for-television preteen Movie. I thought the movie should be goofy and spooky, kind of like a Courage the Cowardly dog sort of deal. Lauer, however, from the very beginning made it clear that he wanted the film to be as scary and disturbing as possible. He didn’t want it to be cheap thrills, with a good, wholesome ending. He wanted to push it farther than Are You Afraid of The Dark ever dreamed of. And I guess he did. Cry Baby Lane isn’t in the same ball-field as Are You Afraid of The Dark or Courage the Cowardly Dog. To quote good old Jules Winfield, “They aren’t even the same fucking sport.”
It was about 3 weeks into production when I first noticed something. Lauer had the absolute power of persuasion over everyone else in the creative production team. No one fought him, and by the third week, he was already suggesting some, well, morbid things. I remember he said he wanted the the little brother to die halfway through the movie, getting hit with a dump truck. I immediately shot it down. I was the only one who said anything, and it stayed that was until I left the studio entirely for a couple weeks.
At first, cannibalism and other fucked up shit was kept to jokes and tasteless comments, but as time went on, it became more and more overt. I’d pitch a idea (which most of the time he would end up using, twisted into his own little perverse abomination)
“How about the movie starts with a morbid undertaker who reads them stories,” I’d say, to which he would reply, “Yeah...and then he can cut them up into little pieces and force-feed them to his dog!” He made those jokes a few times in the early stages. The he got serious.
He’d stand up like he was a skinny, perverted and fucked up faux jesus or something. He’d clear his throat loudly, and proclaim his idea. I’d be the only one to shoot it down. Every-fucking-time.

One day near the end of our brainstorming sessions, Lauer cleared his voice and stood up. We all fell silent, and looked at him, like we normally would have. He stood up, and said,
“Gentlemen and females, I have an idea.”
I remember what he did- he paused, and looked right at me.
“The story will revolve around the legend of a pair of Siamese Twins. Have you ever heard of the Donner Party?”
Everyone nodded, except for me. I didn’t like where the conversation was going.
“They ate themselves when it got cold. They ate each other.”
Everyone nodded again. I closed my eyes.
“What would Siamese Twins do if they had nothing to eat? Would they wait until the other twin dies, then consume her own sister’s flesh? Would they claw out each other's eyes until one of them died, then dine upon them like a vulture tearing at the skin of a dead deer? I do not know. It is interesting indeed.”
I didn’t know what the fuck I was hearing. I opened my eyes and looked around the room- no one was fucking moving. Everyone’s eyes were on Lauer except for mine, and when I looked at him, he was still staring at me.
“Children like violence, they revel in it. Children like to be scared. So we’ll scare them, wont we, Jonny?” He leaned over the table, getting pretty damn close to my face. His breath smelt like decaying shit. I stared back at him.
“I think your fucked up, to be honest.”
He smiled, then backed away.
“Oh, I’m fucked up alright, but you have to be fucked up to survive in this cutthroat world!” His grin expanded.
“Children need to learn how to survive, Jonny, they needn’t be lulled and comforted by Barney and the easy and the fucking known, a pseudo reality created by fuckhead granola parents who have no idea what it’s like to sleep with your dead, rotting brother your to scared to get up, and face your father, blackout drunk outside your door with a bloody hammer waiting for you to get up and make a run for it. My fucking movie is going to teach them a little something about the real fucking world!”
It was silent.
“Right now, I’m going to show you some pictures that will spark some of your imaginations, and put a whole new meaning to the term brainstorm.”
He got up, and locked the door from the inside.
I stood up, and said, “What the fuck are you doing? Let me out.”
“Let’s not make any...errors in judgement, Jonathan. Sit down.”
“No-”
“Sit.”
For some reason I did, and Lauer pulled out one of those shitty overhead projectors. He turned on the switch, and he speak-shouted, in a unusually high and semi-frantic voice,
“This is the fucking MUSE we NEED to CONTINUE with THIS PRO-FUCKING-DUCTION!
THIS IS WHAT EVERY CHILD SHOULD SEE!”
His eyes bulged in his head.
He put the image down on the glass surface of the overhead.
It was silent.


The image was in black and white, and it was grainy. I could make out a kid lying on a brick floor, his arms cut off and his bloody little nub black dots. The only thing that was clear was his face. He was bleeding from the mouth.
Lauer almost threw the paper off the overhead, and it fluttered to the ground. He slammed down another one.
It was a zoomed-in shot of the boys face. It was in color. The blood trickled from his open mouth onto the brick floor, his eyes shut, grimy blood underneath his eyebrows and eyelashes.
Then, his eyes opened, and I screamed. No one else in the fucking room did, and it died in infancy, the shrillness ringing in the air.

The pupils were completely black. The rest of the eye was normally white.
The longer I stared, the more the eyes opened, widening and widening until it looked like the skin above his eyebrows and eye sockets was going to rip in half.
Then they started to bleed. Blood started as a trickle, and I swear to god I could hear it. More and and more, until it was like a full blown stream. More. More, until the brick on the floor was a lake of blood. I could hear it. Drip, drip drip. Eventually, I could smell the kid. I could fucking smell his rot.
I leaned underneath the table and vomited. When I rose back up, the images were gone. Everyone else in the room was expressionless. Lauer turned on the lights.
“You may go,” he said, unlocking the door.
I walked through those fucking doors, and promised myself I would never go back.

This happened near the end of the brainstorming process, and by the time I left the casting was done and the script was almost fully written. They were desperately behind schedule- I think Lauer planned it that way, so their wouldn’t be time for proper editing. I never watched the real thing when it aired, but I heard from a friend who was working at the editing department that they had to cut a good 15-20 minutes of ‘disturbing’ footage from the film before it was fit to be released, and it was only fit to be released. They didn’t have enough time to check the footage frame by frame.
I guess he got his wish, unless they cut every single scene that had the pictures in them. Every child watching Crybaby Lane has an unconscious memory of those pictures, and I weep for them, I really do- they fucked me up, and as I write this to you, /x/, it will be last thing I’ll ever write before I slit my throat and before blood spatters all over this fucking computer screen.

There’s something I should tell you first, though.
Early on, Lauer posed an idea of the two brothers capturing a squirrel, putting said squirrel in a jar, and slowly drowning it before filling the jar with sand and dropping it into the bottom of a pond.
Soon after this was suggested, Sandy from Spongebob Squarepants appeared in ‘Tea at The Treedome.’

Lauer also suggested, in one scene of the movie, for a man with a ‘squid-like-nose’ to take off his pants in front of the two boys and rape them off camera. Squidward soon appeared as a major character in Spongebob Squarepants.

It was suggested that the two be stepbrothers, forced to live in the same house after the first one’s mom was found dead in a shallow grave, her body heavily cannibalized by her own husband, a local weatherman. A show with the vaguely premise, Drake and Josh, started in 2004, and the Step Father is indeed a weather-man.

Lauer also suggested the younger brother have a dog house in which he keeps various animal fetuses preserved in acid. He also suggested that the younger brother tie his sister to a pole and shoot hydrochloric acid at her through a water gun.
As Told By Ginger debuted soon after.

A man who captures the souls of children in a vacuum cleaner and sends them to hell? Danny Phantom.

A robot who goes insane on the two brothers, kills one of them, wears his skin, pretending to be the dead brother at high school?
My Life As a Teenage Robot.

The list goes on and on. Nickelodeon knows. They thrive on it. They’re proud to continue the legacy of Lauer, sometimes subtly, and sometimes overtly. And there’s nothing you and I can do about it.