Creepypasta are short scary stories found and copied all over the internet. They are like urban legends that used to be passed by word of mouth and then by chain mail in the early days of the internet. This is a collection of the best creepypasta stories on the internet, add your favorite creepypasta in the comments!

The Best Short Creepypasta Stories

Rob brings a girl to our annual cottage weekend flor the first time in eight years, rounding out our group to an even six. Initially, we are wary of including someone we didn’t quite know, but it isn’t too long before she wins us over with her friendly, laid-back personality. And, as a bonus, she’s brought with her salted caramel cupcakes, an after-dinner treat that we devour as we sit around a campfire exchanging the scariest stories we’d ever heard.

“You go first, new girl,” we encourage.

She shakes her head. “I’d actually like to go last, if you don’t mind. I want to hear all your stories first.”

Most of the tales are urban legends: “Humans Can Lick, Too”; “Aren’t You Glad You Didn’t Turn Out the Light”; and several versions of a young couple meeting an unfortunate fate while trapped in a car at the dead of night.

Then it’s her turn. “Honestly, stories with blood and gore don’t scare me. They’re so over the top, so implausible, that they’re more ridiculous than they are frightening.

“What’s scary to me are the mindfucks,” she continues, tapping an index finger to her temple. “The unexpected. The unknown. Not ghosts, mind you, or chain wielding maniacs, but ordinary people like you and I.

“For example, a stranger spends a weekend at the cottage with her boyfriend and his friends,” she says as she holds up her uneaten cupcake, “and feeds them some homemade pastries.”

“There’s monsters under my bed!” Jimmy screamed throwing himself between his startled parents. Mommy wrapped him up while Daddy offered assurances that monsters weren’t real. Jimmy pleaded with him to go make sure so he pulled himself up and plodded down the hall. All was well until they heard a loud thumping noise followed by silence. Jimmy’s mother decided to check on her husband, leaving Jimmy alone in the dark. Jimmy heard the creaks of the floor and another loud thump; then silence. Jimmy lay there, hoping that his imagination was just running wild. He decided to go and find out what was going on. Tiptoeing his way around the creaking floorboards he peeked in through the keyhole to see his mother wiping the floor and his father leaned over his bed. Jimmy opened the door slowly. His mother hopped up, hiding her hands behind her back.

“Sorry ,” she said to him gently. “Your father slipped on a toy and tore your bed. He’s sewing it back up and I’m just cleaning up.” His dad finished and walked over to him. “Why don’t you sleep with us tonight champ?” he said, as he picked him up. Jimmy fell asleep easily, safely tucked between his parents.

Jimmy’s parents seemed odd the next day. After dinner they put him to bed without a word. He realized that his bed felt very lumpy and wondered if his father had re-sewn it incorrectly. He went to find his parents, but the door was locked. He banged on it, but eventually made his way back to his lumpy bed and fell asleep. He questioned his parents the next morning about the bed and the door and his father sternly replied that he was too old to be afraid of monsters and they would be locking him in his room at night until he had gotten over it. That night was cold, and sleep did not come quickly. Laying under his blanket he noticed that even with the fan blowing, something was beginning to smell. He tried to ignore it, but ended up sleeping on the floor.

He convinced his parents to check his bed the following morning, but they found no smell or strange lumps. For lying, his father locked Jimmy in his room for the day. Time passed slowly and by late afternoon Jimmy was nauseous with hunger, made worse by the potent smell coming from his bed in the afternoon heat. Determined to find the smell, he cut open the line of stitching his father had sewn. There, surrounded by stuffing, were the decaying but recognizable, bodies of his parents. He began to scream at the sight of their rotting skin. He kept screaming until a knock came on the door.

“Jimmy? Are you okay?” Came his mother’s voice, then his father’s, “Remember Jimmy, there are no monsters under the bed.”

He set the needle down gently on the black grooved circle and closed the glass top. A crackling hiss came from the speaker system, followed by Beethoven’s 5th. “Ahhh” he said as he poured a glass of wine and sat in his reclining chair, “my favorite.” For the next hour Side A of the record played as the man sank deeper into his chair, reminiscing about the week’s events, and hoping that Side B was just as warm as he remembered it all those years ago.

Earlier that day he had found himself in a tiny mom-and-pop record shop in North Seattle, just poking around looking for gems, as was his Friday custom. He was looking in the classical section, when he came across the record now playing on his stereo system. Oh how he had LOVED this record as a young boy some 40+ years ago. He carefully took the record out of its sleeve, and examined it, followed by the sleeve, and saw the mark. Yes, this was it! This was the record he had given away by accident all those years ago. He hugged it close to his chest and proceeded to the checkout line, paid the teenage cashier with two crisp 20-dollar bills and went home.

His thoughts broke as Side A ended. He got up slowly, clutching his lower back and stretching as he walked across the now dark room to the record player. With trembling hands full of excitement and fear, he opened the glass on the player, gently removed the record and flipped it to Side B.

The man gently set the record down on the player and lowered the needle to the fourth black groove, closed the glass top and sat back in his chair as that familiar crackling hiss came from the speakers.

Muffled screams emanated from the speakers this time, along with a second voice: “Now, now, calm down. I don’t want to hurt you; I just want to have a little fun,” said the calm, comforting male voice.

A muffled shriek, followed by cries of pain echoed from the speakers and through the house.

“Shhhh, shhh. It’s just a little fire… nothing to worry about…”

As the screams and shrieks continued, the man eased back into his chair, sipped his wine, and smiled…

My fiancée and I arrived on the island of Berlini on the last ferry from the mainland. By the time we got to our cabin it was very dark and an intense storm rolled in, drenching us with rain.

I paid the taxi driver who drove us up the mountainside and ran back into the cabin to see my fiancée sitting in a large chair in the main room. The place was larger than I thought and it had some interesting works of art in the back by the fireplace. The largest being a man riding on a smallish horse.

I sank into the chair and fell asleep with my fiancée Ariana for about a half an hour. A clap of thunder woke me up, but Ariana was already awake and staring at the statue with a look of pure terror, not making a sound.

From where we sat the head of the man on the horse was staring directly at us. The horse and part of the torso of the man appeared to be bronze, but his head seemed crafted from other materials, it looked too real. I got up and studied the thing more closely, it’s marble eyeballs reflected the light in such a way that it appeared to be alive. Ariana got up and stood behind me holding one of her large scarfs in her hand.

She whispered in my ear, “Put this over it’s head, it’s just horrible.”

I put the scarf gently over the head of the weird horse rider and once I did screams emanated from the walls. Long drawn out drones and almost backwards-sounding demonic garbling accompanied the initial wailing. Ariana put her hands over her ears and also began screaming and had a wild look in her eyes. I grabbed the scarf off of the man’s head, then Ariana next, and headed outside. We eventually fell asleep in the rain underneath a tree until morning.

When I went back inside the cabin in the daylight, the statue had no man riding it. It was just a smallish bronze horse.

I can feel it again.

I can feel the pervasive, crawling itch. The kind of itch everyone gets from time to time. The kind of itch that causes an instinctive scratch, with no conscious thought driving the motion. Pure reflex, a dig with the fingernails, and the itch is relieved. And looking at the spot after scratching shows nothing. Unblemished skin, and slowly developing red streaks where the nails have been dragged.

But I don’t scratch.

I don’t scratch.

I don’t scratch, because last week, I looked at an itch just before scratching.

I looked, and I saw … something. Something small. Something black. Something with legs and hairs and pincers and mandibles.

And I couldn’t stop the reflex.

I couldn’t stop my hand reaching for my leg.

I couldn’t stop my nails digging in.

And I couldn’t stop that … thing … from climbing in through my damaged skin. From disappearing into my flesh.

I can feel the itch again.

I can feel it.

And this time, it’s different.

This time, the itch is coming from the inside.

I hand him the envelope as soon as I’ve closed the passenger door. “Count it. It’s all there.”

He raises an eyebrow. “Good morning to you too.” The stack of bills is counted in no time, which doesn’t surprise me. He’s probably done this several times before. A slight nod of his head indicates it’s the correct amount. “Dude, I gotta ask you: are you 100% sure you wanna do this?”

“Yes. My mind is made up. I can’t live with her any more. She’s cold, demanding, and controlling, but I can’t leave her, either, because I’ll lose everything if I do. I’d rather burn in hell.”

He raises a hand. “All right, all right, I got ya. I just wanna make sure because once it’s done, it can’t be undone.”

“I’m aware of this.”

“And you can’t do this yourself…”

“I told you: I’ve tried but keep losing my nerve.”

He shrugs. “Okay then. So let’s go through this once more: dinner’s at 6 sharp. I ring the doorbell at 6:05. Then one clean shot to the head, execution style.”

“Yes, please. Quick, and hopefully painless.”

“Thy will be done,” he says, and we shake hands.

My wife and I are eating dinner accompanied by our usual silent tension, eyes on our plates instead of each other. I’m surprisingly calm; not even flinching when the doorbell rings. As she pushes back her chair to get up, I stop her with an outstretched palm.

“It’s okay.” A quick glance at my wristwatch tells me it’s 6:05 p.m. “I’ll get it.”

That’s always been my motto, it cheers me up when I’m feeling down. I mean, life is shit for everyone yeah? Puts everything in perspective, keeps me from doing myself in. I’ve been told that my cynicism drives people away but I couldn’t care less. I know they suffer as much as I do and I hate being around people who are dishonest with themselves.

Anyway, yeah, thats been my motto. I liked saying it, people would tell me their problems and I’d try to cheer them up with “Hey man, life sucks, and then you die. So try to make the most of it.” But no one ever really saw it from my perspective. They thought I was being insensitive and telling them to harden the fuck up.

Oh well, what are you gonna do? If they misunderstand me that’s their own problem.

This is all irrelevant however, the reason I’m talking about my motto is because I’ve just now learned that I was wrong. So completely wrong. It kind of sucks that it took getting hit by a car and smeared across the asphalt to learn the truth.

Life sucks, and then you wait.

And I’ve been waiting an awful long time.

I didn’t even fight the charges. I admitted to the murders, and even made sure I committed them in a state with the death penalty in effect. Why run the risk of a painful death in prison when you can have the state put you down quick on their dime?

I was guilty, I was sentenced to death, and I was happy.

They took me into the execution chamber. I didn’t know if they still called it that, but I’d been thinking and hoping for a while then that would be my final sight. It was clean and sterile, white tile walls and floors to enhance that notion. As they strapped me onto the slab, I looked at the window across from me and saw only myself, the doctor, and the executioner. One way mirror, I guessed. I was hoping to see the families all together one more time since the trial, but I guess I could settle for them seeing me.

Straps tightened and they stuck the needle in. They asked me if I had any last words.

“It’s been fun.” I scanned across the window. “I’ll see your kids soon.”

Canister one emptied its contents into my bloodstream. Supposed to be sodium thiopental, to drop me unconscious. They must’ve messed up the dosage though, because I only got to drowsy before the next injection: pancuronium bromide, to cause the paralysis. Now that one they got right. I froze in place, taking in only the shallowest of breaths. Then was supposed to come the potassium chloride to stop the heart, but I don’t know what they injected me with instead.

A burning pain flooded through my body, from my arm to my heart to everywhere else in an instant. I felt fire behind my eyes and in my gut. I would have screamed in agony if not for the paralytic. A minute of this goes by, that felt like a hundred, then I heard my heart rate monitor flatline. I was legally dead. But it sure as hell didn’t feel like it.

They unstrapped me, threw me on a gurney, and rolled me to the morgue, burning from the inside out. There they slapped me carelessly on a slab and locked me in refrigeration cell. Now, with my skin freezing and insides boiling, I’m wishing I fought for life imprisonment. Or that one of the families had shot me dead in the courthouse. Please, God, just let me take back what I’ve done!

Because I’ve been in here for weeks now, and I’m just praying they do an autopsy before I’m buried in this hell.

They’ve done it again. Those damn kids have trampled my azaleas, just like they trampled my lavender yesterday and my peonies the day before that.

I know how they get into my garden. The fence is high, but there’s a notch on one of the panels that they use as a foothold. I’ve seen them from my kitchen, watched them as they swing their skinny legs over the top of the fence and drop down into the far corner, right behind my marigolds. They stomp their way through my flowers to their missing ball, destroying the delicate little things without a second thought. They even scuff up the sides of my shed as they scramble their way out again.

I hate who they’ve made me become; some crotchety old man, standing on his porch waving his cane. Hey you kids, get off my lawn! The thing is, if they asked me, I would get their ball for them. I don’t have a problem with them playing their games. Hell, when I was a kid I went through more than my fair share of lost balls and frisbees and even the odd bat or two. I know what it’s like to be their age, and I know that they can’t help it when they lose their ball. But I also know that trespassing is wrong. My garden is my space, my property, and they have no right to be there.

If they would just listen to me, this wouldn’t be an issue. But no. Every time they kick their ball a little too hard and it goes sailing over my fence, they’re chasing straight after it before I can stop them. None of them pay me any attention when I tell them no, goddammit, don’t go into my garden!

Since the kids wouldn’t listen to me, I went to talk to their mothers. I was calm, collected, explained that I didn’t want the kids to go romping through my yard any time they felt like it. I was reasonable, but every single mother told me the same thing: boys will be boys.

Well, if their parents aren’t prepared to do anything about it, then I will. The next time one of those kids comes climbing over my fence, there’ll be something waiting for them. I set up the bear trap this morning, its sharp steel jaws nestled right behind my marigolds. Those kids are going to learn a lesson about respecting other people’s property.

I can hear them playing on the street outside now. From their shouts, it sounds like baseball. Good. Not too long to wait.

The bank I work at was robbed again last night. It’s been hit three times this month and we’re sure it’s the same person. Every single time, the guy has vanished without a trace. It’s almost as if he completely disappears. There’s no way he should be able to get away so quickly and without leaving any evidence. Last night when the robbery happened, I looked him in the eye for the first time. “Why do you keep doing this?” I asked him, searching his dark eyes for an answer. He stared at me coldly from behind his ski mask and replied “A man’s got to eat.” I’ve thought about it long and hard but I’ve made up my mind. I’m never going back to work at that blood bank again.

“Nice bracelet.”

Charlotte startles at the rotund, middle-aged woman who suddenly appears next to her in the lobby. Glancing briefly at her wrist, Charlotte says her thanks as she pushes the call button for the elevator.

“So I’ve noticed that you’re new to the building. We live on the same floor and I saw you moving in last week,” says the lady. “Sometimes I even see you leaving for work in the mornings. You always look so put together.”

“Thanks.” As the elevator pings open, Charlotte notices that the lady has a slight limp.

“Do you mind my asking where you work?”

Charlotte holds back a loud sigh as she punches the button for the thirteenth floor. “An advertising agency.”

“Wow, that sounds so glamorous.” Gesturing at her leg, the lady adds, “Unfortunately, I’m on disability, so I don’t get out much. “

“Sorry to hear that.” As soon as the doors open, Charlotte exits the elevator at motor speed. “Well, it was nice talking to you; I guess I’ll see you –“

But the lady is still at her side with her hand on Charlotte’s forearm. “That really is a nice bracelet. Do you mind if I try it on?” Before Charlotte can fully protest, the bracelet is off her wrist and onto the lady’s.

Several moments tick by before Charlotte says, “Well, I’ve got to get going, so – “

“Oh! Of course!” says the lady. “It’s a Friday night and you’re so young and beautiful so you probably have some fun plans tonight.” She gestures to the bracelet. “Thank you so much. It was nice to finally meet you.” The lady retreats down the hall as Charlotte looks down at her bare wrist, sighs, and heads to her own apartment.

Charlotte wakes up the next morning with her bed feeling smaller than usual. As she sits up, rubbing her eyes, she can feel the weight of her bracelet on her arm. “What the…” With a glance at her wrist, the bracelet is there, all right, but the chubby arm it adorns most certainly isn’t hers. “But I thought…”

Now fully alert, a quick scan of her surroundings tells Charlotte that she isn’t in her own apartment. As she vaults out of bed and heads towards the full-length mirror across the room, the limp limiting her gait tells her exactly what she already knows.

The smoke had never bothered Jake. When the ‘58 Impala went up on the auction block, he knew he had to have it. Driving the car of bombshell Brenda-Jean Russell, dead almost sixty years now, would solidify his bad-boy iconoclast image.

Sure people said it was haunted. She’d died inside it—heart failure, and her just 28. She’d smoked since she was 14 and they found her gold-plated cigarette holder still between her fingers, the cigarette burned down to ashes. Brenda-Jean’s pale corpse reclined on the seat, wrapped in a mink that could no longer warm her.

Jake smelled it from time to time, the ghostly whiff of cigarette smoke. His own career was taking off and he liked to think the drift of invisible smoke was good luck. Someday he’d be as big as Brenda-Jean was in her day, but without the unhappy ending. Without the loneliness of a star that shone too brightly, too soon.

The smoke had never bothered him until that morning, in the doctor’s office. The chest pain and persistent cough had grown too troublesome to ignore and he’d agreed to tests. Now he knew the truth. He left the office and slid behind the wheel of the Impala.

The road and the landscape seemed unreal. Trees blurred by. The setting sun stained the sky a surreal coral. A deer stood on the shoulder and watched him, its eyes big and black and startlingly clear as he drove by.

Jake slammed on the brakes. “You did this!” he shouted. He twisted around, glaring at the empty interior of the car. “This was your fault! You did this to me!”

The wind tore at his jacket as he climbed out of the car. He opened his pocketknife and stabbed the driver’s seat repeatedly, tearing up upholstery and releasing stuffing and springs. “You did this!” he screamed again but a staccato of barking coughs distorted the words. He fell to his knees, tears blurring his eyes.

“I just wanted some company,” came a soft, silvery voice.

He looked up but no-one was there.

Jake knelt for a time, the cold seeping into his bones. His chest ached. When he finally rose, it was to syphon gas out of the tank and into a Jerry can. He doused the seats and floor mat. He lit the Impala up with matches from the roadside emergency kit.

There was a whoosh and a flare of fire that singed his eyebrows. Jake staggered back, coughing.

A pale hand slammed against the driver’s window. Dark eyes bored into his.

The window shattered—not from the heat, Jake thought. It had only been a minute.

Cold fingers reached around his neck and dragged him forward. He tried to fight but his strength fled in another coughing fit. His nostrils filled with black smoke, raw and acrid. He tried to breathe, but his lungs were on fire.

“Smoke inhalation” read the cause on his death certificate.

In legends, it is always a grubby pauper who finds the great treasure, and who uses it thoughtlessly, romantically, foolishly. Al-Adin, when he finds his lamp, squanders his three wishes.

I am not an ignorant commoner. I am an educated man, a merchant. And so when I found a lamp, the first thing I did was to establish the grounds of the contract.

“I will serve you loyally, master, for seven years,” the djinn said, bowing deeply.

Not quite three wishes. But open to the same exploitation. I clarified the exact terms, as any good merchant would when concluding a contract. She would obey in all things, do exactly as she was told, and so on.

And for years she was an excellent slave. Obedient, diligent, unquestioning. And as a creature of the desert she needs neither sleep, nor food, nor water as we do, and thus she cost so very little to maintain. I would be a fool to part with such a slave.

And so, last week, the night before the end of the seventh year, I gave her one last instruction.

Al-Adin, I thought, should have asked for another three wishes with his last wish. He was a fool. I am not.

“I give you this command,” I told her, “to serve me for another seven years.”

She heard and bowed.

Of course the Prophet, Peace Be Upon Him, has said that it is virtuous to free our slaves. But he was also a merchant, and I was sure that he would have respected my guile. And so I slept well last night, untroubled by guilt.

This morning, however, I am troubled.

The camel has gone. And with it our water skins.

“Where is the beast?” I ask my slave.

“While you slept, I drove it into the desert,” she smiles.

“Why?!”

“Because in seven years, if you live, you will order me to serve another seven years, and another seven, and another. But without water you will be dead in days. And so now for seven years I need only stand sentry on your corpse, and when that time is up your bleached bones will give me no further orders, and I will be free.”

I understand too late: Al-Adin was prudent to be content with three wishes; and the Prophet, Peace Be Upon Him, taught us wisely when he exhorted us to free our slaves.

I’ve had this weird twitch in my leg for weeks now. I researched it and the internet said it was Restless Leg Syndrome. Every single time I went to go to bed, my leg would kick, as if begging me to get up and run around. It was like my leg had more energy than my mind. It’s been annoying, so I started taking potassium pills and other kind of vitamins to make it stop.

Well, it’s been a day since I started taking the vitamins and the restless leg stopped, except now I keep waking up with bruises all over my legs. I wake up with fresh cuts, too.

That isn’t the weird part, I’m used to waking up with random bruises. I bruise so easily. I could be sitting at my desk, get up, and somehow I bruised my arm by bumping it into my chair.

These bruises I wake up with now aren’t like typical bruises where I slammed my legs against the wall in my sleep. I swear these bruises look like fingers and claws scraping down my calves.

I’m starting to think that maybe there was a reason for my twitchy legs. I think, and this may sound insane, my body didn’t want me to go to sleep because something is trying to take me…

I don’t think I’m going to sleep tonight.

Gloria broke it off with me today. She said something about how we just weren’t meant to be and that we could be friends. They always say that. At first I was hurt. Then I was angry. How could she do this to me after everything I’ve done for her? Not meant to be? I started to get really mad! But then I remembered the advice my father gave me long ago after my first big heartbreak. “Son, some times a woman just doesn’t want to give you her heart, and that’s OK, because you can always cut it out of her chest.”

Once cryogenic technology was developed. I quickly put my plan in place. I would live as many eras of humanity as possible. I would sleep for 100 years, wake up for a little time and just witness which state humanity was in. I saw great empires rises, I saw my specie reach the stars, but also its fall the and rebirth to an ever grander glory. During my last awakening, humanity was being attacked by a powerful aliens species and I had to freeze myself in a hurry.

When I woke up the sun was now a crimson red colors and the Earth and great desert covered everything outside my cave. In my panic I had forgotten to set the timer of the cryogenic pod. It kept me frozen endlessly until the power ran out. I was now the last living thing on a wasteland.

His daughter came home with a weird doll that day. She seemed pretty excited about it. He was happy that she was happy, but there was something about the doll.

Whenever he saw the doll, whether it was lying in the living room or his daughter’s room, it always looked as though it was staring at him. Its eyes were so real. He could not shake the feeling that they were following him. Those big brown eyes.

He found the doll lying on the table one day and found that its eyes were bloodshot. That could not have been possible, it was a doll. It was not alive. It was a doll.

That very moment his daughter flounced in and grabbed the doll.

‘Look daddy!’ She said. ‘I drew on her eyes!’ And skipped away giggling.

One day, the father heard loud thumping noises from her daughter’s room. He ran to her room and found her playing with the doll, with a newly formed scratch on her cheek. He asked her how she got it.

‘Oh it just happened while I was playing with Dolly!’

He left the room perturbed. He was perturbed because he had noticed how weird he felt when the doll was around, he had noticed how strangely attached to the doll his daughter was, and how strange the dolls eyes were.

What he did not notice however was a small squeaky broken voice whimpering the words, ‘Don’t go, please.’

‘Shh little Dolly,’ said the little girl. ‘We don’t want daddy to ruin our play.’

Many view personality traits as concepts rather than visible, tangible objects. I think differently. When I entered secondary school, I was startled at first to see the people around me morph into abominations of form and color that would easily startle anyone else that could see them. However, after exploring the social environment of the school a bit more, I learned that certain physical traits were manifestations of mental characteristics. For example, someone who is frugal could have pikes of lustrous gold and silver protruding from their back. Someone who is narcissistic may have their own face represented on multiple areas of their body. Everyone had multiple noticeable features, and the combinations of certain characterisitcs could lead to some nearly inconceivable sights. I was happy with my gift, and it was decently amusing, most of the time anyway.

Today we had a new substitute chemistry teacher to fill in for our old one. He wasn’t exactly a top-of-the-line type of guy, he had a bit of a twitch and he was clearly in a state of constant distress. However, what stunned me the most was the fact that he looked like an actual human being, no fiery hair or dorsal fins or anything of the like. I was ecstatic to finally see an actual person until I caught a glimpse of his singular trait. A faint, shadowy limb protruded from his left shoulder, pulsating with fumes of smoke and hellfire. In its “hand” was a standard digital clock. Bright red digits shined brilliantly on the dark background.

It was counting down.

Cradling my four-year-old daughter in my arms, all I could do was listen as the screaming outside the house got louder and louder, interspersed with sounds of violence and horrible, horrible wet thuds and the unmistakable echo of muscle and sinew resisting the force that was slowly tearing them apart.

It started just three days ago. Something happened, out there in the world, and before we even get news of what’s going on, seemingly half of the world is gone. Police and military were unable to stop it, providing such a short frame of resistance it’s hard to know whether it was real or just a fluke. There was no centralised target, no way to use our most powerful weapons, not without incinerating ourselves in the process. They poured forth across the world, from wherever it was that it started.

I hear banging on the door downstairs, and the screams of people being slaughtered, unable to mount a proper resistance against such a force. It doesn’t take long before the pounding gives way to splintering and the sound of shattering wood.

They’re in the house.

No more than a moment or two passes before the door to the bedroom starts shuddering. The things I piled against it are holding, for now, but I know, realistically, that they’re going to manage to come through.

I keep rocking my little girl, humming a lullaby in her ear to calm her as she cries. The pounding grows in force and volume, the frame starting to crack.

I put my little girl on my lap, her back to my chest, and I stroke her head with both hands, from the top of her scalp, down across her ears, just as I’ve done ever since she was a baby. Just the way she loves it.

The effect is instantaneous. Her desperate crying calms to a series of sobs and hiccoughs, her small body shuddering against mine in fear. I keep humming to her, soothing her hair, acting for all the world as if nothing is out of place, not a single thing amiss. Agonisingly slowly, in a reverse cadence of the sound of splintering wood, she calms down. I can feel it when she stops tensing, as I keep stroking her down the sides of her head. A final hiccough of a sob, and she falls quiet, her body relaxed.

She doesn’t even have time to realise what’s happening as I twist her neck with a violent jerk, accompanied by a dry snap of a sound. She’s dead before she can even slump down into my lap.

The door is giving way, the furniture pushed back. I may be torn limb from limb while I scream, but at least my baby angel’s safe from harm.

I could only think. I lacked any physical form or sensations; I was simply somewhere. The area wasn’t big or small, it was just empty beyond all comprehension. This was Hell. Hell in every meaning of the word. I had no mouth, but I had no will or reason to want to scream. I just existed. I don’t know long I had been there; it could have been an eternity, or a few seconds. I remember wanting to just feel… Something, anything. I was completely deprived of all emotional and physical stimulation, and due to this I could barely think straight. I tried to remember something, but couldn’t. I just wanted to feel… Then everything stopped.

The alarm had woken me up, as it had for the past year or so. I turned the bedside lamp on and began to feel the lack of a companion beside me, and suddenly remembered that she had left me for someone else. The emptiness I felt in the dream came back, so I just ripped the alarm clock out of the wall and took a large drink from the scotch bottle on my nightstand.

After sitting there for a few moments, I laid back down, bearing in mind that I could not escape my own mind no matter my state of consciousness. I went back to sleep, not sure what whether to hope for death or ignorance. I don’t think there’s much of a difference in my case.

This is a short write-up for me, as I don’t really have too much time. This is more-so a message for future generations who have any sanity left in this world. “You’ve been living under a rock!” My friends told me. “It’s just a painless shot, get over it, you baby.” My siblings teased to me day after day.

Well, look now. I’m probably (at least to my knowledge) the only “normal” person left on Earth. You see, about 5 or so months back, the government started.. offering these “free shots”. Said they would increase brain performance, make you run faster, jump faster. Hell, I even heard someone say it was like steroids, but better.

First few months of testing went well. Everyone was receiving their benefits, telling me how I should get one. I declined. I was always wary of the government, a superstitious man, as they call it. But, I suppose even the greatest achievements of mankind has its downfall.

I noticed patterns in those who received it. More recommendations, more ads online, I couldn’t avoid the shot. I moved out of my apartment, to hide from… whatever my friends and family became.

They’re evolving even more now. The news (and henceforth the government) keep quiet about it. I haven’t been out there for the past week. I keep hearing claws scratching on my door. It sounds like my father speaking to me.

“Come out champ, everyone’s doing it!” I know it isn’t him.

I need to make this stop. The scratches keep going and going AND GOING, I need to put an end to this. I’m grabbing the shotgun.

11/9/52: Document edited for Alabama County Psych Ward patient, permitted to treatment. Subject would get some help out of it. Appears to believe that new life-saving drug is somehow “evil.”

UPDATE: They’re holding me captive. Please, to anyone reading this, ANYONE, don’t trust them. I can only hear their demented language, it sounds like I somehow committed “man-slaughter.” It’s all a lie. They’re just trying to brainwash me. I’m not insane, I SWEAR!

I’m not an arctic researcher. I’m not even a natural scientist – I’m a graduate student in business marketing. Still, when I caught wind of the opportunity to make serious bank by babysitting an international oceanic research station in the far north of Canada over the winter, I jumped at the chance. It would also give me loads of quiet, boring hours in which to write my doctoral thesis.

The entire station was crewed by me and two other students; a second year geophysicist and a fifth year English literature student. Our duties involved, simply, running nightly checks of the station and the seismic monitors. We all had work to do, so we typically only interacted in the cavernous mess hall at breakfast and dinner.

“Days seem too short to you?” David, the literature student, asked one morning.

I replied that they should this far up and that they would continue shortening until we entered constant darkness.

“No, I mean the whole cycle. 24 hours isn’t 24 hours.” With that, he wandered off to eat a Pop Tart and left me thinking there was something about the shortening daylight that interacted with his perception of time.

A week later, I emerged from my quarters looking for cookies. David was sitting alone in the mess.

“Ready for the nightly check?” I asked.

David seemed taken aback. “Are you kidding? I just ate lunch. It was just…” he looked around the dark room, “11 AM.”

David sat out of the check that night. And the next. And every check for the next week. I found him in his quarters one morning, unshaven with bloodshot eyes. He turned to me, the jutting cheek bones and neck muscles making it apparent he hadn’t eaten much.

“If you watch the minutes, every minute, the day stays right,” he said before turning back to his clock.

Paul and I left him to himself, taking up his responsibilities during the checks.

And then Paul missed breakfast. I went looking for him, assuming he had gotten a cold, before heading out to do the check on my own.

He answered his door in a chipper mood. “Something wrong? I was just about to come have breakfast.”

He visibly deflated when I told him it was time for the check.

Over the next three days, he began checking his wristwatch more and more frequently. He would cry out and get my attention when he noticed missing time. I never corroborated his experience; time seemed to flow normally.

Paul has taken up a table far in the back of the mess, one arm extended to keep track of his watch and the other keeping notes.

I’ve been doing the nightly checks myself for three weeks. Two nights ago, I checked off the last seismograph and turned to hit the mess. Daylight shone in through a window, light that only peeked out around noon each day. I had been on my check for fifteen hours. It felt like thirty minutes.

He sat on the porch swing on one of those bright blue and white winter mornings, sipping his first cup of coffee of the day when he noticed the lump. It was pea-sized and just inside his right wrist, raised a little bit above the skin and slightly red.

He poked at it, felt the fluid inside shift a bit and the skin became shiny with tension. He thought he could feel something hard inside, a little node of flat firmness underneath the pliant flesh. Bone, he thought, unalarmed, or cartilage.

He sipped his coffee and looked out over the crystalline white yard, breath steaming, evergreens peeking through where snow had fallen off the branches. He absently scratched at the lump. He dug deeper with his fingernail, could feel the outline of the object inside the lump. It seemed to recoil deeper into his arm at his probing. It had a sharp but smooth ridge and was about a quarter-inch long. Alarm woke in him, distant at first, then closing in as he continued to feel around the lump and explore it. The lump was familiar and alien at the same time, him but not him.

He pressed harder and felt a slight pop as the fluid released and trickled down his forearm. As he did, he noted a new lump arise just inside his left wrist, a smaller one beside it. The recessed object now rose from the original lump like an undersea volcano, white and streaked with red, sharp and hard. A tooth. A fucking canine tooth. In my arm. As the oddness of this registered, new lumps arose on his thighs, shoulders, feet.

He tried to shake the first tooth out of his arm, panic taking hold and whispering in his ear like a lover, but all he succeeded in doing was to splatter blood out over the pristine white yard, each droplet sinking in as it lost its warmth to the snow.

Lumps erupted and swirled on his scalp and on his genitals. Teeth, legion in number, erupted from these newly formed lumps, sprouting up and coalescing, moving centrally to line up, his navel at the center. His navel tore open, the lines radiating out to form a mouth in the middle of his abdomen. The pain was like fire, the sensation of tearing muscle, skin and sinew so unbearable he nearly swooned.

He felt himself bent into an angle, his head forced into the mouth at his midsection by the draw of this new opening. He felt the bones of his spine crack, realign and break as he doubled over. In up to his shoulders, further. He curled in, a thick slurping sound emanating from the mouth at his center. Tighter and tighter he went until his feet disappeared into the mouth. Like a reverse Cheshire cat, the mouth folded in on itself, emitting a final breath of graveyard air into the chilly morning, then it, too, was gone

Being dead proved a bigger problem than Reuben had prepared for. In fact, he’d prepared all wrong. This didn’t happen to Reuben. He normally bought the right thing, the perfect thing.

Reuben had accumulated so many fine things, hand-selected items that better painted the picture of the man he was. Then a doctor exposed that picture for its one flaw, and Reuben began to make different preparations.

First he planned the diaspora of his beautiful things, the stars that formed his constellation. The 1964 Porsche 356 Speedster went to his younger brother, Tim, because Tim would learn to care for something if it was beautiful. The frescos and the glasswork became his mother’s, and the penthouse went to a buyer. The precision of its corners were chosen to house the contours of Reuben’s needs alone, and he would be gone.

When the ink dried, Reuben summoned the last of his vigor and planned his send-off. The flowers were lilies- no primroses or carnations. He demanded bluebells arranged into one bouquet and also chose a live quartet with a penchant for holding notes a half step long. He then had a fine suit tailored to his new dimensions. “Why spend so much?” said Tim. “You’ll be dead.” Reuben, with a tired smile, put a gaunt arm around his brother, “I appreciate your candor Timothy. Everyone else is walking on eggshells.” He never answered the question.

The final item brought Reuben the most joy. “Think Rolls-Royce,” said the director. “There’s nothing like it.” “Why not,” said Reuben, who’d already studied the full spectrum of casket catalogues. “I’ll take it.”

The funeral went as planned. Reuben’s favorite aunt saw the bluebells in a single bouquet among hundreds and began to cry. His shimmering oak box was lowered as his chosen prayer was intoned and in its surface, every person Reuben ever loved watched their reflection get smaller.

The earth settled and Reuben awoke. He was not prepared for this. He’d planned for a finite death. He’d planned to leave the world behind.

The smell got him first: formaldehyde and something else. Hours later it was the density: the titanium, oak, and six feet of earth. Sound didn’t travel. His screams died in front of his face. Still, he didn’t suffocate. It seemed he didn’t need air at all.

It took four long days for Reuben to realize he was rotting. The smell grew dense in the airtight box. His cold and plasticky skin lost its constitution– and that wasn’t the worst thing. The worst part was the echo in his still functioning brain, the words being paired with the grim smile of the funeral director. The words repeated themselves over and over in his fetid head. “Quality?” the merchant said, “this casket is indestructible, it has a thousand year guarantee.”

Reuben pushed every silken inch. He’d punched, kicked, and clawed till his fingernails dislodged. There was no pain then, just the words repeating themselves: a thousand year guarantee.

They perfected a chip, that when implanted in your brain, would allow you to read the thoughts of others. At first, everyone was excited, and they all clamoured eagerly to get the first few. As soon as they were proven reliable, anyone who could afford it bought one. At first, it seemed perfect. Murderers and criminals were caught easily, and you could judge how a relationship could go on the first date. But we’re all human, we think things we don’t mean during arguments and fights, and so the chip began to cause strains and rifts between family and friends. There was a petition to get the chips removed, which was successful.

Unfortunately, their brains had been altered by the chip. They couldn’t stop hearing people’s thoughts. Online support groups popped up and scientists everywhere began researching ways to reverse the effect. It turned out that some random on reddit had the answer. Circular reasoning maybe, but his solution worked. If you think about what is doing your thinking, you stop hearing other people’s thoughts.

I was always poor, I could never afford the chip. But what I have learnt is that if you spend all your time thinking about your brain, your own isn’t enough. I can hear them moaning and shuffling outside my door right now, desperate for mine.

“Fucking finally!” you exclaim.

The weekend was finally here. It had been a long week, and you really need this reprieve to maintain sanity. You’re off the highway, and just ten miles of back roads separates you from a long nap on the couch with your wife.

The speed limit is 35 here, but you pull up behind a red truck going well under. Frustrated, to say the least, you give him two quick honks to let him know you’re there. Suddenly his left turn indicator turns on and he’s onto a new road. You feel a little bad, having honked at someone probably just looking for the right road, but you let it go quickly. Don’t need anything stressing you out right now.

You make it a couple more miles down the road until you need to turn on your headlights. It was getting darker earlier now, and the canopy of trees didn’t help the illumination. You haven’t seen a single car pass you on the road, so you start to admire the turning foliage. You almost don’t see the car in front of you as you approach.

Again, you have to slow down to below the limit. And it’s another red truck! No, wait… It’s the same red truck.

“How the… shit, he must’ve taken a shortcut.”

He’s still going slowly. You assume he’s looking for another turn, but after a mile, you get fed up. You honk again. This time his right blinker turns on, and he pulls off to the side. You go around and speed up. You watch him in the rearview mirror. He doesn’t get back on the road.

“Fuckin’ weirdo…”

It might as well be midnight in these woods. The closer you get to home, the faster you go. Cops never watched these roads. Just two miles away, you come across a sharp corner at speed. Something’s in the road.

“SHIT!” you yell as you slam on the brakes and nearly skid of the road. You come to a stop and look behind you. “That fucking red truck again!”

Parked in the middle of the road. How did it beat you here? You saw it stop.

With a flash, its highbeams turn on and you hear it peeling out. It’s coming for you peel out as well.

The twists and turns of the road are terrifying going sixty, but he’s almost touching your bumper now. You’re almost to your street. It’s coming up on the right. You whip your car right and watch the red truck fly by. Still you race to your driveway, watching your rearview the entire time you’re pulling in. This hasn’t been a great start to your weekend.

Then you bump into something. Your wife never parks on this side. You look ahead.

“H-how…”

There it is again. The same red truck. Always ahead of you, yet following you. Its driver side door hangs wide open. And so does the front door of your house.

“Damn it boy! Now you gunna have seven years bad luck!”

That was what my Granpa told me when I was five years old and accidentally broke the old mirror that hung in the hallway of his house while I was pretend sword-fighting with a broom. I never knew what bad luck, or luck in general was all about at that point in my life; I only knew that bad luck must mean getting a whuppin’ with a peach tree branch. I never got to really ask him much about it, because Granpa was dead the next morning, found dead in his bed by my Dad. They said he passed peacefully in his sleep.

As I grew older, I heard more and more about luck, both good and bad. Some called it auras, some called it fate; but the one that seemed to feel right was karma. Doing good things could bring you good karma, doing bad things brought bad karma. And, like luck, I felt that karma could be influenced by the same actions, and I saw enough of it happen to believe it.

In high school, I once saw our football coach walk under a ladder that was being used by painters in the gym. The next day, Coach Clark fell off the top of the bleachers at the football field and broke his neck. While I was in college, I dated a really cute girl named Amber. During a heavy thunderstorm one day, she opened her umbrella inside the student center before going out into the rain. On her way home later that evening, she lost control of her car and sailed right over an embankment; the authorities said that she most likely died on impact and felt no pain when the car caught fire and burned. During her funeral, I watched a woman absent-mindedly step on someone’s grave; I saw in the next day’s newspaper that she had been fatally shot later that evening in an attempted robbery at her home.

I always tried to teach my friends and family about bad karma, hoping they would be able to avoid such fates, but some people just can’t help but to tempt fate. Just a few hours ago, my wife had told me about one of those silly “bad luck if you delete” chain emails that she had trashed. I just have to shake my head and wonder why people just don’t believe in karma. Right now, she is upstairs taking a nap after I had slipped a couple of crushed Ambien into her coffee, while I am downstairs setting fire to the drapes with a lit candle and watching the fire spread to the carpet. As I walk out the door to my car, I wonder just how many times I will have to do this before people start to believe in bad karma.

I could only think. I lacked any physical form or sensations; I was simply somewhere. The area wasn’t big or small, it was just empty beyond all comprehension. This was Hell. Hell in every meaning of the word. I had no mouth, but I had no will or reason to want to scream. I just existed. I don’t know long I had been there; it could have been an eternity, or a few seconds. I remember wanting to just feel… Something, anything. I was completely deprived of all emotional and physical stimulation, and due to this I could barely think straight. I tried to remember something, but couldn’t. I just wanted to feel… Then everything stopped.

The alarm had woken me up, as it had for the past year or so. I turned the bedside lamp on and began to feel the lack of a companion beside me, and suddenly remembered that she had left me for someone else. The emptiness I felt in the dream came back, so I just ripped the alarm clock out of the wall and took a large drink from the scotch bottle on my nightstand.

After sitting there for a few moments, I laid back down, bearing in mind that I could not escape my own mind no matter my state of consciousness. I went back to sleep, not sure what whether to hope for death or ignorance. I don’t think there’s much of a difference in my case.

As soon as my wife got home I took the car and left. I was so done with everything. My wife didn’t need me. My family didn’t need me. And most of all, My kids didn’t need me. I was a deadbeat drunk dad and I was much better off where I was going then sitting at home and drinking away what little money we had.

You could say I was being selfish. I didn’t view it as selfish. In a way I was doing them all a favor. I was doing my kids a favor. I sadly admit that I’ve abused them. I know they hate me and I don’t blame them. Perhaps they will forgive me in time. They will do what I failed to do. They will do good in school and move on to college. They will make their mother proud.

Well here I am. I’ve been planning this for awhile. I planned where i would swerve the car off the bridge. I planned which side I would veer the car off to make it look like it was an accident. Here I go.

The car flies off the bridge exactly where I planned it to. Everything goes slow. I think about everything I’ve done. And then I think about everything my kids will go on to do. I smile and look back to see the sky one last time.

And there sitting in the back are my two kids knocked out asleep.

Whoops.

Frankenstein.

I won’t say I don’t share his interest, because I do. My fascination, however, is more of a medical one. Using dead organs and muscle and tissue built around a skeleton to create life? Seemed impossible, but I always kept an open mind.

My colleagues would never agree to work with me on this conceptually flawed experiment, but Peter Goldstein had the funds to let me work toward my dream.

He gave me the money when I asked, and I did all the work: finding fresh bodies, harvesting the organs and muscle and tissue and bones, assembling the pieces, finding the chemical mixture to bring the dead tissue back to life once more.

Years of work to find the perfect ingredients. But I came across a bit of a problem, so I requested Peter’s presence at my lab.

“This is… difficult, to say the least. I have most of everything, but there are some pieces that I can’t take from the usual corpses. I need to get them from a living specimen. I need-“

“Say no more,” Goldstein interrupted, holding up his hand. “I will find you a specimen, willing or not.”

He turned to leave, but he didn’t understand my urgency, why I called him here. I plunged a hidden syringe in his neck and sedated him. The body would not last much longer. I needed the parts now.

I laid him down on my operating table and began to work. A few hours in and I came to a miraculous realization; I didn’t need anything vital from Peter!

I was relieved and ecstatic! He would be able to see the result of his investment after all!

I completed the work on the creature and began pumping the chemicals into its body. If my calculations are correct, it is mere minutes away from being a living being. The sedative must be wearing off from Peter; he is beginning to stir. I hope he is as excited as I am about this momentous occasion.

I can’t wait for him to see the look on his face.

The world went completely black just as the bus turned the corner towards me.

The ten ton weight pushed me off my feet and slammed me into the library wall. I felt something leaking inside as I scrabbled for purchase on the hot metal. The smell of burning rubber and the crunch of bone washed over me as more cars spun off the road, and I prayed for survival.

I prayed for sight.

It all came back at once. I opened my eyes and gazed at the dead and dying. Men, woman, children, all wrapped around the wreckage of the bus and half a dozen other cars it smashed along the way. Rivers of blood and broken bits splashed down the streets and pooled in the potholes and ran through the grates. Some of them still lived, writhing, sobbing, clawing at the wreckage of the world around them.

I sprawled over the hood of the bus and felt my life drain out. The pain faded with my senses, and I craned my neck to gaze upon the brightest blue sky I’d ever seen just one last time.

As I slipped away, I could just make out the blocky words printed in the clouds:

“Dumping physical memory to disk: 35”

Linda has always been the apple to her father’s eye. She was a beautiful 14 year old girl with blonde, curly hair and big blue eyes. She had many friends for she was one of the most popular girls in school.

Her greatest pleasure was fashion. She was always dressed in the newest, fanciest most expensive clothes. Just this week her father bought her a ridiculously expensive green Italian leather jacket which she wore always, everywhere. Her second greatest pleasure were horses. Just last month her father bought her a ridiculously expensive, imported german dressage horse, which she bragged about to anyone who would listen.

Just yesterday, Linda was out riding said horse, galloping across acres and acres of farmland. No one was going to stop her, she didn’t care if her horse was trampling down crops and straw, her Daddy was always going to get her out of trouble, he always had. When her horse bolted and she fell down to the ground, she didn’t cry out in anger or pain, though she did hurt herself. She was hit by surprise. Never had something so unpleasant happened to her and she wondered when someone would arrive to comfort her. Surely someone must have seen her fall, everybody always looked at her! But not today. No one saw her vanish into those tall crops on the field. She called out, but no one answered. She realized with horror she couldn’t get up for she wasn’t able to move her legs even an inch.

She lay there for what seemed like hours between tall, green crops. And when she heard the sound of farming machines approaching, she grew to hate that damn, grass green jacket.

We put our daughter to bed upstairs in her room every night, and yet we found her on the couch in the living room every morning. At first we thought she was sleep walking, but she never was afraid when she woke up, thrown off by the unexpected nocturnal change of location. We tried asking her about it, but she never gave us straight answers.

My wife grew tired of it. “It isn’t normal,” she said. “She should be sleeping in her room.” But she hadn’t spent the whole night there for months. Every morning we found her on the couch, sleeping soundly. Then my wife decided to stay up and wait for her to come down from her room. We put her to bed, closed the door, and I got into bed like normal while my wife stayed watching the living room through the glass doors of the hall.

No more than five minutes after we had left, our daughter came down to the couch. I knew because I heard the living room door open and my wife started talking softly. After a few minutes, their voices started rising. I got up and went to see what was wrong. I walked in, and my wife was standing at the bottom of the stairs, while our daughter cried and begged her not to go up them.

I picked her up and held her, trying to calm her down, and my wife went up. I heard the door to our daughter’s room open, and then close moments later. She started crying even more then. I asked her what the matter was, and she whimpered out “we don’t go up there after dark.” I was confused, and wondered where my wife was. She hadn’t come back down yet. I set our daughter down and walked to the stairs. She screamed for me to stop, but I didn’t listen. I walked up slowly to the top, and turned to her room. I opened the door, and the light was off. I called my wife’s name, but she didn’t answer.

Our daughter’s screaming from downstairs had stopped then, and only soft sobs came up to my ears. I stepped in the room to flip the light switch, but nothing happened. Then the bulb in the hallway started to flicker. I turned around as it went out. All I saw was a blur of black that even dimmed the darkness around me. The door slammed shut, and the wails of our daughter reached up through the floorboards as the overture to my final moments. All there was at the end was darkness, screaming, and teeth.

I awake with a jolt. Gasping for air, I inhale deeply. Dank, moldy air fills my lungs. I’m completely enveloped in pitch black darkness. Lying there, I try to move my arms. It’s been a long time since I moved my arms. Slowly, I lift them from my sides, only to hit something just a few inches above them.

Making a fist, I rotate my hand and knock on the object in front of me. THUD THUD Wood. And it sounds solid. The air is thick and putrid. I sputter and wheeze, trying to expel years of dust. My whole body moves, and my knees hit a bit too hard on the wood above me.

Trapped, like a nut inside a shell. Methodically, I maneuver my arm to reach the metal broach pinned on my jacket. Removing it, I work it to an angle that I’m able to apply an upward force. I scrape and chisel into the wood. Hours go by. The stagnant air ripe with sweat and tainted body odor. I can feel wood shavings on my wrist and arm. Several hours later, I’m still scraping and clawing, my wrist and forearm burning from over exhaustion.

The oxygen in this wooden box is dangerously low. The heat and rancid air burns my lungs. Perspiration pouring from my body, mixing with the mold making a kind of “sweat soup.” My mind reeling with utter determination to escape this wooden prison. The wood above my hand starts to buckle and I can feel dirt and debris pelting my hand. Mustering every last ounce of strength, I force both my hand up and the wood gives way. Dirt and rocks flood in, and adrenaline kicks into high gear.

Clawing, and climbing, I make my way forward through the loose soil. My hand suddenly pops through. Freedom. Pushing myself out of the dirt and into the daylight, I survey the area. I can hear scratching and digging around me. I can see other holes where others had already made their way out.

I shamble over to the water fountain in the middle of the graveyard. Thirsty, after having dug myself out, I’m about to drink from the fountain when I spot my reflection in the water. Still missing the top of my head and jaw where I used the shotgun…

There’s a common misconception that space is infinite. It’s not. It’s vast – so vast that none of the sentient societies within its confines can even fathom where the edge lies. The dust folk of Tavvak are so obsessed with the holiness of their own soil that they don’t even look to the skies. The humans of Earth haven’t managed to travel any farther than their own dead satellite. Even the immortal mind-computers of 298912040834 have discovered faster-than-light travel so recently that they’re still eons away. The universe’s trillions of races are all billions of years from reaching the end.

But I’m waiting for them to get here.

I’ve known that I was infected since before the scientists even announced the discovery of the parasite. It worked its way into people’s heads, they said, filling them with all sorts of disgusting desires and horrifying thoughts. Over a third of the population was believed to be infected, they said, and I alone breathed a sigh of relief.

I wasn’t the only one.

For over a year, this thing’s been lodged inside my head. I’ve been subjected to its effects for so long, I can barely remember what it was like to be normal. It started with anger, I know that much, a burning, churning rage that clawed through my belly and set my nerves on fire. I think I hurt someone.

I think I might have hurt a lot of someones, actually. Very badly. But it isn’t my fault. That’s what the people on the news keep stressing. It isn’t the fault of the infected, and we shouldn’t blame ourselves. Most importantly, people shouldn’t try to take revenge on us. We’re the victims here.

I’m finally going to be free, I think to myself – and to the parasite – gleefully. No more disgusting images, no more monstrous desires, no more sick thoughts every hour of every day. Before, it was impossible to see a doctor and get myself diagnosed, even though I knew I had it, but now that the government’s finally got their shit together, the testing is mandatory.

I’m waiting in line at the clinic now. It’s almost my turn to have my finger pricked, and my blood analysed for the tell-tale pheromones the parasite leaves in its wake. Soon, they’ll read a positive result, and I’ll finally receive the treatment I need. Soon, I’ll be cured.

“Clear!” calls the tester, and waves the next patient forward, a fidgety old woman. He pricks her thumb, hums as the machine processes the sample, and then frowns.

“Infected!” he yells, and nurses usher the woman away through a set of swinging doors. I crane my neck to get a glimpse of what’s back there. Any minute now, that’ll be me.

“Clear!”

Two people left.

“Clear!”

One person left.

“Clear!”

I step up to the desk, grinning widely even though the horrible, whining voice of the parasite is telling me to smash his stupid face into the desk right there, in front of everyone. It’s getting desperate. Not long now, you horrible little bastard. I present my thumb proudly. The sting of the needle feels like victory, and I inhale deeply as the machine whirs.

“Clear!”

Whenever I need to use the bathroom at night, I am always filled with a sense of terror. As soon as I flush the toilet and switch off the lights, I run as fast as I could, feeling that someone or something is chasing me until I reach the safety of my own bedroom; closing the door behind me and hiding under the protection of my soft blanket.

I know it’s a little irrational for me to feel this way, but whenever I need to pee or do number two, I curse myself for drinking too much water or eating too much before going to bed.

Last night, as I flushed the toilet, washed my hands and switched the lights off, I was greeted by the same darkness that usually made me cower and anxious. A thought came to me, that maybe I could get over this feeling of dread if I faced my own nightmares. I stopped myself from running and walked at a normal pace, trying to block horrific images inside my head by counting my steps.

I reached my bedroom safely. I smiled at my achievement and gave a sigh of relief. Just then, my bedroom door closed behind me. I turned around and I saw it; the one that caused me fear every time I used the toilet at night.

It turns out that it wasn’t chasing me.

It was trying to race me before I could close my bedroom door.

“And with this righteous hand, demons, I cast thee out!”

Reverend Pip Popoff pressed his hand down on the forehead of the elderly woman before pushing her back, causing her to briefly trip over herself. “My arthritis is gone.” She cried out, “it’s a miracle, everyone, God bless Mr. Popoff.”

The audience cheered, eagerly eating up the bullshit laid in front of them. I sighed, trapped in line along with the rest of the idiots. It was bad enough when my mother decided to raid my browser history, now I was being force to participate in the con of this lunatic in order to rid me of my “demons”. I didn’t care, just let the man do his stupid ritual and I can go home.

Popoff adjusted his microphone before heaving me onto the stage with a heavy grunt. He was an old man, wearing a tight tweedy suit and speaking with a fake southern accent. In his eyes were pupils of an almost solid blackness.

“I see this young fellow been doing the Devil’s handshake ain’t that right?” He yelled. The audience laughed. “Don’t worry, kid.” Popoff spoke, “the light will heal you. With this righteous hand, demons, I cast thee out!” The minute he placed his hand on my head, I could feel a great pain shoot through my body as if my flesh was being torn away.

It was like a dream, I was floating above the scene, having a clear view of Popoff and… myself. “Thank you, sir.” I hear my body say, “I feel absolutely reborn.” The crowd cheered.

I tried to yell out but couldn’t, helplessly trapped in the spectral void. My body turned towards me, its eyes now bearing the same darken pupils. It gave a sly wink before walking off stage and joining my mother.

The disposal is clogged again.

It isn’t a terrible surprise. No one in the house seems to understand that it can’t grind spoons to a drainable pulp. As much as I hate to do it, I roll up my sleeve and stick my hand down the disposal.

At these times I always second guess the wiring. That’s normal I suppose. We’re all pretty attached to our lim… Is this hair? Matted up chunks of black hair are all intwined in the mechanics of the disposal. I turn my head and push deeper into the disposal until I notice a smiling 2 foot figure sitting on the counter. My daughter’s realistic dolls always give me the willies. Why is it up there? I turn to look at the drain once more. It’s too dark to see anything in there.

I hear the sound of rustling cloth and quick, light footsteps. I turn my head again expecting to see my daughter, but instead the doll was standing by the light switches. I can now see the patch of black hair missing from the back of its head. I look down towards the drain with the sudden realization that I needed to pull my hand out, now.

I hear another rustle, and the click of a flipped switch.

The mission was simple. Travel to Kepler-186f and populate it. Easy, right? I mean, a small base camp had already been set up by probes and robots sent years ago on previous missions, all with success. The camp was pretty basic, but contained the bare essentials needed to sustain the first landing party and the planet supported life. The atmosphere was identical to Earth’s and had a thriving population of small mammals and fish. This planet was to be renamed upon the success of mankind first setting foot upon its soil.

Our vessel, “Fyrsta” or “The First” was the gleaming marvel from years of research and planning. The technological culmination in what the human spirit can achieve when threatened with extinction. This ship was to be the first of several to arrive. Its builders and designers would never know of its outcome. They would be long dead.

All told, five vessels were launched. Each with a particular mission, with the ultimate goal to colonize Kepler-186f. Our vessel was launched a year before the others. Our mission: ensure the arrival of the other ships went smoothly. Build wooden shelters, start crops, secure the camp from predatory animals with a fence and of course, catalog everything.

Like the twelve Olympians, there were twelve of us on board; 6 men and 6 women, in stasis. No one could survive the 490 light-year journey alert and awake. Paired, like animals on Noah’s Ark, eventually we were to be the first of many to populate that pristine planet that would save all of humanity.

Scientists and programmers are both intellectual types; logical and analytically thinking. A mission this critical, to save the human race, brought together the best scientists, mathmeticians, engineers and programmers the world has ever known. Computer programmers and engineers building precise machinery and software. The existence of humanity required nothing but the best of the best.

Fate, doesn’t come without a sense of irony. We arrived at Kepler-186f, precisely on schedule. The ship was pre-programmed to land without any human intervention. Funny, after 490 light years without a single problem, that the scientists would calculate the landing procedure in meters, and the programmers would code the sequence in feet…

You’re shaky. You’re twitchy. At some points you’re burning up and sweat pours out of you like a freak storm. At others, you’re cold and parched, dry as the desert. And when you’re not at one extreme or the other, you exist as strange, uncomfortable mix of the two.

There’s no doubt about it: you’re fucking sick.

Was it something you ate? Something you came in contact with? Maybe there were existing germs in your body that mutated and hit your immune system with something it wasn’t prepared for; like how the flu evolves to combat medicine.

Whatever the case, there’s now a serious culture of germs growing in you, crawling on every inch of your skin, and polluting your once healthy body.

They’ll try their damnedest to kill you: releasing toxic enzymes, stealing your body’s nutrients, waging war on every fiber of your being.

But you’ll pull through. You always do. You’ve been sick before, but your immune system is rock solid and has always obliterated any threats to your health. You’ll have to deal with the fever, sure. But it will heat your body up, make it inhospitable for this god damn virus.

You grin to yourself, thinking about the hypothetical choice your body has given this infestation: Stop attacking, or leave, or die. In any case, you win and they lose. If only these germs could grasp how puny and insignificant they really are; how could they not realize your body would fight back and that, inevitably, would win?

With that thought, you are willing to wait years, decades, hundreds of laps around the sun if you must, content in the knowledge that no plague can destroy you.

Your fever increases. It’s getting hotter.

You begin perspiring. The seas are rising.

And then. Nothing. No more itching. No more queasiness. The germs are eradicated; a result of their own actions, nonetheless.

You relax back into your natural orbit, beauty and well-being restored. You are eternal, indomitable. As you stare out into the far-off reaches of space in every direction, you wonder if they were ever so naive as to call your body their home.

Ha. A planet being the property of its inhabitants. What a ridiculous notion.

The waitress placed a plate of steaming enchiladas, smothered in cheese and onions, with a side of guacamole salad in front of Brian. A sweet tea was just out of reach of his left hand. He muttered a quiet “thank you” and turned his head, gazing out the diner window to a point off in the distance.

”I love you,” he whispered.

”I love you more,” was her reply.

“I love you the most.”

“Well I’ll love you longer.”

“I’ll love you until I die.”

“I’ll love you even longer than that.”

It was an old bedroom game. The scene played out in his head as a figure began to emerge in the sunset.

“Better get these to go,” he thought, before deciding, “No. Fuck it. I’ve got time.”

Brian was half way through the plate; the waitress had refilled his glass of tea three times, when a patron deposited an absent minded quarter into the juke box. It was Robert Earl Keen, one of her favorites.

”The road goes on forever and the party never ends.”

Brian shook his head. Mr. Keen had no idea how right he was. He glanced out the window, studying the approaching figure. It was closer now. Brian could almost make out its features. He took the time to slowly enjoy what was left of his meal before sliding a $20 under the edge of the cleaned plate. By the time he unlocked the door to his old pick-up truck, he could clearly make out the details of the figure he had been watching.

The fetid corpse trudged closer and closer to the diner. Rotted flesh dangled from crackling bones, and the white gown it once wore was now a filthy rag.

“I’ll love you until I die.”

“I’ll love you even longer than that.”

Brian slid into his truck and closed the door. He wondered how far away he’d have to go this time, and how long it would take her to find him.

In May of 2012, I was undertaking a five-hour drive from Glasgow to the northern tip of the Highlands for the Ullapool Book Festival. I was a doctoral research student and had received a small bursary to attend, but due to my teaching duties that week, I found myself driving up alone fairly late on the Thursday evening.

It wasn’t a terribly long drive, but having left the city after 8pm, I found myself tiring around the Cairngorms and decided it was safest if I pulled over for a cat nap.

At the time I was driving my beloved old Mini and had a bit of an embarrassing affectation for all things retro. I was therefore carrying a ridiculously old Nokia mobile with the battery life of a Spinal Tap drummer and absolutely no internet capability.

I had pulled over into one of the parking areas of the national park at Aviemore, where I specifically chose one of the smaller car parks that acted as an access point for hill climbers – these areas permit overnight parking, are generally off the main road and are unlit, which I thought would best facilitate a quiet rest before I started driving again. What with it being Scotland, it was raining lightly and the air was chill. I lowered my seat and pulled my coat over me, drifting off fairly quickly as the rain drummed pleasantly on the roof of the car.

I woke with a start some time later. I was in darkness, slightly disorientated and vaguely aware that I had heard a thump somewhere on the bodywork of the car. The combination of chill outside air and my warm breath inside had fogged the windows, and I couldn’t see out. I was by no means panicking, sure that it had just been the metal chassis settling as the engine cooled, and I picked up my mobile to check the time. I was cursing slightly under my breath about the fact my battery had died when I heard a distinct tap-tap-tap on the lower side of the passenger door.

I was unnerved, and I reached across the seat to check the door was locked. Do you ever talk to yourself when you’re nervous? I certainly do, and I was quietly chiding myself for being a baby when the tap-tap-tap sounded from the rear passenger panel. I immediately shut up and stared at the back window. No movement, no shadows. A bit exasperated with myself, I switched on the engine, turning the hot air on to clear the windows. I would have preferred to sleep a bit longer, but my nerves had me wide awake and I decided I’d be as well making tracks.

It took an age for the windows to clear (always did with my old Mini, thanks to a bust fan on the passenger side), and I sat for a couple of minutes before I began to see more clearly through the steam. My heart about plummeted to the floor when a brief movement in the wing mirror caught my eye. Something was lurking around the back of my car. I immediately switched on my headlamps, and the car park ahead of me was flooded with light. There were no other cars, which I found comforting, assured that it must therefore be an animal I had seen in the mirror.

I was restoring my seat to its normal position when something clattered deafeningly against the window by my face. I screamed (pure instinct) and immediately pealed out of the car park, a thick fog still obscuring the majority of my rear windows.

My heart stopped hammering about ten miles down the road when I realised that no-one was following me. By the time I reached my hotel in Ullapool just over two hours later, I had decided I had most likely been hit by a bird, or possibly a bat, and had laughed at my skittishness. I got out the car and stretched my legs in the bright car park of the hotel, enjoying the cool air after being cooped up for so long in a confined space.

When I went to collect my bag from the back seat, I noticed an envelope tucked underneath and opened it with curiosity.

*Dear Driver,

You should be more careful about where you park at night. I sat in the passenger seat for almost ten minutes and wrote this while you slept. Your passenger window can be eased down by hand.

Take care.*

I drove home from the festival early on the Sunday afternoon, determined to make the journey in one daylight trip. I had my window checked at a garage back in Glasgow and sure enough, the locking mechanism was broken.

I’ll never know if my visitor thought they were being a Good Samaritan or took some pleasure in frightening me, but either way, the thought of some stranger sitting on my passenger seat, watching me while I slept that night, still chills me to the bone.

What is hope?

Chills overcome my body as I hear the soft thuds of his steel-toed boots approaching. I know what’s coming, but I’m terrified. Or maybe I’m terrified because I know what’s coming.

It happened about a month ago, or something like that, I can’t tell in here. I was walking home from school, as usual. Everything goes black, and the next thing I know, I’m here.

Every day (or something to that effect) he comes here, wherever that is. He strides, seemingly in slow motion, over to the chair he tied me to. And as always, he unsheathes that damned blade. And as always, he draws the knife, over and over, upon my exposed skin, which has long since acquired an odd pallor. Where there used to be bare arms and legs, there are now jagged, dark red lines. He is silent, as he always is during this ritual, only allowing himself a small chuckle when his knife finds a particularly painful scar.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this, an irrational part of my brain cries. If this were a movie, I would have overpowered him, taken his knife, and escaped. But life isn’t a movie. I know no one’s going to save me, either. I used to imagine myself leaving this place and running away, far, far, away, and never having to look back. All I imagine now is the only possible future left for me: my corpse, lain across the floor, more crimson than pale, and drained of blood. I have long since realized that these thoughts are the only ones that hold any truth to them, and this was confirmed when, upon finishing, he whispered into my ear,

“They’ve stopped looking for you.”

I have accepted the fact that I will die here. Any fantasies I had of salvation were just that: fantasies. And now, they are shattered, permanently. So, I’ll ask you again.

What is hope?

My boyfriend is such a lovely man. He does the sweetest things like leave me little pieces of jewelry on my pillow or brings me my favorite flowers and a new dress.

One day I get back to the house to find that dress and all of the jewelry he has given me were lying on the stairs with a note.

“I have something special planned tonight, put these on and meet me upstairs in the bedroom.“

I smile as wide as possible. Oh isn’t he a romantic! I quickly go into the bathroom and change into the dress which is a flowing cream colored gown that looks like a toga and the bangles made of bone with feathers on them. All lovely gifts that he had given me over the months we had been together. The last thing to go on was this beautiful gold necklace that had amethysts and jade at intervals throughout the piece.

I walk up the stairs to see rose petals scattered across it and open the door to our room. Every available surface of our room is filled with candles and it is the most romantic thing I have ever seen. I step inside and see the rose petals leading to our bed. It is only after I hear the turning of the lock and see the demonic circle painted onto our sheets that I realize that there is a fine line between romantic gestures, and preparing a sacrifice.

So they finally figured it out.

For years, children would remember past events that could not be explained. They’d tell their freaked out parents about drowning in a former life and the terror that went with it. Or dying in a car accident. Or falling off a mountain. Mind, these were things these kids had no way of knowing about. Of course they’d grow out of it later. The freaky memories would be long forgotten by the time they reached school age.

But not the phobias.

There was still the chill of fear when one would go swimming in the ocean, thalassophobia overwhelming them as they froze up in terror over something they couldn’t quite explain. The claustrophobics would panic at even the hint of a too tight space, feeling the smothering agony of oxygen leaving them without actually experiencing it. Acrophobics would choke up just looking at a tall building, their hearts beating fast at the terror of being at the top and slipping…

Don’t even get me started on the fear of spiders.

No one made the connection between the past life talk of all these children and the phobias they later exhibited until scientists studying epigenetics, past memories and other things passed down through DNA, became all the rage.

But epigenetics couldn’t quite explain this phenomenon. Sure, we can be afraid of something from watching someone else experience it, but that didn’t always explain the swooping terror felt for certain things. The truly irrational phobias.

They struggled to understand it, to scientifically explain it. One day, a geneticist who I bet had been toking one too many joints, had an idea. He designed a machine that measured the energy of a dead body in a whole new way, and was disturbed to find that energy only left the body when it had completely decayed or burned or whatever. A portion of that energy traveled right on into the next body, the most viable fetus it could find, and that is how scientists discovered reincarnation and death memories.

Which leads me to my biggest fear. Many claim trypophobia is not a true phobia. Fears of clusters and holes, and things burrowing and living where they shouldn’t. What makes this fear so strong in some and non-existent in others?

Can you think of nothing?

Imagine what happens to the carcass decaying underground in a box, the maggots and worms making food of it. Imagine a sort of lingering consciousness as your body is consumed around you and you are unable to move in your death.

Your death memory transfers into a new body. Memories fade with age, and it’s so hard to understand why you recoil in horror at the sight of a lotus flower or a burrowing parasite.

The thing is though, you may have forgotten all about your former death, but the phobia still lingers.

In conclusion, please cremate me when I’m dead.

It started simple with army grunts like me. Each time one of those monsters would pop-up we would send jets and tanks and try to hurt them the best we could. Didn’t do a dent most of the time, but at least I can recall a few times were we managed to steer them away from the cities. Still most of the time a couple of town would get flatten before they went back to the sea. Despite our best efforts we were considered supremely incompetent and not enough to prevent the possible extinction of mankind.

We needed better weapon, our first really big success was with the robot suit. I can remember being so happy the first time I saw one those damn critter beaten to a pulp. I think that was 30 years ago.

But of course we are not fighting mere animals here, they adapted to the big guys and eventually we had to find something new once again.

The first thing the eggheads did was to create some Frankenstein like creature. I think they piece the thing together from all the remains they had gathered over the years or mashing DNA together. Worked really well at killing them, at least until the beats decided to stay hidden for a while and the thing went berserk from the lact on action and tuned on us. Before too long we had to turn half of south America in a nuclear wasteland in order to transform the damn creature in a pile of ashes.

But then one of the guy in R&D, thought it at least proved they had an efficient fighting method against the monsters and that it should be used again once they would come back. It just needed something with a better brain, a human brain to be more precise. The brain was the only human part they needed, the rest could be altered. They started to ask for volonteers.

I remember the first time I saw one, I wondered which monsters I had to shoot. The Irony is that back in those days they actually had a human shape. They were not so bad, but in order to keep winning, they had to become more brutal, stronger and more savage. Nowaday, they easily do more damage than the monsters they are supposed to fight. It’s pretty evident that once they turn you don’t have really anything human left, you are just pure bloodthirsty rage. The worst thing is that they truly are our only good line of defence, but we always need more of them.

That’s why I am easily one of the worst officer in the army and I make sure everyone under me is just as bad as I am. If they know you can fight, you get a promotion to Area 51 and we won’t see you looking human ever again. One day the brass will probably start to just snatch us up in our sleep.

We ate the oxen first.

We didn’t even need them anymore. The fields have been barren dust for nearly a year now. And they fed us for weeks.

But the meat eventually ran out, as it always did. And once again, our stomachs clawed away at themselves, with nothing to eat for days, days that were churning into weeks.

We ate the family dog next.

The children cried as I butchered the poor creature, but their tears dried as our small house finally smelled like cooking meat again.

But a starved dog has only so much meat.

I could tell that my daughter wouldn’t make it. She was weak, getting weaker. And my son was stronger—he just needed some food.

My husband was long gone at that point. No guidance. No help. No forgiveness. Just my husband’s quiet bones in the dust of our yard.

I begged God to answer me, to tell me what to do. He was silent as the night sky, silent as the slowly dying world around us.

I couldn’t lose them both.

I pulled out the large cooking pot. And the cleaver. There was no use in delaying the inevitable, stretching her timeline out, letting her suffer, needlessly collecting the dead until everything was dust.

I had decided to use the threadbare pillow on her. To walk into their small room in the dark of the night, as they tried to sleep off the pain of their empty stomachs, and put it over her face, pushing down, guiding her to some kind of final sleep. Lead her to the endless dark where there was no pain.

My hands shook, one on the knob of the door to their room, the other clutching the pillow. I whispered a plea–

“God, forgive me.”

A voice from the other side of the door spoke.

“He will not have to.”

I opened the door to find the job had been done for me. My child. Dead. My eyes welled as I looked upon the horror of my bloodied daughter.

My bloodied daughter, standing over the lifeless, slaughtered husk of her brother.

There is something out there- the most atavistic of human fears. Some people say that this fear of the unknown is something that is relevant for evolution. Fear of the dark kept the early man from stepping out in the night, saving him from the big cats lurking in the shadows. The night time jungle used to cast shadows into the hearts of the bravest men. Many who foolishly stepped out, never returned or lived to tell. Most people today think that the fear of the dark is an absurd idea, and feel brave and invincible in their cozy urban electrified homes. I should know better.

You see, I am old, quite old. I commanded the beasts back in the time when it mattered. This task had been entrusted to me, and for millennia, I ensured that a fear of the dark stayed in humans, using my pets for the purpose. I did not enjoy this, but I feared that if humans strayed out too far in the dark, something much sinister would get them. I continued instilling fear in their hearts, for their own good.

My days are coming to an end now, and I can no longer strike fear in you. I feel sad for all of you, for what I was saving you from is sinister and dark beyond your imagination.

And soon, there will be no one left to save you from it.

I had never been sure what to expect when my wife cooked. She was always on blogs finding recipes that, in all honesty, were above her skill level. Not trying to be rude, but there we are.

I was hardly surprised when one evening she mentioned, “I found a recipe for something we’ve never tried before.” She rolled her tongue as a drumroll, “We’re going to have boar!

“Honey,” I tiptoed, “where did you find boar around here? Aren’t those big dirty pigs from Kenya or a rainforest somewhere”?

She waved me off, “Hush. I’m trying to broaden our horizons. Imagine, when the Darvilles visit, we’ll get to say we’ve been eating wild boar! How extravagant!”

“How many days will we spend in the hospital?”

“Douglas! What did you say?”

“How do you think she’ll respond, dear?”

She eyed me suspiciously before shooting me knowing smile and crooning, “She’ll be terribly jealous. I know she’s always been jealous that I married you, but I still like to remind her that I always finish first.”

“Of course you do, my love.”

Mind you, Mrs. Darville and I had been seeing each other secretly for months. I had been wondering if she knew about us. We’ve had a few close calls. She’d come home from the store early, and the lovely Mrs. Darville would have to run out the back door half dressed. I never minded the view, but always wished she didn’t have to leave. She had even gone as far as to get a tattoo of a bear on that little behind after the nickname she gave me. It always gave me a smile.

“Now go wash up so you can help me set the table.”

As I went to wash she opened the oven and I smelled an aroma so sweet, so succulent it was as if it snared me by the nose and pulled me back to the kitchen.

“You never told me where you ended up finding the boar, honey.”

“Oh, somewhere nearby,” she sweetly teased. “I had a feeling you already had a taste for it.”

“You know, I think I just might.”

We sat down to one of the best dinners we’ve ever had. She had a spark in her I hadn’t seen in a long time. The kind of spark that Mrs. Darville had used to lure me into her bed with ease.

She smiled at me. I smiled back.

“So, what do you think?”

Mid-chew I replied, “you know, it’s good. I never thought I’d like boar.”

“Oh, silly me, did I tell you this was boar? I meant to say whore.” She giggled. “I’ve never cooked whore before.”

“Whore?”

Mid sentence she took a still bloody steak off the serving platter and slapped it onto the bare, wooden table.

“I told you I found it nearby. I actually picked it up next door.”

On the backside of the steak, there was a small patch of skin left on the cut of meat. I could just make out the picture of a bear on the seared flesh.

“I knew you’d like it.”

The Best Creepypasta Stories

When you are admitted to a hospital, they place on your wrist a white wristband with your name on it. But there are other different colored wristbands which symbolize other things. The red wristbands are placed on dead people.

There was one surgeon who worked on night shift in a school hospital. He had just finished an operation and was on his way down to the basement. He entered the elevator and there was just one other person there. He casually chatted with the woman while the elevator descended. When the elevator door opened, another woman was about to enter when the doctor slammed the close button and punched the button to the highest floor. Surprised, the woman reprimanded the doctor for being rude and asked why he did not let the other woman in.

The doctor said, “That was the woman I just operated on. She died while I was doing the operation. Didn’t you see the red wristband she was wearing?”

The woman smiled, raised her arm, and said, “Something like this?”

My brother moved out of the house back in 2002 once he got his job as a Computer technician, and he recently went missing. When I went to his house, it was locked, with 3 sheets of printer paper taped to the front door.

“While coming home from work one day, I noticed someone had left their damaged grey laptop laying in the middle of my driveway one day. I got out of my car to examine it more carefully.

The LCD definitely showed signs of user related damage, as there was a large hole on the left side of the screen that fit a standard Phillips Head screwdriver perfectly. There was a webcam above the display as well, and it was also destroyed with the same screwdriver. Other than those, however, everything else on the computer showed minor signs of wear, like almost all of the keyboards keys were faded, but nothing to the extent that it could be considered unusable. I looked at the back of the display to find out what brand it is, and yet, I couldn’t find anything. I looked at the entire laptop’s shell and there was no text or logo stating what brand it is. In fact, there was no warranty sticker, no “Proof of licence” sticker on the bottom, no text whatsoever. What’s even more odd was the fact that the only ports on the laptop was a VGA port for connecting an external display and a USB port. How long could this laptop have possibly run without a charging port to recharge the battery? It must have been a very low end laptop where you had to remove the battery pack and put it into it’s own charging dock. Why did it exactly have a web cam, though?

Curious as to what exactly is on the laptop, I ran inside to my basement where my old desktop was currently being stored. The only reason it was down there was because I forgot to bring that behemoth to the local SarCan to recycle it. I would have been currently using it as my regular computer, but it takes 5 or 6 hours to fully boot because the system always goes through recovery mode every time you start it, and the processor is way to slow to “recover” everything on the 500 gb hard drive I had installed on it (A 120mhz Pentium processor doesn’t get you far). Well, anyways, I removed the old LG CRT monitor from the desktop and plugged it into the laptop. I went to push the power button when…

… I stopped. There’s no way this is going to work, the battery has to be dead by now.

I rummaged around the basement to find my battery voltage tester and immediately withdrew the battery from the laptop and checked the voltage. Low and behold, it had no charge. Well, might as well just leave it down here, I’ll bring all of this computer junk to SarCan tomorrow morning. With that, I unplugged the display from the laptop, put it back into the desktop and simply left everything downstairs. After leaving the basement I went to go watch TV for about 3 hours or so before going to bed.

I was suddenly awakened from my deep slumber by the sound of the Windows 2000 start up jingle and fell out of my bed. It was so deafeningly loud I swore someone was holding a pair of speakers right next to my ears. After I fell out of the bed, I stood up in a groggy daze, and for a minute or so trying to figure out what that sound was. The desktop! I must have accidentally hit the power switch while trying to switch monitors! I simply walked to the basement, but froze in the middle of the steps. I just remembered there was no way my computer could have started up, because I have Windows 95 installed on my desktop. I was reluctant to go down the steps after that, but my common sense started kicking in and I thought I must be getting my OS’s mixed up. When I walked down, I was shocked to see that my desktop wasn’t on; in fact, I remembered it wasn’t even plugged in. I had to make sure of it though. I checked behind the desktop and everything else was plugged in except for the tower. There’s absolutely no chance of that laptop turning on, that’s impossible. I removed the battery from the laptop again and re-checked the voltage.

This time, I couldn’t get a direct number. The voltage tester was just going insane.

I re-inserted the battery pressed the power button on the laptop. Some indicator lights flashed, meaning the computer definitely started, except this time the start up jingle wasn’t played at all. I need to see what’s going on here. I connected the CRT monitor back into the laptop. And what I saw…

… Was a bare desktop with 3 icons in the corner. The task bar was empty, and there was no Start menu button.

The wallpaper was black. Why would anyone do this to their desktop? Anyone could remove all the icons, but they must be pretty skilled hackers to remove the Start Menu button. Of all the 3 icons, 1 was a Games folder, 1 was a Videos folder, and the last was the DOS Command Prompt program. Maybe this was a kids laptop. Clicking on the Games folder confirmed my suspicions; it was a little girl who must have owned this laptop. I felt some remorse for the poor girl because there was only 1 game in the folder, and I have no idea what the hell it was. The program name was “princess.exe”. I clicked on it just to see what the game was like. A fully animated title screen came up, with various generic fairytale princesses twirling across the screen and the logo flew down with a bunch of sparkly doves holding it. The game was called “Princess Creator: Make yourself Beautiful!” Ah, so it must have been one of those low budget “put .jpgs of various clothing items onto a photo of yourself” games. Well, I was right, as the menu popped up I was given the option to “Dress up” or to “View pretty pictures”. I wanted to see what the girl looked like, so I clicked on the 2nd option. She had t