Creepy - Observations From the Passenger Seat of a Lime-Green Lamborghini

Episode Date: December 9, 2024

Observations From the Passenger Seat of a Lime-Green Lamborghini***Written by: Christopher Hawkins and Narrated by: Nate DuFort***Don't Read This Before Going to the Vet***Written by: Ashley Edens and Narrated by: Jimmy Ferrer***The Bog Creek Bogy***Written by: Jules Rowlen and Narrated by: Cole Burkhardt***No One Lives Forever***Written by: Crickshaw***Story link: https://creepypasta.fandom.com/wiki/No_One_Lives_Forever?so=searchContent is available under CC BY-SA***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.

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It really means a lot to see how much some people listen to and enjoy the show. So thank you for a great 2024 and hoping for even. more in 2025. Of course, there's still a few more weeks to go until then. So, no. 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. Creepy presents. Observations from the passenger's seat of a lime green Lamborghini. Written by Christopher Hawkins and narrated by Nate DuFort.

I wouldn't have called Derek a friend. I doubt that he would have called me one either. Derek didn't have friends, at least not the way I think of friends. In all the time that I knew him, from those first days of high school up until the end, I'd never known him to confide in anyone. It was as if he was keeping that innermost part of himself, all to himself, just for him, alone. Or maybe it was just that that inner part of himself didn't exist at all. Some people are like that, or so I've read and have no cause to doubt, no inner monologue,

no nagging conscience at their shoulder, no great depths to uncover, nothing in his soul that would make friends worth having. No, Derek didn't have friends. What he did have and what he never seemed to be without was an audience. It had been that way since we were kids. with me and everyone else in the fifth grade class, trying not to laugh at the faces he made while the teacher's back was turned. It was that way now, always with a dozen or more people crowded around his booth in the VIP room of some noisy club or other, hanging on his every word.

Get a way of drawing you in, of making you feel wanted, or at least wanted enough to stick with him if he wanted you to stick with him. And if he felt you were drifting away or losing interest, he would lock on to you, and suddenly you were the most important person in his world, at least until he was done with you. Once he was done with you, there was no coming back. It was like getting ghosted except right to your face,

like he could be looking right at you and still not even notice you were there. I'd seen it happen dozens of times in the two years or so since we'd been reacquainted. Girls reduced to tears. Guys left standing with their mouths open, wondering what they'd done wrong. I was never sure why Derek kept me around, if I'm honest. Maybe it was because I reminded him of those grade school days when his audience didn't depend on how much money he had.

Or maybe he'd just liked that I'd known him back in those days and could see how far he'd come. I hadn't thought about Derek in years, nearly two decades, in fact, until I ran into him completely by accident in a hotel bar. I didn't even recognize him at first, but he recognized me, smiling and pumping my hand like we were long-lost friends

instead of just barely acquaintances. Before I knew it, I was following him and a crowd of hangers-on to an impromptu party in the penthouse swing, wheat. From that point on, I was in his circle, and being in his circle meant you were his for as long as he wanted you to be. Derek made most of his money in cryptocurrency. He started mining Bitcoin back when it was trading for pennies and didn't stop until the price was over a grand. When the Mount Gawks Exchange got hacked and everyone was losing their shirt, he was already out of the market

and sitting on a fortune. When Ethereum came on the scene, he did it again, getting in at under a dollar, and getting out right before the mass panic cell and the crypto winter. While everyone else was drowning in bad decisions, he was surfing, selling high, buying low, riding every shit coin IPO, ditching meme coins just before they tanked.

In the space of a few years, he turned nothing into billions. The guy was a wizard. Everyone wanted a piece of what he had. Maybe that was part of why he kept me around too. That much money attracts a certain kind of person, the kind that has to be at the center of attention, to be seen, conspicuous people,

always on their Instagrams, sneaking selfies with Derek in the background when they thought he wasn't looking, ordering rounds of shots that they didn't have to pay for, always working hard to keep the party going, once the party was over, they'd go back to being ordinary. I didn't mind being ordinary. Not at first. Maybe that's what Derek liked about me. Everyone else was clamoring for his attention.

I was content to just be. But don't get me wrong. I went to the clubs. I drank the shots. I rode in the limos. I spent a few weekends on his yacht, even one where he wasn't there and the party just kept on going without him. I wasn't immune to the trappings. No one who gets a taste of that lifestyle doesn't want that lifestyle, even if they'd tell you otherwise.

Hell, I would have told you otherwise once upon a time. Only back then, I wouldn't have meant it. I was just as entranced with Derek's wealth and all his displays of wealth as anyone else. I just did a better job of hiding it. But now, after everything, after looking behind the curtain and seeing how much it all cost, yeah, maybe now, I really do mean it. But back then, what I'd really wanted once I'd had a taste of it, was to have that kind of money for myself.

And maybe that was the real reason that Derek liked having me around. We grew up the same. Not poor, not exactly, but close enough to wave to it and say hi. We'd both had fried bologna for dinner and knew what it was like to wait alone for our moms to get back from working the late shift while the sky got dark and the whole world seemed to grow cold. We knew what money was worth better than any of the trust fund babies and social media phonies that fed off his leavings like hyenas do with lions. I guess I was one of those hyenas, but I could watch the lion hunt, and more than anything, I wanted to be a lion too. So, like a lion cub, I started learning to hunt.

And like any good lion cub, I learned by watching the big lion do his thing. I dabbled a bit in crypto before Derek and I reconnected and managed to turn $5,000 into $2,000, buying high and panic selling low. The whole market seemed like it was held together with bullshit and the hopes of small children, so I pulled out. Only to watch the coins I didn't have anymore go up by 200% in the space of a month. Meanwhile, my savings account was paying out a quarter percent on the dollar and I was still living paycheck to paycheck. During that time, Derek's wealth only kept on building.

It was around then that he bought the yacht, I mentioned earlier. It was practically a cruise ship, and he kept it staffed at all times so he could take it out whenever he wanted. Seven docks, three kitchens, and a helipad, along with a little second boat that he could launch out of the side of it when he wanted to go on an excursion. He chuckled a little bit when he told me that bit. Excursions. He acted like the whole thing was absurd, like none of it mattered. That was just how rich he was. I'd say his net worth more than doubled in the space of three months. I don't have anything official to base that on.

Crypto earnings were a murky and lawless thing then. That's why rich people liked them so much. He had businesses, but how he's got the sense that they were listed under other names, shell companies within shell companies, enough to keep the size of his accounts a secret. to keep his numbers from going public. More than anything, that was what made me realize that there had to be a trick to it, some system that Derek was using. There was a gimmick that he didn't want anyone to find out about,

something way more sophisticated than the obvious pump and dump schemes you saw Elon pushing on Twitter. Derek made money in bull markets. Derek made money in bear markets. It was like, whatever the right, rest of the world was doing, didn't matter. It was like the man was magic. More than ever, I was determined to get a piece of that magic for myself. I waited for my moment and found it when we were at a strip club that was so exclusive that it didn't have a sign on the building or even a name. At the bar, I bought an overpriced bottle of single malt scotch for the table on my ever-growing credit card.

Derek always appreciated gestures like that, but he never let anyone else pay, not while he was there to see it happen. Even if you insisted, he'd always wear you down. So, I told him as offhandedly as I could manage to just pay me back in Bitcoin, and I texted him my wallet address. He gave me a suspicious little side-eye when I said it, but two days later, he sent me a transfer for three times more. more than what I'd paid. I didn't care about the money, though. What I was really after was the address of the wallet it had come from. See, people tend to think that crypto is totally anonymous, and that once it changes hands, you have no idea where it came from or where it's going. They think it's untraceable. But the beauty of crypto is that everything is out in the open. The whole ledger, every transaction down to the date, time, and amount is public.

Once you have someone's wallet address, you know how many coins they have in that wallet, along with every trade that wallet has ever made. And once you have that, you can trace each of those trades to their own wallets, and so on and so on. With a little patience and determination, you can get a pretty good picture of every move a person is making on the blog,

blockchain, and Derek was making moves all right. He was making a ton of them. It took me a month of late nights, but I was able to get a pretty good picture of how Derek was making his money. He had something like a hundred different wallets, some of them dating all the way back to when Bitcoin was trading for pennies, and it took a thousand of them just to buy a pizza. But Derek wasn't buying pizzas. He wasn't buying anything. He was mining coins. accumulating them by fractions at a time, not wasting them buying drugs on Silk Road, but holding on with the strongest of diamond hands until the first big spike to 19K. That alone was enough to make him a billionaire, but it was only the beginning.

Anyone who trades crypto now wishes that they could go back to those days with perfect clarity of hindsight to see this thing that was taken for a joke and get in on the ground floor, before anyone had any idea what it was worth, like buying Amazon stock in the 90s or even Apple in the 80s, just grabbing those black swans by the neck and plucking every last dollar out of them. It's a dumb pipe dream because, short of a time machine, there's no way to tell when something like that is going to hit big. It's a one-in-a-billion lightning strike. You might get lucky once, and a lot of people do. But the market's like Vegas.

If you keep playing long enough, the house is going to get its chips back. And the market's volatile. You have all the systems and candle charts you want, but sooner or later, you're going to lose. No one can follow all those ups and downs and come out on top every time. Only that's exactly what Derek was doing.

When the first crest hit, he sold it all, and I mean all of it, right down to the last fraction of a coin. Two months later, when it bottomed out, he bought it all back. Every dollar and almost tripled his holdings in the process. On paper, it was insane going back to the table like that after you'd already taken the house for all it was worth. $1.2 billion. More money than most people see in a lifetime.

Hell, more money than most rich people see in a lifetime, enough to let him do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted, until the end of time. And there he was, betting it all again, like the money didn't mean anything to him. No, not like it didn't mean anything, but like he knew that he couldn't lose. And Derek couldn't lose. Or at least he didn't, not in those early days. When the price was down, he bought. When the price was up, he sold. And I don't mean in the general sense of someone who manages to consistently get lucky.

I mean that he was riding those ups and downs with uncanny accuracy, selling at the very last minute, buying it back in just before the rise. His moves were perfect. He didn't miss. I traced back every one of his early days. trades, everyone I could find, and when I grafted them out, they matched the market exactly. It was like looking at someone who was writing the rules himself, like someone who could see the future. If I'd known then how close I was, I probably would have left the whole thing

alone. Then again, maybe not. Even secondhand, the idea of that much money was a heady thing. And once the possibilities took root in my mind, there was no getting rid of them. On paper, it seemed like such a simple thing to just match Derek's moves, to hold when he held, to trade when he traded. I was pretty sure that I didn't have the full picture of all of his finances. There were plenty of trails that led to dead ends once the money was moved off the blockchain, but light enough. Derek's investment strategies had gotten more sophisticated,

since those early days. He never kept too much in one account or moved so much that he'd catch the wrong kind of attention. He lost on purpose, just often enough so it wouldn't be obvious what he was doing. He still made a killing. It was just a longer timeline. Unless you were looking for it specifically, you'd never notice. But I was looking, and I matched him move for move. I lost money at first, but it didn't take long before I was winning, too. A month and a half later, I'd made my first million. The second came even more quickly, and the third, quicker still. Following Derek's lead was like printing money.

I quit my crappy office job, and I didn't need it anymore. Once I made Derek my full-time job, the money came even easier. I told myself that I'd stop at 15. 15 million was a nice round number, and more money than a hick kid from Indiana could ever have dreamed of back in the grade school days, in the baloney sandwich days and the dark lonely nights that came with them. Of course, this was after I'd already told myself that I would stop at five, and later I'd told myself I'd stop at 10. But there's a weird kind of elation that comes with playing a game when you know you can't lose. No one walks away from something like that. Human beings just aren't wired that way, or at least I'm not.

So, I kept playing, and sure enough, I kept winning. I already had plenty of money, not Derek money, of course, but enough to make any reasonable person happy. I should have been happy, only I was miserable. Because the truth of it, the real bitch of it, was that it wasn't me winning at all. It was still Derek. For every move I made, he was there, reaching out through the blockchain to guide my hand. They were his moves, not mine. And the more I made them, the more I came to resent them.

I wasn't content to just watch and follow. I wanted to know what Derek knew. I wanted the power that Derek had. I was still a hyena, only with better scraps. I was still searching for a way to hunt. And I became resentful of those nights I spent in Derek's orbit, drinking Derek champagne, watching other people thawn over him while I sulked in the corner.

I took to paying for things whenever I could get away with it, intercepting waitresses and bribing hotel managers with promises of exorbitant tips if they'd only use my credit card instead of his. Sometimes it worked, and while Derek would always acknowledge my gesture with an appreciative toast from across the room, there was something in his eyes that told me I was walking on dangerous ground. That was all right by me. I wanted to provoke him.

He knew what my finances had been like. He had to have questions about why I was suddenly able to afford so much nicer clothes. or how I'd been able to trade in my old Honda for a brand new Audi. He stopped trying to pay me back when I managed to steal a bill away from him. Apart from the subtle knot of the head and the tip of the drink, he never mentioned it again. He knew. He had to know. And if he wanted confirmation, all he had to do was look online for the wallet I'd used

when he paid me back for that bottle of scotch. Unlike him, I'd made no ever. to hide the moves I was making. I wanted him to see. I wanted to intrigue him, to anger him, to get him to confront me, because a confrontation would bring me one step closer to learning his secrets. He was still the magician, and I was just the rube who had managed to get a peek behind the stage door. Now that I'd had a taste, there was no going back. But he gave me nothing. With every swiped check, with every elaborate gift, I could see that look in his eyes getting harder and harder. I came to live for that look. Like a love-starved child, I began to thrive on that little

hint of attention. I waited for him to tell me to stop. I waited for him to tell me to leave. But the party kept on going, as if nothing had changed. And the less things changed, the more I came to resent him. Every night, the idea of watching him sit there at the center of adoration, hoarding his secrets like a miser, made my stomach acid rise and burn at the back of my throat. It shames me to say it, but I grew to hate him, even as I followed his trades, even as I borrowed his magic to make myself richer. I hated him, and when I sat in a room with him, I could imagine launching myself across the table and sweeping aside the $1,000 champagne bottles and the party drugs just to get my hands around his throat. So I left. I stopped going to the parties, to the little

excursions that had come to define my weekends. I avoided the clubs and hotel bars altogether out of fear that I might run into him by accident. I removed myself from his orbit entirely, though, in reality, I was more in his orbit than ever, because I still spent my nights following his every digital move, buying when he bought, selling when he sold. The money didn't even matter anymore. I had plenty of it, sitting unused in a basic savings account while I lived in the same studio apartment and ate my meals out of the microwave. I stared at my screen, waiting for every new news. transaction, every peek behind the curtain. I was addicted. Not to the money. Now that I had it,

I didn't want it. No. What I was addicted to was the knowing, and the knowing was always just barely out of reach. When he texted me three weeks later, it was all I could do not to respond to that very instant. I made myself wait a full 20 minutes before I texted. I texted me. him back. And an hour after that, he was waiting outside my apartment building, leaning against the door of his sports car, his arms folded across his chest. He was alone, and I realized that it was the first time I'd seen him alone since that first chance meeting at the hotel bar. He seemed shorter somehow, without his entourage to lend him height. He looked me up and down as I opened the door, and I realized I was still wearing the same sweatpants that I'd worn for the last three days

and a t-shirt with stains whose origins I couldn't remember. Get in, he said, and didn't bother to explain why. You didn't need to, because I already knew. I slid into the seat next to him without saying a word. He drove us through the heart of the city, past the places we used to frequent, hidden away at the tops of glass skyscrapers and behind façade. of cut stone. I watched the people on the sidewalk in their expensive suits and fancy dresses, every one of them a pretender, every one of them living a lie. For what was all that money,

but a lie? A measure of worth against a yardstick that had no meaning beyond itself. I watched them speed by, gawking at this car that not even they could afford, and wondered what their lives would be like if they had to sleep on the street beneath a piece of discarded cardboard. How would they measure their worth then? The whole time, I sat silently, waiting for him to ask me where I'd been, to tell me to stop following his trades, to tell me I didn't deserve my newfound wealth, that I only had it because of him. I wanted him to tell me that I was nothing, that I was worth nothing, if only because it would lend some weight to the things I've been telling myself since our whole association began. More than that, I wanted him to tell me that I wasn't the

same as those people on the street, but there was more meaning to my life than the meaning his actions had lent to it. When he did finally speak, his voice was barely more than a whisper, as if his throat had narrowed down to a straw and refused to open. This, he said. It's not what you think it is. When you see it, I said nothing. And after a moment, the silence seemed to be enough because he did not speak again.

We passed the on-ramp for the expressway, issuing the quick path to the suburbs for the outskirts of the city. We flew down narrow roads past darkened buildings, their foundations crumbling, their windows boarded and covered over with graffiti, and it was well past two in the morning. This part of the city had long since gone to sleep,

and it seemed there was little left of it to waken. We sped past empty storefronts, gliding over potholes and running red lights, as if the very act of stopping might root us to this place, revving the engine to drive away the silence that had fallen over both of us like a shroud. Across the railroad tracks, commercial buildings gave way to row upon row of identical brick bungalows, their lawns gone to weed, the corners of their rustling chain-link fences clogged with old newspapers and plastic bags.

They huddled shoulder to shoulder at the ends of cracked driveways, and where the lots were empty, they stood out like missing teeth. Their windows were dark, and I could not tell if anyone still live there or not. The look of them made me uneasy. and it took me several blocks before I realized why. It was because I'd grown up staring out of windows just like them, waiting anxiously in a darkened living room for headlights to swing into the driveway, running upstairs to pretend that I'd been asleep the whole time.

Any of these old houses might have been my old house. This was the place where I belonged. Soon, the houses faded away altogether, and all that was left was empty land covered in gravel and twisted saplings that would never grow to reach the sky. Only the sidewalks remained. The carve-outs for driveways and the curb, the only hint that people had ever lived here at all. All this land is mine, Derek said, just under two square miles. After the auto plants closed, it was mostly abandoned anyway.

I bought out everyone who was left. tore it all down, got it rezoned. It took six holding companies and a bunch of bribes to get it done, but it's worth it for the privacy. We were driving toward a warehouse, a great concrete box of a building that seemed to take up two blocks or more. It was unlit with no windows and no sign to label it. There was only a loading dock with a single overhead door

that seemed to be its only entrance. What do you make? there. Derrick met my question with a sad little smile. It's not about making, he said. It's about seeing. We pulled up to the door and barely had to pause as it rolled up to admit us inside. Once it was closed again, the lights came on, one by one, like soldiers snapping to attention. Ahead of us, the road continued as if it had never been interrupted, and the houses here, had never been torn away. They still sat on wide lots, not bungalows, but sturdy two-story affairs from back in the pre-war days with sloping roofs and sheltered porches at the end of long

walkways. They stood preserved, like the backgrounds of photographs folded into a book and hidden away from prying eyes. The overhead lights were dim and bathed the place in a perpetual blue twilight, Dead trees raised their naked branches up toward the trust ceiling and cast strange shadows on the ground, eclipse shadows that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere all at once. The sight of them left me feeling uneasy, or maybe it was just the tension that had come over Derek like a fever. His knuckles white as he gripped the steering wheel. The whole place seemed to be filled with a strange energy that set the hairs on the back of my neck to tingling. to see it was like looking out into some alien landscape, and yet I felt the same odd nostalgia

that I had when we passed the rows of bungalows. I had known neighborhoods like this all through my childhood. I hadn't grown up on this block, but perhaps Derek had. He blew through a stop sign as if to prove the rules of the world I knew held no meaning in this place. I realized then that I was completely at his mercy. I had gone with him without question, without any thoughts as to where he might lead me. Now we were alone in this hidden world on the outskirts of the city. If I needed to escape, would I be able to? Were I to pull out my phone, I doubted that I'd even get a signal. If Derek were to kill me and bury me behind one of these houses, would anyone even know? It's just over this way, he said, read.

my unease. He seemed calmer as he downshifted, taking a turn and letting the car coast beneath darkened street lamps, past wooden fences that leaned away from the road as if they were trying to escape it. The weird tension I'd seen in him earlier was gone. In its place was the calm of resignation, as if he'd only just made up his mind about something that had been troubling him. It did nothing to put my own mind at ease. We turned into the driveway of a squat little house with white siding. The car's low chassis scraped against the concrete as he brought it to a stop. The sound made me wince.

Even in my excited state, I wasn't immune to thoughts of how much damage he'd just caused and how much it would cost to fix. Derek didn't seem to notice at all. Here's what's going to happen, he said. I'm going to get out of the car and go inside that house and down to the basement. You're going to wait here because you don't know if it's a good idea to follow me down there or not.

You're going to think about running. You're going to think about it a lot. But in a few minutes, curiosity is going to get the better you. And you're going to make up your mind and follow me down there. The way he said it took me aback. He was so matter of fact. Like he was reciting the plot of a movie he'd seen a dozen times. Like what he was saying was a foregone conclusion, what's down there?

He smiled, but the smile didn't touch his eyes. Everything. The answers to all of your questions and so many others that you never thought to ask. You'll see it. I'm sorry for that, but you will. Take your time. With that, he was gone. He left the door of the car open as if to,

say that the car no longer mattered if it had ever mattered at all. He left the key fob and the cup holder, too. It would be nothing to move over to the other seat and drive away from this place the same way we'd come in. Derek surely knew that, too. It was a test, and I couldn't tell if I was passing or failing. I stepped out of the car and was struck at once by the stillness of the air, by the stale indoor scent of it when my eyes were telling me I was still outside. I was at the very center of the warehouse,

the concrete walls so far off that I could almost trick myself into believing they weren't there at all. I shuffled at the grass and little tufts of it came up dead and brittle dry. I watched my shadow on the ground, muted and multiplied in the artificial light, my outline broken into a dozen directions, each one a new possibility, a new path waiting to be followed. The little house had two black cables snaking their way up the stairs and into the front door. The door was open, and it made me think of times when I was a child, and my mother would complain to me about heating the hole outside. Now Derek was doing exactly that. Had this been his husband? house all those years ago? Had he used his wealth to make a museum of it? A reminder of where

he'd come from? No. Derek was not so sentimental. He wouldn't have preserved this place without good reason. He wouldn't have taken such pains to hide it away if it didn't hold a secret worth keeping. The answers to all your questions and so many others that you never thought to ask. A dim light glowed in the depths of the house As if a lamp had been left on in some distant back bedroom I became aware of a low electrical hum Vibrating up through the soles of my shoes Building in my bones and sharpening my senses to the edge of a razor

The black cables on the steps wound around the porch And disappeared into the backyard But there was no way to tell if they were bringing power to to the house, or taking it away. I thought again about leaving. In fact, I made up my mind to do exactly that. The call of the outside world, away from the unblinking artificial lights,

was like a drumbeat in my head. I knew then that I was afraid of the house and whatever might be inside it. And yet, I also knew that Derek had told me the truth. The answers to how he worked his magic were beyond that other door. and I found my feet taking steps toward it, as if my body knew what I wanted better than my mind did. Before I could stop myself, I'd mounted the steps and followed the cables inside.

The front room had the look of someone still living there. In the dim light that filtered in through the drawn curtains, I could see the threadbare sofa, the recliner tucked in the corner, the painting of a landscape hanging over flowered. wallpaper. Unless I missed my guess, the place hadn't changed in at least 60 years. And again, I wondered if this could be the place where Derek had grown up. Had this been where he'd returned to after school days spent being adored by his classmates? Living what I'd always supposed was a better life than mine. The light was coming from the kitchen, and I followed it past

Vermica countertops and a little table with only two chairs. to a wooden door. Beyond it was a narrow staircase that led down to the basement. That was where the light was coming from, so bright now that I had to squint just to see down into that place. The electrical cables snaked down the steps. I could feel the odd mechanical hum, more insistent now as it vibrated through the structure of the house

and made every surface feel as if it were crawling with life. I took the stair slowly, the shrill creak of every footstep loud enough to make me wince. I listened for some reaction from below, some sign that Derek was there to welcome me, to explain it all to me, but I heard none. All thoughts of running were gone now. In their place was an all-consuming curiosity, a feeling of being on the precipice of some great discovery. With each step, I felt closer to Derek, closer to knowing. I was an inner circle of one, orbiting him now with the speed of electrons and an atom,

feeling the energy of my own motion in the hairs on the back of my arms, in the eager churning of my stomach. My legs felt weak, but I made them carry me down one step, then another, making up for strength with sheer giddy will. The basement itself was unremarkable, but for the hole in the far wall where the concrete blocks of the foundation had been pounded to dust.

Light spilled from the opening like a beacon, but now that my eyes were adjusting, I could make out its contours, tall and narrow, but wide enough that a person might be able to squeeze through. The cables led into that place with no sign of stopping, and it gave me enough confidence to follow them. I shimmied sideways down the gap,

first through concrete, then through stone. The rock was worn smooth, but it still tugged at the buttons on my shirt and compressed my ribs each time I tried to take a breath. It was only a few moments, though it felt like an eternity, before I emerged into a larger chamber. Lights had been arranged along the floor at random,

each one so bright that I could not look directly at it for fear of going blind. Along with the cables, they led deeper into the earth, descending through switchbacks and over natural stairs. I followed them as the floor lights lengthened my shadows into distorted monsters that aped my every move, down and down until I could almost feel the weight of the stone above my head, growing heavier and heavier. The natural steps gave way to constructed ones, carved into the stone by ancient hands and worn smooth by the relentless drip of water from overhead. It fell from the ceiling and collected in rivulets that raced ahead of me, descending and descending past strange symbols carved into the rough stone walls that

arranged themselves into some actual language, long forgotten, and never to be translated. I traced them with my hand as I descended, until at last the passage opened into a high-domed chamber so vast that I could not see all the way to the other side. Derek was there, frozen with his back to me, as if he himself had become part of the stone, a stalagmite in human form. He stood in the midst of six pillars that rose to disappear into the shadows above. Each one, covered with that same odd writing I'd encountered in the passageway. Thick iron chains long since gone to rust, hung heavy in slack, converging to meet at the center of a flat expanse of stone that bore more writing,

arranged a spiraling circle that wound its way inward to the awful thing that hulked at its center. I hesitate even now to describe what I saw there at the center of those. chains, as much because I can't bear to remember it as because I still can't be sure what it was my eyes were seeing. It hunched like some great blob of mucus, like a deep sea creature that had been hauled onto dry land. It had no limbs to speak of, no shape that suggested that it had bones or even the most basic animal structure. The chains disappeared into fleshy folds and its blistering skin, as if they'd been spiked directly into the heart of the thing to pin it there, like a worm in a dissection tray. It had no face, but it did have eyes. They bulge from one end of the

thing, split-pupled and clustered like a spider's eyes, lidless and unblinking. Derek stood before it, staring into those eyes. His arms limp at his sides as if he had forgotten he had a body at all. The thing quivered as it tested the chains, the surface of its skin rolling and subsiding like magma, and every one of its terrible eyes was fixed on Derek, as if hypnotized, though in that moment I could not tell which of them was in the power of the other. It surged in his direction, but he was just out of reach. The electric hum was strong there, and it resolved itself into a series of whip-cracks and sharp pops. The creature flinched back, and I could see that the wires had been fastened to the

anchor points of each chain. They fed from a junction box that hung on the wall, just a few steps from where I stood, along with the lights and the two cables I'd followed as I made my way down. On its side was a knife switch, with a large red handle. The thing between the pillars tugged at its bonds again, and I watched as blue lightning arced over and into its bulbous hide. As Derek stood transfixed by the thing, just one of the creature's eyes slid from his gaze and turned in my direction. It was the merest of glances, but as that terrible eye flicked across my consciousness, I could feel it pierce my mind. All at once, the questions that had brought me to that place came back.

boiling to the surface. That eye drew them from me, like a parasite pulled from beneath the skin. The eye did not ask. It insisted, and I had no more power to deny it than I did to look away. One by one, it tore my questions from behind the veil of my panic, and one by one, it answered. All at once, I saw this secret to Derek's magic as that. that terrible glinting eye showed me the future, unfolding it before my own eyes, like a slick of oil spreading through water. Numbers came so rapidly that they lost all meaning, and the more that I grasped at them, the more they eluded me, bursting like dandelion seeds in a hurricane. I saw myself driving away from this place. I saw the building on fire. I saw myself

locked away from the world, screaming myself to sleep. The images overlapped, imprinting themselves on my brain like overexposed photographs, memories of a life yet to be lived. Each image brought with it more questions, and the eye seized on them before I could even think to hold them back. In the space of an eye blink, my whole future lay out before me, scattered and disjointed, but still undeniable. I watched my life end, and still the images continued. They poured into me, though my mind had become too cracked to hold them. I overflowed with the end of humanity, with baked earth and boiling oceans.

I stood upon the surface of a lifeless rock as the sun grew large in the sky, only to contract and explode. The fragments of all of our history scattered to the surface. stars like dust blown from a window ledge. I watched nebula coalesce into stars and planets, only to burn bright and wink out as if they'd never been there. I saw the whole of the universe contract to a single point until time itself became meaningless, and the void, endless and unfathomable, floated before me and subsumed me. The eye shifted, and at once, I was freed from its grasp.

I staggered back against the stone wall, pulling at my hair and pounding at my head to try and drive away the images of that thing had etched into my brain. Even when I could no longer see them, I could feel them, like an itch in the depths of my skull that I would never be able to scratch.

The chained thing, it turned its full attention back to Derek. It had him pinned like a hypnotized snake. I couldn't look at them anymore because the itch had become an ache that suffered through every aspect of my being, through my bones, through my very soul. I felt the naked electricity coursing down the chains and felt its sting along my limbs as surely as if I'd been entrapped by them. All the while, I was afraid to look up for fear that this thing might turn one of its terrible eyes my way. and I should have thought to free Derek, but all rational thought had left my mind. All that remained was the burning of electric fire and the ache in my soul, and the need to be rid of them both. With a wild lunge, I grabbed the knife switch on the electrical box and pulled.

The electrical hum was cut off with a snap, and the chamber went dark. At once, the burning that can see. assumed me subsided, and my mind took a step closer to being my own again. All was still for a moment. Then came a terrible creaking as the old chains pulled free of the pillars and clattered to the stone floor. The darkness was total, and as I turned I could not be sure of where the danger might come from. Then Derek screamed, a high, gurgling sound. that was strangled away almost as soon as it began.

After it came the wet crunch of snapping bones in an awful chewing sound like the grunting of hogs at the trough. Eventually, that died away too, and I braced myself for the thing to fall upon me as well. And yet, deep down, I knew that it would not, because I'd already seen the end of my life play out. down to my last breath. That last breath would not come in this place. How long I waited there in the dark? I don't know. I listened for the thing, but all I could hear was the beating of

my own heart. Eventually I found the knife switch, but when the lights came back on, I was alone. All that was left was the six pillars and the fragments of chain that still clung to them. There is no sign of Derek or the creature with the terrible eyes. Tormenter and tormented were gone, though I was still unsure as to which was which. The authorities haven't found out yet what caused the explosion, but they will. Industrial explosives had been piled behind the house just waiting to be used,

enough to fill that narrow crevice in the basement wall a dozen times over, enough to topple those pillars and lock their strange inscriptions away from the eyes of the world forever. When it was done, the little house was barely more than a hole in the ground, and what was left in the backyard was enough to set the rest on fire. It spread from house to house, the dry, dead trees catching better than kindling, until the entire place was raised to the ground. The fire burned itself out before the fire. firemen ever came and never carried beyond the warehouse. Derek had left nothing around it to burn.

I've abandoned all my accounts, all my digital wallets. If that chained thing beneath Derek's house showed me anything, it is that I'll never need them. I've thought more than once about making an anonymous donation of them in hopes that someone more deserving can put them to use. and I don't know if I will. It's good to have that kind of uncertainty. It's good to know that, despite all the answers I've been given, there are still questions I forgot to ask. Perhaps it was that same uncertainty that led Derek to allow me to discover his secret,

or maybe he'd known all along. Maybe, like me, he'd become addicted to the knowing. and the money was just a way of keeping score. Whatever the truth might be, it's buried now, beneath brick and stone, beneath the ruins of a home that was more than an ending, more than a beginning. I will swear to this, though. In the instant before the lights went out in that strange and terrible cavern, Derek had managed to break the thing's gaze and turn his head toward me. In that instant, he was smiling. Creepy presents.

Don't read this before going to the vet. Written by Ashley Edens and narrated by Jimmy Ferrer. Live at a vet clinic. My apologies. It's been 20 years and I'm still butchering my vocabulary. I guess I exist at a vet clinic. And nobody knows. Not really.

Every so often one of the texts or one of the girls at the desk may sense me. They sense something, they say to their co-workers or significant others. Mostly they feel it during the moments of anticipation right before euthanizing. Old Miss Ruth Ellen's cat. Heaviness lingers in the air, sure. But my excitement, my eagerness, to slip through and caress them peace. I'm sorry. I'm really getting ahead of myself here.

I had a name at one point. And it might be familiar to you. You'd scratch your head and wag your finger trying to pinpoint where you had heard it before. Then you would remember an article. Perhaps a series of articles and news clips, but we don't need to go there. You simply need to know I existed before. I lived before, corporeally. Then one day I didn't.

And I was given options. Oh yes, it seems we have choices even in death. Those pure ones, the good ones. devout and well-intentioned or some shit have a golden light extended to them that's what i hear anyway excuse me there i go screwing up my verbs again i don't hear anything from the other side i'm not standing around in a supernatural water-cooler listening to the ghostly gossip i just feel it i guess I sense it like the human sense me in the clinic. But as you can imagine, the golden light was not offered to me. I saw darkness that soon lifted revealing the street. Just a plain, ordinary street, with a cracked pavement and a gray sky.

It was one of the roads leading into town. But the world was different. All the colors seemed off, like a movie filmed with a weird filter. To my left was a reduced speed limit sign. And to my right, the open highway, the open highway and a door. It wasn't a black, gothic door that wept blood and was muffling screams. It was just a door. a plain, brown, hollow door with a little golden knob that you would find in some old cheap prefab home.

But it was ominous. I took a few curious steps towards it, and with each inch closer, the dread within my body intensified. I say body, but that's also incorrect. For when I looked down, I was horrified to find. nothing. Just more of the Pockmark Street. You might be wondering how I hadn't noticed that I no longer had a body. But I assure you, this whole experience occurred within a matter of moments.

I was so confused by my new perspective that I hadn't yet realized. I hadn't caught any glance of my T-shirt-clad shoulder. or arms skin in my periphery. You're moving your head around now to see if you can see your shoulders too, aren't you? Naturally, I freaked out. And before you ask, no, I don't remember my death. I ran in the opposite direction of the door, towards town. This caused more stress as I realized how wrong it was to flee without hearing.

my feet scrambling on the pavement. My breath panting raggedly. My heart thundering inside my chest. The people I saw continued on with their tasks, unsurprisingly, watering their lawns and carrying in groceries. The first view I saw I even called out to. I attempted pleasantries, pleased for help, and finally brazen insults. desperate for any acknowledgement.

I felt the words leaving my mouth, but it's like they dissolved as they entered the atmosphere. Despite my new-found freedom, I eventually grew tired as I wandered the streets within the city. Snew existence was depressing. Before I could even place the sound, a bicycle. Nicholas peddled right through my back bursting out in front of me like he had just broken the ribbon at the finish line. I suppose it really wasn't like that, but I was pissed. I spun around screaming and grew more infuriated.

I wasn't screaming into the void. I was the void. And the door was back. Following from a safe distance, it waited for me, patiently, hovering right atop the street, about a block behind me. It really was, Erie. Then I lucked out. The squeal of tires grabbed my attention.

Up ahead, I saw a car stalled in the street. The driver door flung open, and a woman stepped out. A tall, thin woman. I reached to the scene. It seemed like she had hit an animal, an animal wearing a collar. I'll spare you the details as you probably have a heart and actually care. But I was more interested in her. She knelt beside the animal, teary-eyed and remorseful.

Her bright red hair was pulled back and a smattering of her. and a smattering of light freckles littered her cheeks. Her cheeks with very high cheekbones. Her eyes were rather dull, but her big red lips were tantalizing. As she started to cry, I reached out to her. I wanted to stroke her face, to my amazement. I did. It was soft yet firm and dewy with tears.

She recoiled at once, and I knew it was real. I had connected with her. I needed more. Excidentally, I ran my hands down her body, and now, clearly frightened. She fell backwards onto her ass. Oh, this was my reward. I lunged at her then, ready to wrap my fingers around. her throat.

My invisible hands felt nothing as I touched her delicate skin. I tried again, but my repeated motion ended with the same result. Our moment it seems, the sudden denial infuriated me. And while each swing I took at her left no physical imprint, she sensed me without a doubt, sniffling and rubbing her cheeks. She stood on shaky legs, just like a fawn. No, she was a beautiful dome. One I wanted stuffed and displayed in my basement.

Gaining back her strength, she quickly slid into the driver's seat. I passed through the metal exterior into the passenger seat, unwilling to let this one go. She cranked the wheel around the dead animal and flew back into the street, leaving me, staring at her taillights. I was hurt. This outcome didn't really surprise me. If I couldn't sit within the confines of the seat, there was no physical way to keep me within

the car. I glanced back down at the mangled body on the page. and it clicked. I had a small window of time to interact with the world when something was dying. Apparently once the energy has completely left its physical form, my time was up. I considered my options. I could try to track her down and silently haunt her home, but with very little likely to die within her walls. That seemed a bore.

My best chances of frequent death would be a busy hospital. But then I envisioned God sickly patients. That was a big bus kill. With my non-existent eyes fixated on the bloody creature, I made my decision. So, since then, I've been at the vet. Well, I suppose I better make that plural. I've tried out many over the years. Most of them are staffed with unattractive, overweight receptionist, and veterinarians well past their prime.

Some of the clinics are balanced. With frequent visitors of the young female persuasion, though, I move on once I lose interest. I've been at this current veterinary office for a couple years. Typically, I like to inhabit offices that offer late hours and emergency services. But it make exceptions if the conditions are just right. This office has the best exception I think I've ever encountered. Right now, it's just me and Pauline, the face at the front desk. Per usual, she's an incredibly stout middle-aged woman with a short black perm and thick square glasses.

Silvery strands peeked through her latest dye job. Daily ripaway calendar displayed at the desk is filled with grumpy cats making stupid jokes. It helps keep me rooted, but I'm embarrassed by association. She is in the middle of texting someone about dinner when Calypso walks in. I shit you not. That's her real name. In my time there were Sarah's and Rachel's. Today there are apparently Calypso's, at least one anyway.

And she is magnificent. Calypso breezes in, permeating the stagnant urine smell with the fresh odors and a hint of something floral. She smiles brightly as she greets Pauline. Her bleach blonde hair swept up with the clip, but a few long strands have slipped down into her face. I walked to her, standing right before her eyes. I love to move in and out of the space her body occupies, fantasizing about her sensual skin and the ecstasy of tightening my grip around her dainty neck. Calypso walks down the hallway to put her personal items in the staff room. I move behind her, holding my would-be nose over her right shoulder.

She jerks her head slightly towards me, and I wonder if it's my presence, or one of the animal noise is emanating from the other room she's, responding to. Pauline, she calls. I linger beside her as she walks back to the reception desk. Pauline is in the middle of an obscenely large bite of a donut as we enter the room. She rushes a hand to her mouth as she sets the donut back on the napkin next to her computer mouse. She mumbles an incoherent word in response. What do we have on the schedule for today? Pauline pulls up the appointment screen and begins to scroll through the names.

Calypso stares at the screen purposefully. Are there any euthanasia appointments today? Pauline, looking a little perplexed, continues scrolling and stops at the name now highlighted by her cursor. She turns and looks at Calypso. Calypso nods knowingly before telling her thanks. Why did you ask? Pauline says as a Clipso turns to move on to something else. She pauses for a moment as if contemplating her answer.

It just feels different in here on those days. I grin widely. Giddy is a schoolgirl. Even if she doesn't feel my breath on her neck or my tongue on her ear, she feels me. She's already in tune with the other side. Maybe I can push the boundaries with her. I eagerly wait around for the appointment.

I am Calypso's shadow. When the moment arrives, I sit beside Calypso in an exam room. Calypso is an assistant and has lots of hands-on time with animals, including our special death dates. Over time, I've adapted my behavior. If you come on too strongly with the staff, like I did with the hit-and-run Redhead, they quit the clinic immediately. I really like Calypso, so I've done my part to develop our relationship. During the first few deaths I nuzzled against her hands.

Then I began rubbing affectionately up on her lips. legs. Eventually, I worked my way slithering between her legs in just the same manner as a friendly cat saying hello. In the case of bigger dogs, I have even paddled my way up her leg and burrowed my face into her side. She has responded very positively in these moments, often growing teary-eyed over these animals loving goodbyes. I'm perpetually torn in these moments. All I want to do is overpower her, have my way with her body, before digging my fingers into her neck,

and gazing into those big brown eyes as the cheerful spark fades away. Before, I could keep her with me forever. I could lose myself in those glossy eyes until they shriveled like raisins. But I can't do that anymore, can I? I can't lose my cool this time around. The animal today is a large breed dog. He's been suffering from some incurable ailment. Who cares?

I'm focused on his tall stature and long snout. That dog would surely reach any typical adult's chest while on its back legs and easily snuggle against her face. You see what I'm thinking here. I watch as the veterinarian speaks with the owner. Another pretty woman, though significantly older and less appealing than Calypso. She wipes at her eyes with a tissue as the veterinarian, a man of about 40, picks up the needle. I crouch next to Calypso, assessing the space in my approach. The vet does this thing and is focused on the animal.

And that's my cue. and I squeeze in front of Calypso and jump at her chest, attempting both gentleness and playfulness. But when my hands press against the curves protruding from underneath her uniform, but squeeze, I grab firmly and pinch before burying my face against her neck, tracing my teeth along her carotid artery. Calypso shrinks and stumbles back from the table. Veterinarian glances at her as he checks the animal with the stethoscope.

And then he mouths. You okay? I'm so sorry, Calypso says, nodding at the vet and looking over the owner sympathetically. I fear I've blown it. And I grasp Calypso's wrist desperately. The vet declares the animal is gone. I study Calypso's face as her eyes fall to her wrist. She's doing her best to remain calm, but I can see the fear.

She purposefully lifts her sight to the veterinarian, ready for her next direction. She's putting on a little show for me. I smile satisfactorily. Our moment should have passed, but it hasn't yet. After a few seconds, she slips her hand from my grip, a little unnaturally, and speaks comforting words to the owner. Calypso doesn't come in the next day or the day after. This is worrisome. But I haven't heard talk of her leaving.

According to the vet, she's just sick. I wait around in the lobby for morning. I used to go in back to check on the status of any animals boarded. But the dogs would always erupt into a cacophony of terror. So I don't do that anymore. My door still waits outside, ever patiently. Resting on the street just past the parking lot. Most of the time, I don't even notice it.

It's really just during these excruciating stretches between office hours. Suddenly, a car pulls into the parking lot. Headlights disappear between two white lines and I watch the front door with anticipation. The bell jingles as two figures creep inside. There are murmurs of being careful and comments about how dark it is. The building explodes with a continual stream of barks. Light floods the room and I am delighted to see. Calypso. She's joined by another woman who appears to be old enough to be her mother,

but I don't sense any familial relation. She's wearing all black and holds a large bang over her shoulder. The woman asks Calypso about what's been going on. Calypso takes a deep breath before explaining how she often feels a presence in this office. Originally, she thought it was positive energy, left over from the pets. But after her experience the other day, she thinks it's something else. Yes, I can sense a darkness here. The woman says, walking slowly across the lobby, I stare at her, feeling a mix of bemusement and intrigue.

In all my time, on the other side, I've never seen. encountered anyone poking around my existence. The woman tells Calypso they should go get the rest of the items. A few minutes later, they haul in a folding table and begin setting it up in the lobby. Calypso hurries past me to grab the rolling chairs from behind the front desk. The woman lays out a white cloth that just barely hangs past the edge of the tabletop. She turns out all the lights except for the small. section that acts as a spotlight over the front desk.

Then she lights a candle before pulling a thick and battered book from her bang. She extends her palms to Calypso, who then places our hands into the woman's. It's their spirit here with us. The woman calls out a little too loudly. As if she's talking to her grandfather who always forgets his hearing aids, I roll my eyes. She continues on with some probing questions and I decide to have a little fun. If there is some thinning of the veil, so to speak, these two might be susceptible to my touch. First I slink behind the woman and blow roughly against her exposed neck.

She doesn't react and I just scoff. Just another crackpot. I saunter over to Calypso and stare hungrily at her flawless face. I reach out a hand to stroke her hair before yanking it aggressively. She doesn't flinch. Feeling unimpressed, I walk away from the table. I turned back to face them and notice Calypso's legs. They're fidgeting and bouncing a bit.

She's nervous. What the hell? I figured. and crawl beneath the table. Maybe her legs will be more sensitive. The woman is saying something I can't make out as my fingers fondle of Calypso's calves. The words seem to grow louder, closer, as they swore my ears, but I don't understand. It seems to be some sort of incantation.

My fingers dig into Calypso's leg as I shake my head painfully. This all at once she's screaming and flings herself away from the table. The woman is begging. Come back. Come back to the circle. Calypso scrambles to her feet, knocking over the chair, she points in horror, and somehow screams even more shrilly. The words have finally stopped, but I feel a bit fuzzy, almost dropped. through the haze I see my fingers. Such a pale gray. I wiggle them.

They attach to my long arms also discolored. And I follow the limbs to my torso. I'm wearing a plain polo shirt that reaches my cackays. It look grimy. I remember this outfit. I extend my long, gangly legs. I need to get out from under this table. I look to Calypso and my eyes meet her petrified gaze as I crawl out.

She's no longer screaming. The sounds escaping her mouth is that of a young child on the verge of frightened tears. I try to smile, lengthen my arm out to her. She's actually seeing me. This is the most real connection I've ever had. Then I hear the other woman behind me. She's reading something from the book again. I spin around to glare at her.

And as I turned back to face Calypso, I see it. The door is here. It's across the lobby waiting for me. I have no desire to get any closer. It is radiating evil. The menace practically swirling around it like a fog. I can feel it feeding on me. I back away, but it's no use.

I am moving closer. Metaphysical magnets strapped to my feet are attracted to the door. The golden knob bleeds for my touch. With all my strength I whirl around and bellow. My anger. My refusal. My revenge. It hurdles across the room.

My energy a gust of icy wind. Packages of pet treats crashed to the floor. A stack of business cards fling into the air as the metal holder clinks against the tiles. Calypso and the woman throw their arms up protectively as tables topple over and the candles go out. The performance is over. It feels like the office should be masked in blackness. My power lightning bolt striking this ritual But the light above the front desk still glows pathetically

Both women straighten and look around each other Stunned Thying the mess and assessing the room's energy They believe I am gone Which is absurd Since I'm still here talking to you I do sag a little though As I hold up my invisible finger

and waggle them once more. The women begin tidying the office back up. Making awkward conversation, I linger near them. But I can tell Calypso has severed our connection. It seems I truly am now a ghost. It doesn't take them long. Calypso embraces the woman and thanks her for expelling my spirit from this world. They flipped the light switch and locked the door by the door.

behind them. Leaving me in the dark, I watch as the car reverses and slips quietly onto the street. Accelerating as it passes behind the ugly brown door, it seems I have a choice to make again. I could continue to hang around here and warm my way back into Calypso's senses, but I believe in my gut. Well, you know what I mean. That it's time to move on. Speaking of which, it seems we've had a pretty good connection, too. I mean, you're still here and Calypso's not. So where did you say you live? You have a pet right?

Oh, don't be coy now. Seriously, is that how you're going to be? Don't worry, I'll find you. Creepy Presents The Bog Creek Bodgey. written by Jules Rowan and narrated by Colbert. The first hunter to walk in bloody was a young buck named Hank Williams. Not the Hank Williams you've heard of,

but Bogg-creates very own barrel-chested golden boy of the country-loving Williams family. He burst through the door at 10 a.m. on the second day of Gun Deer season, eyes shiny with the beer he'd already drank and a shit-eating grin splitting the dried blood caked on his cheeks. Rifle in hand, because at the Bog Creek bar, Duns were as welcome during hunting season as snowmobiles were once the snow flew. Hank stood beside the pool table to bask in his glory, while all the other men in Blaze Orange ponied up for Hank's hard-earned drinks. He'd get pissed up for free for the rest of hunting season. In some camps, the tradition of being the first to feed the bod-treat badgy was a thing of pride.

Sons couldn't wait for their turn, and fathers and grandfathers told the stories of their progenies' first kills with esteemed reverence that comes with passing on a family legacy. The legend, Tainted by generations and so much blaze orange and beer, predated the first deer camps, back when hunting was more about putting food on the table and less about sport. The way I heard it from my own grandfather, back when this was still his Bog Creek Bar, was that the old man Williams, what would be young Hanks' great, great, great-grandfather, give or take a few grates, happened upon the bodgy

when he was plotting out his homestead. Covered in mud and moss as if drawing its form from the earth, the bodgy stood over eight feet tall, dripping creek water and black slime on old man Williams' overcoat. Some claim it had long black claws. Others say it was the teeth

that were long and black. Everyone seems to agree that its eyes were green and depthless and ancient. It said that the bodgy, bloodthirsty and clever, had a decision to make. Kill the new settlers one at a time, starting with Old Man Williams, or use them all to its advantage. On that day, a pact was forged that the first deer killed by each settling family be offered in tribute to the bodgy on the creek bank. Old man Williams spread the news to the others, but no one believed him, until another settler from the Daniels clan strung a buck from his tree in front of his one. room shack near the creek. A few of the neighboring settlers helped him clean the deer in exchange

for a few cuts of meat. Such were the times when bounty was shared, with everyone but the bodgy. The next morning, it wasn't the deer that was skinned and hanging from its hooves in the tree, but Mr. Daniels, or what was left of him. As if that wasn't message enough, the guts he'd left in a pile in the woods where he'd shot the deer, ended up on the doorstep of every hunter that helped him the night before. No one ever doubted the old man Williams again, and offerings were paid to the bodgy, as promised. Over time, laws changed even around here. Hunting was condensed to a season. The story of the settler, hanging stinless from a tree seemed less believable with each retelling to the new generations,

and soon the legend of the Baji became as much sport as hunting itself. Tributes to the Baji were still given for every new hunter who badged their first kill, but in the last decade, some of the men, boozed up and brave, started offering themselves, too. Today, when a hunter shoots his first deer, they cover themselves in the blood of the animal and spend the night alone beside the creek waiting for the bodgy. If they survive the night, and they always do, the first one to make their way to my Bod or Creek bar, just like Hank Williams did, drinks for free. Hank takes a seat among the other hunters, and I set him up with a drink.

He's barely had a sip when I asked him if his grandpa found his dog yet. Hank's eyes grow wide, the pride dripping out of his face. He says, no. He had no idea that his grandpa, Henry Williams, had been by the bar four times already to ask if anyone had seen his beloved pooch, a blue healer named Loretta that never left his side, but had been missing since breakfast. The last time Henry stormed in,

the old man was frantic, begging his unwilling neighbors to set up a search party for his dog. No one in the bar wanted to say what they were thinking. That gun-deer season was the worst time to lose a dog or anything in the woods. Hank drinks his beer a little too fast. pushing the empty mug out for a refill.

A few young hunters pop in to tag their kills, asking if they should spend the night by the creek, or if the honor of surviving the bodgy has already been bestowed. Fresh rounds of cheers and beer flow for Hank until the sun gets low, and the alcohol loosens his tongue. I'm drawing glasses in a corner, pretending not to hear bits and pieces of the conversation around me, when my cute bartender ears pick up Hanks' hushed story to a fellow hunter and friend.

He rings his still bloody knuckles on the bar and says he's been getting a lot of flack for being the only Williams' boy who hadn't bagged a deer and had his turn by the creek. The twisted version of his family's legacy had become such a pressure point that he couldn't. He wouldn't, he says, let another. year pass without spending the night waiting for the bodgy. Only, it wasn't the blood of a deer that stained his hair, cheeks, beard, and blaze orange. I'm not looking directly at him, so I can't say for sure, but out of the corner of my eye, it looks like his eyes are glistening. Hank could always be counted on to do stupid things.

His was the first call when someone's mailbox met with a baseball bat, or a neighbor's baby Jesus disappeared out of their nativity scene. But this? This is different. His friend squeezes his shoulder after Hank's confession, then gets up and walks away, leaving Hank on his bar stool, and me holding the rag that I'd been using to clean the glass I am barely holding. I look down at him.

He looks up at me, and he knows that I know. And I know that he knows that I know. I set the glass down, and I'm about to lock the windows and doors and call the police. When the front door flies open with such force it bends the top hinge. I dropped the sticky floor behind the bar, but not before seeing it blocking out what was left of the setting sun. The bodgy. Like the bog had come alive in a mass of moss and mud, eight feet tall, black claws, black teeth, green, depthless, ancient eyes, and a gun.

The first shot is a bang that I feel in my bones. I stuttle toward the coolers, around a small hallway made by wooden crates and empty beer bottles. Another shot. Everyone is screaming. Unholy whales I never heard from a mouth of a man. more gunshots that sound different than the first few other hunters are aiming at the bodgy as if bullets would help as if anyone will make it out alive another shot and a box above me explodes sending cardboard and dust on my head i don't look back the only unarmed person in my bog creek bar i stay low to the ground hidden by the bar itself, and keep crawling until I make it to the darkest corner where the

earwigs and spiders have made their home, among the boxes still stacked from my grandfather's generation. Tucking into a tiny ball, I pry my phone from my pocket and press the button for emergency calls. The shots don't stop. With each bang and explosion, the wooden bar splinters, booze bottles shatter, skulls, crack and brains spill. I hear gurgled cries for mercy, boots on the floor heading towards the back door, a bang and a thud as a body climbing over the bar falls flat on the floor. The screams of horrified men. I can't stop my hand from shaking to hold the phone to my ear.

I think I hear a voice within it between the shot. It's then, pulled briefly from the bloodshed by a voice not trapped inside my bar, that I asked myself the question I should have asked before. Why does a Baji need a gun? I know I saw a gun in its claws before I hit the deck. And I know I saw claws and teeth and those pools of green. Am I losing my mind? Why would a Bacchi need a gun? The last voice, begging for life, is Hank Williams himself,

sobbing and snotty and desperate. He shuffles like a caged animal, and I hear the Baji's heavy footfalls plotting like a pair of boots on the linoleum. Boots? My ears are ringing from the gunfire, so I must not be hearing right. But I do hear Hainch's pleading end in a sharp cry, then more gurgles as blood coats his words and seeps out of whatever wound has just been inflicted.

A bar stool streaches across the floor and falls over. Haints' body lands with a wet thud. I wait. and for a while there is nothing but the sound of labored breathing. Is it mine? I hold my breath and slide my phone under my leg, so the bodgy won't hear the 911 operator's voice. After a few minutes that feel like a few hours,

I hear it walk away, its footsteps, squishing in blood, then crunching on the gravel outside the brook, broken door. When I think it is safe to stand, I use the surrounding boxes to help me to my feet. I shuffle around the corner, out of the cramped dark space that saved my life, and my toes immediately meet with the pool of blood from what I think is the body of a 70-year-old hunter, who I've known since I was a kid. But I can't be sure because he doesn't have a head. Just the frayed stump of a neck.

Bloody, matted chunks of what I suspect are his brains and skull are splattered against the back wall. I'm staring at the bloody neck stump when I drop my phone and vomit into the pool of his blood at my feet. Around the room, the carnage is the same. A body on the pool table. More slumped over the bar. a few others on the ground. Some stopped on the way to the back door, others, the front. Then there's Hank Williams.

I wipe my mouth and lift the door, separating the back of the bar from the front, and find him by the fallen stool. He's still breathing, but God help me, I'm too stunned to do anything but stare at him as the blood bubbles out of the door. jagged dash in his neck. He's holding something in his hands, something I've seen before, clutched in his fist, is a red collar with the name Loretta in big white letters, the collar of

Henry's loyal blue healer that used to follow that man everywhere. Before, Hank Williams killed it, skinned. it and bathed in its blood to wait by the creek for the bodgy that never found him there, but tracked him to the Bod Creek bar and killed a room full of hunters, leaving nothing but that collar and a set of bloody boot prints behind. Creepy presents, no one lives forever, written by Chris. show. Hello. I am no doubt one of the shadows in your life. One of the people that you don't even begin to wonder if they even have a backstory to their life. You just glance in me for a second

and then mind your own business, be it social, work, family, or whatever else there is in this life. But I do indeed have a backstory to myself. And let me just tell you that you have you have a and probably never will experience this. I walked out in my apartment with a big smile on my face. The sun was shining and the garden the landscaper just put in was absolutely beautiful. The reason I was so happy was because I finally got a date. I finally found a girl that I actually liked, and she liked me back. She said she'd meet me at the theater too.

so I went on my way to the theater. When I met her, she was stunning. She was absolutely beautiful. She had on a red summer dress with little flowers along the bottom of the dress. When she saw me, she twirled as if to say, What do you think? And when she twirled, the flowers in the dress seemed to come alive. She really did pop out from the rest of the crowd.

We both looked at the list of movies and decided to get tickets for Marley and me. And when we were outside of the theater, she giggled a bit. It said it was kind of funny that the both of us cried so much. I could tell that when we were both holding each other's hand when we walked out of the lobby, we were both in love. Let's fast forward a couple years. My friend, Chris, was always a couple of years. close friend of mine, and I asked him when I should pop the question of marrying her.

He asked me how many years we were together, and I said two whole years, and that tomorrow, in fact, was our anniversary. He said that tomorrow he was going to give me his car, and he was going to set something up, so that it feels special. I took the car and followed the directions Chris told me. I picked up my girlfriend and took her to the park where Chris said, to go. On my way there, she asked what I got for her. I simply said something very special. Chris was there waiting for us, and he said he wasn't expecting us here. So we walked, and while she wasn't paying attention, Chris slipped me the box with the ring and winked. When we got to the middle of the park, Chris said stay put. So he just sat on the bench and the front of it. I was

island of flowers of every variety. It was peaceful there. She didn't mind it and neither did I. Chris brought back an amp and a microphone. I asked him what he was going to do with it but he interrupted me mid-sentence. He put down the amp and flipped it on. He got the audience's attention and said that we were together for quite a long time and that I had something to show her.

I got out the ring and said that this was her present. And those next four words sent her spiraling into a happy lunatic. Will you marry me? Yes, spouted from her mouth a billion times. The wedding was wonderful. We set up our house in an ordinary neighborhood. We planned to have kids and even put a crib in the baby room. until that one night.

I got a call from my wife and she said that she'd probably be working late. I said that was okay just as long as she gets home at a decent time. She said, okay, mom, we both chuckled a bit. I said I love you. And she said the same and hung up. I didn't know that would be the last time I would talk to her. At 11, I was playing some Team Fortress 2 and all the same. sudden I heard some footsteps coming from the kitchen. I called out to my wife to see if she was

there, but there was no answer. I exited out of the game and went over to the kitchen to see if anyone was in there. Evidently enough, there was no one there. Just as I was about to turn around to go back, I saw a figure out from the corner of my eye. I looked back and I saw my wife in a black dress. I settled down a bit, but something seemed odd about her. For one thing, she just looked directly ahead of her to the door leading outside. Then she started to walk. I noticed that when she walked, her footsteps didn't have any sound. I called out to her, but she didn't turn her head towards me. I called out once again and asked where she was going. No reply. Then the strangest thing happened. Just as she was walking to the door, she stopped for a second.

And walked right through it. I saw her ghost. I swear to God, I saw something, something out a place in the world we know about now. I went over to the door where she walked into, opened it, and saw nothing. Just the outside. Cool, crisp air was hitting my face. I closed the door and went back to my game regarding all that I saw as a hallucination. Minutes later, I received a call from the hospital. The person on the other end asked if I was the husband to the woman.

and known as my wife. I said yes and asked if she was okay. They replied with a simple two words. She's dead. My heart skipped beat. I stammered out a what? They said again that my wife was dead. The person said she had a heart attack while driving.

They found her dead at the wheel, crashed into a pickup truck. Tears welled up in my eyes, I couldn't believe the news at all. It was like I wasn't even experiencing life at all, and that I was just hearing things. They said that they would have some paperwork for me tomorrow, and that they were sorry for my loss. I hung up and dropped the phone. I didn't even feel like doing anything at that moment. I just felt like dying.

How was the word? that came up in my mind the most. By now I was sitting on my couch staring into space with tears running down my face. But then, the next moment, I was standing up and I was facing my wife in the living room. She was still wearing that same black dress. She was staring at me with a look of dread on her face and a hint of sadness. I asked her what she was doing here. She said, that she wanted to say goodbye. She started to tear up. I wanted to wipe her tears away, but I couldn't really move my arms. I just shushed gently. I then said that she was the most lovely woman I had in my life, and that she'll always be with me. She smiled and said she knew she would. I then asked why.

Nothing else, just, she then said, no one lives forever. She could see that I started to tear up and we both started to cry a bit. Her hand moved towards my face and she wiped my tears away. Her hand felt soft and I wanted to feel her forever. Then she just said, I love you. I said, I love you too. and she disappeared into the air. I woke up on the couch laying down.

I glanced at the spot where I was standing with my wife. She wasn't there. I decided to go to bed and sleep. I woke up the next day and expected to see my wife's beautiful face. She wasn't there. The next day when I went to the hospital, I heard that they found that she was pregnant and that the child died along with her.

That made it all the more devastating. When I went to the park, I went to the bench in the middle of the park. I sat down, put my arm around where we used to sit. I watched Marley and me on DVD later that day. It's been a year since then. Every time I walk past the nursery room, I hear the faint giggle of a little girl. 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.