CreepsMcPasta Creepypasta Radio - "Being able to hear people’s thoughts has always been a curse" Creepypasta

Episode Date: February 28, 2021

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Funny. People have the ability to project their thoughts as invisible waves through space, and they have special little organs that let them receive these invisible waves, and it's called talking and listening. People take it for granted. You only hear what people want you to for a reason. Skipping that isn't a superpower. It's not nice to see the link between everything you do and the instantaneous emotional response it sets off from people around you. You don't need to see the flush of blue wave disappointment that rolls through your father's mind when you show him the A-minus you got on a test. You don't need to see how a lover feels when they see you in discoloured boxes and woolen socks. It's good enough that they lie.

You should be happy with those lies, because a person is not just the sum of their thoughts. That momentary flicker of revulsion a partner feels when they walking a new spoon your guts into the toilet after eating some dodgy takeout. That's not who they are. the fact that they push that disgust aside and still help you up, that's who they really are. I hate seeing these things. I hate feeling other people's intrusive thoughts, the parts they can't filter,

the parts they choose to ignore or lock up. Sometimes I get words, but I have to focus real hard. Most things look like colours that wash up all around me, although I guess it's really just a metaphor I use for your benefit. There's an element of taste, smell, touch, and even sound too, all rolled up in there. Envy is sharp and bitter. Love is like a twang of a guitar that blends the world around it into a peaceful harmony.

Hatred looks like the afterfakes of a nasty burn, the pitted flesh, the glistening blisters, the gut-wrenching pain. Sexual thoughts are almost percussive, but it depends on the person. Some people have a pneumatic drill thumping away in their head. for others, it's more like a crashing of waves on a beach. It would be better if I know I could help people, but I'm no Superman. I get a lot just walking down a busy street. Someone's always getting hit or coerced or abused or beaten or kicked or stabbed or...

Jesus, it's always something. Once on a long road somewhere on the outskirts of Manchester, I heard a cry for help. It was more of a prayer, really. It's so rare to get a clear broadcast, like something you pick up on the car radio. This wasn't a mishmash of sensations. There were words,

a litany screamed into the void in the desperate hope that God was listening. I spent weeks driving up and down those roads. I stayed in a hotel nearby, pausing my journey, my life, everything, in the hope I could find this poor person. I climbed fences and scoped out gardens. I broke into houses when people left for work.

I got arrested, twice, but the police wouldn't listen. Please let me die before he comes back I'm so hungry He feeds me so little Please let me die I never heard them again Never found where they were

Or what might be happening The closest I came to figuring it out Was a whisper of despair Left floating on the air Just outside an old brick building Deep in the woods It was small A shed really

But with thick nails And inside were these thick iron pipes coming out of the ground and then going back into it. It might have been something to do with sewage. There were keep-out signs all over the place. Something about the stains on the floor gave me a bad feeling, and it was probably just my imagination playing up, but, looking at those pipes,

I couldn't help but picture someone handcuffed to them. In the end, I gave up. Whoever they were, they stopped praying. I never heard them again. I've had to stop trying to help people, in general. A lot of doctors have recommended I'd be locked up for my own safety. A few judges, too.

I think luck and not a whole lot else has kept me free on the streets. This power of mine isn't a radar. It doesn't point me to the damsel in distress so I can bust down the door and save them. That it be like pointing at a wave and tracing it back to its origin.

Most of the time, all I can do is listen and move on. And even listening can be dangerous. Not everyone. wants to be heard. The funny thing about psychopaths is that, despite being utterly self-obsessed, they aren't involved in their own little world like everyone else. That's because they can't possibly imagine that they might need to share it.

The world is theirs to enjoy, a great big complex, challenging toy puzzle, and people are the pieces they move around for fun. They're sensitive to everything around them, and they are always, always on the lookout, sometimes for victims, sometimes to learn more about the lumps of meat they call other people, and sometimes because they're afraid of getting caught.

It was an intake of breath that nearly killed me. A single slip-up that forever taught me to be careful about how I react to other people's thoughts. I was on the tube and people watching, as often did when I was a kid. A young guy had been on the carriage with me for about half an hour by that point.

He looked a lot older to me back then. But thinking about it, he was probably only 19. He had a baseball cap down over his eyes, but I knew he was projecting his mind into the whole damn train, drinking the world in. The grimy chairs, the rattling windows, the murky-speckled floor. He was observing it the same way a cat watches the street. He was only pretending to fixate on the floor,

pretending to be disinterested in the other people. I was too young to recognise the signs. I just thought it was another flavor of person. His thoughts tasted dull, devoid of recognizable emotion, but filled with astonishing detail. He was as lost in the process of

appearing harmless as I was drinking in his thoughts. It was only when the train slowed down and the doors opened that his thoughts changed. No one else could have seen it, of course. A young woman stepped onto the carriage and this guy's mind just exploded. There was recognition and

participation, fear, excitement, arousal, and something I would later learn was a special kind of rage. It was like the sky had been sitting and waiting, seeing the world in grey. But now he was seeing it in colour. Some input had been fed into that robotic brain, and it came alive with malignant intent. It wasn't just what he wanted to do to this woman that made him come alive. It was the fact that he'd planned it, and he was now wait to. for the perfect moment to execute. I gasped, overwhelmed by the madness spewing out of his head,

and he never moved a muscle, not once the whole time. But he heard, he knew. The consequences of my actions ripple through my mind as a single course of acknowledgement. He didn't ask questions or wonder how it could be possible. He simply knew that I'd seen into his head. He knew it the same way he knew that the train would soon. soon start up, and I'd be stuck there with him. His certainty in the situation was terrifying.

He wasn't plagued by a single gram of self-doubt. I lurched up, leapt towards the doors, and in less than half a second he was following me. The fact that I had somehow seen directly into his mind was no more interesting to him than the birth mark on my leg, a small detail that he might remark upon as he rolled my naked body into a sewer. Cruelty looks like blood. It spills out of the people's minds And into mine like red wine

Out of the bottle and into a glass This guy made me feel like I was drowning The worst part was knowing I couldn't go home I was close But I couldn't do that This guy was an apex predator He would have sat outside for days

If he wanted to Waiting to my mom or dad came stumbling out early in the morning He would have watched He would have waited I couldn't read his exact But it tasted like copper and was warm to the touch. It made me think of licking a box cutter. I knew leading him home would be a bad idea.

I couldn't hide, so I had to run. I had to lose him. I ran along a long, circuitous route through the city, through parks and alleys and markets with sizzling meat and open produce, until at last it felt as if my legs were going to turn to chalk and crumble. I had to lose the sky. I knew it. So, at some point, I doubled back

and started heading towards the same platform I'd fled. I can sense large groups of people moving around and I timed a journey carefully so that I was stumbling down the escalator just as the last passenger climbed aboard the departing train. I'd reached the carriage seconds before the doors

closed, confident I'd given the guy the slip. When I turned back, he was standing there with a blank expression. He'd never a Lentered during the whole chase, not once. He was barely even tired. If those doors hadn't closed just then,

if my timing had been slightly off, he would have been abroad the train with me, and I probably wouldn't be here telling you this. True psychopaths are exceptionally rare, thank God. They're actually the least of my worries now. Dead people are a bigger deal to me. They're far harder to avoid. Cemetery are a far harder to avoid.

firm no-go. But at least the long-time dead have the decency of keeping it quiet. Their thoughts are like wisps of smoke. Recent deaths are a little more visceral. I drove past the car crash once and just blacked out. The police

gave me a breathalyzer because they thought I was drunk. Thankfully, I convinced them that I just had a weak stomach and the blood splattered windscreen had upset me. They bought that. How could I have possibly explained to them that the psychotic shock of had knocked me senseless. I had heard a man's death cry. I could feel the scream he never

finished as if it was trapped in my own throat. But that wasn't the whole picture. The worst part was that the guy was still screaming. They couldn't hear it, but I could. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror as his corpse was hauled out, and he'd started screaming, not with his voice, but with his mind, with his soul. By the time I started my car up, he'd been at it for over an hour. When the ambulance drove his crumpled body away, he was still screaming.

He would still be screaming in the morgue, and he'd still be screaming when his family buried him. And, after that, he'd scream for months, maybe years, until eventually the dark and the quiet and the total absence of sensory input would lickify his mind, and that scream would wither, until it was nothing more than, well, a whisper of smoke. I highly recommend cremation, by the way.

The journey is the same, but at least it's quicker. Whatever energy the universe gives to us has to go back. You have to be dismantled. Dust to dust, right? That doesn't just mean the body. It means the very soul itself. Better to go quickly. Because if the sound of a recently buried casket is anything to go by,

it's damn terrifying. Everything is dying. It's all going back one way or another. Something about a human mind makes it resistant to that decay. I figured that process must vary a bit from person to person. Some places can even carry stains from things that happened a long time ago. You're familiar with this idea, I'm sure. The notion that a really horrific death leaves a kind of specter behind that haunts the area.

It's not uncommon. The freguest thing for me is that the thoughts are indistinguishable from a living person's. The only difference is they're not live thoughts. They're recordings. Sometimes that means climbing a normal looking hill and catching whiffs of an ancient Neolithic ritual.

Their cries uttered in a long-dead language. Sometimes it means hearing the dramatic bark of old English as you cross a random street in London. In Scotland, there's even places you can catch flickers of ancient Roman battle cries. That's pretty cool. What's less cool is that sometimes you pick up on a stain that doesn't belong to a human.

You know what I mean. You do. Everybody has a little bit of what I have. Did you ever just randomly hate something as a kid? Usually, it'll be some place like maybe the cupboard under the stairs, or the attic, or a well, or an old outhouse, or a spot in your garden

where the patio floor has chipped away and you can see down into the crawl space under your house. That's not an overactive imagination. There are places where sunlight hasn't reached for a very, very long time. Old houses abandoned in the middle of the woods, deep pits carved into the earth, the hearts of ancient forest, the bows of trees so thick and old

that nothing can grow in the stony soil because it is forever night on the woodland floor. You know the places. You don't need me to tell you about them. Every one of us has intruded at some point on a part of the world that just feels indecent, even a little bit hostile. I used to hate the space under the stairs in my first house. It was the way it descended into nothing, the way the ceiling got lower and lower, but the floor didn't go anywhere. And of course, it was dark.

So dark, you never saw the back of it. Even when I was a teenager and helped my dad move out, I never took the time to see right to toward the back. I just hauled stuff out best I could, reaching my fingers into the blackness, hoping to hell nothing reached out towards me. When all bar one box was clear, it occurred to me to maybe shine my light all the way in. I was tempted to push back against my childish fear and see the little knuck all laid bare. I wanted to take that black, lifeless pit and expose it to the light and see just how mediocre and boring it truly was, because, after all, It was just an overactive imagination, right?

That was always what my father had told me, when I came to him, bawling my eyes out over nightmares of being dragged under there by grasping angry hands. When I thought something had moved under there, a box was rearranged, leaving drag marks in the dust, a coat that was neatly folded, now thrown across the floor, a toy I hadn't seen in years, suddenly presented right at the very front of the pile of junk.

It was just my imagination telling me something had moved when it hadn't. There was always a mundane explanation, right? But when I finally had the chance to pull that pile of crap apart and tease the darkness away, I discovered that shadows aren't always silent. Whatever was down there had heard my thoughts, and it reached out with a message of its own. You're welcome to try, it said.

The solidarity of those thoughts. still haunts me. It was the way it felt like squeezing a diamond in my fist, like the words were made out of the hardest stuff on earth and were cut through my mind like a knife through butter if it so felt like it. I'd never had something speak to me before. I caught the occasional word or phrase from other people,

but those were clear thoughts. They weren't communications sent out with poster stamps and return addresses. They were more like graffiti in a public toilet, but those words were sent right at me. laser-guided and dispatch straight into my skull. I couldn't begin to imagine what kind of mind had sent them. If there was an image or sensation that accompanied those words,

it was the taste of cobwebs and nothing else. God, it scared the hell out of me. I didn't raise my hand and challenge the shadows. Instead, I dragged the final box out and made sure to never lift my eyes. I was too afraid of what I might see. It's funny, but... On the drive home, my old man told me he was proud of me for clearing the stairs out.

It wasn't just because he'd knew I'd been scared at that place as a kid, but even he had to admit, as an adult, it freaked him the hell out too. Lots of people are like that. They get little vibes that they attribute to nothing. I once went out with a bunch of film students to help them shoot a final year project. The gear was heavy and I had a car, so that's how I tagged along. Anyway, the director, well, the dude in charge, I guess. he was hardly a professional

had spotted an old half-burned house in the woods a few years back and wanted a few shots of it we got lost out there looking for that house the dude was obsessed with it funny thing is after walking for three hours to find this place when we finally got there no one bothered to go inside I always think that's quite remarkable

first time I laid eyes in that place I figured I was going to have to pull some theatrics to stop anyone going in I was close to something something smart, something old, something hungry. I don't know how a house can look evil, but it just did. I didn't want to go near it.

What amazed me was that no one else did either. The director took one look and I could feel his artistic obsession melt away. He took a few photos, awkwardly as one of the actresses to stand by the front door and after a while he just mumbled something about the light being all wrong

and we left. No one chided him about it. We were all just thankful to put some distance between us and that house. If I have any moral or lesson to impart, it's this. Go with your instincts. That guy was a hardcore atheist, but he didn't try to prove to himself that the fear he felt in the house's vicinity was rubbish. He had nothing to gain by entering the house,

and some part of him told him he had plenty to lose, so he didn't go in. How many lives were saved because of that one decision? It's not always that simple. A few years back, I helped out with a missing person's case. I don't mean the cops came to me, and I held some scraps of old clothing to send the victim out. I mean that I saw a poster, called up the number, and asked how to help. There was a volunteer search party going on, and I wanted to be there.

Even if my powers aren't that useful, I really felt like I needed to be part of that search. team. Maybe it was the fact that it was a little girl's face on the poster about nine or ten years old. Maybe it was because I got a feeling in my gut when I looked at her eyes that was like being submerged in ice water and I never felt that way from a picture.

But I really wanted to help. The police figured that the girl had gone missing in this large patch of dunes by the sea. It was about 20 square miles of grass riddle stand that went up and down and up and down and well you get it it was a massive patch

of hills and as soon as someone went over the lip of a June they disappeared from sight dogs went missing there all the time and there had been times when kids had been found shivering under some bush because they'd lost sight of their parents while playing at the beach it made it an absolute nightmare to search

the terrain was awkward a deliberately overgrown patch of wilderness under strict environmental protection flashflots happened to the lot, erasing well-worn paths in a single night and replacing them with small ponds or simply flat expanses and nothing, and new paths would spring up where water cut through earth like it was butter. And of course, the dunes themselves were never still. They were waves in the sand, moving too slowly for the human eye, but always moving nonetheless.

And sometimes that meant they'd reveal things that had been buried for years, decades even. Like, say, an almost. military listening post that had been set up in World War II and quickly forgotten about. I didn't know that's what it was when I found it, of course. What I saw as I stumbled around in the dark, crying for this poor girl, while hoping I didn't get lost myself, was a door in the middle of the hill. There's no other way to describe it, and it was every bit as surreal as you might expect. Because there I was in the middle of total wilderness, when I swung my light and I saw an old doorway

embedded in the rising sand. The handle. God, how can I put it? It looked warm, like it had been touched recently. That's how my mind picked it up. I just knew the second I looked at it that someone had curiously tugged at the metal

until the latch gave way and the door swung open with a loud, eerie creak. When I tried the handle, it seems somehow familiar, as if the sound and feel of it had already been committed to my memory. Looking in, I saw a stairway going down two or three steps before it disappeared into sand that had filled the tunnel like rising water.

It was a dead end that I desperately wanted to ignore, except something told me not to. And when I glanced down, I noticed footprints in the sand. They were clear as day, little ones, smaller than my hand, scuffing an awkward gait. That made me look closer, even though. I sure as hell didn't want to. This place was wafting malintent towards me, practically blowing itself up like a puff of fish, scaring away predators.

I didn't want to test it or push it. I wanted to leave it the hell alone. But those footprints... I got down on my hands and knees and saw that the sand didn't quite reach the ceiling. The stairway descended for maybe a metre and must have levelled off because in one place I could shine my light through

right to the other side. The sand fell the stairway like water in a u-bend, and where the steps rose up again, there was an open space. The core there would have been grueling, with six feet of sand beneath you, and solid concrete right above. But if you kicked and wriggled, you could dig your way through, and for a kid, that'd be even easier. But why the hell would a girl do that? I wanted to ignore it. I really did. But why was I there?

It wasn't for fun, that was for sure. I wanted to help to make a difference. Maybe on some level, I'd felt that place all the way in the cafe where I'd first seen the girl's missing poster. Maybe that was why I'd come. I reckon other searchers had walked past that door and seen it and just walked away. They never consciously chose to ignore it. It just had an effect on you.

Something that if you weren't used to, you wouldn't understand. Maybe I was the only person who would have ever spotted it. Destiny sounds real nice sometimes, but even back then, I was suspicious as hell. Still, I knew I had to go in. I tried calling for the others, but the sea was less than half a kilometer away, and the wind coming off it was something fierce. My voice was snatched away from me by the howling gale, and no one came to help. I could catch glimpses of the odd light here or there,

but I didn't know if they were just over the next hill or too far away to help. I took a deep breath and got down on my hands and knees. For a moment, I nearly blacked out. It was right when my head entered the tunnel, and I realized it was way too damn small for me. I had this sudden flare-up of claustrophobia, and it was as if my whole body screamed. You want me to go in there?

Are you mad? But I had a shovel, didn't I? We all had them. I grabbed the thing and used it to clear out as much sand as I could. It wasn't hard work at all, but I found myself sweating all the same. Eventually, I cleared enough space and got back down on my hands and knees.

From there, it was flat on my stomach where I began to wriggle my way forward. My hands weren't a lot of help since the sand gave way too easily, so it was up to my legs to push me further along. Like I said, it wasn't far, maybe no more than two metres, with the way the roof pressed down on me,

not to mention the feeling I got radiating out of that darkness. I had to stop twice on the way and swallow my panic. That place wasn't quiet either. Each time I stopped to collect myself, it lashed out, and I saw images of the door swinging shut while I was stuck in a claustrophobic nightmare, pinched between unstoppable concrete and a clawing wall of sand and dirt. I saw my feet kicking frantically, my hands unable to find purchase as the whole tunnel pinched down in my midriff like a curious child crushing a bug. It would have kept me there. The search party would never have found the door.

It would never have heard my cries. It would have kept me pinched in the darkness. And it would have relished my torturous death. I could only hope it was bluffing. Something was alive down there. But it wasn't the actual tunnel itself. It couldn't force the door shot or rearranged soil and earth on a whim. I just had to calm myself and catch my breath.

And when I did, I found myself able to wriggle full. On the other side, I climbed out into an open room. It was derelict with only a few holes in the wall with trailing electrical wires to say where the equipment had once stood. There were bits of old wood and metal on the floor, too rusted to recognise, but it was empty of anything meaningful. Whoever it cleared it out decades before had probably been the last person to ever disturb that room. Well, except for one person. The sand in this place was scarce, but enough scattered the floor that I could see where disturbances had been made. The girl had entered, sure enough, and as I tracked a path, I saw clearly that she had passed through this room and through another doorway opposite to where I stood.

This tunnel made an unequivocal descent, knifing through the earth and straight into inky darkness. Standing over the stairs, I could hear faint drips of distant water and rustling echoes of every breath, movement I made. The sound of my own blood, rushing my ears, was deafening. Death lived down there, plain and simple. You could smell it in the musty air. Hell, there weren't even any cobwebs or signs of rats. Anyone could have stood there and felt something reaching into their minds, telling them to go anywhere else but down. For me, it felt like I was an ant who just looked up and spotted an enormous eye, framed by a magnifying glass, bearing down on it. Something was looking at me.

Something was looking right at me, just on the other side of those shadows. If I lifted my light, I knew I'd see something terrible staring back at me. You're welcome to try. It laughed. I'd seen this thing before. With trembling hands, I raised a light and saw nothing. For a moment, I nearly laughed. Could I have just imagined it?

I wondered, could all those moments of hearing inhuman thoughts be nothing more than an overactive imagination? I so wanted to believe that. No one has ever quite wanted to be alone like I did in that moment. Except, those stairs weren't totally empty. There was a shoe, a little one, a brightly coloured sneaker, the kind of thing that would pad a young girl's foot. The laughter caught in my throat. I was feeling unsure of myself. Had I really heard those taunting thoughts echoing from the dark?

Did it even matter? I had to go down. I had to see. I took the steps one at a time until I reached the bottom. My first instinct was to check the space ahead to see further into the darkness. The dripping human space that greeted me was as derelict as the room above,

except down here, the walls weren't as clean. Maybe water had run down and coated them in layer after layer of organic-looking limestone. Whatever it was, it lent the tunnel a slightly warped appearance, as if the very laws of perspective were twisted out of sink by the dark. When I was content that the tunnel was empty, I let my eyes fall down to my feet where I examined the shoe. There wasn't so much as a scratch. Even the shoelaces were still tied.

I touched it, and for a brief moment, I wield myself into the object's past, seeing what emotion still lingered close to its history. Nothing about the process is reliable, but it was my best hope. And that was when the strangest image came to me. The last time that shoe had been on the girl, it was on the beach.

She was with a father, running and giggling. He told her he had a secret and whipped her up into his arms. She felt happy in that moment, safe. She hadn't seen the man in so long. He promised her her vacation, but she mustn't tell Mummy. The funniest thought entered my head, and I looked up towards the tunnel. The ribbed limestone that coat of the walls was grossly discoloured, a peculiar rainbow of bone white and sickly purple.

It stank as bad as it looked. And that voice, the one inside the shadows, it had shut up awfully quickly. Hadn't I challenged it by raising the torch? For something whose thoughts had wreaked of millennia old hatred, it had fled back from the light as if it never had any power to begin with. I took a step backwards and dropped the shoe. Could it read my mind too? Could it feel the realization that had dawned on me, freezing my whole body in place as if a bucket of ice had been poured over my head? I think luck, once again, had played a big part in my escape.

Had I stepped just another foot forward, I would have been caught. The tunnel snapped shut barely a few inches from my feet. For a split second I saw nothing but a wall of muscle. And when it reopened, there was a quivering, puckering, hungry meat hole, the size of a manhole. The rims of its muscular mouth was darted with a hundred beady eyes that glared at me with rage. It had expected something so tasty, so real. Instead, all it got was a mouthful of dust. I was so frightened

I scrambled backwards on my hands and feet For a brief moment The torch was losing my grip And I lost sight of the gaping mouth That slobbed after me Only to turn back in an instant And see that it was gone

The only sign that anything had ever been there Was the trickling of dust And sand from the roof Of a perfectly square man-made corridor I could have so easily stayed there Frozen Debating with myself Whether it was ever even true

except the shoe remained clutched in one hand and it had been spattered with a foul-smelling goo as the mouth slammed closed even as I held it the viscous milky fluid began to burn and I threw the shoe down with a disgusted cry Lucky boy The boy said

Lucky Once in your house standing by the stairs Lucky twice in the woods Saved by your friend Now Lucky thrice thrice in the dark. Just how lucky can you be? It asked.

If you keep poking around in places you don't belong, your luck will run out. Screw you, I cried. Whatever it was, it had made its point clear. It has set a trap, a clever one. The girl wasn't on the beach. She was with her damn father, somewhere in Ireland. I had sense his intent buried deep within the memories

that lingered around the shoe like second-hand smoke. The shoe had been taken by something else, put to use as bait for me. And I still wasn't safe. I crawled right into the belly of the beast like a goddamn idiot. I hurried back up the stairs, trying to ignore the rising waves of emotion that were crashing through the bunker.

It felt like I was escaping a flash flood of oil. I could feel that thing, whatever, or where if it was, flexing its muscles just out of sight. that what was it getting ready for what did it want my light fell up on the way out and all the breath left my body like i'd been punched in the gut for a brief second a fractional moment of time too small to quantify the tunnel i dug in the sand wasn't there instead there was a mouth just like the one down below embedded in the wall of muscle that expanded indefinitely out of view but then the talk coach caught up with my eye, and the light revealed a plain man of sand with a small crawl space between it and the ceiling. There were no calcified spikes that threatened to skewer me, no bubbling ribbed esophagus, slick with digestive fluids, waiting to swallow me whole. I suddenly realized I'd been an idiot, and I'd left my shovel on the other side of the sand.

There'd be no digging. I had to crawl back through the way I came. You're welcome to try, the darkness said, sensing my own. my thoughts. I could feel it closing it on me as a kind of psychic pressure. I'm not sure I described this thing as angry, so much as just cold and alone. It was everywhere and nowhere. Something that wasn't human,

that had never been human. It lived in the dark, and only the dark. It was only my torch that kept me safe. Wherever it roamed, I saw dusty concrete and not much else. But, wherever the darkness encroached, I could feel those ominous thoughts. that tasted like dry cobweb, seeping back in like water through my fingers.

I ready myself to leave, to keep the light fixed dead ahead, when I felt a waft of hot air blow past my shoulders. By this point, the distinction between thoughts and real sensation was weakening. The things it suggested to me was starting to feel as real as the ground beneath my feet. I don't know if I were to face a psychic death or a physical one, but that thing was after me all the same. Before I let the nerves get the better of me, I ran forward and began crawling, and then wriggled. The torch was effective in such a small space, lighting it up as plain as daytime.

But behind me was another story. I could feel warm appendages caressed my legs, could feel the dam creeping through my trousers, repressed moistly against my bare skin. There was a hint of suction, maybe, as if something was getting ready to clean me out like I was a chicken drumstick at a family barbecue. My head emerged from the tunnel just as something snagged my foot. I lost all sense of reason, and, in hysterics, I tried to kick and scream my way free. It felt so stupid that some sand was between me and freedom. My arms were being close to my side.

Had the tunnel been so narrow on my way in, I wondered. But there it was. Freedom was so close, and all I had to do was loosen some damn earth. But panic only made it worse. I heard my shoulder as I struggled, hurt it bad, and tears welled up in my eye. Frustration was starting to overwhelm me. I tried everything to calm myself, but it wasn't enough. Something had me in its jaws real good.

My foot wasn't just caught. It was being pulled, slowly, inexorably back into a waiting gullet. Look, runs out, the darkness said. I screamed so loud that I was coughing up blood for days out. after. It was rough. In that moment, I felt all hope extinguish, all joy disappear. This thing's mind was flirting into mine, kicking off its shoes and writhling through my memories like a rude guest. It showed me what it had in store for me. It showed me that I wouldn't even be alone. There were others. So many others trapped down in the dark. At least I finally found out why I never

encountered anyone else like me. We make ourselves known to the predators, that lurk behind every shadow. This thing had been stalking me for a long, long time. Someone out there heard my screaming, although they never quite explained how. They just said it came to them as clear as day, and I reckon they might have just been a little bit sensitive to thoughts like I am to have been able to find me.

Either way, someone came to my rescue. A hand, cold and clammy, but so goddamn welcome in the moment, grabbed my wrist and yanked me out. I didn't even care that it was my bad shoulder they tugged on. By the time I slidded out of that place, I was sobbing. The darkness had done a real number of my head. I don't remember much else.

They got me somewhere safe, and I got a mention in the paper for going the extra mile. Story was, I got stuck crawling through and freaked out. That was all. A severe panic attack. Whoever saved me didn't stick around. I tried looking for them, tried to. asking for help? My guess. That thing set a trap for people like me, and it caught more than one. Like I said, there was no way anyone could have heard my actual screams through that door,

and with all the wind. It makes more sense to me that they heard my mental ones. Maybe they got a little too close to the darkness too. Maybe they glimpse a little of what had me in its jaws. Who knows? I steer clear of places like that now. places that have a special vibe. You know the one. People who see me think I'm overreacting. Think I'm being a coward or superstitious just because I won't go down into the basement

or take a lonely walk to an outhouse. I'd like to tell them the truth. Maybe even show it to them. But I couldn't do that. Seeing this thing, noticing it, I think that's what ticks it off. Anyone could have gone into that place and had no trouble.

It showed itself to be. me because I'd spotted it years before and who knows maybe it's not the only thing like it like I said we all have those good feelings don't we everyone no matter where or when we live have had those kinds of feelings there are always places that give us the creeps we should trust those feelings more often