Creepy - Never-Ending Millipedes

Episode Date: January 7, 2019

When you see them, it's already too late...***Credited to EmpyRealInvective***Content warning: attempted suicide, drug overdose, depression, existential bleakness***Please consider supporting the podc...ast at Patreon.com/Creepypod or creepypod.com/support***You can also subscribe to us on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/creepypod***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.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 This episode of Creepy is presented by our patrons, like new patrons Jason Millard, Zachary Blount, Matthew Staten, Alexis, Dylan Heinrich, Jim Schwartz, Connor Foley, Bridget Dinwidie, Cassidy Grace Hunter, Cody Nichols, and Jessica Davis. This podcast happens because of our patrons. If you'd like to see how you can support the podcast and get rewards like weekly bonus episodes, logo, hoodies, and more. Please visit our reward tiers at patreon.com slash creepypod. Now,
Starting point is 00:00:39 this is creepy. A podcast dedicated to sharing the most famous chilling and disturbing creepy pastas and urban legends in the world. Whether these stories truly happened or are simply
Starting point is 00:00:57 fabrications is for you to decide. These stories may contain graphic depictions of violence and explicit language. Listener discretion is advised. Creepy presents. Never-ending millipedes. Written by Empu Reel Invective. I was 20 when I finished gaged myself.
Starting point is 00:01:31 To be perfectly honest, I couldn't tell you my exact thoughts as I did it. Everything that had happened earlier in the day has been lost in a haze of whiskey and the brief smell of cordite. All I can recall now is about how angry I was. I just left her rambling page-long rant on my ex-girlfriend's Facebook wall, calling her a bunch of terrible things that I didn't really mean. I was mad at her for some stupid fight where we argued about stupid bullshit I wouldn't remember in five years. It felt like it was the most important thing at the time. I was angry I'd spent a year of my life with her
Starting point is 00:02:12 and that we'd thrown it all away over something so stupid. I was furious at myself for thinking that she was the one. I was drunk. I remember sloppily tipping over the empty bottle of gut rot whiskey while mumbling something about how unfair everything was and how I didn't deserve any of this. I lifted the 9mm handgun and looked down the barrel. I assume that the quickest and least painful way would be to make sure I hit the upper portion of my brain.
Starting point is 00:02:46 Anyone with the slightest knowledge of biology will tell you that was an incredibly foolish assumption as the base of the brain actually contains the most vital sections. I thumb the safety off and told myself I had wasted so long with there that I was fine with throwing away the rest of my life in a bright flat. and a brief moment of pain. I was, am, and always will be, an idiot. I squeezed the trigger and shot myself in the left eye and threw part of my brain. The 9 by 19 millimeter obliterated my left eye
Starting point is 00:03:25 and tore through my frontal robe. Everything erupted in a bright flash, and even though I had closed my eyes out of reflex, I was temporarily stunned by the sudden brightness, as well as the bullet which tore through my head. I tasted purple and smelled something acrid. The gun fell out of my hands and bounced on the carpet of the living room before the whole world went away.
Starting point is 00:03:54 I remembered hearing the sound as someone screaming. I could only think about how it didn't really matter, and I was gone. I woke up in the hospital almost 40 days later. Another tenant in the apartment heard the gunshot and immediately assumed that there had been a murder. They called the police who quickly arrived and kicked open my door to find me slumped over my table. I woke up alone. Unlike the movies, I wasn't surrounded by family or friends. They had work in their own lives to deal with.
Starting point is 00:04:32 A couple of years of reflection had really helped me to deal with some of my more melodramatic moments. I finally alerted the nurses to my consciousness when I sloshed out of bed like a spilled martini and smashed face first into the hospital floor. It was lime green and smelled like steel lemons. The nurse rushed into my room and helped me back into my bed. They told me that I shouldn't try moving after being out for so long. I looked up at them. Tried to make out their faces, but something was wrong with my vision.
Starting point is 00:05:11 It was like looking at a face that was being. reflected by two mirrors placed next to each other. There were hundreds of overlays and I couldn't really make out any details. This only happened when I looked at them. The bed in the hospital and the IV looked perfectly normal. I told them about what I was seeing and they looked at each other as if this was what they had feared. The doctors told me I had lost my left eye and would need a prosthetic. It was slightly more brown than my natural eye color, but other than my natural eye color, but other
Starting point is 00:05:46 than that, it looked real enough. They said a few more tests were needed to see what kind of damage I had done to my frontal lobe and the bullet tore through it. They explained that I've been incredibly lucky for shooting myself in the face the way I did. I laughed at the ridiculousness of that statement, and they put me on patient assist. I was lucky. I spent another month in the hospital receiving physical and mental treatment. both helping to differing degrees.
Starting point is 00:06:24 The physical therapy helped me regain some control of my body again as well as getting used to my prosthetic eye, whereas the psychological treatment wasn't really needed. In some dark way, a bullet to the brain gave me a bit of perspective in my life. I'd wrap myself up in the little bullshit that happens in everyone's life and treated it like it was the end of the world. I decided I would never lose the realization that nothing can be bad enough to record shooting yourself in the face.
Starting point is 00:06:58 The final consensus from the physicians was a shrug of the shoulders. The doctors couldn't really figure out why my visual issue was only distorted with people. The best they could come up with was that I had destroyed a section of my brain which was responsible for facial recognition. and I was dealing with some kind of prosopagnosia. The visual distortion never fully went away. Instead, my brain just adjusted to accommodate my disability. Much like correcting to the change in stereopsis, I eventually learned to make sense
Starting point is 00:07:37 of the constantly blending after images of the same figure. By focusing on what I thought was the center image, I was able to see with a bit more clarity. I noticed that as I focused more on the image in the forefront or in the far back, became more and more difficult to see. Even after I was cleared from the hospital, I still had difficulties with my vision in day-to-day life. During this time, I found out I'd been laid off of work and went on unemployment.
Starting point is 00:08:11 I spent most of my time looking for work. It was a hard proposition to find someone who was willing to hire someone with a visual handicap. much less someone who had shot themselves. They all found ways to turn me down that didn't involve my instability. As the weeks crept by, I started to experience strong migraines that almost paralyzed me. The worst one I can remember occurred after being home for a week. It flared up while I was sleeping. It felt like someone had pounded a molten railroad spike into my head.
Starting point is 00:08:45 My hand instinctively shot to my left temple and pressed hard, and an attempt to quell the pain. To my surprise, it worked. I kept pressing as I waited for the pain to subside. I only stopped when my vision started to warp. As soon as I removed my hand from my head, my vision became more clear. I think the worry that I might end up blinding myself was what scared me enough to go to my doctor.
Starting point is 00:09:15 My doctor was quick to subscribe a butyl-bidol-a-cidomenefin caffeine medication to treat my tension headaches and to relieve stress. It worked wonders. The pain I've been experiencing for weeks was numbed and I felt a lot more relaxed. A miracle of modern medicine is that it can treat almost all of your symptoms, but it rarely will address the cause. It's funny how that works out sometimes. It did treat the pain of my headaches, but it did nothing to really prevent them.
Starting point is 00:09:50 Just mask the symptoms. Unfortunately, like all medicine, it slowly began to lose its effect and I found myself taking more to keep the migraines to a minimum. I won't lie. I ended up taking too much, which was how I had my first accident. I'd popped a few tabs 30 minutes earlier when someone knocked on my door. I struggled in my feet and made it to the entrance after a few moments. I swung open the door and found my neighbor standing at the top of the stairs.
Starting point is 00:10:23 I closed the door behind me and moved to greet him, but I lost my foot in. I reached out to catch myself only to feel my hands slide through him. I looked down the stairs just in time to see my neighbor at the bottom. I tried to interact with one of the after images. With nothing to stop me from falling, I toppled down four stairs and banged my head on the wall in the stairwell. Everything exploded in a bright flash. my vision became almost painfully crisp. I could see my neighbor's shocked expression in that brief moment.
Starting point is 00:11:02 Everything was clear, and it felt like I could see for miles. I saw each after image of my neighbor perfectly, and I realized that each iteration was different in some way. The images that were closest to me looked younger, and the images that were furthest back appeared slightly older. I saw one image with his best, back to me and a small part of me knew what was coming. I knew he was going to sprint down the stairs and run out the front door.
Starting point is 00:11:35 He wasn't going to call anyone. He was more worried about getting in trouble with the law. He'd heard about my accident and was seeing if there was some way he could buy some of my medication off of me. The idea of having to call the ambulance and possibly talk to the police was enough to cause him to bolt. as my neighbor sprinted down the stairs and fled out the door. I slowly picked myself up. I was fine for the most part. I banged my ankle on the railing and felt a bit dazed from the impact with the wall.
Starting point is 00:12:09 But other than that, I was okay. I went back to my apartment and Iced my ankle and tried to make sense of everything. It took days for me to figure out how I saw all of the stuff about my neighbor. Once I did, I wish I never knew what I know now. It took a few days of observing people at the park to understand the full extent of my abilities. Watching the pre-images of people, I could see what they had been, what they were doing, and how they were feeling at that time. The after-images revealed where they were heading, what they would do there,
Starting point is 00:12:49 and what emotional state they would be at that point in time. Despite only seeing the person, I somehow knew what was happening in each image. The images never faded away completely. They blended into each other and stretched out, a twisted amalgamation of thousands of limbs and trunks contorted in different positions, emotions, and states. It was like they were all humanoid millipedes as images encapsulated our past, present, and future
Starting point is 00:13:20 by looking at someone. I could experience sections of their life. It was not without its limitations. After a certain point, about a month in the past and the future, I'd be unable to see the images clearly. I could accurately predict their lives in 30-day segments. Be perfectly honest. I had no idea what to do with this new fondability. I think that's why I decided to go back to the hospital.
Starting point is 00:13:54 I didn't know how to process all this information. I'd hope the doctor might. That's not quite how it went. down. Let me set the stage a bit so you can know my exact mindset for everything that happened. I scheduled a follow-up examination with the intent to talking with the doctors and getting their opinion on my circumstances. I decided to stop taking my medication as it had the tendency to model my thoughts and I wanted to be clear-headed for the meeting. The day of the appointment, it took an hour for the follow-up examination to begin.
Starting point is 00:14:34 I understand that sometimes life happens that you can't plan for but it didn't help ease my frustration as I sat in the waiting room for an hour with a massive migraine sawing through my head then when I was fun to call back the doctor was an ass he tried to rush through my patient history and examination he brushed off any of my issues as nothing to worry about as I told him about the severity of the headaches and the degradation of my situation
Starting point is 00:15:05 He fidgeted in his chair and tapped his pen to the clipboard to pass the time. Finally, I decided to bite the bullet and told him about what I'd discovered. I talked about the distortion of images and how they were different from each other. I told them how everyone appeared like a jumbled mass of limbs, joined together by their own torsos, and that by focusing on a specific image, I could see what they had done or what they were about to do. He didn't take it seriously.
Starting point is 00:15:40 He spoke in a manner like he was talking to a child, patronizing and bemused. It was a traumatic event, so of course you're going to be a bit unsettled by what your vision is like now and try to make up a story to justify it. Unfortunately, we can't do much about it physically. Perhaps a therapist might be better suited for you. I told him that what I was seeing was real. And that was the point he started a wisecrack. Maybe I'll call this new condition,
Starting point is 00:16:15 Trelfelmador syndrome, as it seems fairly obviously you copied this off Vonnegut. I'm sorry, but I'm not going to increase your dosage. And don't have a lot of time to spend on people who are telling ridiculous. I was mad that he was making light of everything and talking to me like he was reassuring a foolish child. So I said something I was. regret. If I had spent a little time looking at him, I would have seen that Dr. Jones had spent
Starting point is 00:16:46 the entirety of last night dealing with an uncooperative drunk driving patient who had crashed into a house, crippling a nine-year-old girl, and a majority of the day having appointments with drug-seeking junkies, and his patients had run out. He thought I was telling him a tall-tail to try and get a stronger medication and he lost this temper. If I had known that, I may have tried to be a bit more compassionate. I wasn't. I told him,
Starting point is 00:17:20 you die auto-erotically exphyxiating yourself. That was true. I could see it clearly in his future. I just didn't realize that I was the one who kicked off the entire thing. I saw everything clearly in that moment. moment. He would kick me out of the clinic and he would write everything off as a ridiculous joke. Unfortunately, the thought would stew in his head for a couple of days. Each time he thought about it, it would grow in strength to the point it couldn't be ignored. Then one night, when he was drunk,
Starting point is 00:17:59 he would decide that the only way to put it behind him was to confront it head on. It would not end well. He would die auto erotically exfixating himself with a belt and a drunken stupor while attempting to eject the thought from his head. I was the catalyst for his death. The sad part is that I tried to change it. I thought it was malleable and could be corrected. I tried to alter the future, but it stuck. I couldn't tell you how many times I called the office and tried to get contact with him in a desperate attempt to change his fate. But he always ignored the call or hung up once he recognized my voice.
Starting point is 00:18:43 The worst part was it even my attempts to stop him or set in stone. My frantic calls, sometimes verbatim, telling him not to touch himself while he was physically depriving himself of oxygen were locked in place. My desperation to stop him from doing the curating crank only served to guide him towards end. He wouldn't have wrapped a belt around his neck had he not been so disturbed by my constant insistence that he not touch himself to the point where it became an obsession. The aberrant thought wormed its way into his head, and he had to have some small victory, a small assurance that I wasn't telling the truth, that I was full of shit, and he had complete control over his life,
Starting point is 00:19:34 that he didn't have to suffer the same cruel twist of fate as his son had years before. He didn't. No one has control over their lives. I think that's a partial reason as to why I'm writing all this. Not to convince somebody that I'm telling the truth, but to convince myself that what I'm about to do is necessary. After reading about Dr. Jones's death and the obituary a few weeks later, I went off the deep end.
Starting point is 00:20:10 It seemed like everywhere I looked, I saw what was about to happen. It wasn't all bad things. Life has never composed of entirely terrible events, but I couldn't help but focus on the worst. I saw grown adults about to lose their jobs and their livelihoods, children about to get in fights, husbands about to beat their wives, and yes, even some people who are always. about to die. Think of it like this. Approximately 150,000 people die every day from various things. Gun violence, heart attack, drugs, car accidents, animal attacks, old age suicide, list goes on. On a typical day, if you work, go to school or attend social events, you'll see hundreds of
Starting point is 00:21:01 people living their lives. Statistically, a number of those people you see will die or suffer some traumatic event in the time span of a month. I stopped taking my migraine medicine and my depression, which only served to make everything worse. I was constantly in pain. I would frequently see people who were about to experience terrible things that I couldn't prevent. Even if I tried to stop it, it would be ignored who served as a catalyst for their suffering. I think being surrounded by that realization was what finally broke me. I so desperately wanted to be. I so desperately wanted to be a catalyst for their suffering. I think being surrounded by that realization was what finally broke me. I so desperately wanted to find some way to stop those terrible things from happening that I put my own life in danger. I remembered what had happened to my vision that time
Starting point is 00:21:51 when I applied pressure to my left temple and reasoned that I could be in a better position to prevent these things from happening if I could see the events more clearly. If I knew the full extent of everything, I might be able to find some way to stop what was going to happen. It was that misguided thought and the horrifying sights I had seen which drove me to trepan myself trepination isn't quite the right word as I didn't drill through my own skull and that would be crazy but it's a bit more rational sounding and lobotomizing yourself as I'd lost a large portion of my frontal lobe already lobotomy isn't quite the right word either
Starting point is 00:22:40 about semantics though. The simple explanation is that I used the hole where my left eye was as an entry point for the screwdriver to target the area for my distorted gift. As I write this, a part of me says that I was doing this to help people. Another part tells me that I was trying to eradicate this vision. Regardless, I still did it. I'd sterilize the screwdriver with a copious amount of scrubbing, rubbing alcohol and planes beforehand. I was worried about anesthetizing myself
Starting point is 00:23:21 or trying to numb the area and rendering myself a vegetable. So instead I tried to push through the pain. The only thing more excruciating than the headaches was digging through the scar tissue until I hit my target. The callous tissue gave way, and I struck solid ground. The previously shed. battered and now mending spino a bone gave way with a disturbing crack.
Starting point is 00:23:50 And I hit something spongy. I felt an unbelievable pressure in my head. The pain sparked with the slay to shift of the screwdriver. Once I hit that mark and saw the blood-tinted mass in the mirror, I scraped that part out of me. And the world was open up in all its horror. I didn't obliterate the ability. Instead, I gained full insight.
Starting point is 00:24:26 After falling asleep for what felt like days, I woke up to find that now the afterimages were clearer than ever. The single benefit of my operation was that the headaches stopped. The only reasoning I can think of for their disappearance is this. It was like the persistent headaches someone might experience from school. for an extremely long period of time. I was no longer squinting. Now my vision was clear.
Starting point is 00:24:58 Now I was seeing decades into the past and future when I looked at people. Everyone's lives were open up to me, and I saw the human millipedes in all their dark tragedy. The final straw was seeing my neighbor and his growing addiction. On the outside, he seemed happy. He would greet me in the hallways. I would see him walking his dog, a collie he called Mellon, humming a song to himself, talking to his friends on his phone. In his future, though, I saw what was waiting for him.
Starting point is 00:25:36 In a few months, his pill-popping party habits would hit a dry spell. His usual source, an elderly man who hated how the medication made him feel, fuzzy and disoriented. would pass away and would rather spend the money on gin, which also made him feel fuzzy and disorientate by it in a fun way. With Jamie's, my neighbor, Soros gone, he would fight it increasingly difficult to get his hands-on pain medication. He would try to score from some nearby neighbors and clinics, but he'd always be rebuffed, and one time would even have the police called on him.
Starting point is 00:26:19 He would eventually resort to heroin. It was easier to get than pain medications. It was less regulated. He'd snort it, telling himself that as long as a needle wasn't involved, it wasn't really that much different than taking a couple hydrocodone. He would slip further and further down until he was mainlining heroin. His last moments would be in his bathroom with a bit of belt wrapped around his arm. Mellon would succumb to hunger in his apartment and the police would find his body a month later
Starting point is 00:26:51 with his starved pet curled up in his lap. He would die by himself. It would be swallowed up in the melee of her daily lives. No one would care. He would just be gone. He would slip beneath the waters of life, leaving only ephemeral circles. I tried to save him. I couldn't do it.
Starting point is 00:27:21 I couldn't stop him. Believe me, I attempted it. I tried everything. under the pretext of selling in my butyl biddle, I hung out with them a few times. It was after we had partied a couple times when I tried to explain everything to him, but he thought I was out of my mind. He didn't talk to me for a week after that until I promised to give him an entire bottle of medication. After that, I tried to talk him into getting himself checked into rehab,
Starting point is 00:27:49 told me to fuck off, saying I was just having a little fun on the weekend and not to be such a narc. As a last resort, I tried to provide him with a steady supply of my medication as a more toned-down alternative. But he didn't enjoy the high as much as a hydrocodone and just ended up doing boths. I tried everything I could think of. Nothing worked. The last time I saw Jamie, he was calling a bunch of his friends and asking if anyone had a hookup for him. He looked frantic. Our elderly neighbor had passed away.
Starting point is 00:28:29 I knew this was the beginning of his downright. spiral. I knew that this was the moment you needed help the most in his life. He was about to slide head first into addiction and ruin everything. I knew he would die if no one stopped him. No one stopped him. I walked away. He died. That's why I'm leaving. I will be surrounded by this charno place populated with people I know. If I can't stop people from their faiths, and I can't get rid of this vision. I decide my next best option would be to go where no one knows me, and I don't know anyone. As long as I can be empathetic, I can stay sane. Don't care, don't worry, don't feel. It's the only thing I can do. And a dark side of me wonders if that
Starting point is 00:29:28 will really be enough in the end. Can I really live a solitary life, free of meaningful interaction? Will it even work? Will I even work? Will I? end up entangled in someone else's life. I'm too much of a coward to look to see for myself. There's one last thing. One last reason why I'm writing this. I want someone to read it. These are not my final words. This is not my suicide note. I am not going to kill myself. I made this promise to myself and I intend to keep it. I'm living a life not worth living, but I'm saddled with an iron will to survive. There's a laughing God up there somewhere, enjoying my tragedy.
Starting point is 00:30:22 The reason I'm writing this is because I need someone to read this. I can't stand having this horrible knowledge all to myself. I know what you're thinking. That there's some horrible event coming in a few years which will ruin us. That it's some chaotic catastrophe which will reduce the earth to rubble and swallow. everyone in hellfire. That everyone you care about is going to be left dead and dying in agony. That's the issue, though.
Starting point is 00:30:56 There's no great calamity coming. The terrible knowledge isn't that we're going to be obliterated in some terrifying moment. It's that we're not. We're going to continue down this path and nothing will ever change. I've seen it. We're going to keep on. surviving. We'll lose ourselves in minor distractions like video games, music, movies, books, or seek chemical means of distracting us from our issues. We'll cower from our existential crisis
Starting point is 00:31:30 and wrap ourselves up in mental armor to shield ourselves from it. We'll distract ourselves with memes joking about crippling depression, feel-good stories about animals being more human than humans, and the drama and gossip of our friends' lives that we won't see that we're living empty lives. We'll surround ourselves with people just so we don't feel so alone. They'll be alone too. Those empty interactions won't give us purpose. We're not going to fill that hole that's inside of us and we're going to propagate the insanity. We are a perpetual motion machine of pain. It is reiterative. It is cyclical. It is forever growing. It's like stretch on forever in a march alongside soul-crushing hollowness. I know a small select of you are sitting back in your chair
Starting point is 00:32:28 thinking of a way to blame this on the bleeding heart liberal cucks or the racist trump tards for our current state. And I can only say this. You are the problem. You are not. You are not. You are not. You are the solution. Extremism favors no one except a select few. Setting up scarecrow arguments to strike down to give your life meaning will not work. Life is not an absolute with perfect answers for every situation. This is human nature. People like to think that their voice matters, that they matter.
Starting point is 00:33:09 But we don't. We're small parts of a greater whole. Nothing we do will ever really change anything that was already destined to happen when this universe squeaked into existence. Life is messy. It's beautiful, too. I wish I could see the silver lining amongst the clouds, but I can't focus on the positives anymore. Now all I see is what we really are, and that thought is eating me away inside. We are a death march of endless militia. I'm going to distract ourselves from our own lives with the bland scenery as we shambled towards our end.
Starting point is 00:33:57 That's why I'm writing this. I know some of you may read this. I know you will, but you won't change. A small part of me hopes against hope that you will and break the cycle. It's why I won't stop. I'm drowning, but I refuse to sink. I'm not going to vanish beneath the wake like Jamie, never making any difference, never generating any waves. I'm going to keep struggling to keep my head above water and not sink into the empty malaise of the human condition.
Starting point is 00:34:35 Please don't leave me alone, treading water on the surface, please. 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.

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