Creepy - Rat King

Episode Date: July 22, 2020

All hail the king...***Written by Max Voynich and narrated by Michelle Kane***Check out our reward tiers at patreon.com/creepypod***You can also subscribe to us on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/creepypod***Produced by Steve Blizin***Title music by Alex Aldea***Intro/Outro Narration by Joe Stofko Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is the Bloody Disgusting Podcast Network. No. This is creepy. A podcast dedicated to sharing the most famous chilling and disturbing creepy pastors and urban legends in the world. Whether these stories truly happened or not simply fabrications is for you to decide. These stories may contain graphic to picket. of violence and explicit language. Listener discretion is advised.

Creepy presents. Rat King by Max Voynich and narrated by Michelle Kane. Rat King Noun A collection of rats whose tails are intertwined and bound together by one of several possible mechanisms. Such as entangling materials. like hair or sticky substances, like sap or gum, or getting tied together. The first time he coughs like that, we're halfway through a game.

It's wet and rasping, and he doubles over as he tries to force it out his throat. I stop. Are you sick? He rolls his eyes. Kings don't get sick. I can see that look on his face, like he. He doesn't want the world around us to change, like he doesn't want the dragons to turn back to trees, or his crown to turn from gold to twigs and string. He doesn't want this imaginary world to collapse in on itself. I don't want to stop playing either, but the second cough drops him to his knees, and he has to reach his small arm out to steady himself against my leg. I bend down and pick him up by his armpits, hoisting him until he's back on his own two feet and tug on his hand. Let's go.

Kings don't get sick, the little brothers do. I give his hand a squeeze and we set off home. It takes us a little while to get back. His coughs mean we have to stop every few minutes, and we have to take extra care to avoid the tunnels once it starts getting dark. I'm sure they're just rumors, just fiction, but I can't help letting parts of them take root in my mind. The rumors change depending on who you speak to, on whether it's told to you by an old drunk or a cautious teacher, but all have a few things in common. They say that years and years ago, sometime in the 50s, there was a huge underground complex under our town. a complex that spread out in all directions like a fungus.

Something happened down there, although what this event actually was, changes from person to person, and it was abandoned. Some claim that a whole city actually lived down there and were forced to evacuate after the nuclear reactor went into meltdown. They say that it was a huge government cover-up, and this is the reason that strange, aircraft make flybys over our otherwise boring little town. Some claim that the complex was populated by a strange cult that made a deal with something so terrible and ancient that they can

never see the light of day again. I've even heard people say that the junkies found the labyrinth of tunnels under the city and used it to navigate the town and smuggle in dope, until they stumbled upon something that trapped them down there. They call the people who supposedly live under the surface, rats, claim that after years without sunlight, they went pale and lost their vision, and that they'll chase you using only the sound of your feet if you wander too deep.

Wayward little boys and girls will get chased by rats, rats with milky eyes and long fingers, until they're caught and eaten whole. Whatever the truth is, there's something below the surface, something wrong, something that makes the children sick and the adults weary and paranoid. When we get home, my parents rush my brother to the hospital, and he stays there for several days whilst they run all kinds of tests. I'm allowed to visit on the third day, and I find my mother sat in the waiting room, holding his twaseless. twig crown in her hands. She gestures to the crown. Contamination risk. My brother seems to have somehow shrunk in the past three days, although perhaps that's just perspective. He is, after all,

surrounded by huge machines that whir and beep and tubes that loop over the side of his bed. He smiles when he sees me, makes a movement to give me a hug, but a doctor calmly puts his hand on his chest, no sudden movements. I try and hold it together to be the best big sister I can be, kissing his forehead, stroking his hair, telling him he's going to be all right. I try and ignore the look on the doctor's face. At the end of the third day, they take my parents into a separate room and I can only make out their silhouettes through the mystic glass.

I can see my mother put her head in her hands and my father puts his arms around her. They do not say anything until we get home, where my father calmly takes every plate out of the drawer and smashes them against the wall. A dozen porcelain explosions and then he collapses to the floor with huge animal socks. I cook dinner and we eat it out of the pan. I understand. Our life becomes a series of trips to and from the hospital, and I'm entrusted with carrying out tasks that were meant for my brother. It's strange, although he is far younger than me, six years, to be precise.

There must have been some tradition about these falling about the man in the family. Each week, I take bundles of food and water to several spots just upstream from various tunnels or sewer entrances. There, I place them in the water and watch as they follow the course of water down and around and eventually disappear into the black mouths of the tunnels. Sometimes, if I leave it until it gets dark, I can hear things coming from these entrances. Paranoid whispers. Muted whales, something like humming. It is as if a hundred people are speaking all at once, a thousand miles away,

and the echo of the echo of their voices is drifting out into the night. I make sure that whenever I visit my brother, I bring him strawberries, his favorite food, until he grows too weak to eat them, until I have to cut them up with a night. and fork into small, bite-sized pieces which I feed to him. We pretend for a while that he's still the king, that I'm just a knight who's making sure my king is fed and healthy. But it soon becomes too painful. It's a reminder of the years spent outside of long summers of the promise that we both might someday grow old. Around a month later, he comes home. He is almost skin and bone at this point, but we still make the effort to have a little welcome home party. My father acts strange at

dinner. I can see it in the way he moves, the redness around his eyes that suggests he's been crying. A boy like that shouldn't have to face death. He shouldn't have to grapple with. He shouldn't have to grapple it to try and understand it, rationalize it. He looks to me. A boy like that should live forever. My brother was always the favorite, and I knew that. I didn't mind. He was my favorite, too.

That night I hear a rustling, hush whispers, and the lock to the back door spring open. Curious, I peek out my blinds and see. still partially illuminated by the light from inside, my father, and in his arms a bundle of white cloth and a face, my brother. Immediately, I get dressed and make my way noiselessly down the stairs and out of the house, following as best I can in the dark. I follow him down the back roads, through the fields, and eventually to the mouth of a tunnel. The roar of the water coming from it muffles my movements, and I lurk at the very edge of my father's glow as we enter.

Thankfully, he does not look back often, and when he does, he seems to be in a trance, eyes glazed over, a grim expression on his face. It gets quieter as we get further and further into the tunnels, and I have to make care not to make any sound. holding my breath, taking exaggerated short steps. There are noises, though. My father holds an old-fashioned lantern in his hand, which casts a small sphere of light across the tunnel, and every now and again he'll freeze and hold it in front of him, as if challenging someone to come out from the dark.

Whispers bounce off the walls of the tunnels, saying all sorts of strange and horrible things. I hear the faint sound of manic laughter over some tuneless hum. My father carries something that makes strange, periodic clicking noises, that every so often starts clicking rapidly until he moves on. There's writing on the walls, and the further we get, the more demented it gets. It goes from teenagers' graffiti to genuine warnings, telling people to people, to stay away that they must not go any further, welcoming us to hell.

Then smaller, stranger writing, in scrawled almost childish letters. Stay a while. I think about the rats we were warned about. Imagine them as a pack stalking me in the same way I'm following my father. Milky-eyed and hungry, peering at me from crevices in the wall and from, under the surface of the water. We start going down an incline, and I have to hang further back,

trying to time my steps with my father so he doesn't hear me, crouching and covering my face whenever he turns around. The voices are getting louder now and more manic. There are so many of them. I can hear arguments, confessions, laughter, songs, monologues. You never told me I never wanted to hear. I loved him. I loved him.

It sounds like all the thoughts of an asylum and the smell. It starts to reek not only of shit, but of sweat and bile and curdled milk. Or if it's some great mind leaking, their worries and anxieties and desires spilling out and into our world. My father pushes on and we get deeper. The tunnels turn from brick to concrete, and the graffiti turns to actual printed text. Plaza, one mile, approximately. The noise starts to hit me like a wall, and I grow in my confidence, standing up straight. There's no way he can hear me over this.

Fucking, why did they leave me here, here of all places surrounded by these idiots, and where has it gone the last time I saw it was... incomprehensible. So many words layered over each other. It sounds like TV static. See them, see them, see them. How many times? Something else, something else here, here, let me out. And then we emerge into this vast underground chamber. It seems to be illuminated by small lights around the edge, although they're so faint. It takes a while for my eyes to adjust. But even in the dim light, I can see how big this thing is. How massive, as if each light is a star, hinting at unknowable depth and height.

Something changes as we enter. My clothes and skin have the texture of used gum. Everything becomes sticky, like a leather seat on a hot day. My vision swims slightly. A wall of stale heat hits me, the temperature of sweat, of hot breath. whatever it is that's here is emanating into the room and reality around us. It stinks and the voices are deafening. I can see the bundle of clothes and my father's arms start to wriggle and shake.

And he holds his lamp up and I can see. I see it first as a wall. A wall the color of pallid skin until I can make out familiar shapes. shapes, hands, arms, faces, all coming from attached to this wall, legs and ears and fingers, all bursting from this wall like spots or growths. Hundreds of mouths, moving, hands, endlessly grasping at nothing, legs spasming and trying to move along the same. slick ground, and some shapes are more defined than others. You can see some bodies that are half absorbed by this wall, some that still have the shape

of a human, shoulders, bellies, and some that have been completely absorbed, so that all that's left is facial features spread out of a mass of skin. And it occurs to me then that these are poor, we're... and the sound and the stench is coming from this thing, whatever it is, this thing that laughs and screams and whoops and mutters and spits, until it dawns on me that it's not just a wall, because somehow, slowly, and with great effort, it's moving, swaying, and stumbling and fraction by fraction, it starts to make its way towards us. The eyes that litter its surface fixed on the white bundle in my father's arms.

The mouth filled with yellowed teeth, hollering and wailing, the fingers across the surface, contracting and spasming like dying insects. And frozen in horror, it's all I can do. to watch my father, take my brother out from the bundle of clothes, and hold him out to the grabbing hands and flailing arms, until they take him and pull him in. And he's too weak to resist. And the voices seem to reach a fever pitch, united for just a second as he joins. And I can hear him scream, loud.

and louder until I lose his voice amongst the others. We watch for a while trying to keep track of my brother's body before the thing shifts and wobbles and new faces appear. And what was once my brother disappears into the dark. My father turns around, walks straight towards me, grabs my hand and pulls. We have to go now. I have so many questions.

How did he know I was here? What is that thing? Is my brother okay? But he's stronger than me, and when he tugs on my hand, I stumble after him. He says only one thing to me once we're far enough away

for the sound to turn back to whispers. He says it with tears in his eyes, and for a moment I can see that he's not just a man, but also a boy, down and that he's just as scared and hurt and confused as I am. That thing, it does not die, it does not age. A pause as he wipes the tears from his cheeks. He will not die down here.

When we return home, my mother has fallen asleep at the kitchen table waiting for us. And when we wake her, she looks at us as if we had done. at us as if we had killed him ourselves. I think on my father's words, he will not die down there and wonder if perhaps death might have been better. I still do the jobs that were meant for my brother,

the strange rituals that were meant for the man of the family. I still pack and send the bundles of food into the tunnels. But now that I know what's down there, I take a few extra steps. I make sure I put strawberries amongst the food, picking the biggest and juiciest I can find. If I've got a spare hour or so, I'll make a little crown from twigs and string and hope that it finds him somehow in the dark. And if I get close enough, close enough to hear the whispers and shrieks and laughter,

sometimes I can make out his voice amongst them, the voice of my little king. My Red King 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

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