Creepy - Day 3 - Tales From the Gas Station Part 3

Episode Date: October 3, 2018

There's a gas station at the edge of town...***Written by Gas Station Jack***Please consider supporting the podcast at Patreon.com/Creepypod or creepypod.com/support***You can also subscribe to us on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQ3SrH_3fsROXFAjomKcUtw***Produced by Steve Blizin, Puzzle Audio***Title music by Alex Aldea***Intro/Outro Narration by Joe Stofko Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This episode of the 31 Days of Horror is presented thanks to patrons Daryl Kanoir, Sam Bunting, J. Jeb, Lassandra Lantigua, Shara Rosashan, Cropera, Joshua Hernandez, and Caleb Brown. If you'd like to learn more about how you can support the podcast, please visit the reward tiers at patreon.com slash creepypod. This is creepy. A podcast dedicated to sharing the most of the most. 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. Creepy Presents The 31 Days of Horror. Days 3 Tales from the Gas Station Part 3 Credited

to Gas Station Jack There are times when this world Drifts so close to the fabric or reality that I can hear something calling me from beyond that veil Sometimes when I get too close I can feel that thing on the other side

tugging at the corners of my mind I'm worried about Carlos He doesn't seem to be taking this so well. In case you don't know, I work at the shitty gas station at the edge of our small town. The weird thing's been happening for as long as I've been here. I finally started to tell some of my stories, and if you haven't caught up yet, then I would invite you to listen to Part 1 and 2. When I returned to work after my post yesterday,

I was delighted to find a stack receipt paper sitting neatly on the register counter with notes written in my own shaky handwriting. I don't remember writing all these notes. But then again, I don't remember a lot of things. It is possible that I'm working too hard. Or maybe the fumes coming from underneath the gas station are playing tricks on me. Or perhaps it's just another side effect of my condition.

At any rate, I'm not one to look at gift horse in the mouth. Or any other animal. and any other orifice for that matter. Admittedly, my handwriting isn't the best, and at times the scratches on the receipt paper become nearly eligible. So if anything herein seems unbelievable, it's probably because I copied it wrong. With that in mind, this is my best effort at a transcription.

7 o'clock. It's getting dark earlier these days. 7.30. Farmer Jr. came into the gas station at night asking about the handprivile. plants. I told him that they weren't there anymore. He left his phone number scribbled on the back of a coupon for 15% off bulk pig feed from an online retailer. I think he's trying to send me a message. 9 o'clock. I think maybe some kids are playing a prank on me. I found a lawn gnome behind the pork rinds. I didn't think much about it. I put him in a box behind the counter. But then I found

another matching lawn gnome in the soda case. I added this one to the box as well. It wasn't until I noticed the third and fourth lawn gnomes that had started to suspect something. I had taken out the garbage and found the gnomes perched atop a branch of a tree next to the dumpster, staring down at me like gargoyles. I used a chair and broom to knock them down, and I put them in the box with the other three.

When I got back to my desk, I found a note on my chair written in red ink. It says simply, I'm in the walls. I don't know who wrote it, but the paper smells like oranges and plumaria. 10 o'clock. There's a strange scratching noise coming from the tiles above the cash register. I fear Rocco and his brood may have infiltrated the building again. 11 o'clock. Farmer Jr. called the store.

He asked about the handplants. I assured him that they weren't there anymore, and if they ever showed up again, I would call him. I think he's beginning to suspect that I'm lying. 12 o'clock. One of the cultist recruits wandered in from the community in the woods. They hate it when I call them cultists. I know the recruits aren't supposed to interact with the outside world,

but from time to time they will sneak into town, never any further than this gas station, and buy cigarettes. They aren't supposed to try and recruit new members until they graduate to the Honorable Senior Cultist status. But this one isn't a very good cultist. I know they aren't supposed to have names, but I'm going to call this one Marlborough.

I'll let you guess why. Marlborough stayed at the store for at least half an hour, trying to convince me to go back to the compound with him. They hate it when I call their home a compound. He tried to appeal to my logical side, but I had let him know politely but firmly that I was not interested in logic. I can't remember.

when he left. Two o'clock. Found myself digging again. Sometimes, on slow nights, I let myself drift. My mind goes somewhere. When I come to, I wonder, where was I just now? Who was that controlling my body while I was gone? My body did those things I've done so many times before

that I guess it's learned how to do them without me. My body restocks a cigarettes. My body rotates the frozen drink machine. My body scraped the mold off the bottoms of the ice buckets. My body emptied the rat traps. Somewhere along the way, my body found a shovel, went out back, and started digging a hole. Actually, I shouldn't say my body started digging. I have been, or rather, my body has been digging this hole off and on for the last few months.

Usually I come to after a few shovelfuls. This time I added another foot deep before I snapped back to reality and asked myself, What the hell am I doing? 3.30. I just noticed the door at the end of the hallway past the walking cooler. How long have I worked here and never noticed that door before? It seems disappointingly ordinary as far as doors go, except for the fact that it's warm to the touch and feels like it's vibrating.

I tried the handle, but it's locked. When I got back to the register, I noticed a man in a man in a little. a trench coat standing outside beyond the gas pumps, just outside the reach of our lights, dangerously close to the road. I can't tell if he's looking at me, or if he's looking past the building at the woods on the other side. I wish he wouldn't stand that like that, stoic and still with his arms reaching down past his knees. The scratching against the tiles and the ceiling over the counter is getting louder. 3.45.

A man came into the store, rolling a large white ice chest behind. him. He had sunk in blue eyes, wiery hair coming from his nose and ears, long bony fingers, and paper-thin skin revealing every blue and green vein beneath the translucent dermis. He wore a bowler cap and smelled like milk. I had definitely never seen him around before. He asked if we'd be interested in partnering up with him. He sold ground meat at discount prices. But I told him that our store doesn't do well with the fresh foods category. Recommended he try his hand at making jerky. Before he left, he scooped about a pound or so of raw ground meat from the ice chest

onto a piece of parchment paper and gave it to me as a sample. Once he'd left, I took the meat into the cooler where I found another lawn gnome waiting for me. I put the lawn gnome into the box with the other seven. 4 o'clock. Carlos just told me something very strange about Kiefer. 4.30. There was a kid named Spencer Middleton and went to the same high school as me and Kiefer. Spencer was just about a year ahead of me, but looked much older and acted much younger.

I live in a small town, and small towns get bored. For entertainment, some turn to Gaza, some turn to more sinister pastimes. The latter often fueled a former. There were rumors around town that Spencer liked to torture and kill animals. Rumors that Spencer's parents and siblings always locked their bedroom doors when they went to sleep at night. The rumors didn't slow down any after the fire at Spencer's house, where Spencer was the only one who escaped unscathed. I once saw Spencer gleefully stomp on a lizard, throw his head back and laugh.

Some short time after his house got fire for the second time, Spencer left town. The story went they'd have gone off and enjoy. in the army. I don't know what to think about that. So I simply don't think about that. I would have been perfectly happy to never think about that, but after all these years I'm forced to. Because Spencer Middleton just came into the store and bought a cup of coffee. He's sitting in one of the booze, talking to Kiefer. Marlborough was back. He asked if I could spare him some time to talk about his fake religion. They hate it when I call it a fake religion. I told him he had to leave. He seemed upset.

4.45. Spencer and Kiefer sat around for a while and didn't buy anything but two cups of coffee. When they finally laughed, I let Carlos know. He'd been hiding under a blanket in the walking cooler, although I can't really understand why. Carlos explained to me exactly what happened. He finished his shift a couple nights ago and it just left the gas station when he saw Kiefer's SUV pulled over in a ditch at the bottom of the hill. Carlos, being the good guy he is, decided to check and see if Kiefer needed any help.

He says that when he pulled up and got out of the car, he could hear what sounded like a loud crunching noise coming from just beyond the tree line. Carlos went to investigate. That's when he saw something. When I asked Carlos what he saw, he just started speaking Spanish in a vast, panic sort of way. I don't speak Spanish, but I nodded along empathetically. The only word I could pick up with... was straga, which is the name of a liquor leakery.

Whatever it was that Carlos saw, made him race back to his car as fast as he could and back out quickly without looking, and that's when he ran over Kiefer. Carlos is a good guy, but here wasn't a bad situation. He stopped long enough to get out, check on Kiefer, and confirmed that he was definitely dead. There was nothing he could do that would change that fact. It was an accident.

Carlos was on parole. There was that thing in the woods. Carlos had to make a decision. So, he heaved the body into the trunk of his car and drove off. Carlos took me to his car and showed me the body. I can confirm 100% that it was Kiefer in the trunk of his car. Not just because of his unmistakable face, but also because of his phone and wallet that were in his pockets.

I finally got tired of this scratching and pulled our ladder out of storage to see what the raccoons were doing in the ceiling. But when I pushed back to tile, the only thing that was up there was another gnome. That makes one dozen so far. 6 o'clock. The man in the trench coat is still outside. The cultist came back in, demanding an audience with me, insisting that if I would just listen to him,

I would see that his reasoning is superb and flawless, and that it would be a fool not to join him in the perfection of logic and hervana that is his belief structure. I agreed to listen to his pitch if he would agree to ask the man in the trench coat to leave. Our hasty verbal contract in place, I steal myself to listen. Honestly, he did make a few good points. But I suppose that's to be expected from a viral thought experiment strong enough to convince perfectly normal people to abandon their real lives and go live in a commune in the woods past a shady gas station on the edge town.

They call themselves mathematicists. They believe that humankind exists to fulfill two. moral imperatives, to decrease suffering and to increase happiness. A successful life increases happiness more than suffering. A decent life decreases suffering more than happiness. How good a person is can be determined by the spread between the happiness increased and the suffering decreased. Obviously, if the individual has a negative spread, that is, if they've increased happiness

less than they've increased suffering, or if they've decreased suffering less than they've decreased happiness, then that means very simply, that the individual is bad. Therefore, if an individual causes a tremendous amount of happiness and suffering, one can simply determine which was higher, and use this perfect rubric to determine whether that individual was good or bad. Simple, right? The mathematicists believe that the world has been going about good and bad in the wrong way.

For eons, we've been attempting to increase happiness when instead we should be focusing on decreasing suffering. As happiness is a fluid concept, and the more happiness you create, the harder it is to sustain, as happiness has a clear set of diminishing returns. Suffering, however, is constant. Suffering results from happiness coming to an end. Suffering is pure and eternal. For a mathematician to be supremely good, they must simply end all suffering. That's why the mathematicists are working on a bomb to destroy the entire planet. By ending all life on Earth, they end an infinity of suffering into the future.

With every life they avert, an entire lineage of people that would be born to a life of suffering will no longer. Every death is a preemptive mercy killing. Every happy moment that will no longer occur pales in the face of the sad moments that are likewise prevented. And so, as Marlborough explained, their murder cult believes that killing is a kindness. I told him that his ideas were stupid and he was stupid, and now he had to go tell the man in the trench coat to go away. The phone rang. This is strange for two reasons. First, because it was not the landline.

It was the cell phone, even though we do not get cell phone service way out here. And second, because it was the cell phone. The one that I took off Kiefer's body. I'll admit, I was stuck in a bit of a moral quandary ever since Carlos confided in me. On the one hand, Carlos had killed someone. On the other, it was an accident, and Carlos' parole officer may not see it that way. I thought I'd have more time to figure this out. But when the cell phone started ringing, I knew I had to make a decision.

I answered it. I didn't speak first. The voice on the other line was one that I recognized. It was Spencer Middleton. His cell phone and wallet, I answered. He was right. I did. It was an accident.

I explained. Can we do that? 7.30. Carlos came in for his shift an hour ago, and I explained the deal to him. He wasn't thrilled, but as I laid it out very clearly, and he didn't have a choice. We parked Carlos' camry behind the gas station near the growth of handplants and made a point to stand far enough away as to not get our ankles grabbed. Kiefer's SUV drove up a few minutes later.

Spencer was driving. He and Kiefer got out without a word, sized us up, and opened the back of the their vehicle. Carlos popped his trunk. Kiefer and I stared at each other, keeping eye contact the whole time while Carlos and Spencer transferred the body from one vehicle to the other.

Spencer had a tarp and blanket ready to wrap everything up. When it was over, Kiefer put a hand on my shoulder and whispered in my ear. You done good. Then they left. Carlos started crying when I went back inside the store.

It was almost daytime, and that's when the new part was supposed to take over. 8 o'clock. The new part-timer's late, and I'm overdue for a lunch break. I made the best of my extra time here by putting price stickers on all the lawn gnomes. We're ringing them up as miscellaneous grocery for $9.99 each. And I've already sold a couple. I'm a really good employee.

8.30. I went to the bathroom and saw a man standing there with his jeans of his ankles. He wore red and white checkered boxers and a cowboy hat. He smiled when he saw me and simply said in a somewhat sing-songy voice, Come on, man, come on with it. I took the opportunity to ask him something that's been burning at the back of my mind. Do you know, is everything going to be okay? The bathroom cowboy took a second to think,

then he pulled up his pants, fastened his enormous belt buckle, and walked past me, spurs clinking against the bathroom tile. He stopped for a second when he was right next to me and said plainly, I appreciate it. Then he left. I honestly have no idea what that means. These are the entirety of the receipt paper notes. But I did make a point to continue keeping this journal.

I think this will be a healthy way of chronicling the weird events at the gas station. Maybe this will help with my condition. I don't know. The next time something strange happens, maybe I'll come back and write more. Until then, I guess this is to be continued. Edits. Sorry, upon further inspection, I realized that some of the scribbles on the receipt paper

may have been transcribed incorrectly. I also made some adjustments to the spelling and fix some typos. While I was added, I added another typo just for the observant reader. Lastly, upon the advice of some of my readers, I removed the part where I listed Farmer Junior's Social Security number and address. Also, thanks to the reader that pointed out that, Strega isn't even a Spanish word. I asked Carlos about it when he came in for his fourth shift today.

But Carlos simply looked at me blankly and told me he doesn't speak Spanish. For more information, including pictures and videos of the stories told on this podcast, or to suggest stories for future episodes, please visit us at CreepyPod on Twitter, Instagram. All stories told on. this podcast can be found at creepypasta wikiya.com and are protected by a creative commons license some rights reserved unless otherwise stated