Creepy - A Ripening, A Split, and a Cry  & The Shadow That I Am

Episode Date: December 4, 2025

A Ripening, A Split, and a Cry***Written by: Mel Harlan and Narrated by Alicia Atkins***Content warning: body shaming, graphic descriptions of child birth***The Shadow That I Am***Written by: P.D. Thompson and Narrated by Nate DuFort***Support the show at patreon.com/creepypod***Sound design by: Pacific Obadiah***Title music by: Alex Aldea Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

No. This is creepy. A podcast dedicated to sharing the most famous chilling and disturbing creepypastas and urban legends in the world. Whether these stories truly happened or are simply fabrications is for you to decide. These stories may contain graphic depictions of violence and explicit language. Listener discretion is advised. Evening, everyone. Been a minute since we heard from Eddie.

Partially because of the holiday week, but mostly because there just wasn't much to share without this podcast during this on-like-my-own-like-my-own-throwback passion project. I mean, I can paraphrase all the stuff you haven't heard. Eddie Graves was being Eddie Graves. Until he wasn't. I've heard stuff like this before. sort of.

I don't know how many of you all listen to terrestrial radio. Save those of you out there who are actually hearing this moment on your AM radio dial. I still listen most mornings when I start work. Still default to the radio more often than not when I'm driving too. So I've been listening to talk radio for about as long as I can remember in one manner or another. It's like podcasting. You listen long enough and you start to feel like you know the people you're listening to, right? You hear things differently.

You notice when they tell the same stories over again, like each time is the first time. You hear details about their lives. You get used to the tone of their voice. It stops being like something you're hearing and starts becoming a part of your life. So when things are off, you hear them. You can hear when people aren't getting along.

You can hear the dismissiveness, the delivery that sounds more like contempt than playful banter. All of which is a real long way of me saying, that there's a point where things changed in Eddie. The last you heard he come back from some time off for an undisclosed cold or sickness or something. Things kind of got back to normal for a while, but then he started to sort of come and go.

You wouldn't know it from the few times I played stuff here, but Eddie was a staple on the station for years. He wasn't the sort to take time off. He definitely seemed to love the job, or detention or whatever. but something changed. To tell the truth, I can't really tell if what you're about to hear

as a part of a bit that Eddie was doing or if it was something else. But it really landed with me when I heard it the other day. I'm sure Owen's weird call didn't help matters. Figured maybe you'd all like to hear it too. Good evening, my restless ones. Eddie Graves here on

Radio After Dark. Back again, third. cup of coffee in hand, heart rates somewhere around that of a hummingbirds. Funny thing about working the graveyard shift as long as I have. First, you feel a little isolated being here, I'll buy you and lonesome. Then, one day, you don't even think about it anymore. The rest of the world is either sleeping dead or up to the devil's business. But lately, lately, I don't know, things have been feeling,

I've been feeling different. Oh, hold on, looks like someone's eager this evening. You're on. I'm sorry, what? Yeah. Yeah, real funny. You got me. Wait, how'd you know about that?

No, I didn't. I mean, I never say that on air. That was off mic. Okay, I think we're going to take a quick break from the Collins tonight. In fact, let's take a quick commercial break while I. Fill up on some black medicine water. What do you say? Hey, um, I know this is going to sound like a joke, but...

I think someone's outside. Not the usual panhandlers either. There's a car parked by the tower, and the lights are off. No lights. And every time I walk past the hallway window, it feels like someone ducks out of sight. Seems like someone's trying to have a little fun with me, I think. Anyway, moving on.

The story tonight is. There is the man who listened. Too long. What the hell? Hello? Ah, I must have been the janitor. You know, always cleaning up ghosts and broken dreams around here. All right, folks, if you're still tuned in,

keep your dials locked in your eyes open. This is Eddie Graves still broadcasting. Whether anyone wants me to or not. Okay, enough of Eddie's personal journey. Let's get to today's stories. First up from writer Mel Harlan and narrated by Alicia Atkins. Creepy presents. A ripening, a split, and a cry.

Re hesitates to follow the physician's assistance instructions to step on the scale. She should have peed to shave off a few ounces. She hasn't been able to eat or sleep since she scheduled this doctor's appointment, a combination of anxiety and anticipation forcing her to toss and turn, while her cat Binks mewed his frustration from the foot of the bed until it was nearly time to get up. Still, she's sure she gained weight in those 12 days. The physician assistant's watches with annoyingly unknowing eyes.

He's too young and trimmed to understand how Ree's body has betrayed her. She shucks off her slides and steps on to the analog scale in her lightest workout outfit. Her feet feel cool on the platform as the assistant adjust the little, metal measure and it clinks to the left, a little to the right, a little back to the left. She looks up higher, ignoring him as much as she can to focus on the blue, scaled hallway wallpaper that makes her think she's been swallowed by some large fish. Worry thickens her spit until it clogs her throat. Will he announce how much weight she's gained?

Somehow, knowing exactly how many pounds she'd failed her long dead mother by is worse, especially since she can still hear what she'd say, you're not allowed to get any bigger. Her mother's voice is always calmly disappointed, like she's doled out advice she knows can't be followed, especially since her mother didn't believe in weight gain unless you were pregnant. Rhee fights a gag when she remembers her mother's expression for childbirth, a ripening, a split, and a cry.

Rie realizes she's been sucking in her stomach like it would help. the way her mom directed for every outfit try on. After a pause for the assistant to note her weight, she escapes the scale without checking where the final measure sits. She's directed to an equally bland exam room and sits in the exam chair. Her leg crinkles the paper cover, while a sliver presses directly against the chair's plastic material. It's saturated, as if she barely missed someone dousing it with pine-scented cleaner.

across from her is a blue abstract painting that matches the wallpaper, a traditional medical diagram of a pregnant woman, and a wall of brochures, one of which asks if she's depressed. The assistant asks what brings her in, like it's a special occasion. I'm experiencing abnormal weight gain, Rees says as she shifts and resettles, crinkling the paper, and subtly wraps her arms around this new belly that swaddles her like a inner tube. They ask if there's any changes to her routine, and she tries not to snark that it's

only jogging, vegetables, weightlifting, not eating, no carb, high carb, low carb. Not really, she answers. The rest of their questions are routine, and she practically knows the order. She can answer each without thinking. No insurance change. Still accounting with the same firm. No relative family history that I'm aware of. Her mother would never have gone to a doctor. Science knows nothing it can't explain. In fact, she'd had Rhee at home and never let her forget it. It's one of the reasons Re scheduled so many doctor appointments.

This is the sixth in as many months, and so far she's heard, Don't eat, weight loss specialist, you're not pregnant, OBGYN, no blood work out of range, thyroid specialist, no horn, hormone issues, functional medicine doctor, and avoid processed food, another weight loss specialist. The entire weight of it, months without answers and endless meal prep and the workouts that leave her gasping on the floor, and the scale only going up, up, up, to where her mother is shaking her head in heaven, smothers her like how the summer heat fills every pore. The assistant doesn't notice the flush creeping up Bree's chest. The only instructive

her to change and hand her a thin cotton gown before leaving. Re-strips, slips on the gown, and sits half naked on the exam table, twisting her hands. Her fingers are moist from the humid air humming through the office, one of the unavoidable side effects of living next to the bay, and she keeps wiping them on the rough gowns fabric. They never seem entirely dry. It takes another 30 minutes of waiting in desperate anger for the general practitioner to appear. She sits on a rolling stool and clasp her hands. Her setoscope is an afterthought next to her chunky gold necklace that dwarfs her throat. The doctor checks her form before calling her by her full name, Riannon,

before asking what brings her in today in a tone that suggests she cares about the answer. Rees swallows her diatribe about life on repeat and how a doctor should read your notes. Weight gain seems like the safer reply. Without looking at anything else in her chart, the doctor mentioned that this happens a lot to patients in her age bracket. Like she'd simply dotted in the wrong boxed on a form and ended up in this room explaining why her situation was abnormal. I'm only 30. There's no other way for her to say something more is wrong. It didn't make any sense.

And as Rie had this thought, she had the second. No, it didn't balance. the order of her life, like the spreadsheets that always matched with enough time, they couldn't accommodate this anomaly. She could circle it in her mind for months, for hours, for every minute the world didn't balance, and it couldn't be corrected by her effort alone.

The doctor says there are things they can check, and Reed denies her own hope until the doctor drowns it herself as she suggests checking for pregnancy. That's not possible. An IUD and no sex for the past two years make Rhee extra positive. She's remained untouched in every way that matters. At the doctor's vague reassurance, Rhee leans back in the exam chair.

The doctor extends the chair's bottom and adjust something to reveal metal foot supports, so Rhee can scoot her bottom toward the doctor and place her feet in the stirrups. The stirrups are wrapped in fabric to be more comfortable, but there's no such thing as comfort when your leg, and gown are open to display for someone's medical gaze. Rhee resigns herself to another wasted copay. She's at a loss of what to do. Except something else, even if she doesn't know what something else is.

Rhee steps out of the shower and drips onto the matted rug. Her restless anger bled off her, swirled down the drain, and left only dim uncertainty in helplessness that clings like the perfumy soap her mom bought her. Jasmine. Night-blooming Jasmine that's making her sweat and clings to the fog bathroom mirror. She leaves pulled footprints on the tile as she grabs her towel. It's too tight around her middle, looser than the shorts she'd been wearing and refused to size up. But it wasn't the towel's fault.

You're fat for no reason. She doesn't want to hear her mom's disapproval despite the four years since she'd passed, but knows it's her own words, cloaked in her mom's parental tone. Her sigh echoes. Binks appears out of nowhere, the way cats do, and weaves between her legs without stepping on her damp footprints. Good boy, Rees says, and then he's gone, off to wherever he goes when she can't find him. He's been gone more and more these past few months, sensing her dour mood and hiding elsewhere, hopefully off-pawing dust bunnies.

She's too hot, and her sweat springs back into places that should be dry from the towel, even along her belly. She reaches a hand underneath her towel, feeling for the stretch mark she's seen out of the corner of her eye. They look like binks dragged his claws down her stomach, feeling along their soft edges for the first time. They give under her fingertips. Her mouth dries to a sticky paste, her tongue sucks. suddenly too big. Shifting for a better grip on her towel, Rees' fingertips press against the stretch marks. They're stretchier than the surrounding skin. Slick. Almost as if she pressed hard enough, they'd split like an overripe peach. Her hand yanks away from the sickly urge to find out.

Rie enters her closet for an outfit to erase her weariness, at least for a little while. Tonight is another friend's dirty-thirty, and she's supposed to dress up for the dirty girl. Dresses flow across her hands as she pulls each out, rejects it, and selects another. Too tight, too shiny, too youthful. Her hand lingers on the last option, an oversized black jumpsuit. She shucks off the hanger and his legs puddle on the floor. As she steps in, suck it in, don't just hold your breath. She's sure it won't come up over her thighs.

When it does, miraculously, she's grateful for the dressingless salad she chose for lunch. She inhales and then sucks in this new belly, this second presence glom to her own. And the jumpsuit is over it. It's on, and she pulls the straps up. Tight, but fits, re-pronounces to her sucked in and nearly fogged reflection. Her hair flops wet and limbs. Her uncovered arms stretch pale. She wraps her arms around her middle and pads to the living room to relax now that the hardest part is over. Her downtown Tampa apartment is as stale as the job she refuses to leave,

a carbon copy of the showroom so she didn't need to worry about decorating. Everything is shades of beige, including the cat tree that binks muse at her from. His tail swishes impatiently. I remember... says, you can wait a minute. She snatches a tuna can from the pantry and opens his pungent dinner. The fishy smell irritates her more than his loud reminders. She bends carefully, so carefully, to set the wet food down. He sasses her one more time before he leaps off the cat tree to eat with smacking sounds that turn her stomach. She licks the back of her teeth, finding a remnant from lunch,

a chickpea that she savors for a few unnecessary chews. She ignores her stomach and plops on the couch. Her moist skin sticks to the jumpsuit, and it splits along the crotch, up the back with a loud rip. She hangs her head and reproach as binks smacks and smacks. A closet full of clothes and nothing to wear. Reethinks as she lies in bed with the sheets up to her neck. Those fit at least, even if she can vaguely smell old sweat and detergent. The lavender pillow spray isn't working.

She hasn't relaxed, even though her hair is nearly dry. There's no relaxing, not when she wants to run her hands downward to check if the mass is still there. Some part believes the belly is a mistake that will have been returned, like an unwanted gift. Then her stomach roils. She aches like she has her period, only sharper. They said I wasn't pregnant, Rees says under her breath. She'd purposely created a life opposite her mothers in every way. She had work tomorrow.

She lived in the city. She didn't observe the moon, play with crystals or believe in tarot cards. She wasn't pregnant. She flushes hot and hurries to the toilet. As she sits, her belly. does as well. It rests on her bare thighs with a strange, intimate brushing of flesh that she hates. She reaches a hand underneath it and lifts it off. Her stomach recoils against the move, and she leans back to pant. It has to be a cramp, doesn't it? But she's never felt one like it before.

She cracks open her bathroom window to see a glowing cityscape. There are no trees or ocean in her view. Which is why she picked this room. The highway roars distantly. Nothing's wrong with you, remember? The doctors, all six of them, found nothing. She calms until she remembers her mom's unhelpful advice. Science knows nothing it can't explain. Her stomach or intestines clench.

And she's sure it's not a cramp. It's stretching. Something is... moving inside her. Maybe it's a parasite. No. Then she'd be losing weight like thinner. You're a reverse thinner.

She jokes before that movement comes again. Maybe it's something trying to get out. Whatever gave you those stretch marks, she thinks unhelpfully and her heart races. You're not pregnant. She reminds herself again. She'd refused to be like her mom, which she'd only seen photos of pregnant, overalls over her belly.

Naked and bare-breasted, belly proudly pointed toward the woods. Her mother, who'd worshiped nature and all her secrets. Indigestion, she hopes and returns to bed. The smell of Jasmine follows her. Nervous sweat slicks her hair, and she brushes it off her forehead. Blankets trap her sweat, and her breath drowns the regular sounds of the complex.

She's alone. She can't hear any steps on the stairs, the kick of the air conditioning. She can't hear binks either. His jingle is lost compared to the rushing in her ears. You're not in pain. No. It's more like a settling, the way a stomach complains after a meal. She refuses to acknowledge that her last meal was too long.

long ago to be the cause. She almost wishes she was in pain. Then she could be sure something's wrong and go to the hospital. Because what if she showed up now and said she thought something inside her was moving? Nothing about that idea seems right. Not with the gown she'd been forced to wear, and the doctors who'd ask her to open it up so they could check what's going on. Her entire chest would blush with humiliation, and it'd travel up her neck, up to her ear, loaves which would burn and burn. She'd be a burning hypochondriac. You're overreacting. You'll stay here and you'll be fine. You're fine. Rhee eventually falls asleep, counting the reason she shouldn't be worried. Rhee wakes to bleeding, angry bleating. That baffal scream repeats until her head

clears enough to realize it's her phone's Amber Alert. She lies on her back and flops an annoyed arm to turn it off. She wants to leave it there on the side table and fall back asleep, but she's awake now. She wishes no one had kidnapped that kid. She could have slept through the night. According to the phone, it's almost 3 a.m. The witching hour. She slaps it back down next to her and stares at the darkened ceiling. Her apartment shrinks around her. The walls are alive with shadows. The kind you can dismiss during the day, but not at night. A car horn honks far away, further away than it has any right to be. The world she's carefully integrated herself into is gone, when the ceiling's shadows hover

and look like the tree branches creeping outside her childhood window. In the dark, in this forest of shadow, she can't deny what she's known in her heart, that something is coming, and it won't be denied. The thought hurts, and she tries to set up, but her belly weighs her down. Blankets balloon over her stomach. Under the blanket, her hands trail along her ribs, and then hit the swelling across her entire middle. They follow that curve up, up further than her belly has any right to go, until they reach

the stretch marks. They are faint under her fingertips. She only finds them by their slick feel, but they're not. They're taught now. Stretch tight. If they're tight, that means you've grown. Just lying here and breathing, you've grown again. Rechance for reason.

Take me. Take me. Take me. Let it be over. Even if I do split at the belly and something slides out of me, I'll know. Even if science doesn't, at least I'll know. Split me in half and use me, use me. My God, use me.

and leave me bleeding like a good mother should. She blinks long and feels even heavier. It can't be. Her eyes fly open and she relaxes when it's only binks on her chest. Hey, boy. Her voice crackles like it's been unused for years. His tail curls around him and flicks at the distress in her voice. Like her mom, he'd shown up at her door one day,

and she'd been forced to take him in. Unlike her mom, he'd stand. despite being an outdoor cat. It's okay. He paused at her chest and then strokes himself under her raised palm. He steps further onto her phone and it lights up. He's her screensaver, all dark eyes and dark fur. You might be right, Rees says, but there's nothing that can be done now.

Months ago, maybe. But now, whatever this is, it's happened. She's ready in her bones. Her body vibrates with retained violence as she grips the bedspread. You don't want to be here. She says gently and restrains the hands that want to hold him for support. Instead, she gives Binks a final pat. She doesn't think it's the final time she'll see him.

She knows it. It's not surface-level worry, all brain and thoughts. It's the deeper part. It feels it's the last time, knows it like her bones know what doctors couldn't. Rie cups her belly. It ripples like an insect landing on the surface of a pond. There's still no pain. That pain her mother complained of incessantly throughout her childhood.

She's surprised when it starts without. Whatever it is, it has to be a baby. It's hungry. It will need her to nourish it. She has a sudden urge to scream at the thought and throw off her blankets. She inhales, prepared to wake the neighbors at this ungodly hour, before something travels up her spine, a deeper knowing that Rhee can recognize, and she arches so hard something within her snap sharply.

She has enough time to worry. I'm not ready, before she touches her stomach, and she's no longer Rhee. orderly, logical accountant Rhee, who needs balance like the ocean needs the tide is gone. She's a body, a belly of need. Rhee can't think, can't process what's happening, but her body knows. Her fingers tingle, her legs ache. It's tried to give her time to come to terms with it, and no one, especially not the doctors, can truly help her. It's time.

Her body doesn't know what to expect now, but it all feels right, like lying in the dim sunlight on the forest floor. Her legs spread, and her breath comes in small pants. Her body has no words for what's happening, borrowed from Rhee or not, since it doesn't know about placenta or afterbirth or any of those unpleasant medical terms that Rhee had ignored in health class. It doesn't need to be filled with words when it can feel everything. Her body drips with what's coming.

It stained her sheets. It's omnipresent scent. The dankness of old rain and the sweetness of blood fill the mouth with the metallic taste of blood-soaked earth. The gurgling of her stomach is an ancient rumble, before a groan rips out of her throat and forces her to breathe. From far away, Rhee wants her. to hold her breath, but her body remembers its instinct to survive. Her tongue dries a little more with each open-mouth pant. Her body is fascinated with itself. Her belly is more than rippling.

It's undulating, like a jellyfish. Then it's waving, trembling up and down now that there's no more room inside her. She's full, too full. If her body didn't feel the urge to push, she would really split open at her stretch marks, rent open and splayed without the need for her feet and stirrups. There's a deep sense of fullness and natural urge to push, fills her as something is coming and coming and coming. Then it's exiting with a squelch. It's smooth. Whatever it is, it's smooth. It's not falling out. It's sliding. Rasping. Her hips scoot backwards as much as they can while tilting upwards like she's still on that doctor's chair for inspection. It's still coming out of her, slowly strolling out of her. She props herself against a sweaty pillow and doesn't

pause. She can't stop now, even if she wanted to, as her eyes find the blood-drenched sheets. In between her thighs is something rolling inside a clear membrane. She can see it pressing outward, pressing against that slickness until it splits. The snake's scales look wet, the thigh, down her leg, coiling around her calf. It's dark against her paleness. Its tongue flicks out at her and welcome. Hello, Mother. Rie would have recognized the eastern indigo by its deep bluish black.

She would have, whether she wanted to or not, known it was wrapped in an amniotic sack. A call. She would have recognized the apex predator. She'd seen it take prey more than once by the house. Anything you could overpower, it crushed before consuming. But there's not enough time for Rhee to return, for logical Rhee to reassert herself. Fear comes before, and dread fills in the pauses. But there are no pauses as her body writhes again.

Rhee's last thought barely registers. The forest was always here, even though it's finally in her own voice, as its brother or sister comes. It comes and comes, and exits her in fresh red gush. It's the easiest of splits, an opening, really, and her teeth grit as triumph floods her limbs with a warm tingle. The tingle grows, and their next sibling is larger. A groan wrenches from her raw throat. as the pain her mother spoke of is here. There is a rending, a tearing as she stretched too wide,

and it slithers out of her proudly. This one had outgrown its call inside of her, and her body knows it will still come out. It will all come out, and the forest will be here. Her body's exhausted, unable to count as there are more, still more, more than Rhee could have predicted, if she could have predicted this. Their siblings slip out fast now, one after another, without an urging and coil between her twitching thighs.

She doesn't know when she bit her tongue, but the metallic taste is heavier now. It has nothing to compete with, only cocooned by the musty air filled with more blood. There's one final spurt of fluids and tissue, and then it's over. She can barely move as all her turn. children began swallowing, gulping, the final remainder of their birth. Her weak hand gathers one of them to her breast. The child, her child, is cool, tacky with her blood. They calm and warm on her chest as it slowly moves up and down. Her child slithers upwards to settle against her cheek. They rub against her in a soothing, kneading rasp. Mother, mother.

Mother, she hears in their whispering slithers and hisses. They only smell of her. In that long blink between hugging her newborn and contemplating their siblings, the gush of tissues has been devoured. Her children's tongues flicker with hunger, and the largest one slithers forward first. Her eyes close as her body waits for the moment that has always been coming. A ripening. A split and a cry.

Now she's sure that cry will be hers. And next from writer P.D. Thompson, I narrated by Nate to Fort, creepy presents the shadow that I am. The house breathed around Abner, like a dying thing, its walls exhaling 18 years of accumulated silence and unspoken fury. Tonight, ah, would be the final exhalation. The last wheeze before he stepped out into the electric darkness of freedom. The boy who was almost but not quite yet a man stood at his bedroom window,

watching the streetlights flicker like distant stars threatening to burn out. His reflection stared back, his father's unfortunate architecture of bone and flesh, his mother's storm-cloud disposition etched into every line. A walking contradiction, a living argument between two immovable forces. Permission The word tasted like copper pennies on his tongue. Approval, like old milk, left too long in summer heat.

These were the currencies his parents dealt in, and Abner had finally gone bankrupt trying to pay their endless tolls. Years had passed like slow-motion lightning. Each day, another small death of possibility. His mother and father, those twin guardians of no and cannot, had grown harder with age instead of softer, their hearts calcifying like old tree bark. They said children were meant to grow and leave,

but they built their love like a prison, with walls that grew higher each year. The suitcase yawned open on his bed, like a mouth ready to swallow his past. Into it went the debris of boyhood, a few clothes, a photograph or two, and dreams folded small enough to fit between the pages of books his parents never thought to ban. Clank, clank, clank, clank, went his saved pennies in their coffee can, a pathetic orchestra of copper hope, but hope not. the less. Hope enough to rent that shoebox apartment across the city, far enough to breathe,

but close enough to prove his point. The job came like magic, like dandelion seeds on the wind, finding exactly the right crack in the sidewalk to grow through. And then, Miracle of Miracles, the bank loan, the golden key to his very own castle, however modest. Two bedrooms in one bath in a neighborhood that time forgot, squeezed between yesterday and tomorrow. The lone officer, young in kind, had smiled when she said, approved, and Abner felt his soul expand like a balloon filled with summer air. That was it. This was the moment when the boy who was 18 became the man who was free.

He would surround himself with yes instead of no. with golden possibilities instead of iron certainties. No more interminable dinner conversations about responsibility and disappointment. No more walking on eggshells through hallways that remembered every argument, every slammed door, every tear shed in frustration. His mother's voice drifted up the stairs now, pleading like rain against windows. His father's silence was louder, that terrible assignment. that this was merely a phase, that love could be taken for granted like oxygen or gravity.

You'll be back. The words would echo in Abner's memory like thunder after lightning, a challenge thrown down by a man who had forgotten what it meant to dream beyond the boundaries of duty and expectation. But Abner knew better. He was done being a satellite and his parent's solar system, done only. orbiting their disappointment and their fear. Tonight, he would launch himself into the great unknown, that beautiful wilderness of possibility that stretched beyond the horizon of home.

The streetlights hummed their electric lullaby, and somewhere in the distance, freedom called his name. The bank came like autumn fog, silent and inevitable, to claim the three-bedroom ranch house that squatted on Maple Street, a sleeping cat. When they arrived with their papers and legal proclamations, they found something peculiar. The house breathed alone. Its owner had simply evaporated, vanished like morning dew, leaving behind only the archaeology of a life, chairs that remembered the weight of his body, dishes that still held the ghost taste of his last meal, clothes hanging in. Clothes hanging in

closets like shed skins of a man who had simply walked out of his own existence. No note fluttered on kitchen tables. No violence had painted the walls red. His plastic rectangles of credit lay dormant in wallets, and money slept undisturbed in bank vaults. The automobile dozed in the driveway, keys dangling from the ignition like a question mark. He had simply stepped out of the world as... easily as stepping out of shoes. The bank's cleaners came with their white trucks in sterile efficiency,

erasing him room by room until the house stood naked and anonymous, ready to dream new dreams. Then came Abner Lemuel Morrison. Twenty-three years old in carrying his loneliness like a suitcase, Abner discovered the house on a Tuesday that tasted of possibility. He had been adrift since the great severance from his parents, that ritual cutting of invisible cords, that left him floating in the vast space of adulthood. This house, this beautiful fortress of rooms and corners and shadows, called to him like a lighthouse calls to ships lost in fog. It's practically a cathedral, he announced to his assembly line companions at the automotive plant, where he spent his days birthing automobile.

with the mechanical precision of a steel-fingered god, a temple for winter worship. Into this sanctuary he carried his meager treasures, books that whispered stories, photographs that captured ghosts of happier times, furniture that had known other houses and other dreams. The house welcomed him with creaking floors and settling sighs, learning the rhythm of his footsteps, the cadence of his breath.

The backyard called to him with its wild tangle of neglect. After eight-hour shifts of oil and metal and the endless ballet of the assembly line, Abner would transform into a different creature, a gardener priest tending to his green congregation. His hands still black with automotive grease would dig into the earth that smelled of rain and secrets. He pulled weeds like extracting bad memories, trimmed bushes, like editing poetry, and felt something ancient and peaceful flow through his fingers into the waiting soil. On this particular evening, after the sun had painted the sky in shades of copper and gold,

after two hours of honest sweat had baptized him in the religion of growing things, Abner retreated to his porcelain sanctuary for his nightly ablution. The water sang against the shower walls, washing away the day's accumulation of dirt and fatigue and small victories. It was then, through the steam and the symphony of falling water, that he noticed it. A mark. Black as a period at the end of a sentence. Round as a coin, dark as a pupil, perched there on the white tile wall above the shower like a beauty mark on the face of his pristine cathedral. He stared at it through the warm rain of his shower, this small imperfection in his perfect refuge.

Tomorrow, he thought, letting the water massage his tired shoulders. Tomorrow he would scrub it away with cleanser and determination. Tonight, he was too deliciously tired, too content in his steaming sanctuary to bother with such small rebellions. The mark seemed to watch him as he finished his shower. patient as a spider, dark as a secret, waiting to be told. The following night, his eye caught the black spot again. It was bothersome, but again he was soiled from the yard work and only wanted sleep. So again, he put it off and ended the shower and found the softness of his bed.

He dreamed, but not of anything pleasant or soothing. In the dream, he saw himself being mocked, ridiculed, and laughed at openly on a street. It was a street where he had never been. He was no hero in this scenario, but rather the villain. He could see himself as if he were floating slightly above, pitifully scorned by a large group of eyeless people, all dressed in dull grays. His persona was that of a sickly man. He sensed he might be dying in the illusion.

His character stumbled about until he evaded the group of people. He stared at a shop window, and there he saw the graphic horror of his image. He was a withered man, blanched, ashen, sallow, exanguinous, like an atrophied corpse. The night after, he repeated the routine of working in the backyard. He liked the way it was shaping up. He was very proud of his sculpting and grooming. Standing on his back porch, feeling sordid and grungy, he admired his work and figured two more days in the yard would be in good working order,

just like he'd imagined it in his mind. Abner took off his dusty shoes at the back door as he had the previous night and made his way to the shower. There was that black spot again. He had the hot water hitting him on the last. the nape of his neck and was feeling relaxed, but this black spot looked a bit larger than last night. He could have sworn it was growing bigger, and had maybe even grown darker than the night before. He decided that he would try to wipe it away with his soap-drenched washcloth.

He did a light rub of the black spot, but it did not wipe away, dull, or smear. He scrubbed harder with the cloth, but again, no success. This was certainly a stubborn stain, and his mind went to his garage cabinet, where he wondered if he had a cleaner stronger than soap. Abner finished rinsing the soap away from his body and did a good towel dry. He slipped into a t-shirt and sweatpants and went to the garage to take a look. He found a commercial cleaner that he had used to remove grease from his car engine. He figured if this could remove grease, it could certainly erase a sense.

simple black spot. When he returned to the bathroom, he did a double-take at the black spot. It had increased to the size of a small saucer. Abner proceeded to apply the goop, as it was properly called, to the black spot. He gave the spot an aggressive scouring, but this black spot was resistant to his efforts, and his attempt failed. Not able to achieve his goal right away, he committed himself, again to the spot using maddening exertion.

As he scrubbed, he wondered how this stain was not yielding. This would have taken the paint off the wall under normal circumstances. Abner threw the cloth to the floor of the shower. Then with his fingers, he touched the black spot. Instantly upon his finger touching the black spot, his mouth filled with a sweetness as if his mouth was just infused with a cube of sugar. An eerie coldness raked the tendons of his emotions. He probed the black spot, which was sticky like honey.

He pulled back his hand and long entrails of the black spot clung to his fingertips. Abner felt the entrails start to recoil and pull back into their center. This adhesive glue was stuck firmly to his fingers, and it was creeping up further onto his hand as if it were a living thing. He was certain that the inky black was spreading upon his skin. Abner stepped out of the shower, yet the entrails of the black spot were ratcheting his hand back toward itself, as it now pervaded his entire hand.

It was growing, inching upward, cocooning his hand in its vice grip. Abner pulled backward, using his foot against the wall of the shower for extra resistance, but his travail was thwarted by the enormous grasp of the entrails. Gaining no dominance on this blighted concern, he yanked his arm violently, attempting to break this Anaconda strength stranglehold. The black hole itself was augmented with swelling, a grotesque bubbling as if it were the stomach acid digesting something delicious.

Winding with an enhanced mirror reflecting, Abner could see his face in the black spot. His face was clear and deepening as if it were retreating, moving backward in the broadening abyss. The black spot was now the size of a bowling ball. Regardless of Abner's repulsion, he was fully aware that this was an insurgency, a menacing revulsion that no defiance could quell.

Now he was fighting for his life, pulling, straining, and battling the best he could, but had no weapon to cut himself loose from the stringy purification. His protest was in vain. The scale of the insurmountable black spot was now even more incredible, and Abner was inside the blackness up to his elbow. The spot had prodigious strength. It was cold, obscure, as if that part of his arm was frozen.

He was numb, with no feeling from the elbow to what he remembered as his fingertips. This callous, ineffable monster was winning. Abner placed both feet on the shower wall and gripping his right arm, encased in this doleful cast. With his left hand, he made one last stand and pulled back every fibrous strand of his being. He refused to surrender. The frigid chill of icy dread moved as a glacier, irreversible, invulnerable, incestantly with patience with indomitable gelid. As a spider weaves its high tensile strength and extensible silk around its abysmally defeated prey from spinnerets from its abdomen, Abner was being spun and dragged helplessly, still alive into the shallow Cyrae of the void.

The gooey black strands from the black spot had shrunk up to his shoulder and now caught his left hand as well and had begun its vivisection, or perhaps was this a carnivorous beast? Abner, with congealed breath, leaned back, rearing his head because both arms were equally entombed within the frostbitten wasteland of this surrealistic fetid darkness. The ooze was licking at his face, burping and bubbling with celebrated, horrific, Druel. Abner prayed to the God of heaven that this was a hallucination and that it was just a nightmarish dream. In the bleakness of that moment, Abner realized that he did not know. It was all so evocative, unmistakably numinous. However, as he drew his last breath of earth, he was

resolved to melancholy and letting go of the unquiet and all volition. Abner was just a black spot the size of a coin on the wall over the shower, part of the ubiquitous eye of the beast. His name was Abner. The following are his words, echoed by his spirit. I am in obscurity, a dark blot where a body blocked the light. I have become hidden beneath blackness and against my will, disappeared and dissolved into nothingness. Have I become the phantom,

the shadow figure of which I was so terrified? There is no trace of who I was that still remains. I am draped in a chilling pall forever, to be that which is feared, a cloud that drifts with the changing winds. I exist, though, I do not live. The mantle upon me is oppressive and heavy to bear. yet I am powerless to crawl from beneath the suffocation of this, an embraded dread.

I am a vestige of myself. I am the specter in the corner of every eye. I am fiction with a shred of truth. This alternate world where the wraith of my confined soul is black. I find no rest. I have been placed by the hand of evil fortunes in the crypt of my own incarceration. lusterless are my eyes, which once burned with life. I long for the taste of sweet light, if only I could dip my fingers into asterated waters. The profulgent of my calendar has been lost

to the abyss. I stand on the clefts of magma and feel the fires of burning night. I recoil like a vampire at the light. I can no longer be anything but a ghost of my own past, haunted with every vivid sin that I have committed willingly and ignorantly. I walk among the dead, the angels that have fallen, but dearly departed in the gutters and trenches of the devil's waist. I am one of the bloodless ones, caught in the entrails of the gutted, drowned in the blood of the martyrs, a cadaver yet bodiless without shape or form. I am among the cemetery doomed, exanimate, who have no peace, restlessly waiting for annihilation. I bewail the life before now, the balsams of perfume and ointments of healing that filled my nostrils with pleasant antitotes. I have crossed the aqueduct

of no return, where all hope has been abandoned. Glowing orbs looked down upon me with unsympathetic eyes. I shudder at the mention of my fate. I was the curate of a cancer, debrided that I had been discarded like a foul exhumation from the living. Gloom is an adjective that I know well. The choking deflation never ends. No gravestone tells the story of what is after. The record of my life has been hidden in a novella never written. I cannot grow weary, for I am in perpetual weariness within the confines of this mockery I have abominably become. For more information on this podcast, including how to submit your own story for consideration,

please visit creepypod.com. You can also follow us at creepypod on social media and YouTube. All stories told on this podcast, are done so through Creative Commons share-a-like licensing, or with written consent from the authors. No portion of this podcast may be rebroadcast or otherwise distributed without the express written consent of the creepy podcast production team and the story's author.