Creepy - Burnt to the Bone & Choose Your Own Destruction

Episode Date: June 4, 2026

Burnt to the Bone***Written by: Deirdre Gregg and Narrated by: Heather Thomas***Choose Your Own Destruction***Written by: Amanda Cecelia Lang and Narrated by: JV Hampton-VanSant***Support the show at patreon.com/creepypod***Title music by: Alex Aldea Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hey, what's up y'all?

Man, I don't know about the rest of you, but I've been having a blast lately avoiding anything that resembles the normal depressing news cycle. The horror world has just been so amazing lately. From stuff like sinners and weapons and hard eyes last year to what we have right now in the back rooms and Hocum and obsession. There's just so much. much to actually look forward to.

I've even gotten into horror games, something I've never really had much interest in before. There are so many legit, like, scary, unnerving, independent horror games out there. Or, I mean, at least I think they're indie. I won't share some of the titles I've been playing because they are legit effed up. But it's just been so much fun to see the world coming around to horror in more ways than just thinking about slashes and grindhouse movies. Like, I watched Iron Long the other day, the movie adaptation of the game of the same name that was made by the streamer Markiplier.

Seriously, has there been a better time for horror? I'm not even getting paid for these shoutouts. I'm just seriously digging how far horror has come even with mainstream audiences. And the fact that I get to be part of this community, admittedly to a much lesser extent. But still, how can I not be happy? Oh, and I should do a quick request, some actual business. We're looking for more stories that feature either ambiguous or male narrators. By ambiguous, we just mean that there's nothing in the story that calls out that it's a male or female narrator.

You all heard our last ask for stories that feature female narrators, and now we're looking specifically to get some more that feature male narrators. As always, we accept stories regardless, and submissions are always open. Our current need is just for male narrated stories. not male narrators, as has been an issue in the past, just the stories. And don't forget that we do a monthly drawing for all accepted stories for free swag to one lucky writer, just as a special thanks for the work they do. So, if you have a story and you're interested in submitting and getting paid if that submission is accepted,

please check out creepypaw.com slash submissions. Oh, and we have started getting in stories for the 31 Days of Horror Event. So make sure to get on that if you want to see your story featured in October. I can't wait for October. I suppose I should get to the task of providing more horror to the wonderfully scary world of our creation. First up, from writer Deirdre Gregg and narrated by Heather Thomas, creepy presents, burnt to the bone. The Glass River Wilderness died on the afternoon of October 5th, when the family of Dominic and Jennifer Ware

sought off not one but three bright blue smoke bombs at a gender reveal party for Jennifer on a clear, sunny, and brutally dry day. They thought they had extinguished the fire, despite the Dad Depe's idiot brother throwing his cup of whiskey on it at first, but they missed a spark somewhere, and the whole forest burned down.

Glass River was so beautiful that people came from all over the country to visit, but it was only about an hour away from our home, and I practically grew up there. There were literally trees with knife-notches in the bark marking the height of my cousins and me as we grew. We camped there at least a couple of times every year. My aunt Lucy even got married on a mountaintop up there. And it was all gone now. After the fire, everybody told us not to go back, not to even look at the pictures.

But my mother couldn't resist. When she got back that night, she sat at the kitchen table staring blankly ahead. She tried to talk, but started coughing, and cracked open a beer and drained half of it before she tried again. I could smell the smoke rolling off of her. She'd kicked off her hiking boots, and they lay crooked on the welcome mat, caked in ash and reeking mud. Promise me you'll never go, she said. It's not just that it'll break your heart? It will make you despair.

So we obviously had to make backup plans for spring break. I reluctantly agreed when my mom suggested camping at White Rock Mountain, a place we'd never been to before, or even heard much about. We didn't have much time off between her job and mine, and if we spent it sitting around the house, we'd just end up sniping at each other the whole time. Things didn't go great from the start. It was going to be a longer drive than Glass River anyway,

At least two or three hours, but we took a wrong turn somehow. Our GPS wasn't working in the mountains, and my mom smugly said that she had written down the directions in case that happened. So she handed me the directions, but my mom's handwriting is shit, and I couldn't make it out, like it legitimately could have been a list of directions or a recipe for chocolate chip cookies, that bad. And somehow getting lost became my fault. I had been really, really trying to get along with my mom, because having an entry-level job for the past few months has taught me some important life lessons,

namely that having an entry-level job sucks. I want to go to college in a few years, and I don't have much choice other than to live at home while I do it. That's going to become significantly more logistically difficult if my mom and I kill each other. We ended up pulling over to the side of the road, where my mom yelled at me for not being able to read her handwriting until it turned out that she also couldn't actually read her own handwriting,

although she pretended otherwise. Our stress level was jacked up further by the other drivers. We were well off the road to the point where I was worried the dirt verge would crumble out from under us, but two cars and three trucks laid on their horns honking at us like we were stopped in the middle of the street. This just wasn't a friendly type of area. We did eventually get to White Rock Mountain and park the car. We arrived hours later than we had been hoping to get there, but in plenty of time to screw up in several more ways before nightfall.

The problem was, we had almost forgotten all the rules you should follow when hiking an unfamiliar trail. I yanked my backpack on and stomped off, ready to burn off the frustrations of the long car ride. The trail split and split again, and while there were wooden signs to show the way, they were so old and worn. One of them I was pretty sure had been gnawed on, that it was impossible to read all the words. We passed a nurse log with three little saplings, and my mom gave her usual reaction, a cloying smile. A nurse log is a fallen tree that starts to rot, and seedlings take root there to get a boost up closer to sunlight, and to gobble nutrients from the decaying wood. My mom, who is a nurse,

very much views herself as my perfectly nurturing lifegiver. I know she is hoping that one of these days I'll break down and compare her to a nurse log. I give my own usual reaction, which is to roll my eyes. I'd be more likely to offer a different botanical comparison. She's more like a stringler fig vine, or maybe a cudzu. As far as the nurse log, there's a lesson I take from that, too. Get a jump on the competition by pillaging the bones of the dead. After the nurse log, we kept heading generally uphill,

looking for a campground called Drake Plateau that was supposed to be a few miles in. I thought we'd come across more intact signs. But eventually we realized that we didn't know where we were going, and we should probably go back to the car and try. try to find a trail map. Then we realized we didn't know how to get back to the car either. The trail that we thought we were taking back down petered out altogether.

I didn't start to get really worried until we pulled out our compasses. They didn't agree, and the direction needle spun lazily around in a slow circle while I was standing still. This mountain didn't like us any better than the passing drivers did. Not sure what else to do, we started walking again, and then we came to a rushing brook, and we were both relieved to see a man sitting on the edge of it.

Relieved at first, anyway. As we got closer, it became pretty clear that he was way worse off than we were. He was hunched over, clutching at his stomach, like it hurt him. But what really worried me was he had taken off his boots, and his feet and lower legs were submerged in the room. rushing water. That was glacial melt. It had to be brutally cold. I didn't know if you could actually get frostbite from flowing water, but his feet must be completely numb by now, and he must be losing body heat like blood from a slashed throat. My mom hurried forward, shifting into nurse mode, and asked

if he was okay, and didn't he think he should take his feet out of the water? He looked up. He guzzled from the water bottle at his side. He mumbled something about not wanting his feet to swell so he could put his boots back on. His gaze was skittering and wandering, and he kept pausing to drink from his water bottle. He stopped to refill it right from the stream, no filter or anything. The even grosser part was he filled it on his right side, just downstream of his feet. He pulled it up and took another slug. I decided to try to get some useful information out of his feet. He was, he filled it him before my mom got in too deep. I asked him if he knew the way to Drake Plateau. Drake? He said, snorting the laugh. I don't think you're going to find it. Not the one you mean.

We're all in a lot of trouble. We've all gotten crossways with the wood weirm. He said it with emphasis, so you could practically hear the capital letters, hear that weirm was spelled with why? Jack Pine and Lodgepole Pine, Eucalyptus, and Bigsea. He rambled on dreamily. What do they all have in common? Anybody who'd been listening to NPR coverage of wildfire season knew the answer to that one. Those were all plants whose seeds germinated after being exposed to fire. Enough fires. Enough heat. And we've managed to hatch something very old and very deep down. I sighed. The guy was probably on drugs, and just as lost as we were.

And now my mom was going to insist on bringing him along since he was obviously in bad shape. Sure enough, she reached out a hand to him, telling him he had to get his feet out of the water. He looked up at her slowly, straightened up, grogly extended a hand. His torso looked weirdly lumpy through the crumpled fabric of his shirt. His fingers closed around her.

hers. And then he leapt to his feet, somehow launching upward and knocked her over backwards. Her backpack cushioned her fall, otherwise she might have had the wind knocked out of her. I rushed towards them, but then the man yanked up his shirt, and I stopped in my tracks, gagging. His belly was boiling with cysts, swelled to bursting, gleaming and hard with the internal pressure. He flung himself down onto my mother, and some of them ruptured a against the bare skin of her leg. I really did throw up then. This is why I have no ambition to follow my mom into the nursing field.

I don't have the stomach for it. But when those cysts burst open, it was less disgusting, but much weirder than I had expected. The liquid that came streaming out looked more like sap than anything animal. And the little clusters of leafy fronds that uncurled from each one were delicate, quivering, as new and as fragile as the plants I'd sprouted from seeds and paper cups at school. I might have stayed frozen, but my mom started screaming her head off and shoving at him with her arms and other leg. I snapped out of it and ran at him, kicking him with a disgust turned to rage.

He rolled away over the bank and into the stream and made his way clumsily through it, and on to the other side. He staggered to his feet and started walking away, and then I wanted to throw up again. His feet were unraveling, long strands of skin trailing behind him like waterweeds. More boils burst open along his body with audible pops, and the frills of leafy tendrils extended out to the sides, blindly questing like newborn kittens.

Now it was my turn to help my mom tear her feet. We didn't see any cuts on her leg, but she walked a little ways upstream and then peeled off her boots and socks. and then gingerly stepped into the water. She gave an involuntary scream when she felt how cold it was, but I could understand wanting to blast off any residue of that diseased flesh. She said at least the cold was distracting her from the sharp rocks digging into her feet.

I frowned, because we really couldn't afford for her to have any kind of foot injury. But when she clamored out of the stream and scrubbed her skin with the alcohol wipes from the first aid kit, There didn't seem to be any cuts on her legs or feet. She quickly put her socks and boots back on. Her face kept reverting back into a rictus of disgust. One good thing had come out of this little meeting. At least we could follow the stream downhill, which would hopefully get us to some kind of familiar territory.

Maybe because my mom had been rattled by the encounter, or maybe it was the sound of the rushing stream, but she finished drinking all her water within the hour. Of course, she could have used her personal water filter to purify water from the stream, but the thought of getting anywhere near the water that those diseased, disintegrating feet had been in made me want to puke. Unfortunately, given our late start to the day and our confused wanderings around the mountainside, it became clear we were not going to make it out of the woods before nightfall.

The good thing about getting lost while backpacking is, you have the supplies you need for a reasonably comfortable night's sleep. Before it got too dark, we found a sandy hollow under some tree roots, a spot that wasn't visible from the stream. Instead of our bright blue high-roofed tent, we tacked up a couple of brown tarps and a ground cover beneath us. I thought we would be reasonably well hidden if the sick man came back our way. My mom broke out containers of self-heating noodles.

Normally I might have bitched about the amount of microplastics and dodgy chemicals we were consuming. But I didn't say a word as we gobbled down the spicy, salty, piping hot noodles. After dinner was done, we sort of stared at each other for a minute, before I finally spoke. Hey, we don't have to talk about what happened, I said. Maybe not ever, but definitely not right now. I fell asleep fast, even though we'd agreed to keep our hiking boots on overnight, just in case. It was not much of a surprise when I found myself dreaming about the deranged man. He was sitting on the edge of a cliff, legs dangling.

I walked over to him, and there was the burnt wreckage of the glass mountain wilderness spread out below us. He stood and stepped off the edge, but instead of falling, he glided downward, swooping like a flying squirrel. I remembered what he'd said. A Drake and a weirm. You know what those are, don't you? I thought. Dragons. Dragons of the earth? Not of sky. Below me I saw a long, long golden brown body twisting toward me through the ocean of cinders. A huge heavy-jawed head lifted out of the ashes to snap the flying man out of the air. Just as the man had said, something very old that had slumbered deep beneath the earth

was finally hatching, or maybe sprouting. The wood weirm turned its glass bottle green eyes on me, and then it breathed a torrent of flame. My own body caught fire, and it burned with all its ancient rage and sorrow. It felt the pain of glass river burning, and the pain of so many, other wildfires. Wildfires that had grown bigger and faster and wilder, given the overheated air,

all the drying and dying forests. A thousand-year-old trees consumed alongside the frail little things that scurried around them, at a rate so much faster than they could be replaced. It was a relief when I jerked awake. I heard something outside of our tent, and I sat up fast. My mother was gone. I scrambled up quiet as I could, and I saw her walking slowly into the forest. I called after her, but she didn't turn her head. I got it. She had held it together for my sake, but she was going to go throw up now. I thought of how I had gagged and vomited at just the sight of the boil-covered man.

It must be so much worse for her, with the feel, the smell, the contact of that infected flesh, cysts bursting and little live things squirming inside. My gorge was rising again just at the thought. I ducked back in our shelter and grabbed her sleeping bag. I could drape it over her shoulders, at least, when she was shivering afterward. I felt a flash of guilt, thinking of times she'd sat with me while I was sick,

back when I used to want that. I grabbed my pack, too. I wasn't sure how long we were going to be out there. maybe until dawn. Maybe we would just keep going. By the time I caught up, she was still plodding forward into the trees. She was going a long way from our campsite on a very dark night, and her lurching walk made it look like she was going to trip over a tree root any minute.

I hurried after her, calling her name, but she didn't respond. I grabbed her arm. Even through the sleeve, the flesh was burning with fever. She glanced over at me with glassy eyes, but didn't stop and didn't respond to my pleas. When I tried to physically block her path, she shoved me aside without much effort. She's still a little bit taller than I am, and outweighs me by a lot. I reached for her arm again, but then recoiled. If she was infected, just from skin contact with that man?

I didn't want the same thing to happen to me, so for now all I could do was fall. follow. At some point she would have to stop, and then I could do... I didn't know what, something. But we walked on and on for hours. I was exhausted, my legs burning, my shoulders aching, when finally we broke out of the forest and started across a flat expanse. In the moonlight I caught a glimpse of her leg, horribly swollen, the shape distorted by lumps under the skin. Then I saw people ahead of us in the moonlight and almost called out before I saw they were shambling along, just like she was. It was a long walk across the field before we came to the burned place. It was a low valley, blackened and dead. Some crumbling stubs of trees still

stood, but mostly it was just ash as far as I could see. The man we'd met at the stream, walked ahead of us, he waded into the ash without hesitation. He stopped and laid down and buried himself in the ash like a kid playing in sand at the beach. And the rest of them followed suit, including my mom, lying there like so many nurse logs, ready to rot and feed the newborn forest. She was probably too far gone to save. I knew that already. But I knelt down. down next to her and somehow stuffed her limp and unprotesting body into the sleeping bag and dragged it out of the ashes. As soon as we got out of the cinders, she started to struggle. She clawed her way out of the sleeping bag and back to her place in the ashes. I'm going to get help, I said out

loud, more to convince myself than anything else. I walked and walked, and when I got to a forest road, I sat beside it for a long time, hoping a vehicle would come along. But no one did. And so I finally hauled myself back to my feet. When I did see a Forest Service truck, I wasn't sure it was real. I figured they wouldn't believe me and I'd have to beg and plead to get them to listen. But I only had to say a few sentences before they nodded. I realized this wasn't the first time they were hearing about people burrowing into the ashes.

It was happening everywhere. It was happening in so many places that despite some initial hand-waving about classified information and national security, those of us who survived were able to compare notes. My mom was one of those survivors. She was sedated and pumped full of countless medications whose names I couldn't keep track of. I was on some of them myself. They made us both terribly sick. My mom lost the 20 pounds she'd been talking about wanting to drop,

and then another 20 pounds after that. She lost other things, too. When they let me in to visit her, I drew the blind shut when I realized how much it was upsetting her to see a tree through the window. Plenty of the others did not survive. The ones who had been there a little longer, who had roots growing down through their backs into the soil

and seedlings poking out above them, Most of those people died. They dug them up and burned the bodies. They said they cleared out the valley. Some people never learn. I'm not sure it will do much good. There are at least a couple dozen wildfires in the United States right now and many others around the world.

Who knows how many people are making their way towards the broken and burnt lands? Who knows what will rise? from the ashes. Next, from writer Amanda Cecilia Lang and narrated by J.V. Hampton Van Sant. Creepy Presents. Choose your own destruction. You jerk awake in the back row of the ancient Rialto theater and gag on a fistful of popcorn crammed inside your mouth. Something metallic clicks against your teeth.

Choking on disorientation and rancid imitation butter, You spit out the crunchy sharp wad on the floor. What the actual hell. You don't remember passing out. You remember buying a ticket for a midnight screening of your favorite horror flick. Remember peering over your shoulder. Nervous your watcher with the spidery silhouette and that glowing, flickering gaze might have followed you in off the street. The shadowy creep had.

You didn't buy popcorn, but you remember sitting in the packed theater, a center seat with a clear view of both aisles, both exits. Three endless days of this of seeing him everywhere. Important to stay alert. Stay around people. You're an expert. You've devoured all the best scary movies and know what happens when morons doze off with one. lurkers slinking around. Still, there's no denying it.

You passed out hard. Now, spitting out the last invasive bits of popcorn, blinking woozy sleep from your eyes, you realize two things at once. You're alone in a blackened theater. And along with that popcorn wad, you're pretty sure, Something metallic scraped your teeth when you spat just now. Feels undeniable, an echo inside your skull. Something clattered down the slanted concrete floor.

You try standing, and your wrist shackles snap taut. Insidious chains, rusty bracelets, they lock you to the arms of your chair. Your guts sink. your mind starts plummeting. Did your watcher do this? Where is he now? You force yourself to go numb. If you panic, whatever fresh hell this is will end badly before survival even begins.

You're wondering if it's futile to scream for an usher when the projector spins to life and a flickering message dominates the silver screen. I'm close. Can you escape me? Quick, choose one. A, scream for help. B, find the key. Okay, deep freaking breath. You've seen these movies, read these books.

You know this game. Another thing you know. The odds won't be kind to you, the hapless victim. Still, there's usually a razor-slim path to victory. It's no fun if you die right away. That's why the first choice is always an easy one. Clearly, anyone still hanging around the projector booth and the popcorn stand is dead. Finding their gory jackknifed corpses will prove quite dramatic if you manage to make it to the lobby.

So, no point in screaming, that leaves the key, which was definitely that metal object you spat out with the popcorn earlier. It gleams dully in the half-chewed kernels oozing under the seat before you. You test your shackles. The wrist cuffs are tight, cutting off circulation. But with dim relief, you discover you've been sitting, On chains. Your right shackle has an arm's length of extra give, enough to reach under the seat.

Your hand feels deadened and oddly stiff, your whole body actually, but you twist forward and tweez the key with your fingertips. Something under the chair bear traps down on your wrist. A hand. Your watcher's bony, spidery, nighty. Maitmare hand. Clamping you in place, he slices out with razor-fingered brutality, opening grinning gashes across your knuckles. You scream, shriek, bellow, and finally yank free. Like you suspected, nobody rushes in from the lobby to rescue you. Instead, a crooked silhouette

unfolds from the dark row ahead, standing silently. Like always, he's wearing your clothing, or tattered replicas. Same pants you wore to the theater, same shirt, even your favorite jacket. All of it shredded at the seams, too small for his distended form. Except that's not the worst of him. Those shimmering high-beam eyes have always cast the rest of him in ambiguous bent-bone shadows. But he's tall, so tall his unseen face turns fish-belly pale as he rises into the projector light and, That's not a face.

No mouth, no nose, just a featureless, egg-smooth terror, dotted with two spherical lenses. Movie projectors for eyes? They ignite, and he angles his gaze upon you, dazzling your vision. Your shackles rattle as you shield your eyes. Silent as the first films, your watcher waves at you with one gloved hand,

waggling, long razor-tipped fingers like the first time you caught him prowling, three nights ago, outside your bedroom window. Like something from the endless horror movies you use and abuse to escape your stressful life. Fake kills to distract from the troubled pains of daily existence. The sight of him warps your reality. Your hyper-vanilating mind can't keep up.

That Razorblade glove is famous, like MTV famous, though you feel anything but starstruck. You shrink back into your seat and press your hacked up hand against your chest. Blood slicks your fingers, but despite yourself, you grin. The key digs into your palm. Your watcher observes you with a daft tilt of head, flickery gaze, blinding, and mused. He could easily reach over the seat and end you fast, slash slash. But where's the carnival in that? He taps one razor-sharp finger against his forehead, then slices a red-rimmed line

from brow to chin, splitting his egg face with a gruesome vertical smile. Twin flaps of flesh curl away, one broken disguise blooming to reveal another. Studded with shining eyes, the face beneath once gave your great-great-grandparents gaunt-cheeked nightmares. An undead horror with pointed ears and pointier teeth. Victorian victims drained of blood. Filmmakers accused of plagiarism. It all flashes before you in a black and white blur. Then your watcher swings his projector stare away from you and begins a leisurely, ghoulish stroll down his row, gliding past seat after seat.

Where's he going? Quickly, trembling, you open your bloody hand. And hell. Holy face-flaying hell. The key isn't a key. It's a razor blade. No. It's one of his bladed fingernails. That was in your mouth? It gleams at you, a sharp, rusty wink.

Something else gleams too. Between the slice to gills flesh of your index finger, where you should find bone, you catch a glint of steel. Above, in the Rialto's projector booth, the spinning flick, flick, flick, flick of the movie reel pulses like a heartbeat. The message on screen changes.

Everything you need is already inside you. Are you brave enough? Choose one. A, find the key, B, wait right there. You're a monster! You shout and snarl. But your watcher already knows this. It's the point of this game.

He reaches the end of his row and swings into yours, taking his demented time, drawing out the terror, 20 seats away. Nineteen now. Long dagger-teeth, classic movie ghoul rictus. His gaze sprays sharp-cut light across your row, and you can't believe what you see. Everywhere the beams touch, the scenery ripples and blurs, revealing a milky, movie-glossed glimpse into an alternate reality. In this other world, every abandoned seat appears occupied, a jam-packed theater. All around, patrons slump in their seats, heads lolling to the bone. Only they're not sleeping.

You shudder, swallow hard on raw panic. The ragged tooth bite marks staining every throat promise their throat. promise they're as dead as you're about to be. Stay away! You scream, shackles rattling. Page six in the invisible script, and you still haven't found the damn key. Your index finger, besides being sliced to gills, won't bend. Uninfected incision runs the length of your finger.

nodded with thick black stitches where the twisted bastard sewed you together again, where he inserted a surprise. You pinch the malformed tip of your finger. The key's teeth poke sideways like a growth beneath your skin. No time to think about this. Grave shovel footsteps scraping ever closer, your watcher sweeps rays of throat-masacred illusion, across the theater like the flashlights of a gawky usher.

Weielding the razor blade in your good hand, you saw your stitches, popping them one by one. Now for the worst part, refusing to scream. You peel yourself open, parting pale meat and tendons, but there's no pain. No pain, even as you tug and twist and slide the tip of your finger away. No pain.

Shock and adrenaline. Or maybe he anesthetized you? Ghastly toxins in the air. A quick injection in your neck. Something lacing the popcorn. You might never know. The keyhead protrudes from your finger, wickedly, triumphantly. Ten seats away now, your watcher's gaze transmutes the neighboring seats.

Beside you, a moviegoer appears with a silent, throat-torn scream, her milky dead eyes imploring you to hurry. You jammed the key into the keyhole. You twist, your cuffs rattle, but the lock doesn't give. Instead, the end of the key spins slightly, inside your finger stump. Quick, you jerk the key from the cuff. Clamping your teeth around it,

you wiggle it loose, hollowing out your finger. The flayed flesh droops, boneless as snake skin. Your watcher looms, five seats away now. The end of the key is just a tiny bar, nothing to grip. So, you can, clamp it between your teeth and screw it into the nearest keyhole. It works. The left cuff slings open

and falls off your wrist. Two seats away now. You stand and pivot just as your watcher swipes at you. Hidious hooked fingers scrape your shoulder. Scambling, you grab the unlocked shackle and swing the chain wildly at his pasty movie vamp face, hoping to smash. those projector eyes. Instead, that ghoulish, toothy leer shatters like porcelain. You catch a shuddering glimpse of the hockey mask beneath and back away. The chain cuffing your right hand snaps taut. Shaking, fumbling, using your teeth,

you frantically unlock the second cuff just as your watcher raises a machete. Where in movie franchise hell did that spawn from? Your watcher's new oversized blade splits the air near your spine and lodges in a seat cushion as you escape down the row, or almost escape. Three seats deep, your right leg buckles. You collapse sideways onto someone's cold, spectral lap. In the furious projector spray of your watcher's glare,

you discover a corpse dressed like a camp counselor with an arrow through one eye. The Rialto's sticky popcorn floor turns verdant, outdoorsy. A path of pine needles point you onward between a forest of bloody trees. You recognize these corpse-splashed woods. You've hiked them a dozen odd times thanks to the power of your old VCR. Holy slasher. But there's zero time to freak out.

You've got a bigger problem. You pull yourself off the camp counselor's skewered corpse and instantly you know. Something's hideously wrong with your right leg. What did that monstrous freak do to you? Your watcher yanks his machete. free and towers over you, blazing eyed in his hockey mask. You lurch away on your good leg.

The elongated shadow you cast in his furious light cuts a line of sticky-floored reality between the woods. Using the chairbacks as crutches, you hobble out into the aisle and stagger toward the tangible reality of the silver screen. Your watcher stomps after you, sweeping the theater with his leer, illuminating unexplored trees. Over where you last spotted Rialto's emergency exit, a ghostly archery range appears. Heavy boots clomp into the aisle behind you. You don't look back. You grit your jaw and shamble in the general direction of the emergency exit.

In the illusory blaze of his movie light, the archery range draws closer with every step. You're not certain how the physics of this nightmare operate. But if you can't reach the emergency exit, you figure the artery range is the next best option. Maybe you can arm yourself. Arrows won't do much damage against zomified psycho-slashers in masks, but it's the only plan B you've slam. You smack face first into the back of the theater, and the illusion of summer camp crashes to black.

Starbursts dash your vision. Blood trickles from your nose. You barely notice. Nearby, the emergency exits hallway sits at an angle untouched by your watcher's light, this is your chance. You start to limp down the dim prefab hallway, only to balk. He barred the door at the other end with chains. A trap if you go down there without a key, and the only key you knew is still lodged inside

the shackles you abandoned in the top. row, you stagger back into the theater. Nearing the front row now, your watcher angles his light your way. The Maniac Woods return, a 35-millimeter mirage superimposed on the seats. Butchered moviegoers hang pinned to trees, while overhead the message on the silver screen changes. You can barely read it through the blur of greasy, dizzy tears. Exits aren't an option, I'm afraid. You know what happens next. Choose one.

A, find a weapon. B, run all night. Never do what your attacker wants. That's survival one oh, freaking one. What attackers want helps them, but not you. If they tell you not to scream, you scream. If they tell you not to struggle, you struggle. But in this case, your watcher offers sound advice.

Run. Find a weapon. No point begging for mercy. Sometimes sick bastards are just sick bastards. And this one wants a showdown worthy of a franchise, a chimera of cinema, and you stumbled right into his lair. Fool. You try to run, despite your right legs dead weight. Reclaiming the seats as crutches, you lurch along the front row. With every drag of your foot, the bones inside your legs shift and swim apart with a hideous metallic clatter, like meat and silverware. One row from the front, eyes glowing behind that hockey mask, your watcher raises his machete.

Ahead, skeletal branches paint the aisle and side with a dense and hopeless forest. The light of fiction rippling like lake water. You pivot up the side aisle of the theater, not daring to look behind you, trying to see beyond the trees. As you reach the middle rows, your watcher's machete slices past your head, whirling like a helicopter blade. It lodges into an evergreen tree and the Rialto's wall. You don't miss a heartbeat. You hobble over and yank, but the machete remains buried handle deep. Your strength feels gooey, transient.

Still, you put all your weight behind one more tug. The machete doesn't budge. No! Your skin prickles with desperate futility. Your watcher shines at you from the foot of the aisle now. A dozen odd rows below. The machete's a lost cause. You gotta leave it.

Tumbling through phantom branches, you land hard on all fours and scramble up the remaining half of the aisle. Behind you, the hockey mask clatters to the sticky floor like a snake molting, revealing a new nightmare? Gut-sick, you glance over. over your shoulder.

Your watcher still lurks near the bottom row. All at once, the woods and his projector glow drops away as he collapses into a fetal ball. He grips his lake-blooded skull, clawing at himself again with that blade-gloved hand. Red raw gashes open up, but instead of blood, they sprout fur. rabid, wiry fur, ears turning pointy, teeth and maw elongating, savage claws hooking the air. All of this in a stop-motion flash. Still, you know what you're up against.

The exit at the back of the theater isn't an option. More chains cocooned the double doors leading to the lobby. Desperate, completing an insane loop, you slip back into the top row and hobble, chair by chair, right leg meaty and clanking. You can't avoid it any longer. Your attention shivers downward. Before the evening got going, your watcher must have split your pant leg to the hip. What you glimpse now between the swinging bell. of fabric is not your leg. This jagged, bruise-modeled horror show, with bulging lumps,

and the festering zipper of black stitches cannot be your leg. What did you do to me? You gasp, voice strangling, with a vicious stretch and tear of flesh, and a grisly snarl. and a grisly snap and fuse of bone, your watcher completes his transformation and raises his slathering, blazing attention your way. Vandalized by movie light, the Rialto intercuts once again

with paintbrush streaks of midnight trees. Different this time, though. Black and white and full of wolf's bane. Amid the distant, seats, you glimpse a quaint, fat-roofed village nestled between hills of rolling fog. A bloated full moon hangs in the sky beside the projector booth. Near the front row, your watcher throws back his toothy maw, howls silently, and leaps with ferocious agility onto the back of a seat.

Everything about his snarling, muscle-rippled silhouette promises he's ready to pounce. You scuttle deeper down the back row, hunting for the shackle with the key, praying it's your razor-thin chance at survival. But the shackles have vanished, and with every unsteady step, tightly packed horrors shift and poke inside. your jagged, serrated leg. With every step, pointed object protrude from your stitches. You think you see the tip of a dagger jutting below what used to be your kneecap. Bloody leg-splitting hell, you know what you have to do. You reach the end of the top row, putting as much distance between you and your watcher as possible.

No way you can outpace him. He's relished the chase, cherished, toying with you. But if he decides to bounce, you're dead. Drenched in moonlight and fog. You drop into the Rialto's final seat. Your leg juts sideways. That's definitely a dagger poking between your stitches,

like a compound fracture. Gritting your jaw against a vertigo wave of dizziness, you grip the dagger's tip with your good hand. Every vein in your body turns to ice. You're seriously going to do this. You tug. Your fingers slip on the blood-soaked blade. You cry out in ragged frustration. You try again, wiggling the blade like a loose tooth.

The only mercy is there's still no pain, only numb, surreal horror. Your water sniffs the air. His predatory stink mingles with the rancid butter promise of popcorn. You hold your scream. What's he waiting for? But naturally, you know. He wants you to do this. Dig deep for a weapon so he can. can see what you're made of. Fine. The dagger slides, blade and hilt from your ruined knee, slicing putrified flesh and popping one of your stitches on its way out. A pathetic match against any snarling snapping beast. Even so, you grip the dagger and stand, hell-bent on going down fighting. Too bad your leg has other ideas. Jard by your unstable weight, the sharp contents of your

fleshbag calf shift and clatter. Your entire leg cracks like a lightning bolt. Shrieking, you spill sideways into the aisle, and the light shifts as your watcher springs across the theater. He lands in the aisle above you with a feral grace, claws digging into the red carpet, embedding you both in a foggy wolf-sbane meadow. The legendary flower is lethal to shapeshifters, but something tells you the weapon you need doesn't reside in the world of unreality. Time to dig deep, remember? Freaking literally. You grip the dagger and start with the bottom stitch, near where your ankle bones used to live. You pop your stitches one by one.

Desperate, shaking, sanity swimming on the edge of blacking out. Pop, pop, pop, from ankle to mid thigh until your flesh splits open like a rifle case. You gasp. Instead of bone, an arsenal of meat and metal spills out. From this gut-twesting muck of hamburger and horror spills blades and crucifixes and tiny alchemy bottles. No going back, your watcher crouches again, eager to finish you. His shadow darkens over you, hooked hands, fingers, like a skeletal forest, preparing to tangle around you.

From the booth, the Rialto's projector light flick, flick, flickers, the contents of your oozing leg-sack gleam. And on the haunted screen, the message changes. Look at yourself, raring to survive, open to anything. Choose one. A, discover my weakness. B, I discover yours. He's right. You've come this far. You'll do anything to survive.

Even reach inside the hollows of your own jacked-up slaughterhouse leg to fish for salvation. He's filled you with every cinematic possibility. Bronze dagger, crucifix, a machete, bundles of white sage, alchemy jars of holy water. A Zippo, a wooden stake, a sawed-off shotgun, and a scattering of silver bullets. Everything needed to slay a silver-screen monster. Your mind fast-forwards through a montage of creature films. Stakes for vampires, machetes for undead psychos, silver for werewolves. But what's guaranteed to stop a film-obsessed chimeric abomination like your watcher?

You seize the sawed-off shotgun. You rip it wetly from your gruesome calf. Boneless flesh slithers as you scoot against the wall and face your watcher. Silver bullets won't fit. You aren't fooled. You can only hope the shotgun comes with buckshot, and that it still works. For the briefest, two-flame flicker, you consider turning it on your, yourself. Ending this nightmare, ending the soul-wrenching anxieties of your everyday life,

it would be so easy. You raise the barrel, take aim, but your trigger finger sags. More deboned flesh. With a desperate, sickened scream, you switch hands. His shadow twitches, and you aim wildly and pull the trigger. The barrel detonates with a gunpowder flash and kicks you against the wall. Your watcher's wolfy shoulder explodes, back scattering tendrils of meat and fuzz into the Rialto's projector light. But he doesn't stop. He rages at you with beaming eyes. All around the Wolfsbane Meadow

swirls with technicolor plumes of crimson fury fog. You don't need audio to feel the low rumble of his growl. His sharp-toothed maw snaps open and he pounces. You scream out and raise the shotgun again. This time your aim doesn't shiver. The buckshot blasts him square in that projector lens glare, shattering his light. All around you, the foggy forest cuts to black.

Your watcher drops to his knees. His werewolf pelt splits down the middle, peeling away layer after layer, falling loose like exercised masks, revealing a lake-blooded killer, a Victorian vampire, a blade-handed nightmare stalker. Horror after horror,

until all that remains is a buckshot charred pile of shadow and bones and the tattered echoes of your clothing. Two ruined projector lenses tumble loosely down the heap. But you've seen these movies, read these books, know this game. You cock the shotgun, aim and squeeze the trigger. There shouldn't be any ammo left, but, This is your movie. The gun fires. High above, where his full moon once shined,

the buckshot shatters the projection booth window. The theater falls into darkness. Only thing left is to roll the final credits, but naturally, you've made sure that can't happen. With the shotgun clamped in your hand, You slump against the wall and welcome the darkness. Relieved this creep show is finally over. Whatever trippy drugs your watcher used on you must be wearing off.

Your mangled, deboned leg tingles with the first needling, shuddering screams of lifelong misery. Still, you can't help but smile. The pain means you're still on. alive. The pain means you've won. Laughing wildly, dazedly, you shove yourself upright. You're just starting to wonder how you're going to puzzle the chains off the exit when the projector in the booth flick, flick, flick, flick, flick back to life, an immortal heartbeat refusing to fade. Every pulsing victory inside you plunges into a dark theatrical pit, even as a Hollywood glow beams from the fragmented window above, ever lighting the silver screen. Inside the flesh of your mangled leg, something twitches, something hideous pokes, squirms, a new nightmare being born.

A bladed arachnid hand burst from your flayed flesh. You scream and scream as that festering, stump gash births a nightmare arm with shadowy bones. It coils snake-like, and a bladed hand rears back, ready to strike, ready to cleave you down the center and open you wide, exposing every real-world. tragedy you ritually hide from. You grope for a weapon while the projector ticks out a grainy movie reel countdown. Four, three, two. A final message appears on your beloved silver screen. You chose wrong.

The monster I am is the monster in you. Ready for our sequel? Choose one. A. Face yourself. B. Game over. 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 common share-a-like licensing, or with written consent from the authors. No portion of this podcast may be rebroadcast or otherwise distributed without the expressed written consent of the creepy podcast production team and the stories author.