Creepy - Father Death

Episode Date: January 15, 2024

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Listener discretion is advised. Creepy presents Father Death. Written by Chris Castle. I never learned his real name. Never asked, never cared, and he never volunteered it. To his face, like I always did with men of his generation. I called him sir. And with my friends, on the fleeting occasions we mentioned the man with the house beneath the bridge trestle.

I called him Father Death. And that house? My God. Amid a maze of old tires and derelict mattresses. Among the casually lethal knots of homeless, dope-sick addicts casting off their sour and grimy smells. The house was a tiny one-room cottage, not much bigger than a tool shed. It was backed with a huge crumbling concrete pylon, and it had neither electricity nor plumbing. Yet father-death maintained it immaculately, with a garden in front where he grew collards and tomatoes,

a miniature picket fence draped with brilliant roses, and, maybe most striking of all, in a land where everything wore graffiti, tags or the flakes and peals and neglect. His tiny house was untouched by the vandals and painted brilliant white. I discovered Father Death's house one balmy, seductive early autumn afternoon when I was 14. One of the many days I skipped classes at Ruby Bridges Academy. I love to trot down to the river and hang around with the older dudes who fished for

carp and walleye and drank from paper bags and generally had already lived so much. much life that they preferred to spend the rest of it casting reels into murky river water. I've always had a feel for these edge people, more than the rest of my crew. And I love listening to them chat and bullshit, and I recognize style behind their mutilated spirits and resilient strengths. On that particular day, I took a different path along the river course, wandering near a low wall that had once served some now-forgotten purpose, and been neglected so long that trees grew right through the concrete.

A few businesses that had ever existed here closed before I was born, and remained as red-brick husks with names of what they'd been entirely faded away. Where the wall ended, a pile of railroad ties turned gray and festooned and silvery spiderwebs, and behind this stood Father Death's house. except that it didn't stand so much as it nestled and banked. Such a breath of wholesomeness amid the self-perpetuating pathology of the city was even stranger than the witch's gingerbread hut in that savage storybook forest. And like Hansel, I stepped near and touched it to see if it was even real.

It was. I ran my finger along the miniature picket fence. the delicate latch on the gate. I squatted by the garden where fat red tomatoes hung obediently, and leafy beads planted seemed to be seeping gently into the ground. I stroked clapboards and felt the silky warmth of the paint in the morning sunlight. And when I tried to peer inside, I was startled to see Father Death standing on the other side of the window pane,

observing me with profound and silent intensity. but for the eyes, he was not remarkable. A cocoa-colored man with a neat white beard and tight white curls. He was dressed in a brown sweater and looked to me like a retired school teacher. But for his eyes, even through the window glass, they were unsettling and shone with something like cold green fire. It wasn't the expression, and it may not even have been the pale olive. hue, which was not only the same color as the river, but seemed somehow linked with sluggish

and placability, an ominous depth, where people swam and drowned, and sometimes their corpses were never found, and the gaze fell directly over me, because there was nobody else there, and I held it for as long as I could before I needed to turn and run, at which point a gnarled black finger came up in beckoning gesture. It struck me as neither threatening nor compulsory, and I could have run all the same, but I didn't. And in another moment I passed through the white door, without a lock or a bolt, and stood in the middle of a solitary, spotless room, not that there was much to spot up. There was a cot spread with a blanket, a small table and chair in a corner, incongruously, was a gigantic stuffed gorilla.

My eyes darted around, but his remained fixed. Sounding softly puzzled, he said, I thought I knew why you'd come out here, but now I think it's something else. Since I didn't know why myself, whether it was fate or coincidence or something more significant that had tugged me along the crumbled concrete wall. I sputtered dumbly. Why you think I was here? Because you knew that I could tell you things about your death, the circumstances.

I can do that, the reason, the hour. But that isn't what you want, is it? It wasn't. Of course not. Why would I want anyone to tell me that? Because someone can. No other reason, son. Knowing that I know and you don't,

it plagues certain people. It infests them. It gestates. It festers inside. If they don't take the information the first time around, they come again. Three times, sometimes four. four, but they always come back.

You will, too. But how? How can anybody know that? Remember, I was fourteen. Callow, credulous. I'd seen my share of life already, of course, by that age all of us from the projects had. Enough life to know that the world was filled with cold-blooded insanity, that crossed thresholds sooner than you could set them.

And that didn't even take into account the social chasm that lay just beyond our hood. The massive world-defining dynamics we had to learn to navigate one way or the other, or die in the attempt. The real world was indomitable. It was out there and waiting. Among the people who inhabited it, I assume that there might be folks who could foresee your death. Why not?

In truth, at that point, I was more intrigued with the mechanics than the possibility. So I repeated the question. How could you know? He approached me, resolutely entering my space. He took my head in his hands. He pressed his face close to mine and scrutinized me for a long, long time, as though he was after something deeper than my shaken expression,

something behind it. I was mesmerized. I looked back and saw eternity twinkling in the watery green. He released my head. Like that, he answered. I remained still, trembling slightly, otherwise inert. Did you see me die? I asked.

I did, he answered. There was a small, from Mike a table with a couple backless stools in the corner by the stuffed gorilla, and he indicated that I could, not necessarily that I should, sit down. But that's not what you came out here for, is that I know what you're after, son. I saw that too. What you came out here looking for today, yesterday and maybe tomorrow what's that

I answered an edge of defiance mingled with my interest it didn't seem to put him off in the slightest he said gently your father I was a small kid but I thought of myself

as intellectually powerful even then he had to be a special kind of broke to live in the projects and some of us came from haunting lineages. I hadn't seen my father since I was five. I certainly wasn't searching for him out here in the dust and degradation and desolation of edge city dumps. My father was long gone and not coming back. Of that, I was sure. He was dead or in jail, not to be found in these dark landscapes.

Not in the flesh, maybe, he said. In the essence. In the essence. You find some in this man, some in that, some in me, but you never find a single one complete with all the good and the bad, all the insignificance and omnipotence. You are here because your father disappeared, and there is no fear that consumes you more completely than fellow human beings disappearing, accounted for or not. because if your father can do it, on a whim, without a trace, maybe without even wanting to, so can you. Within this, there was so much truth that I couldn't listen anymore.

It took my breath away. I fled. I ran back to Ruby Bridges Academy. And after that, I went home to a dysfunctional incubator of neurosis and hopelessness and tried to keep myself from evaporating. I might have left it that way. Maybe forever. I'm not sure.

But everything changed with Alan and Marcus Hughes, a couple of my boys from 6E. They were urging kids who never did anything with a grasp or proportion, and they had no patience whatsoever. They were the sort of street tufts who succumb early to damage programming, who start fires for fun,

out of boredom, and simply flee when they get out of hand. To them, the humiliations and compromises the life had already offered a workable balm. Having the most bitches, stomping the most thugs, talking the most shit. They were my crew only by default. They lived across the hall from me, and also by default,

and became their leader, because I learned early to diffuse, certain life-altering situations beyond their violent instincts to do so. Thug life sounds good in rap songs, but in real-time survival, if the dude you accidentally bump into isn't packing. You might not care about catching an aggravated assault charge for beating you down with the tire iron. Instinctively, I knew how to dial those situations down, and they occasionally saw the value in that.

Not that they needed my temper cooling skills often. Alan. Alan was a year older than me, and twice as big. While Marcus, only 12, was already a bruising behemoth with more bulk than either us. In general, they both took cues from me, at least until I told them about the white cottage beneath the trestle, where Father Death claimed you could see your fate, detail by detail. In hindsight, I never should have mentioned it. Because once I did, we were off the bridge with nowhere to go but down. Naturally, they wanted to check it out.

Prudence was not their terrain. This was the sort of beast they liked to poke. The kind of cage into which they wanted to stick their hands. I couldn't dissuade them, although in the end I didn't even want to. As I said, at 14, I had no ability to be seen. skeptical of father death's claims. To imagine he might be a fraud, like the fortune tellers at the fair. I truly believed he had looked into my eyes and extracted details of my death.

And although I didn't want to hear about them, it was hard to mount a credible argument against the Hughes brothers' justifications for wanting to. If you know when the doom hand is coming, you can avoid it. You just plan on being somewhere else that day. saw the following morning, we skipped school and made the trek down the pock-marked road that ran along the riverbank. As we walked, Marcus, who had wanted to be a rap star since he was five, started off, hip-hop rhythms, and electric phrases about living large and slaughtering rivals.

Ellen, in his expansive pants, gold-framed tooth-fitted ball cap near Jordans, was similarly light-hearted, bobbing his head. head to his brother's beat, jostling me and thrown stones at the pheasins that have begun to repopulate these open places. They were of a like mind. This was a fun day trip. At the end, they were going to learn how and when they would die. But to watch them?

You'd think they were going to the state fair to ride the kamikaze and hit on girls. I suppose I had my own revelation about them that morning. and about the strange pyroclastic flow of fatalism that ran through my streets where death was not a predator lurking in the shadows, but another pesky companion on the life stroll. Somehow, I didn't feel this way, which made me an anomaly in the hood. And we walked by the painted crumbling wall, the shuttered shrimp shacked, the sumeric trees overgrowing everything.

I recognize that about myself for the first time ever. The Hughes brothers were intrinsically different creatures. They had no expectation of fruitful lives. And as such, any expository information about the end made their current images complete and whole. Amid the cycle of drugs and AIDS and omnipresent warfare, along with a general mission statement stating, if you want a last word in a violent place, you've got to be the most violent.

To them, the more complete the picture, the better. It was not my place to argue. I did, however, worry that their edges were too rough. When we approached the house beneath the trestle, I was overwhelmed with its pristine and isolated sense of beauty. It was ideal, an awesome beacon in the shadows. Instinctively, I put on my respectful face.

But I wasn't sure they had one. It didn't matter, of course. That was another lesson I learned that day. Father Death did not require a mollycoddling. He provided it. He had known that my needs were unique and individual, and he saw the same thing instantly when it came to the brothers. He came outside to greet us,

and his damp green eyes were wide with welcome. His people came back, as he had promised, and I was now his people. Alan and Marcus filled up nearly the entire interior space of the cottage. They were crude and inappropriate, cantering through a range of expression. pointing to the stuffed gorilla and laughing. That a guard dog pops?

Father Death replied. Depp belonged to my daughter, Lucinda. Fifty years gone this April. Cancer of the morrow. She was only five years old. So yes, the gorilla is a talisman. It makes my home holy. And people respect it

as an asylum, a place of sanctuary. That sapped some of the brothers' hulking comic hustle. With them, in Father Death's summation, there was no equivocation. He knew why they'd come. I know he knew, because when I started to explain it, he held up his crooked black finger to quiet me. No need, he said. I recognize these young brothers, rising spiritually toward manhood.

I know these works in progress. I've known them always, boasting and taunting their way through brief lives. I knew them before they were knit within their mother's wombs. I used to preach to them on street corners, but now I wait until they come to me. You can see the value in that, especially since in the end. They always come to me. I could see the value in that, indeed, and what he told me as well. And I understood that Father Death might have other equally appropriate names.

He could read through the swagger and pride and the chaos we all slid through, haplessly or by choice. Calling him Father Essence ultimately made more. sense to me. But today it was Father Death, because the Hughes brothers were not here to listen to Street Corner lectures about redirecting their lives. They wanted to read their stories in a single finished volume. When Alan said, You tell me how I'm going to die? Father Death replied, In technicolor, son, if that's what you want to hear, it was. So Father Death took Alan's big buffalo head between his tapered fingers, and like he'd done with me, focused rapidly on Alan's gaping glare, seeing far away, past the game, past the seething, past the now.

The things he saw were as personal as things could be, and Father Death said we might want to wait outside as he shared the vision. but Alan would have no part of it. No, that's cool. We blud. This is fun. Let him stay. Dad father death had Alan sit at the Formica table. Gave him a date and an hour that was less than a year away.

It would come down like this. Alan was sleeping with a girl called Luck. That was true, and everybody in the small white room knew it. even apparently father death. But what we didn't know, couldn't know, is that sometime in December she'd stare getting bold with Binkdog from another click. Apparently, the mutual girlfriend passes long sum of Alan's smack talk and on January 15th of the year coming up at 2.17 a.m. at a red light.

A Chevy blazer pulls up beside the car in which Alan is riding. and people inside opened fire with an oozy, hitting him four times in the chest and killing him instantly. Through the small window where I'd first seen father death, oblique September light filtered and briefly turned everything in the tiny whitewashed room into a golden dream scape. There was pure, unsullied silence. Then, far off, the sound of a tug on the river. Finally, Alan horsed out a guttural sigh and said, That's some shit there, huh, my brothers?

Luck gonna burn me. Suddenly Marcus and his silly break braids and canair yellow t-shirt from Spoonie G looked like he'd rather back out of the whole deal than take his turn at the formica table. I have no doubt that he'd have jumped at a chance to slip quietly from the pretty cottage and run back to Six E. lock himself in and spend the next 12 hours watching low-impact mind-melding TV shows. But he couldn't do it. That's not how street life works. Not how family dynamics work.

And Marcus knew he had an obligation to keep up with a challenge. To leap from one rooftop to the other if his brother did it first. To let an even bigger firecracker go off in his hand. I certainly didn't want to be there. I didn't want to hear the bones break or smell the blood, even in narration. It's why I hated to fight. The first sucker punch takes you unaware, but the second one you wait for, steal for, tremble over. And that's what we were doing as father death took Marcus' gigantic head between his nimble fingers and did the death watch.

as much as I cared about these mammoth intimidating babies and as little as I had envisioned for their futures. This was invading the most private space they had. This was rubbernecking at a car accident where they were the victims. You didn't want to look, but you did. And once you did, you never got the gore out of your head. Marcus got the Cliff Notes version. But that was fine.

Context wasn't needed. He had 15 years to live, but you got the impression they wouldn't be pleasant years. After Allen's murder, he hunts down Bink Dog and emulates him. Lands and state-run juvenile justice facility where, lacking filter or tether, he attacks and kills his supervisor. On turn in 21, he transferred to the prison in Bellamy Creek, where noon on May 4th, a decade and a half from now, he's beaten to death by a gang of inmates carrying socks filled with batteries.

My role in these brutal conclusions, if anything, lingered somewhere behind the cryptic green gaze of father death, and I suspected that the more significant it was, the less I wanted to know about it. For all I knew, I might not have. even live to see these big, sad boys die. As for the old black gentleman in the whitewashed cottage beneath the bridge trestle, I believed sincerely that what he said was what he saw.

Why he shared it with us, for the time being, alluded me. There was nothing more for us in the house, and I expected at least some introspective silence on the walk back. There was nothing but defiance and bravado. I remember that day, Alan blustered. I get that day tattooed on my forehead so I don't forget. January 15th. Do it, or I will.

You don't get taken out in a drive-by. I don't go to jail. I take the whole house with it so I don't forget. Changing the subject was useless, of course. I tried, even understanding that they'd be fixated first. a while. But I was hoping they wouldn't stumble across an obvious solution, which they shortly did. Of course.

Let's go find Bink Dog tonight and put a cap in his ass and be done with it. Let's take down that bitch luck to pay her back for something she ain't done yet. And instantaneously, that was their plan. Fortunately, as I mentioned, the Hughes brothers were jitterbugs without the organizational skills to arrange a milk run to 7-11, let alone a gang hit. So I tried to refocus their energy in a different direction. Maybe they've been given this information as a sacred and supernatural gift, perhaps directly from God.

Maybe it was a sign, and they could, in fact, change these timelines, not by blowing away bank dog, but by getting their shit together and becoming productive people who would neither find themselves writing in hoopties at two in the morning nor killing guards at PT Riley Boys Training School. I don't know if I myself believed that one could change what was preordained. But for me, these strange encounters were bookended by the idea that my own fate might also be in some cosmic balance. And they became my wake-up dispensation. My minimal obligation seemed clear, and going forward, I began to apply myself.

I stopped taking afternoons off to shoot Breeze with their elix and instead spent them inside classrooms paying attention. I cracked the books and found teachers willing to put an extra time after school to drag me back up to speed. An upshot to this obviously was that I spent less time with boys than six E. And by January, when I was scholastically solvent, I hardly saw him at all. They'd fallen in with other homes. Meas in the meantime.

Meaner kids. Scary kids. Sorted kids who shot the eyes out of rivals and pretty much played for keeps. I'd been their leader by default. And now they had a leader by predilection. I hadn't been back to see Father Death in those months, but neither had I forgotten about him.

And now, with the date he'd given for Allen's end approaching, I felt a tug of duty, since I had instigated things in the first place by having opened my mouth. I caught Alan in the dingy hall at Christmas time. And again I knew his Eve, when he nodded at me with a quizzical smirk. Like he'd processed that morning by the bridge trestle so long ago that it was non-existent in his current world. The night before the night, though,

I saw him in Popeyes with the girl Luck who was supposed to orchestrate the drive-by, and I felt like a trifling punk for giving it a final goal. But he wrapped his arm around me, took me aside and assured me that it was well under control. Look cool, he said. That old cat in the White House scamelama for sure, but just to be safe, don't worry. I'm taking her to Chicago for a few days. We'll even in a night and it's all going to blow over. You'll see.

I even went so far as to knock on the door of 6E on the night of the night. The big, bleary Marcus assured me that his brother had indeed gone to Chicago for the weekend. And I slept a little easier. At least until 4 in the morning when their mother woke up the whole sixth floor with her screaming. At the funeral, I learned that the whole thing had been a set up, was luck pretending to get a call in Chicago saying her mother was ill. Alan had fallen for it and rushed her home and paid the price for dropping his guard. And now the rules of war were clear.

And Marcus, 13, an explosive with rage beyond his years, beyond his coping skills, was not to be restrained by me, by his mother, by the handful of people who knew what was street code inevitable and knew it without a mystic and a whitewashed cottage by the British Trust. and the rest of the story played out exactly as father death said it would. Even the part about me coming back in the end to hear him tell me about my death. It was many, many years later, however, decades after Marcus was beaten to death in Bellamy Creek correctional facility.

By then, I was on the tail end of a reasonably wholesome life. I'd married a decent young lady from the neighborhood and her kids. kids were grown and moved on. She'd passed in March, and I was living alone in the brick house on Outer Drive we'd shared for 40 years. I'd gone being from a wiry young scholar to an old dude with ragged teeth and a punch, but I'd retired from the City Water Department with a pension and was reasonably content with how I'd played my cards.

I had no doubt that my death, however it was to come, would not be attended by me. any regrets. Still, I was knagged with knowledge that father death could fill in the blanks. Blanks that, for a multitude of reasons, finally interested me. Back on that warm September morning, he phrased it perfectly. For these intervening years, it had gestated within me. In the meantime, I'd grown comfortable enough in my own skin that nothing. thing he'd say held any particularly dread to me.

But I was getting on, and now, like Alan and Marcus had all those years earlier, I saw some personal, private value in reading my biography complete. So on another bright September morning, when many things had changed and all things remained unchangeable, I made the trip again, down by the low concrete wall, out into the barren terrain beneath the bridge. Common sense told me that Father Death was dead himself by then. They couldn't have survived all these years. He'd been an old man when I was an adolescent. But nothing about Father Death. Not the miniature house, not the picket fence, not the clairvoyance, not the luminous river green eyes set like gems into a coal-black facade operated by reason.

None of it was chartered in logic and none of it followed prescription. except for his omens. So I was not the least bit doubtful that I'd find him there, at his window waiting for my arrival, which he was. Neither did I have to remind him who I was. He remembered me immediately and nodded at the notion that he'd been expecting me. Tomorrow, if not today, or in another month, if not then,

or the following month. He received me with respect and civility in the small pristine room with the cot and the Formica table and Lucinda's stuffed gorilla. This time we talked in grown-up terms, about the years sandwich between this visit and the last, about all the fatherless brothers and motherless sons who turned up in the interim, looking for various bits of wisdom. But those who wanted to know their fates were told, either on the spot or later when they changed their minds, Those who'd wanted to know something more complex about surviving life, like I had, they'd been given the insight of his lofty overview.

We talked about young bloods like Marcus and Alan Hughes, trying to breast the world of cultural disconnects, of a vulgar ideology of alien nation. And most of all, how faith and silly dreams can overshadow a sane view of most situations. These were the identical challenges I'd faced. The same ones my sons have been embraced to expect when they were still in pamper's, in which they'd overcome as efficiently as I had.

They were both successful, professional men. Many of the kids who'd found father death like the Hughes brothers, of course, they'd remained defiantly unaltered, scarred and scowling, and it succumbed early to the shit storm. but not all of them. I was living proof. So the conversation was long and convoluted, and it lasted all day. And in the last part of the afternoon, when the sun made sharp savage slashes in the sky,

I was ready to know. And this time, when Father Death took my face between his nimble black fingers, my head was thatched with thin gray tufts. I sensed it was ritual. He remembered what he'd seen the first time, and indeed it proved to be so, but there was more. I returned the scrutiny, looking deep into the translucent green eyes of father death, this time from the perspective of a man who'd seen his own share of tragedy and triumph, and what I saw amazed me, but in the end, it didn't surprise me.

afterward we did not take seats at the fermica table father death led me through a small rear door into a patch along behind the cottage where there stood an exquisitely carved cross painted white now tinted with rays from the dying sun lucinda i asked and he smiled behind the cross a path fell away through a mail swarm of tall weeds and piles of broken concrete and trailed all the way down to the the river. Father Death asked me if I was sure, and when I said I was, he pointed to the Dunnish current spreading a slow half-mile toward Canada. He said, you will fill your pockets with debris from those piles and walk into the river. And he gave me the time and date. There was a folding lawn chair leaning against the clapboards of the house, and I opened it up and sat down

quietly, opposite Lucinda's grave. As I watched, Father Death filled his pockets with debris from the concrete pile and walked slowly, deliberately, confidently, into the river. As I knew he would. I'd seen it. And since the date that Father Death gave me that afternoon has not yet come, I am there in the tiny cottage beneath the bridge trestle now. Tending tomatoes, standing at the window, patient, pass a turn, and utterly content,

waiting for your visit. For your bonus episode, Creepy Presents, Meat, written by N.M. Brown, and narrated by Owen McCune. It was all I could do not to vomit when my mother-in-law proudly set the roast down in front of us. It's meat glistening brown on the kitchen table. Doug, are you all right? My wife, Maxine, whispered, making sure her parents couldn't hear. She hadn't told them what I'd been through. Hell, I'd hardly had the mental strength to tell her everything myself. The smell of the freshly roasted meat created an acrid taste in the back of my mouth. Ever since I was a kid, I'd been obsessed with experimentation. Scientific,

constants, variables, and results fascinated me. When other guys my age were mastering unhooking a bra with one hand, I was pouring salt on snails and making semi-poisonous toxins with my chemistry set. Before I'd had time to process, I'd signed an NDA, given over my bank account information to payroll, and had signed my first official contract in the scientific world as an intern, which seemed odd considering my current major. However, once I saw that flyer, I was sorry.

sold. The feeling of knowing I would be welcomed into a community of peers that were into the same interest that I was. My mind raced at the possibilities of what my employer and I would discover together, the ways we would change the world as we knew it. If only I'd have known. One little shady-ass flyer would change my life forever. When I walked in that first day, I was ready to take the world of science and medicine by the balls. The man who'd hired me would be the one I was working under. He told me nothing about himself other than that his name was Harris. Whether that was his first or last name, I had no idea. I didn't care much to ask at the time. Then again, I didn't think it was information that would be too relevant during an internship.

People don't like an overabundance of questions, whether they'll admit that to you or not, and I didn't want to be the squeaky wheel that got boiled in hot grease. Anyway, science is one of the broadest subjects there is, and I knew I could have signed up to study any one of them. Being a student with military upbringing, I won't lie and tell you I wasn't hoping for something biochemical, or at the very least, weather-related. Having said that, when Harris told me we'd be studying behavioral science, I was more than intrigued. The science of the mind hadn't even occurred to me as a possibility. With my family's various mental illnesses and addictions, I thought it'd be a wonderful area to study and understand.

Excuse me, Harris, I said quietly. Will we be studying serotonin levels and the effects of different chemicals on the brain? A thin smile stretched across his weathered face as he turned to acknowledge me. That, my good sir, is more psychological science. What we do here is different. you'd be hard-pressed to find results like these in a roar-shock test or blood panel. He began to walk down a hallway to the left, wordlessly motioning for me to follow as he continued to speak. You are here to learn, not to judge.

Many aspiring scientists shy away from greatness. They let their moral compass get in the way. Is that going to be an issue, Doug? I more than disliked the implications of his tone, but answered nonetheless. Of course, whatever you need, sir. Harris, he barked, correcting a politeness that any other of my superiors would have appreciated.

Harris then cleared his throat before addressing me in a softer voice. Everyone here is perfectly aware of why they're here. They get compensation in the name of science. Now, who wouldn't want that? He smiled, resembling an old-timey snake oil sales I merely nodded in response. We entered a dark room that contained a long table and chairs,

a pane of glass that took up the entire front wall, fully revealing the room behind it. Two women in nurses' scrubs sat in a bare, stark white room. There was nothing for them to sit on or lean against. It was just the two women, the floor, and a vast sea of maddening white. I stared at Harris, confused. Don't worry. They can't see or hear us, he said matter-of-factly. They look bored and tired, but otherwise healthy.

The complacency in their movements and facial expressions proved what Harris said earlier was true. These women were definitely here of their own volition. We watched in silence for a full hour before Harris spoke again, shedding a very dim light on the point of the experiment. These ladies here are vegetarian. Our job is to see how dedicated they are to their cause by testing their willpower and defenses. The first one to give into their hunger goes home with nothing. The woman who holds out the longest will receive a quarter of the money gathered for this research study, $10,800.

More silence continued, with even less activity coming from the inside. The taller woman with the dark hair seemed perfectly content with sitting idle and doing nothing. I'd surmised maybe she was a housewife or something. stay-at-home mom and desperately needed an empty space to herself, mostly. However, the shorter woman with the red hair became fidgety after only six hours. She began twisting her hair at the ends before ripping it off, chewing her fingernails, and tapping her feet. I guessed that she was a smoker, someone who depended on an oral fixation.

I felt relieved at the end of the day when I got to go home. The plan was to go home and cook up the fattest, juiciest steak that I had in the freezer. I'd assume that the women were released also and were satiating their hunger with salads, veggie wraps, or whatever the hell it was that they preferred to eat. I was wrong. The next afternoon I was surprised to see the women in the same clothing they were in the day before.

Their hair was disheveled and dark bags were beginning to plague the skin under their eyes. Jesus Christ, didn't they go home and eat? I asked incredulously. My lower lip clamped under my top teeth the moment the inquiry came into the open, audible air. Instead of snapping in me, I was surprised to see a smile form on Harris's normally joyless face. I figured you'd ask.

That's why I wanted you to be here when I fed them. My heart dropped as I saw him reach into a plastic container and pull out a raw hunk of fat marbled beef, much like the one I'd selfishly grilled up and enjoyed the evening before. He sprinkled what looked like a mixture of pepper and rosemary, before sliding it into the room on a tray. Both women looked at it disgustedly as it entered their shared space.

I saw them murmuring things to each other but couldn't hear inside of the room. You can't be serious, I exclaimed, much louder than I'd meant to. Harris shot me a steely look of warning as he withdrew the empty tray from the slot, closed the entrance to it, and locked it. I cringed as the taller woman dropped her pants

and started urinating in the corner. Similar stains began to catch my eye the more I glanced around the room. The red-haired woman had reduced her nails to bloodied shards and still winced as she attempted to bite off more. Her swollen fingertips twisted off brittle bits of greasy hair. Harris grabbed a phone, clicked on a button, and leaned towards the opposite side of the room

before whispering something I couldn't understand. As he did this, I realized that the red-haired woman wasn't trying to chew her nails at all. Instead, I noticed she was taking the ripped balls of her hair and placing them between her teeth to chew on. Two men walked into the white room with assertive steps. Everything inside of me screamed that I should have said something, anything, to try to stop what was going on in front of me.

But, of course, I didn't. In my mind, it was all justified. They signed on for this. No one was forcing them to be here. The men grabbed the red-haired woman by the shoulders before forcing her to her knees. A single tear slid down her face as one of the men withdrew a pair of scissors from his inner coat pocket. The other produced what looked like a beard and mustache trimmer. Thin moments, the beautiful curls of red hair were nothing more than stolen wisps on the floor,

dying more by the second. The women looked at each other as the clippers turned on, the blonde giving the other a nod of encouragement and solidarity. The room was swept and vacuumed before the pair left the same way they'd come in. You know what? This whole thing would be a hell of a lot easier if I just gave them names. I decided to call the tall or blonde woman Barbara and the other Rebecca. I wasn't privy to their real names, but it felt disrespectful to label them as subjects A and B,

as Harris had in past statements. The stakes still sat between them, and I gagged to see some of the rust red hairs from Rebecca's head stuck to its flesh. Oxidation had begun to set in at the corners, slowly turning the once crimson meat to a dull, rotted brown. I couldn't help wondering which one of them would crack first, or how long they'd have to stay if neither one did. After two days off, I almost didn't go back.

But Harris's words plagued me each time I thought about it. Many aspiring scientists shy away from greatness. They let their moral compass get in the way. Is that going to be an issue, Doug? So, after much mental rationalization and justification, I showed up bright and early Monday morning as promised. In my mind, there was no way that the women would still be there. Surely one of them pulled a fear factor

and bit off a chunk of the meat by now. But, as per the theme of this story, of course, I was wrong. Their once bright room had now become dingy under the pristine lights. Brown smears adorned the back of their clothes, excrement that had made it past the self-made defecation corner. As off point as it was, I remember wondering how one could shit so much with virtually nothing in their stomach. Barbara lay sleeping in the fetal position on the floor,

surely weakened from the lack of nutrients and hydration. $11,000 had the potential to be a life-changing, amount of money. But was it really worth all this? I thought, sadly. Rebecca crawled weakly to the front of the room, sniffing the steak before dribbling bile down her chin. I gagged a little myself once I saw that the piece of meat was now tinged a sea algae green, with gray marbling swirled through it where the fat once was. I bit my lip as she lifted the meat up to her face and couldn't help but breathe a sigh of relief as she tossed it away. Then I saw something that scared me.

Rebecca looked at Barbara. A wild look had taken over her face. She was studying her, eyeing her. I'd heard a lot of my friends rudely refer to girls as pieces of meat, but this was the first time I'd ever seen that saying personified on someone's face. Now, what I said earlier about the NDA, I realize this entire thing is a direct defiance of that order. If legal ramifications fall upon me after this,

but I welcome them with open arms. The truth is, I'd be safer in jail anyway. What happened next shouldn't have been a surprise. This was a behavioral study, after all, and people are capable of almost everything when pushed too far. Still, I didn't see it coming. I don't think any of us did. Rebecca made a cooing motion with her lips as she softly stroked Barbara's hair.

The woman stirred slightly as Rebecca's shaved head leaned down to kiss her cheek. In a snap-like motion, she reared her head back and viciously buried it in the corner of Barbara's neck. Her eyes snapped open and surprised as Rebecca sent blood and sinews spewing from her own neck. Rebecca paused only slightly to write something on the floor in Barbara's blood. By the time anyone had gotten in there, it was too late. Rebecca knew to bite the most lethal part of the body, cutting off her air supply and blood flow instantly. She smiled through flesh-covered teeth,

and she continued to eat her way up her right cheekbone. I snapped my attention back to my mother-in-law's kitchen table, shuddering away from the array of meats and vegetables piled high on plates. She'd been trying to speak with me, but I'd been too wrapped up in my own horrors to realize it. Go on and eat, Doug, while it's fresh. I wasn't one of the men who busted in the room the women were being held in. I, ashamedly, stayed behind, frozen in horror like a coward.

But when I was questioned, they showed me a picture of what Rebecca had written on the floor. The words haunt me to this day, forever burned into my memory in an emblazoned red fond. If you're going to make me eat meat, it has to be fresh. I don't think I want to be a scientist anymore. For more information on this podcast, including how to submit your own story for consideration, please visit creepypod.com. You can also follow us at creepypod on social media and YouTube. All stories told on this podcast are done so.

through Creative Commons Sherrillite licensing, or with written consent from the authors. No portion of this podcast may be rebroadcast or otherwise distributed without the express written consent of the creepy podcast production team and the story's author.