Creepy - Day 7 - The Smiling Door & Cutter

Episode Date: October 7, 2024

The Smiling Door***https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/***Cutter***Written by: Cyndi Gradel 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.

Now. 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. It's midnight, it's October, and that means KREP is on the air

and ready to guide you through this most magical time of year. It's day seven of the 31 days of horror, the time of cool winds, falling leaves, costumes, and pumpkins, when the veil between what we know and what we will never understand is the thinnest and the darkness that creeps out of the shadows is free to play. You're listening to KREP, and I'm your host, The Creep. You may have heard me mention last night there's been some odd things happening behind the scenes,

and without getting too deep into how the sausage is made, rest assured that we are doing our best to keep things on track. In the meantime, I'd like to issue a welcome to some new listeners and supporters of the show to join our ever-going list of the damned. Tiffany Shooter, Chris Chandler, Linda, Nicole Wartooth, Luhronda Stuckman, Andrew, Angela Campbell, and Breaker O'Day. Let's kick things off with. That's not the question what exactly that was. He said let's focus on something we can grin about.

And according to this listener, he's... He knows of a place where he grew up that had a smiling door. I think we all fall down rabbit holes for one reason or another. Blame YouTube or Google or whatever for their algorithm trying to show you more things you appear to be interested in if you want to. But the reason comes from somewhere. Like when I got really into Warhammer 40K because I saw Henry Cavill talking about it during some Superman press junket.

I have absolutely no interest in role-playing games or table-top games or whatever they're called, but I got curious about this thing that Superman wanted to do more than talk to actual people. I think a lot of us can relate to that one. So I spent a few months watching videos and reading up on the lore. It's interesting stuff. Not enough for me to want to draw money on the 100-plus novels, figurines, and all the other stuff associated with the game. but it's kind of fun mythology to wait into. That's just an example.

But I've done similar with plenty other things, especially back during quarantine. My point is, there's a reason we look for some information. It could be passing curiosity, or there could be a personal connection. For example, about 2,300 children are reported missing every single day in the United States. That's over 800,000 a year.

Pretty startling fact, huh? And by itself, the number is incredibly sad and scary. Now, that doesn't actually account for how many are found safe, because why share a smaller number if you want people to click on your link, right? One database showed that Oklahoma had the highest percentage of missing people at 16 per 100,000 residents. Massachusetts has the lowest at 2.7 per 100,000. Between May 2nd and May 14th this year, Cleveland, Ohio reported a staggering 27 children missing. Last year, 15,55 children were reported missing in Ohio alone, and of that, 14,940 were retrieved by the end of the year.

8,525 of those cases were children running away from home. and only five. Yes, five of the 15,000 in change were abducted by strangers. You probably know of a famous abduction case from when you were young. Go back to the Lindberg baby or Patty Hurst, who was 19 at the time, but still. Or more recent cases like Elizabeth Smart, Jacob Wetterling or Amber Renee Hagerman, where the term Amber Ler came from. Maybe it's someone you knew, or maybe, like a lot of us,

it was someone our parents heard about on the news and made us scared about how similar the circumstances were to how we lived. I heard the same thing when I was nine or ten, like a lot of my classmates, but that didn't really stop us from being kids. Sure, we were scared of getting kidnapped or killed, but what does that really mean to a kid? And yeah, the fact that our town of just over 5,000 people had 15 kids disappear the summer before fourth grade started definitely played a big role in their concern and warnings. But it didn't sink in on me as much as they wanted. Their stranger danger talk fell on deaf ears. Their warnings about windowless vans and strangers driving around the streets at night made little difference to me and my friends.

but that's to be expected given that we knew how those 15 kids disappeared. I don't know if every town has that house or if it's just something that movies have made us think, but my town definitely had that house. The one kids told ghost stories about, the one our parents told us to avoid, the house that stood there, empty, unused, unsold, for some reason, never torn down, Just a relic turned fodder for big imaginations.

The story I'd heard was that the house grants wishes. Sounds like a strange thing for a big old empty house to do, but that's how we heard it. If you were brave enough to go up to the door, open it, and whisper inside your wish, you'd hear the house whisper back. The catch was the house either granted your wish or cursory. you to death. And like most kids' stories, there was a whole lot of yada, yada, yada happening to fill out the tall tale. The whole part of the story that never changed was that you had to open the

front door, whisper inside, and wait for a response. The rest of the stories devolved into their own versions of Wishmaster and Nightmare and Elm Street. As we all learn by adulthood, reality is a hell of a lot scarier than fiction. It was October. Of course it was. The prime time to scare the shit out of each other.

As kids, that largely consisted of posturing, telling each other we were too chicken shit to do whatever. Things escalated. Maybe some wrestling was involved before the house was mentioned. We didn't have a name for it. There's no name on the mailbox and no one remembered the last time anyone had lived there. so it didn't have a spooky moniker. It was just the house. If you said the house, we knew what you meant.

Simple. For the sake of self-preservation, I can't tell you my friend's names. I don't even want to use pseudonyms because of the potential legal issues. There's no statute of limitations on kidnapping. And, well, I don't truly believe that's what it is. That's what the police are currently calling it. And even if they knew the truth, they wouldn't call it anything else. For the sake of the story, I'll refer to my friends as one and two.

I won't mince words. I'm alive because I went last. Because I saw them go first, how they reacted. The fear in their eyes when they realized that the game wasn't the game and what that meant. One walked up to the door with all the confidence in the world, so ready to prove the rest of us cowards, that we were stupid for even mentioning the house, or that there was anything more to it than rot, mold, and tetanus hazards.

We watched them go up to the door, knock, maybe a little softer than you'd think from the bravado that preceded it, and try the doorknob. Every step in the process got a little slower, at the point that it was almost like one was afraid the doorknob would be burning hot. It wasn't, and the door opened quietly, as if the hinges had been the only part of the house to be maintained. I couldn't hear what they whispered, and I wouldn't have thought they said anything at all, if not for the drained look on their face a few seconds later.

They just stared back at us with this look like, like they were never going to see us again, and wanted to remember our faces. The walk back to us was like a funeral procession for one. Their head was down and they barely made motion toward the two of us as they passed. One just kept on walking, muttering something like, I have to do something. Here's a part of the story where people should say, nope, I'm out. I should have.

I'm the person who, at least in my own mind, would have pieced out and said hell no. We hadn't heard or seen anything to make us think that one was doing anything more than messing with us. Yet at the same time, everything told us that it was wrong. But we were kids. We were as afraid of being laughed at and left out as we were of any concept of physical harm. There was no consequence greater than being on the outside. I knew it. Two knew it too.

because they walked up to the door with a sort of chuckle, seeing one was overreacting. I'm sure the words were filled with doubt, but that doesn't really matter anymore, does it? But the same thing followed as it had the first time. Two's motions might as well have been in lockstep with one. The hesitation, the doubt, then the look of abject fear as they walked from that empty doorway,

passing me and saying, I have to do something. I stood there and watched him walk away. I remember feeling embarrassed and anxious. I felt so alone in that moment. I looked at the house, then back in the direction my friends had gone, and I legitimately didn't know what to do. Was it all a gag?

Had they planned it out in advance to mess with me, waiting around the corner to have a laugh? Or worse, had they circled around and went back to the house, Were they waiting inside to jump out and scare me as soon as I opened the door? That had to be it. In my 10-year-old mind, there couldn't be another answer. Even at an age where every ghost story was real, every creaking floorboard was a monster,

where I refused to sleep with my feet out from under the covers. It had to be a joke, but what if it wasn't? I resolved to go to the house, to do the routine, to see there was nothing to be seen and cover my bases. I'd be ready in case they jumped out, prepared to laugh at them in return. And if it wasn't that, at least I went up to the house against all signs

that was a bad idea. When the door creaked open, no one jumped out. No one said anything. I stood there staring into the darkness, trying to make my eyes adjust to see inside. but it was like the light failed at the doorframe. I didn't have a wish.

It never occurred to me to have a wish. Not a real wish anyway. More than a Nintendo game or a new puppy. Something real that I wanted more than anything, but I didn't have any of that. None that I could remember at the moment. And I know that that one brief moment, absent of want, saved my life.

Well, it damned my friends. Instead of whispering in my innermost desire, all I said was, hello? There was a long pause because I didn't say anything else, and it was just an empty old house, right? Until it wasn't. There was a whisper. Just a whisper.

It wasn't from my friends. It was deep, pained, something I felt in my feet in the base of my spine, freezing me in place. I couldn't even wiggle my fingers, all because something inside that house whispered back. Out of the darkness, I saw the source of the whisper. If I weren't in front of that door, I'd have no idea how big it was. There'd be nothing for scale. I couldn't even see all of it, just the bottom half of its face. A pointed nose, a long, sharp chin, and a grinning mouth full of rotten teeth appeared in the doorway.

But again, just the bottom half. And even that filled what must have been the top three or four feet of the doorway. Then the fingers. Bigger around than baseball bats. Four on each side snaked out and curled around the outside. as if positioned to pull its gigantic head through. There was no way it could fit through the opening. This giant, this monster would have had to have been curled up inside the doorway.

It was impossibly big. Impossibly. I tried to figure it out once and found out that the average person's head is about 18 to 20 centimeters. And if you compare that against the average height, a person is 7.5.000. is 7.5 heads tall. And if I only saw half that things had, at a minimum, it must have been well over 40 feet tall should it ever emerge from the house.

But it never did. At least not for me. It just stayed there, smiling at me, this horrible smile. I still wake up seeing some nights. Like it knew me. Like it knew what I was going to do with my entire life. and the lives of my children and grandchildren.

That it hadn't crawled into the house, but the house had been built around it, like a cage or a prison, a demonic genie in a two-story, hundred-year-old condemned bottle. Then the face pulled away from the doorway until it was swallowed by the darkness again. The fingers slowly withdrew as well

until I was left alone. I never went back to that house, and I never saw my friends again. There were rumors, of course. People saying they saw a middle-aged white male driving slowly through neighborhoods or rumors about their parents getting into fights. Some even claiming drugs were involved. There was one person who claimed to have seen one on the day they disappeared, and that they'd been walking back toward the house with a blank look on their face.

All I know is that within days of their disappearing, One's brother came home from prison. His sentence suddenly overturned. And 2's mom was told that the breast cancer she'd been diagnosed with just a week prior was suddenly gone, chalking it up to mixed-up test results. But I know better. I know what they wished for without them telling me. I think that look on their faces was because they knew what it was going to be. cost to have those things, and at 10 years old they would do anything to get them.

There was no such thing as consequences. The police did claim to have gone and checked the house to follow up, but said there was nothing there, which means they didn't go. They couldn't have missed that thing. If anything, they saw it and wanted to forget it as soon as they could. I know that's how I felt. So when the parents in my current neighborhood started getting all uptight about safety and claiming the world is going to hell or whatever, I know damn well that there's worse things out there.

Things that'll make your every dream come true with a smile. You just have to be willing to give up more than you planned in exchange. And now a word from our sponsors. Sounds to me like we're going to need someone to come look at the old pipes in this building. Well, I check in with our maintenance crew. Let's take a call. Caller, you're on the air with K-R-E-P and The Creep. Hello? Hello, caller.

Where am I? Physically, mentally, or spiritually. Um, any of those. I don't understand. Well, right now, you're on the air with the creep. Sounds to me like you have something to tell me. Just one word. Cutter. I turn off the porch light

when the last group of trick-or-treaters makes it to the bottom step. I didn't run out of candy this year, and I managed to save a bag of snickers for myself. I settle in on my sofa and pop open to Dr. Pepper. My TV is on, waiting for me to choose a streaming service. I scroll past all the usual ones until I get to the new one. Bold red letter spell, Cutter. on the black background.

I click on the icon and only one movie choice pops up on screen. I was expecting a list of the classics like Friday the 13th and Halloween. Instead, there's a thumbnail with simple black font over an orange screen that says, Choose Your Nightmare. I click on it and the screen splits into four sections. The top left is labeled Slasher with an image of a gleaming butcher's knife. The next is zombies. The lower left is spiders, and the final quarter has an image of a mushroom cloud and says,

End of Days. I move the arrow until the slasher screen is highlighted. It's the obvious choice for Halloween night. I click enter and the screen goes completely black for almost a full minute. I'm just about to click again when the music starts playing. It's an 80s synthesized sound that resembles the theme of the movie Halloween. I sit back on the sofa and toss another mini-snickers into my mouth. The movie opens up in a backyard at night.

The view is shaky, found footage style. It's the point of view of someone who's hiding in the bushes. The camera moves past patio furniture and a fire pit, then focuses on a window on the first floor of the house. There's a woman standing at a kitchen counter, chopping vegetables, and watching something on a small TV screen. The music gets more intense, and the camera zooms in on the woman. She's tall with dark hair in her mid-40s.

The actress looks familiar, but I can't think of her name. The kitchen looks familiar too, not like mine, but like one I've been in before. I press pause and wait for the cast info to pop up, but it never does. There's no icons or anything to click on for more information about the movie, not even an option for subtitles. I press play again. I'm sure her name will come to me. The stalker moves away from the window

to a set of stairs on the side of the house that lead to a sliding glass door. He tries the handle, but it's locked. He uses a gloved hand to break one of the windows and slides his hand inside to open the door. We cut to the woman in the kitchen who pauses to look in the direction of the sound. I laugh when she calls out.

Hello? This movie is following the slasher pattern step by step. I can't complain, though. This is why I love slasher's. You know what's coming, but it's still exciting to watch it happen. The actress goes back to chopping vegetables, and that's when it finally hits me. She looks just like my neighbor, Dina.

The kitchen is almost identical to hers, too. Even the house looks similar, although the one on screen seems a bit larger. I haven't been over there in a while. Dina and her husband are one of those couples who throw mixers and force everyone to play those stupid trivia games where you have to know a lot about pop culture and celebrities. I always end up making an excuse to leave early. The woman on screen keeps with the horror movie rules by calling out that

It isn't funny, before heading into the dark room to investigate the noise. The music intensifies, leading up to the ultimate confrontation between the masked killer and the victim. Just when she spots the broken back door, the killer plunges the knife into her gut. The camera zooms in on her face while she lets out a shrill scream that blasts my speakers. A noise from my backyard makes me press mute on the remote. A tiny prickle of fear creeps in, the kind that happens when you live alone and hear a noise that you didn't make. A car rolls past and I catch a few lines of a song I don't recognize. I press the volume back up on the TV.

The victim scrambles away from her attacker, leaving a red smear on the kitchen wall. The stalker catches up to her and stabs her again. She screams, and the camera zooms in on the bloods. knife. I hear another sound and mute the TV again. The sound is coming in through the windows in my sunroom. My mind imagines monsters lurking in the shadows, and I really don't want to get up to investigate. A loud scream sends me into an upright position. It's coming from my neighbor's house. I turn on the light on the side table next to the sofa. The movie is still playing, and the bloody scene looks even more disturbing without sound. I turn on every light on my way to the kitchen.

What does it feel as if light will make me safer? If someone is wanting to kill me, they're going to kill me regardless of how many lights I've turned on. The sunroom is just off my kitchen and is mostly filled with houseplants. Their leaves are projecting creepy shadows on the wall that I try not to look at. I take a deep breath and peek through the window into my neighbor's backyard. The area is completely dark, except for the glow from the solar lights on the steps of her deck. Shadows move behind the blinds in her kitchen, but I can't see the faces of the people inside. A rush of cool air fills the room with the scent of fireplaces and dried leaves. A few cars pass by in front, the sound of the sound.

is muffled by the time it reaches the backyard. Everything goes quiet again, except for the hum of my refrigerator. I close the window and go back to the living room. I leave all the lights on, of course. You can never be too sure. Back to the movie. I can't quite admit that I'm scared, so instead I convince myself that I'm just bored with the slasher. I move the arrow over to the screen later.

and press enter. The screen goes completely black again, and it takes almost a full minute for the movie to begin. The opening shot is of the same woman from the slasher. I don't know if this is going to be four sections of one movie, or if the actress is doing four entirely separate films. The camera zooms in. She's on the kitchen floor and a pool of blood.

The cabinets around her are ruined by dark red splatters. The horrific stab wounds on the woman's chest are still oozing blood onto the marble tile. Her right eye twitches and then pops open. A cloudy iris stares right into the camera. Her upper body smoothly bends into a seated position. The wounds made by the killer are having no effect on her at all. The woman stands up and turns her head. head side to side, getting acquainted with her newly dead body. Her neck makes a squishy,

crunching sound when she moves it. I hope she's going to be one of those fast-moving 28 days later zombies. Those are my favorite kind. Honey! A male voice off-screen calls out to her. He appears in the doorway and casually asks if she's finished making the salad. She lunges at him and ends up with her legs wrapped around his body, with her face inches away from his. The pose would almost look romantic if it weren't for the spray of blood that erupts when she sings her teeth into his face.

He tries to push her off of him, but she is clamped on tight, biting off and eating pieces of his face. He collapses to the floor, making the most hideous sounds, while she devours the last few bits of his cheek. The woman, or now the zombie, gets up and leaves the room.

The camera doesn't follow her. It stays in the same position pointed at the man. I think maybe we're waiting because he's going to turn, but several minutes pass with nothing happening. It's way too long for it to be building dramatic tension. I press fast forward on the movie and at least five more minutes go by without the man getting up. I fast forward again.

but it's still the same scene. I press pause. Maybe I should have just watched one of the classics instead of trying out this new channel. I was really excited about the idea of another all-horror outlet because it seems like the channels I already have are all running the same old things. Cutter was supposed to be something different

with not just the classics but also indie movies that never made it to the theater. I thought it was going to have a whole, whole slate of films that I haven't seen before. But it seems like all they have is this strange movie. Now that I think about it, it was just a short email with the link that got me to sign up with them last week. I assumed they got my email from one of the horror cons I've attended. It didn't occur to me until just now that I didn't see them advertised anywhere else. I pick up my phone and Google Cutter. The first thing that pops up are a bunch of ads for the bug spray of the same name.

After that, a few different companies ranging from golf equipment to computer software. I add the word streaming, but that leads nowhere. My stomach begins to do little flips, and the silence in the room is making me nervous. I hit the music icon on my phone and press play on the first playlist that pops up. The Allman Brothers. The TV is still paused on the shot of the dead man on the kitchen floor. I press the back button, and it reverts to the screen that's split into four. Part of me wants to exit out and watch something else. But I'm curious about this odd movie that seems more like an experimental film than a regular horror movie. I hear something in the front of the house. A breeze blows in through the window along with a strange, pungent smell.

I lower the music on my phone and go to the front door. I open the main door but keep the screen door locked. A woman is standing next to the bushes that separate my yard from the sidewalk. She's watching an animal on the ground beneath one of the shrubs, a possum or a rabbit maybe. Hello? Her head turns toward the sound of my voice. Within seconds, she's bolting up the walkway to my porch. I barely have time to slam my door closed before she crashes into it. I look through the beveled glass and recognize my neighbor, Dina, despite the blood in viscera covering her face.

She's wearing the same clothes as the actress in the movie, and her chest has the same awful stab wounds. It finally hits me what this is. Everything looks so real, and she's not breaking character at all. I look behind her to see if her husband is playing along. He's not by the bushes, and the sidewalk and street are empty. Whatever animal that was there earlier is gone now. The blood and bits on her face look so real. Everything is wet and glistening, and I swear I can smell it through my living room windows. I hesitate to open the door. Something is just off about all of this.

I'm not that close with these people. They must have created that link and then somehow when I clicked on it, I ended up watching a live stream from their kitchen. This is a pretty elaborate prank, even for someone like me who loves Halloween. Okay, you can stop now. I say through the glass. I feel a bit awkward, but I honestly don't want to hang out with them right now.

Do people still do Halloween pranks in their 40s? None of this is funny, and now they're just dragging it out too long. Dina stares at me through the glass. Her eyes are more disturbing in person than they were on the screen, and the sound she's making is disgusting. It's as if the skin in her throat is shredded. and she's pushing air through the flaps while trying to speak. That was pretty clever with the live stream, I say.

Her head jerks at the sound of my voice. She keeps making the noise, and her body is twitching like she's not quite in control of it. She presses up against my screen door and claws at it until a hole appears in the center. Chunks of her shredded fingers remain embedded in the torn mesh when she pulls away. What the fuck are you?

doing? I shout. She rips the remainder of the screen away from the door and begins clawing at the glass window in my front door. Her dead eyes stare straight ahead, showing no sign of pain from the damage to her hands. This is not a prank. She must be high on something. I run to the living room, slam the window shut and lock them. She follows the sound and runs across my porch to meet me. Her bloody palms slap against the glass and leave ugly red smears. I can't believe what I'm seeing. Dina is a normal middle-aged woman who watches Bridgerton and has a book club. I would have never imagined her doing drugs this hard.

Then something too unbelievable hits me. And my mind immediately fights to push it back. I look at the TV. The movie is still in the split screen. The first two chapters are playing out in real life. I feel ridiculous even thinking it. But then I look over at Dina slamming herself against my window. Her face is even more hideous in the harsh glow of my porch light.

Her eyes have collapsed into their sockets, and the skin on her face is drooping off the bone. I don't know what kind of drugs could do that. Honestly, I don't know how she can be alive. right now. I back away from the windows, hoping she isn't strong enough to shatter the glass. Her head turns, as if she's trying to sense where I'm at. I try to stay still, so she can't track me. The volume flares to the highest setting on the TV. The movie advances on its own to the next section, the one labeled Spiders. I have a sinking feeling about what's about to happen next. Even though I know,

Oh, it can't be possible. I scrambled to the sofa to find the remote, but it's not underneath any of the pillows. A sharp pinch on my thumb makes me pull my hand out and jump back. Two red puncture wounds are already swelling up at the base of my thumb. My heart speeds up enough to make me lightheaded. Did I take something? Maybe someone laced the candy I ate, and now I'm just having a very long hallucination. The sickening clatter of legs scurrying and fangs clicking is blaring out of the television speaker.

I pressed my hands against my ears and look around for the remote. I drop down to the floor and point the flashlight in my phone at the dark space underneath the sofa. Dozens of shiny black eyes are reflected back to me. My phone slips from my hand and crashes to the floor. The sofa begins to move. The dark blue fabric bulges and burst open from the pillows to the armrests. Spiny black legs creep out of the openings and scale the walls of my living room. My stomach empties the Snickers bars and Dr. Pepper from earlier.

By the time I think to run towards the kitchen, the spiders have already blanketed the floor around me. I step on a few of them when they brush against my feet, but there are too many for me to crush them all. I feel a tickle on my neck and slap a tarantula across the room. A tortured scream draws my attention back to the TV. A woman is sprawled on the floor with a horde of spiders attacking her. Her face is covered in puncture wounds that have turned her into an unrecognizable mess. I turn away while my stomach heaves. The living room floor is quickly turning from honey-colored oak

to a carpet of crawling horror. Some of them are tiny enough to squish, while others are as big as the palm of my hand. Any escape at this point would mean stepping through layers of spiders. Something I am not prepared to do. I look back to the windows where Dina is still clawing at the glass. Her husband is next to her now, digging into the wooden casings around the edges.

The two of them are working together to try to get to me. Her husband's face is missing the flesh that Dina ripped away from it earlier. All of his teeth are visible, and the bottom jawline moves up and down every time he makes a sound. I can't believe I'm saying it, but they really do look the way zombies look in the movies. And the sounds they're making, I don't even have the words to describe them. It's not human. A small hole forms in the glass, and Dina forces it. an arm through it. The shards slice right through her skin, but it doesn't slow her down.

She shoves her face into the hole, making it even bigger. The glass is going to give way any second now. I won't have time to make it to the front door. I spin around, hoping to take a shot at running through the spiders to get to the kitchen. My foot catches on the table and I fall on top of a mountain of hungry arachnids. They attack immediately. I feel. feel them in my hair, on my neck, even climbing inside my shirt. I shake myself violently, punching and clawing at my entire body to remove the spiders. Fiery bite wounds heat up all across my arms and legs. Glass breaks behind me and I can tell that Dina and her husband are forcing their way through the window. I grab the coffee table and pull myself up to my knees. I need

something I can use as a weapon. The bowl of candy is plastic, not much good. I grab a hardcover copy of I was a teenage slasher and start smashing as many spiders as I can. My skin is burning. I don't know how many times I've been bitten, but I can feel the venom numbing my hands and my feet. My stomach is stretched into knots,

and I'm fighting off nausea from all the bites. I spot the remote next to the bowl of candy. How did I miss it before? I press pause, and the movie freezes on a shot of hundreds of spiders covering the walls of a room. I hoped that the spiders in my living room would freeze too, but they keep multiplying and crawling into every space. The window finally collapses and the glass shatters into tiny pieces. Dina squeezes through it and stumbles into my living room. She disrupts piles of hungry spiders, but they show no interest in her.

her dead flesh. I pressed the back button on the remote to get to the main menu. I keep swatting at the spiders on me, but there are too many to get rid of them all. The remote nearly disappears underneath the glove of bugs coating my hand. I move the arrow over to the end of day's menu and press enter. Bright orange light turns the room into a summer day. A huge explosion erupts in the distance. There's a few seconds to lay before the effects of the blast reach my house.

The heat is immediate. Spiders drop from the walls and crumple into piles of dust. The walls rattle violently, sending clouds of plastered dust through crevices into the smoky air. I pray that this works, and if I'm right, everything will reset. I press fast forward several times and the movie plays at four times the normal speed. Tunes of ceiling fall down and pin me to the floor. Dina is just a few feet away from me, trapped underneath an overturned bookcase. She stretches a crumpled hand in my direction.

Something is still driving her to claw her way to me. The ground rumbles, and I'm afraid the whole house is going to collapse. Finally, the credits begin to roll across the screen, and I wait for the end of this bizarre story. that I somehow stepped into. It feels like hours until the house stops shaking. Clouds of dust and smoke linger, making it hard to see anything around me.

When the dust finally settles, I am alone again. Dina has disappeared and the spiders are gone too. The walls in the ceiling begin to reshape themselves until everything in the room goes back to the way it was. It's over. When the movie ended, so did whatever evil brought the whole thing to life in the first place. My living room is quiet.

The TV is a black screen that sends my reflection right back to me when I stare at it. I feel the need to delete the cutter app immediately, so nothing like this could ever happen again. Something on the TV screen catches my eye. My reflection looks strange. I look closer, maybe the lights are playing tricks on me. I'm inches from the screen, staring at the image that should be me. The woman's face is stretched longer than a face should be, and the skin is a chalky white glow that looks like costume paint.

Her eyes are black orbs that are sunken deep into her skull. I press random buttons on the remote, but the screen remains black with the woman in the screen. the center, staring out at me. Is that? Bloody Mary? Her head jerks to an unnatural angle at the sound of her name. She tilts forward, testing the possibility of climbing out of her world and into mine. Her face morphs into a frightening mask with layers of razor-sharp teeth. I plead my case, shouting at her and at the universe that this isn't fair. I only said her. I only said her. her name once. She shouldn't have been conjured. My words don't slow her down at all. She crab walks out

of the TV like Samara and rises into a towering stance above me. My body shudders with rage, not at this thing, but at myself. I forgot one of the most important rules in horror. Never assume the killer is dead. Her mouth opens to release a scratchy growl like the ghost in the grudge. Her pointy yellow nails dig into the soft skin of my neck. I grip her wrist to try to pry her hands away, but her flesh is cold and granite hard like something that has been dead for a very long time. It's not supposed to be like this.

I'm the main character and I survived the movie. I'm supposed to live. My anger turns to panic. This is really happening. There are no bonus scenes, no chance for a last-minute rescue by someone who we thought was dead but was really just hiding somewhere, waiting for their heroic moment. The world begins to fade, and I know that I am taking my last breaths. My thoughts are scattered. but one thing pushes its way to the front.

I realized that I forgot another very important rule in horror. Maybe the most important one of all. Anyone can die. Thank you, caller. Looks like that's going to be it for our signal today. Regardless, this is the creep, and you're listening to KREP, today, tomorrow, and forever. For more information on this podcast, including how to submit your own story for consideration, please visit Creepypod.com.

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