Creepy - Careless Conjuring

Episode Date: July 29, 2024

What would you do?***Written by: Eddie Spohn***Bonus Episode: "Safekeeping" Written by: Kat Hausler and Narrated by: Heather Thomas***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 creepy pastures and urban legends in the world. Whether these stories truly happened or simply fabrications is for you to decide. These stories may contain graphic depictions of violence and explicit language. Listener discretion is advised. P. Presents. Careless conjuring. Written by Eddie Spone.

I'm sitting here in a dark room watching something materialize from the shadows. Or is it my imagination? Is my mind playing tricks on me? Making me believe that the darkness is congealing into something that looks like a gleaming, all-seeing eye, lidless, and never blinking. The floor immediately surrounding it throbs and convulses, alive with the movement of hundreds of squirming tentacles. I catch a glimpse of it there in one corner of the room. A frosted image exposed in the stroboscopic lights of the traffic passing outside the window.

then there's a lull in the traffic and the room is momentarily dark. There's a wet sliding sound. And another round of oscillating light reflects off the soulless pupil. So wide in the twilight it threatens to swallow me up in its empty gaze. This time it is much closer. And I can see the movement just below it of a fish-like mouth filled with knees. needles of predatory teeth. The tentacles snake upon the floor,

patrolling the boundaries of the protective circle I've drawn, searching for the slightest entrance. Everywhere is a steady hiss, as of a million souls damned for eternity and releasing their doomed frustrations out in a single extended exhalation. Perhaps the hiss is of these souls sizzling in the fire, of their iniquities.

And am I now among their ranks for this thing I've done? Is there a penalty for rousing into manifestation such entities as the one before me? A thing from places where sanity is a byword and reality is skewed. Things which are better left alone? Would it help if I said this was all done now to love? Strange as it may seem, it was. The entity. It's a demon.

Let's just cut to the chase. Pauses before me. It sends out exploratory tendrils of itself, and they climb upwards to the ceiling. Pressing against the circle is invisible outline of force. I'm momentarily in the middle of a cylinder of alien protoplasm. stretching from floor to ceiling, a maelstrom of adhesive suckers and exposed vacuels seeking to attach and golf and absorb. But how did I get here in this room?

In the center of this unspeakable thing from the void, it's all Miranda's fault. She with dark eyes filled to the brim with that which the entity lacks. She of the silken hair and tawny skin. With a smile so full of life, you could not help but be uplifted by her presence. It's all her fault for making me love her so much. And then dying on me without saying goodbye. We were sharing this very apartment, cheap as it is, with the stinking river to one side and the always busy highway on the other.

The lights of the passing traffic constantly strobing past our windows, but at times the view of Manhattan over the river is breathtaking in an entropic way. There's always this sense about it of a decaying beauty. Decaying, like my Miranda. It's only been a week since her burial, but the process has begun. The eventual disintegration of a once vital inanimate bunch of flesh into its constriction. parts, a lifetime lived, chock full of memories. Now breaking down slowly into basic chemistry.

The mortician did a wonderful job on her, though. At the memorial service Miranda had been as pretty as in life. Hair and makeup perfect. Her expression is peaceful as a sleeping babe. I stood beside the half-open coffin, leaning over and embracing her. crying until my tears moistened her cheeks. I had to be gently nudged away before I messed up the cosmetic work and exposed the pale gray reality, Pnees.

You would think that the funeral would be enough incentive for it to sink in that she's gone. It wasn't. Miranda and I had been arguing the night before she died. About money, about our living situation. We'd both come into this understanding. understanding that our accommodations at the waterside projects were a temporary thing until we could save up enough for our own house out on Long Island, but it was beginning to wear on my new wife.

I can't say I blame her. It was getting to me too. When she went off by herself, I knew to leave her alone. She did that when things were bothering her. After a long time spent out on our small balcony, looking out over the steaming mass of the East River. She came back in, coated with the sweat of a steamy August night. The smell of the river followed her in, buoyed on the sounds of passing cars and honking horns. The lights of traffic flickered behind her like a rave. Randa started complaining that she hated it here, and

Ronda and Brat went on honeymoon to St. Barts and are living in their own place in Rochester. They have in-laws with finances, I pointed out. At that moment, anger welled up in me. It's not like she was the only one suffering here. I was working my ass off, too. Waking up early to go into the city and deliver soda to all the sweet tooths in Manhattan. If you think making deliveries in New York City is easy, then you'd never been to the place.

I threw in the comment that probably derailed any hopes of that night's reconciliation. Maybe we shouldn't have gotten married then. Now, in all fairness, I did not mean that we should not have gotten married. What I meant is that we should have waited to have a real wedding. The 20 or so grand we blew in the ceremony would have gone a long way towards a down payment for our own place. Miranda took it the way you thought she would, snarkly throwing you in that I was right. We shouldn't have gotten married. Neither of us spoke to one another for the remainder of the night. We broke the golden rule not to go to sleep angry with each other. I can't speak for her,

but I was complacent, expecting that sometime the next day or so we'd both have the urge to talk. It was the way with us. I woke up early to do my deliveries and she was still sleeping on her side the bed when I left. I vowed to buy her flowers in a card and did later on. Before I got home, I got the call. Miranda had been shot and killed during a robbery at the city drug store where she worked. She was a pharmacist and a couple of junkies with guns had come in looking for painkillers. Miranda had tried to flee and have been shot low in the leg. Detectives hypothesized that the shooter and meant it to be a fatal wound that the bullet had accidentally severed the femoral artery

that made Miranda bleed out, as if that was supposed to make me feel better about the whole thing. A grieving and desperate mind is susceptible to the most outlandish ideas. For me, the idea came on my second evening without Miranda. The remains of a tropical storm were buffeting the northeast with heavy rain and thunderstorms, Our cheaply made building creaked and swayed in the gusting wind. I was seated on the living room couch at the apartment, alone in the dark, watching the storm out the window.

Probably should not have been by myself. But I'd shrugged off the attempts of friends and family to keep me company and declined all invitations to stay with them at their homes. My mind felt like a grenade on the verge of exploding. At any second I imagine there'd be a pop. and the walls of the apartment would be splattered with skull chips and brain matter. I'd be lying if I said I had not been thinking of ways to exit this world. Some call suicide a coward's way out. But I, on the other hand, thinker requires an abundance of courage to step off into the unknown.

I lacked such courage and remained instead to suffer without my beloved Miranda. When the psychic pressure of simply being in the dark room grew unbearable, I put the television on. There was a movie playing on the subscription channel. I knew it was a horror film, as Miranda and I often viewed them. Perhaps this was not the time for such a film. I watched anyway. Despite being fictions, the images on the screen snapped me back to some semblance of myself.

By some strange synchronicity, the film was about a man who loses his work. wife and seeks to bring her back to life with necromancy. The dark arts. A demon restores the man's wife to him in exchange for a small sacrifice. The pinky fingers off his two hands. Something about it rang true to me at that moment. I remembered a childhood of going to the Methodist Church with my grandmother.

How people would fall to the ground as if in the midst of a seizure. Their mouth was frothing rapidly. the minister would lay hands upon them and cast the demons out while the congregation joined in the exorcism chant. I remember being petrified at seeing grown adults acting this way. And when the collection plate was passed around immediately afterward, dutifully putting in the crumple dollar bill my grandmother stuffed into my palm, even though she could not afford it. And though I stopped attending church at the first chance I got,

Now I imagine that there must be something to all the spirituality and demonism for it to endure so long and be memorialized in so many films, books, and mythologies. Two pinkies were a small price to pay to have Miranda back. I immediately went online to the Arenico.com bookshop to locate a volume on demonology. I learned that these were known as grimroars, and there was an impressive. list of them. Knowing nothing of the subject, I went for the most obvious choice. A leather-bound tomb called Demonology for Dummies. A handy-bandy guide to summoning useful spirits. Claimed to have simple formulae for the invocation of spirits capable of granting health, wealth,

love, or revenge. The thing that attracted my most was the inclusion of invocations. to raise the dead. I clicked by. The book arrived this afternoon, a leather-bound doorstop of a volume. I briefly scanned the table of contents to locate the section on resurrecting a deceased lover. I went straight to this,

my intention being to perform the ritual this very night. There was a list of necessary tools, the Athame, or Seasier, ceremonial blade could just as easily be replaced with a steak knife. A wine glass could serve as a chalice. I had an unopened, 20-pound sack of cooking flour in the kitchen to use instead of consecrated sand in the formation of the protective circle. In lieu of black-tinted beeswack tapers, I had a bag of disc-shaped tea lights.

Demons do nothing without an offering. It makes sense. Would you work without pens? In this case, the optimum offering was the sacrifice of a snow-white, unblemished kid. Not a human kid. A baby goat. If they were not available, some already dressed goat meat killed within the last week would yield results. I had some frozen stakes.

It's a thought that counts. Yes? I woke at midnight and cleared a space in the center of the low. living room for the ritual. I laid out all the necessary tools and then poured out a circle eight feet in diameter from the sack of flour. This was called the circle of protection. How a line of flower was going to keep a demon at bay. It was beyond me. I had the offerings of thought out steak on a metal dinner plate. I was glad I didn't have to cut off my own pinkies like in the movie. I lit several tea lights on the inside perimeter of the circle and shut out all the electric ones in the apartment so that all was dark except for the flickering dot of flame in their surrounding twilight.

There was enough illumination to read by. The instructions were to speak the invocation in a loud, authoritative voice. I did so, pronouncing the Acadian words as if they were English. The room grew ice cold And the teardroped flames of the tea lights whipped in a non-existent breeze I continued to read Noticing a weird effect in the shadows They seem to be rushing like a dark liquid toward one corner of the room

They congealed there And something absorbed them into itself and rose The flicker of passing headlights caught on the unctuous surface of something, something closer, sliding towards me with the sound like footsteps and wet mud brings us to this very moment. Now I'm in the center of a cylinder of alien appendages, fish belly pale and stretching from floor to ceiling. Within this are snapping mouths and clutching tendrils, pressed against the invisible force of the surrounding circle. Eyes of all colors appear amidst the swirling tissue like scattered jewels.

They gaze upon me momentarily before disappearing. Finding no way to reach me, the tunnel of flesh descends and retracts back into the unblinking eye resting just outside the circle upon its bed of swirling tentacles. It gazes at me impassively. The glow from the tea lights reflecting and streaks upon the glistening dome of the eye as those tentacles explore the surrounding floor. The temperature drops another few degrees until I'm exhaling smoke. The tea light flames flicker slowly.

A sighing begins, increasing rapidly until it sounds like the roar of a passing freight train. The roar ceases at its peak, and the demon. The human speaks in a drawn-out croak. The surface of its speech is the guttural and archaic tones of a long-dead tongue. The Acadian I bid such a botched job on. Underneath, another voice translates in a snake's hiss of perfectly understandable English, asking me why I had drawn them here to this place. My wife was killed.

I say, and feel as if this is somehow not an adequate opener. Every one of the fine hairs at the back of my neck and arms is raised, and all of my skin is studded with goosebumps. Deep laughter resounds through the apartment, vibrating the walls like the hip-hop bass line of music from a passing car, as the hissing voice asked me why it would care about my plight. I try to sound authoritative like,

the book recommends, although it may be a bit late to start following any rules. I want you to bring her back to me. I raise a photo of Miranda and hold it before that all seeing I. The demon's laugh is something you might hear outside an abattoir where unlucky rabbits are being separated from their unlucky feet. The demon informs me that what is dead stays dead and that life forest does not take well to being forced back into abandoning. vessels. Momentarily, I am very aware of the distant rhythmic thumpings, like the out-of-sync

beating of several hearts. The demon. It speaks in metaphors like my high school English teacher used to do. But at least I understand these. Even if it's to be with someone they loved? I ask. The demon considers the question. The ever-present eye gleams in the candlelight, gently undulating upon its bed of exploring tentacles. The demon poses a question to me. Asking, can one ever truly know if they are loved by another? Now I pause to think this over, and the demon croaks with a hysterical laugh that sounds like a frog pond in the middle of a summer night.

If it was filled with a thousand mutant frogs, the demon is clearly messing with my head. sort of thing comes with the territory. It looks at me, asking where the offering is. I'm not going to try to hand the stakes over and risk getting close. So I use one hand to gently slide the dinner plate over. It passes through the line of flower composing the circle, creating a break. Two things happen simultaneously.

The offering, plate and all, is absorbed into the demonic. bed of tentacles outside. Then, one of the tentacles finds the gap in the circle made by the plate and eases itself inside, and a corresponding line of amorphous flesh breaches the circle above it, stretching from floor to ceiling. The mass flows like water, and once inside expands into a nightmarish array of suckered tentacles and claws and clamping mandibles. Everywhere upon this are born rows of eyes, without pupils and as colorful as jewels, coming briefly to the surface and quickly disappearing again. This wall of invading flesh descends to the floor, parting where the tea lights flicker, and I know that I'm going to be consumed just as the stake was,

for I am alive and a much more desirable offering. I tense up. and let out a final scream. What else can I do? But I am not absorbed or torn asunder. I feel a sharp pain in my abdomen and catch a glimpse of a tentacle with its tip pressed into me. It retracts,

and the mass of flesh inside the circle pulls out through the gap. The flames of the tea lights wag and a tidal breeze as the demon fades out to its slaughterhouse, frog pond chuckling. The temperature in the room goes up in immediate 20 degrees. Neighbors on both sides, banging on the walls, asking me if I'm okay or telling me to stop the noise, depending on who it is.

I'm still sitting cross-legged in the circle, breathing in the last fading remnants of the demon's odor, the lingering ghost of a fart. I clutch my punctured stomach and pull my hands away to brave a look. My shirt there is soaked with blood. For all that, there's only a tiny slit in the fabric where the tentacle penetrated. I slipped the shirt off to examine myself. My pudgy gut is lathered with blood. Just above the sunken pit of my belly button is a puncture wound.

A dark red dot no longer leaking. It burns, but is not unbearably painful. I press at it with one hand. finger. Something is lodged within. A hard nodule down below the skin. I press the wound between my thumbs and attempt to squeeze the object from it, the way you pop out a splinter. There's a frantic wriggling inside of me, and I'm rewarded with a burst of searing abdominal pain that only dissipates when I lay on my side. I lie like a discharged fetus in the center of the circle. The tools of conjuring scattered about near my feet.

The book is lying at my side, splattered with my blood. I decide to peruse it in a way of taking my mind off my situation. The tea lights provide enough illumination to read by, and this time, frozen in place, I take a good look at the table of contents and study the preliminary chapters, which have nothing to do with conjurings and everything to do with preparation. A very important thing, I discover. I come to understand that mastering the pronunciation of the Akkadian invocations is extremely important.

I learn the necessity of correct mystical tools and that these tools, the location of the ritual, and the magician themselves must undergo a rigorous cleansing and purification before any rituals are attempted. I read up on the dangers of inept magical operations and how they create an open portal between this dimension and the void, often attracting wandering and half-formed intelligences seeking entrance to our world and causing great havoc when they gain it. And I read about larvae. The abdominal offspring of such entities are sometimes implanted into magicians who are not diligent in the construction of their predictive circle. These things I learn after, the fact. All during my reading time, I feel movement within my belly.

Something shifting and squirming, pushing tissue apart in order to make room. Something growing. I think I know what it is. I fall into a twilight doze somewhere between wakefulness and dreaming. It's filled with visions of fly-blown roadkill under blankets of squirming maggots. The continuous parade of such images unfolds like a deck of psychic cards in my mind. Scenes of death, a flesh being endlessly recycled, morbidly beautiful and efficient. Then I find myself at a table with a bunch of deceased relatives,

dining on servings of meat tunneled through with plump segmented larvae. Miranda smiles at me from her place at my side. Her face is sagging, dotted with holes. from burrowing maggots. She has a triangle of worm-ridled meat speared on the tines of a raised fork. She puts this into her mouth and the larvae pop between her teeth as she choose. Some of them, though, escape mastication and burrow through her cheeks from the inside, emerging from her gelatinous flesh, wriggling their dome-shaped heads and busily working mouthparts. Her dinner seems to be consuming her, as she consumes it.

You are what you eat, I think. Unless what you eat eats you. I wake in daylight is pouring into the room. Pigeons coo and flutter their wings outside the windows. The wreckage of last night's ceremony surrounds me. I was woken by pain, but also by someone speaking. Miranda stands nearby, looking down at me, asking me, why? She's dressed in funeral garb, her flesh beginning to shrivel and turn gray.

Her once beautiful dark eyes fill their sockets like prunes. There's dirt and crawling insects in her matted hair and on the floor around her feet, which are barren and have taken on the shrunken gray look of tree bark. She looks at me, sad and confused, asking why. I couldn't just leave her be. Why did I sentence her to this purgatory? I want to get up and go to her. My legs, though, are nothing but dead weight.

I wince and try to ignore the spasm of pain that suddenly shoots up my spine. I wanted to see you again. We didn't get the chance to say. I hear a crunching sound and feel something shift inside of me. I'm gripped by a sudden stomach cramp. And when my hands go involuntarily down there to assuage the pain, my palms press against a convoluting mass bristling with needle-thin spines. It's like trying to grab a cactus.

And I pull my hands away with a groan, palms lathered with blood from uncomfortable pinpricks. A pale segmented mass is nestled in my abdomen. It fills me from the top of my pelvis to the base of my ribcage, soaking in a cherry red slush. Layers of striated muscle tissue work beneath its translucent skin. It's busy under my rib cage, and when disturbed, lifts a bullet-shaped, terminus smeared and crimson slime, with a multi-tiered assembly of mandibles clicking in displeasure. On each side of the mouth parts is a black circle. A suggestion of an eye to come at some later stage of development.

Miranda approaches, her bones creaking as she kneels beside me. The larva is settled down again and is submerged in my abdomen. It swells a bit more as I watch and expels a red mist from a series of orifice is down its center line. Kill it! I implore. Miranda shakes her head and twists her face into something as close to sorrow as the denatured flesh can manage. She informs me that it's not alive to begin with. It all makes sense now.

I had gone into the ritual without taking the proper precautions. The one unforgivable thing that any would-be magician can do is take things lightly. Because of this, I had attracted one of those. un-evolved intelligence as the grimor warned about and it had implanted me with its abdominal offspring. But the entity had brought Miranda back as well, not out of a sense of duty, but to mess with my head, and perhaps to make her suffer what will be for all practical purposes and eternity, brushing a sweaty lock of my hair from one eye with a shrivelled gray finger, proceeds to

explain that it feeds on life. She can't kill it directly, but she can cut off its supply. She now has a large steak knife in one hand. My would-be-a-thame. She gives me a familiar smile, silently telling me she loves me as she lowers the blade to put me out of my misery. I hope she finds a way out of hers. Bonus up for your bonus episode.

Creepy Presents. Safekeeping, written by Cat Hausler, and narrated by Heather Thomas. The wide white box surprised Sarah every night when she checked under her bed. It was never quite as long as she expected. She hadn't thought you'd fold a wedding dress unless maybe at the train, but the box had good ratings and was expensive, so she'd followed the directions and laid acid-free tissue paper over every layer of flowing lace. cream-colored, as if already aged, as if it had reckoned with being packed away.

The tags were still on, and people often suggested that she sell it, as if there were no chance of her needing it now. She felt compelled to say how much the dress cost whenever someone brought up the canceled wedding, and sometimes when they didn't. Then she added the cost of the whole event, as if that could make them understand her loss. The dress had seemed monstrously expensive while she was still planning to wear it, but now the price justified its costly storage. The big glorified shoebox was supposed to be proof against dust, water, and maybe even fire,

though she wasn't sure about that one. The description talked a lot about archival quality, which made her picture the dress on a blank-faced museum mannequin with one of those little devices to regulate humidity. A plaque would explain the obscure historical phenomenon of Sarah actually believing she'd get married. She had a lot of feelings about the box because it helped her contain her feelings about the dress, which in turn contained any number of awkward, bulky feelings. The box was a reverse machoiceka, holding something bigger than itself, and so on down the line.

Another popular suggestion was dyeing the dress so she could wear it on other occasions, and get something out of all the money she'd spent. But she didn't have that kind of lifestyle that called for a dress like that, not outside of a wedding. Besides, she'd already bought the box. Justin's wife, Haley, didn't strike her as the kind of person who'd have a nice box like this. Would someone who got married just months into her relationship,

assuming it wasn't serious before Justin broke off their engagement, and she did try to assume. bother putting her dress in storage, or even taking it to the cleaners. The slinky mermaid-cut dress, brilliant white like the bride's bleached teeth, that Sarah had spent weeks examining on every social network at her disposal, was probably crinkled in the back of a closet, with sweat stains under the arms. Haley didn't seem like a careful person, but Sarah was. She thought about things.

Too much, some people, Justin, said, which was why each night she checked first under her side of the bed, then his. Although, of course, both were hers now. The box stayed under her side, serene and absorbed with itself. She'd opened it once, after putting the dress away, but not liked to disturb the tissue paper. You weren't supposed to put your grubby hands on museum exhibits. She kept the floor next to it clean and sometimes wiped down the perlussant lid, skidding around the crisscrossed satin ribbon, crowned in a bow like a child's drawing of a present. If you looked closely, and she had. The box wasn't part of the ribbon, but attached by the long, pointy alligator

clip she'd cut herself on unpacking the box. She knew all the box's details now, but still couldn't get used to seeing it each night. Not what she was afraid of finding. but fearsome all the same. She didn't start checking under the bed until after Justin left, which almost but didn't quite make sense. What would he have done, sleeping next to her, if someone were hiding there? There was even more space before the box.

One Sunday night just after Justin and Haley returned from their painstakingly documented luxury honeymoon in St. Lucia, something jarred Sarah awake. What was it? She'd forgotten to check under the bed. Oh, well, one time wouldn't kill her. She let Justin's throaty snore soothe her back to the brink of sleep. Wait a minute.

She tried to breathe as if still asleep. Should she fumble for a weapon or turn on the light? Her thoughts lagged behind her racing pulse. The light first. Fumbling would address. attract attention anyway. She felt for her reading light and saw her quiet empty bedroom. Had she dreamt it? No. Now that her pulse no longer roared in her ears, she could hear something. It wasn't as loud as before, nothing that would have woken her. But there it was, shallow like her own

breathing. Trying not to be heard. She glanced at the bookshelf, dresser, and curtained windows to put off looking where she knew she had to. As always, except to night of all nights, she checked under her side of the bed first and saw only the box, gleaming, and sure as marble, made for the ages. Was it her own ragged breathing she'd heard? She had been a little hoarse since her afternoon cry.

She ran her hand over the white present bow, its familiar intricacy like a poem she knew by heart. Then, with the gentle clarity of slow motion, she noticed the shadow behind the box, bulging and tense, like a held-in stomach. Of course she was terrified, but that was something she knew rather than felt. Instead, she had the same rich sense of vindication as when she caught Justin with Haley, and knew once and for all that every doubt, every gnawing fear, had been justified. looking in on them, she'd enjoyed a fleeting deliciousness before her devastation, like one bite too many of a decadent dessert, just before Sadie gives way to surfeet and nausea.

The alligator clip nipped her fingers as she tore it off the ribbon, crushing the bow in the palm of her hand. She rolled over to Justin's side of the bed, but there was no need to peek underneath because something was already emerging. Lim for Harry Lim. You would! be on his side, wouldn't you? For an instant, all she could do was hate. Herself for forgetting to check. Justin for his absence. The monster for being there in his place. Instead of answering, it reared and gave her a broad, slathering grin, each tooth as long as the clip in her hand. Seeing its shaggy head grazed the ceiling and its tail spanned the floor, she couldn't believe it it had fit under the bed, especially with the box there. Then it unhinged its jaw.

Things it could have done while Justin was still there to get eaten, maybe with Haley on top. She rolled back to her side as it lunged in savage Justin's half of the mattress. Drawing up the covers, she braced herself against the bed frame, preserved and floating in the moment like a specimen in a jar. When the monster reared again, a strip of memory foam caught between its teeth, she plunged the alligator clip into its underbelly. It thrashed and snarled as what looked and smelled like swamp mud oozed out, but she was ready. When it unhinged its jaw again, she tossed Justin's pillow in with one hand, while the other drove the clip in deeper. It was tiring, but not as hard as she expected.

There were no bones blocking her path, and the more her arm disappeared, The less accurate the monster's aim, and the easier to dodge its lunges. She was in past her elbow when its claws settled on her tattered bedding. Her arm came out slick with greenish-black blood. The alligator clip warped but intact, and the white bow lost somewhere inside. She pushed the dead weight off the bed. It landed with a damp, heavy sound, like a dropped sack of laundry. If there was one thing she'd learned tonight,

It was to make sure. She leaned over and plunged the clip into the side of its neck until she hit the floor. As in the days that should have, but hadn't been her wedding and honeymoon. She couldn't cry right away. Too late, she remembered the box, probably dissolving in the blood, giving way first at the base, and then in the corners. It was a good box, but not for people like her.

not for unworn gowns, single occupancy beds, or the dark reeking flood seeping towards the door. When she looked back at the monster, it seemed smaller, flopped over like a sleeping cub, but even now she couldn't summon up any pity for it. Her shoulder ached, her wrist was numb, and she was covered in cuts and putrid clumps of fur, not to mention exhausted. as after every fight with Justin that kept her up ugly crying half the night, she felt a cringing, preemptive shame. Sure, her colleagues didn't have to deal with things like this.

Would never look at her the same if they knew. But this wasn't her fault. It was the monster who'd barged in and tried to eat her. That kind of thing could happen to anybody. Her only mistake was shirking her nightly checks, but everybody makes mistakes. And now here she was, with a whole week of work ahead of her,

and this brute bleeding her out of house and home, too big for the trash chute. She could always dump it in the lobby for the super to get rid of like everyone did with old furniture, but all the families in the building would assume it was hers, and they'd be right.

She tugged at the monster's tail to gauge its weight. It wasn't as massive as she thought. In fact, it was shrinking, almost too slow to notice, like an airbed with a leak. She stood on its torso to speed things along, and felt herself sinking until there was only a thin layer of fur between her and the floor. She rolled the pelt up like a carpet, starting at the head so she wouldn't cut herself on the teeth, and put it in a garbage bag. After dropping it down the chute, she sobbed up. up the blood with all the towels she owned. It was almost dawned by the time the sticky puddles and smell of rot were gone. No point going back to bed now, or what was left of it. She knelt beside the

box, threw away the stained ribbon, and ran a damp cloth over its lid and sides, surprised that they didn't give way after all the time soaked in blood, but remained sleek and unyielding. When she finished, the box lay glowing as always. If it weren't for her injuries in the greasy towels in the laundry, you could almost believe the monster had never been there. It was a good box, and she was glad she'd made the investment, even that she'd gotten the chance to test it. What was the point of having nice things if you never used them?

She went to the bathroom through her clothes and the hamper with the towels, and washed for a good long time until there was no more blood, not even under her nails. then she pulled out the box. The effect wasn't quite the same without the ribbon and bow, but they could be replaced. She lifted her dress out by the shoulders and let the layers of acid-free tissue paper glide off.

It still looked beautiful on. You couldn't even see a crease. 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

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