Creepy - Day 36 - Away From Home

Episode Date: December 27, 2017

When you run, what are you running from? A person? A place? When you run, and you think it's gone...how do you know?***Written by Charlie Davenport***Please consider supporting the podcast at Patreon.com/Creepypod or creepypod.com/support***Sound design by Steve Blizin***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 creepy is presented by Patreon supporters Ashley Levine and Matt Schreiber. Please consider supporting this podcast and see options for one-time and continuing donations at creepypod.com slash support. This is podcast dedicated to sharing the most famous chilling and disturbing creepypastas and urban legends in the world. Whether these stories truly happened or my husband. 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 Bad Days. Day 36. Away from Home. Written by Charlie Davenport and submitted for consideration to creepypod at gmail.com. It had been a hundred miles or more since you'd packed up everything you owned and simply left in the middle of the night. You'd driven for hours, long past the point where your eyelids threatened to pull themselves down and snap shut over your aching eyes, but you pushed on. Every hour spent on the road met more miles between you and everything that you were leaving behind.

Everything from the diners you sat through with nothing but angry silence passing between your parents and the creek of your bedroom, or in early morning hours. You drove until there was just a thin sheen of fuel left in the tank, and your spine screamed in protest, demanding that you get out of the car and stretch. You debated for some time, but when the gas station, with its promise of 24-hour operation, came into view,

practicality took over. Besides, you were two states away from where you started, and that had to be far enough for a start. As you stood out in the early October chill operating the pump and filling up as far as your meager savings would allow, your eyes drifted over to a stand of skeletal tree opposite the station, and after you're right, there it was. Its shingles graed from exposure, smeared green from the mold that neglected allowed to encroach. The front porch that bowed in the middle from the weight of so many heavy winter snowfalls looked like a welcoming grin. When the light inside, the one by the front hallway came on, you knew.

You knew that if you stood there a moment more, you would see your grandfather step out onto those dilapidated steps and light his first marlborough of the evening. You would see you, and then, you'd be home. The pump made a whirring ding, indicating that your tank was full and you snapped out of your days. You dropped the pump to the ground and roared away from the same. the station, your gas cap occasionally clinging against the car as you did. At five miles or so down the road, you finally managed to convince yourself that it had simply been a place that looked a little bit like where you'd grown up. You were road-weary and bone-tired. Folks are prone to their minds playing tricks on them when they're in such a state. You pulled your car off to the side

of the road and felt the exhaustion start to flood over you. You knew that to drive any further was to risk ending up in a ditch. So you reclined your seat back as far as you could to try and get comfortable. Before you knew it, you felt that heavy tug of sleep. It was around six when the sun started to break over the hills. In the light of those early rays poking through the windshield, you saw the condensation rapidly vanishing as the heat rose, taking the words that have been written in that moisture along with them.

Come home. the message read and you could see the faint lines of an arrow directing you to look out past the passenger side. Your eyes tracked along the dashboard until you saw rising up in the early light. The only thing on this stretch of road. The house was off to your right again. You tore off and stopped only when your tank was dry. You filled up again and put your foot on the floor until you hit Toledo. That had been a thousand miles or so ago.

And since then, you've seen your battered and blighted homestead a dozen more times. Just off the right-hand turn lane next to a diner in Gary, Indiana, in the middle of an open field, under gray skies with mountains worn by countless seasons standing behind it, out somewhere in Wyoming. When you were taking the exit off of Route 84 and saw a wedge beneath an overpass in a place called Ogden, Each time as it would fall into view you would see that porch light come on, welcoming you back to the toxic place that was the closest thing to home you'd ever had, and you'd flee from it in a blind panic, picking directions at random. You drove through Utah and most of Idaho without stopping, running until either you or your car was on empty and then you'd try and sleep. always in a car on some roadside or a parking lot anywhere you could find. Each morning, you'd find the same message lovingly scrawled with someone's fingertip and breath on your windshield.

Come home. As you crossed into Oregon, a place not so unlike where you'd started, you stopped seeing it. You checked in your rear view trying to see past the piles of clothes that filled the back seat. looked out the windshield at the edges of the road while trying to avoid the few cars on the road in the early morning hour. But mile after mile fell below your wheels, and the house was nowhere to be seen. You felt the tension ease out of your body.

Two competing lines of reasoning began to ring happily in your head. The first and strongest suggested that perhaps you'd finally gotten enough distance from it, and that it had lost the scent of your head. you somewhere in the byways. The other, quieter for the moment, but gaining in strength as the night ebbed away, was that you'd simply had an episode, that logically, it being a house, just a house after all, had never left the rocky soil of New England. Exhaustion washed over you again as you pulled up to a stoplight. You looked for any place that you could pull over and sleep a few hours before pushing on.

You're not sure where you were going to stop, but when you did, when you decided to, you'd make that place home. On the left was a convenience store with a simple help-wanted sign hanging under the neon Miller light sign that announced they were open.

You considered stopping for a cup of lukewarm coffee and maybe asking about the job. Maybe. You saw an old man, and hold up his hand towards you as he passed in front of your car on its way to the store. You nodded, indicating that you were in no particular hurry, and you looked in the direction the man had come. Just as the light shifted to green, you saw it.

The house was off to your right again. 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 wikia.com and are protected by a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved unless otherwise stated.