Creepy - The Collector & Foreclosure

Episode Date: June 19, 2025

The Collector***Written by: Em S. Lyn and Narrated by: Megan McDuffee***Foreclosure***Written by: Christian Wallis and Narrated by: Alicia Atkins***Support the show at patreon.com/creepypod***Sound design by: Pacific Obadiah***Title music by: Alex Aldea Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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. The Collector.

Written by M. S. Lynn. And narrated by Megan McGuffie. Even after living in her apartment for nine months, Greta took time to fall asleep to the nightly grumblings of the city. Like learning to sleep next to a new lover, she was still adjusting to buy products of its dormant biology. the low moaning of wind billowing between the brick buildings, the budding rumble and thunderous passing of the twilight trains, and the occasional screams of a couple's disintegration down

the darkened streets. And somehow, Greta would find her way into slumber. Though the journey could be difficult, once sleep had coiled about her brain, rarely did it release its grip until the bright rays of a mid-morning sun set her eyelids ablaze in a living red. On the night of June 15th, however, something was different. Greta awoke from deep slumber, calmly, as though her mind had drifted through a full night's rest, but there was no light outside her window, only darkness. She pawed at her phone screen, squinting against the brightness to read the clock. 2.15. How odd. How odd. she thought, and rolled over, willing her brain to accept the reality that she had not slept enough,

and to be a good little sack of gray meat and banish her consciousness once more to the realm of dreams. This it did not do. In fact, as Greta laid in her bed, her heart started to beat faster and faster, and she found that no part of her really wanted to go back to sleep. resigned to the fate of the awake, Greta rose and tiptoed out into the kitchen, prepared to silence a teapot on the eve of its whistling, and thus lull her brain into slumber with a hot cup of uncaffeinated hibiscus tea. After the kettle was placed upon the gas range, but before she twisted the knob to light the flame, Greta realized what was wrong. The city outside the windows was completely and uttered. silent. She thought back to her waking, but could not remember since then if she'd heard even the purring sounds of an insomniac driver prowling the streets like a lion unable to sleep.

No matter, Greta thought, fighting off the wispy remnants of a dream's unease. Even a city sleeps at some point. Click, click, click, click went the igniter in response as Greta twisted the knob on the stove. The flame was born with barely a whimper. She stood and stared at the kettle, daring it to catch her off guard with its jaunty tune. She couldn't risk angering her roommates by waking them up simply for a late-night cup of tea. They didn't like her. They didn't have to, but it still hurt to overhear whispered conversations about her odd and eccentric behaviors. Greta shook those parasitic thoughts free. She'd nearly broken her first rule of the late-night kettle game.

Don't get distracted. Greta focused on not focusing on anything but the teapot. Her concentration was so consuming, she almost didn't hear the new night noise until it was emanating up from the sidewalk outside her window. It was a jangling, almost jolly clanking, as if someone had stuffed a bag full of empty aluminum cans and glass bottles and thrown it over their shoulder as they walked down the street, which they probably had, reasoned Greta's thoughts at the time. What drew her curiosity to this new noise, however, was the irregularity of the intervals between sound and silence.

It stopped, then started once she thought it had stopped for good, five seconds of sound, then ten of sound, then ten of. silence, then two of clanking, a half-minute of quiet. Whoever was making the noise was making it in such a slow and halting manner that Greta found herself wandering to the window and drawing aside the gauzy curtains to take a peek. The moment her eyes focused upon the familiar cracked grid of the sidewalks and roadways below, the sound stopped. She waited for the clinking, clanking to begin again, but it did not. Seconds passed, then dragged. Greta's heart beat fast once more,

too fast for merely standing and staring, as if it was preparing her. She canvassed the sidewalk along the front of her building, but saw no one. Then her eyes traveled across the street, brushing along closed storefronts and empty alleyways, until her gaze snagged upon a large object, It was tall, taller than a person could be, and made up of a solid impenetrable black.

Perhaps a piece of furniture left out for pickup, Greta thought. She would love to take a closer look in the morning, for it was a very odd-looking piece of furniture. It must be on its side, she thought, for the longest bit was upright, curving to a rounded point, and with a large bulge sticking out from its left side. Greta's mind searched its vast catalog of antique furniture knowledge, finally deciding that what she was looking upon was a custom shes lounge. She even turned to check the available space in the sitting room, and, deciding there was enough,

she turned back to take in any other details that might convince the roommates of its adoption into their home. Despite their grievances with her, Greta was sure they would not refuse a free custom shes lounge. But the object had changed. Greta blinked in confusion. Gone was the protrusion to the side that she had assumed to be the cushioned backing. Now it appeared in profile a taller, skinnier shape,

like a men here or an obelisk scooped from black obsidian, and at the top nestled beneath the apex of the curved point. was a white oval that was, or appeared to be, staring up at Greta. The kettle shrieked. Greta ran back to the stovetop to remove the noisy thing, nearly tripping in her adrenaline-fueled haste. With shaking fingers, she plucked a tea bag from its box, poured the steaming water into the mug,

and stood there, clutching the burning ceramic between her hands. The clinking, clanking, clanking sound. had begun again, but now it sounded as though it was right outside the window, though Greta stood upon Cherry Hardwood suspended three floors up, quiet, then bloomed once more, and Greta dared not across the sitting room to take a peek through the gauzy curtains. Her mind spun a creature of lifeless black, who was born from noise and lived in silence and hunted in the in between. But then, as her thoughts rabbited down the dark hole of imagination, the clinking clanking had taken up again, and teasingly, painfully, it traveled away down the street, away from Greta.

When she felt brave enough, Greta peaked out the thinnest strip of window she could bear to uncover. The piece of furniture that had not been furniture, the black statue that had not been a black statue, had disappeared. A month passed with growing tension. A full night's sleep proved elusive, though Greta had grown accustomed to the city's companionship in the late hours. She even welcomed the noises, for falling asleep was no longer her greatest hurdle. Now she waged an unknown battle in her subconscious to stay asleep, to resist the pull of some force that dragged her into the midst of a night in a city she no longer recognized. And then, without failure or warning, that infernal

noise would return, the harbinger of someone or something stalking, hunting through the catatonic streets below. And Greta would lie awake, clutching the sheet and quilted throw above her breasts, and would stay awake long after the clinking clanking had disappeared, until the dark John's light played upon her far wall, painting it the color of peaches and honey, whose happy hues laughed at her terror, faded but not forgotten. Of course, her roommates did not believe her, even admonishing what they considered a silly attempt to frighten them. And though Greta assured them it was not so, her assurances only produced further exasperation,

and the more she insisted on the truth, the quicker Greta saw their fear grow in direct proportion to her own. But it was not the clinking, clanking story they were afraid of. No, it was her. And sometimes Greta would wonder if the creature, like her, was not a thing to be feared, that maybe it was just misunderstood. The night of August 1st, Greta decided things would be different. She awoke, calmly, for she was accustomed to this new,

to total darkness. She rolled over to look at her phone screen, but was shocked to find that it was not between the hours of two and three as it had always been, but instead displayed 133. For once, there was still time before it arrived. Greta got out of bed, donning sweatpants, a thick sweater, and boots. In one pocket she put her phone and house keys, in the other went a flashlight, and, before she could doubt herself, a can of pepper spray, never before used. She searched the proper method of using said pepper spray on her phone, and watched the four-minute video in silence. Down the hallway she then crept, and slowly she slid the chain from its slot upon the front door. Each click of the lock bolt was a pinch to her nerves, until, at last,

the door swung open with blessed silence. Down the stairs she inched, taking a moment upon each flight to listen for the telltale clinking, clanking, but there was nothing except the creek of floors above as insomnius tenants walked about. At the base she checked her phone once more, 1.54.

Still time, thought Greta, for she had devised a plan the day before, a plan to expose the clangor in the streets and to place her in her roommate's confidences once more. All she needed to do was wait in the little atrium between the outer great door and the inner wooden door of the apartment building. She would wait in the silence and the dark to catch proof of the thing making the clinking clanking. To prove to herself and to anyone else that this was a being that existed beyond her tail. of the night-time hours. Greta awoke, feeling stiff,

a sharp rod of pain running through her spine, an angle of fire in the odd bend to her neck. She had fallen asleep, hunched in the corner of the small atrium, facing out into the darkness, and it was so very dark. Greta did not hear the noise. Greta did not hear anything.

She wondered if she had missed it, rubbing her eyes she checked her phone one last time. 2.55. Odd, she thought. Greta looked back out onto the street, but there was only blackness. And yet, she could see something. Thin burnished lines that criss-crossed in a fine mesh in front of the dark. And she realized she was looking at the reflection of her phone's screen upon the grated front door.

But why so dark? dark, she thought. Were the street lamps out? Greta directed the phone screen outwards and looked a little higher. Just above the knob, the beyond was inky black. Fumbling with the phone, having long since forgotten about the flashlight in her pocket, Greta clicked on the flashlight icon and directed the beam to the door. There was indeed what appeared to be nothing on the other side. It was not just a trick of her sleep-addled brain. It was the color of a black so deep that it did not reflect the light, nor give sway to lesser shadows, as though the very world stopped on the threshold of the grated door. She inched nearer, her nose close enough to smell the sharp, bloody tang of rust.

Greta could see nothing. She could hear nothing. A door slammed behind Greta, muffled by brick and mortar and a surplus of other doors, and yet it was loud enough to make her turn to check the interior entryway. It was the first time another noise had snuck into this odd hour of night, and that is when it started, the clinking, clanking sound coming from right behind her. Greta swung back around. The noise stopped. It was still black as pitch outside, but something else had changed. It floated, a pale smudge at the noise stopped.

the top of her vision. She raised her phone light higher. The blackness on the other side remained unchanging, except at the very top, just below the casing, from where peaked in, looking down upon her, a white oval. It was not the detailless shape as Greta had seen from the view through the sitting room window. Up close, she could just make out creases across the surface. Creeces like the skin around two eyes, clenched so tight they radiated lines, and a long crescent compression of a closed, but smiling, lipless mouth. Greta forgot about the pepper spray. She forgot about her original plan. She forgot to not be afraid. Her back hit the wooden inner door, and she fumbled blindly for her keys, refusing to take her eyes off the thing outside the door. And then the

door was shrieking as the thing ripped the metal apart, pulling at it easily as one might tear through wallpaper. But she had to turn away, to fit the key into the lock. Her hands were shaking so badly. The shrieking, clinking, clanking, clanking continued, so loud. Yet Greta knew only she could hear it. Perhaps only she could see it. Perhaps this was all just in her mind. The door would not unlock. Gretta was using the wrong key. The shrieking stopped. She looked back. The face, for it was a face, floated in the blackness, looking at her through the tear in the door, all the while the sound like cans and bottles and scrap metal bashing together rang in her ears. Greta found the proper key. She shoved it into the lock. The inner door opened and she stumbled forwards even as she felt

something circle around her leg. She screamed, but she could not hear her own voice above the din, and backwards she was dragged into the clinking, clanking night. Gretta's roommates believed for the longest time that she had simply left. They were annoyed by her sudden abandonment of the apartment, her unwashed mugs in the sink, her plants that were now slowly dying. With no word from her, they grew exasperated, then mocking, scornful, and eventually they grew worried. Greta had vanished to a place none of them could conceive of, for they knew nothing of her beyond the oddities they despised. One roommate was racked by more guilt than the others, and they found themselves unable to sleep after Greta's disappearance. They had discovered

there was an odd nowhere hour of the night when nothing made a sound. This strange silence had been discovered in the darkness when they stumbled drunk to the bathroom, and on their return had slammed their bedroom door so hard their muffled ears had heard only the sound of their rapid heartbeat in the silence that followed. In the silence that lasted until the clock rolled into the next number, upon which the noises of the city started up once more. And now they lay in wait for that odd hour every night. They waited for the time when the only sound was their whispered inhalations and exhalations as the city around them held its breath. And in that time they thought of Greta and of the stories she had told, and they tried not to hear the night noise that crept up from the streets below.

A clinking, clanking. Creaking. Forclosure. Written by Christian Wallace. and narrated by Alicia Atkins. I get shot at. A lot. But it isn't what scares me about this job.

When I arrive at a home and see someone burst out of their front door clutching a rifle, I know what to expect. They have something to lose. They're scared and they don't know what to do. So I tell them. I give them resources on fighting back. I refer them to law firms who do pro bono work. government bodies and charities that can help them get back on their feet.

I speak calmly and with empathy. And people listen. Some even thank me as they pack their things up and drive away. The suicides are harder to deal with. I get at least three or four a year. And people who kill themselves out of spite really go all out on the spectacle. The harder it is for the bank to clean up, the better. And people assume the bank puts their houses on the market the second it seized.

But a house can sit forgotten for years before I'm sent to look it over. Lone body swinging in empty living rooms. Flesh like melted candle wax from all that time left in the open air. I find it profoundly sad. These people lay themselves out, like a spiteful diorama. And then no one turns up. They slit their thiriseless. throat's while clutching eviction notices.

And by the time I arrive, the blood is dried and the ink is faded. The worst ones don't just hurt themselves, but their loved ones, too. Suicide packs are more common with the elderly, but it isn't always octogenarians. Families, too. It's rare, but it does happen. A sun-baked house with drawn curtains, so much time passing the dry autumn heat that their skin turned paper thin, receding lips,

black toothless gums born and arictus grin. Hell of a thing to see staring out of a crib. Each house is his own apocalypse. Its own ruined city for me to wander. Whiskey in this toilet cistern, fintinol under the bed, bills pass due. And it doesn't just end with the people we kick out.

These places are empty so long you'll offer. often get squatters. Usually harmless. Not always. Some have the potential to be thoroughly lethal. Stringy men and women with flinty eyes and missing teeth who come bursting out of moldy old blankets and indoor tents, slashing box cutters wildly at the air. You could play tick-tac-toe on my forearms from all the defensive wounds. Even when they've moved on, the things they leave behind aren't exactly safe. Fumes from homemade labs can rot your lungs. An HIV positive needles stuffed down the sides of old sofa cushions wait to prick curious fingers. And the cooks get real paranoid about being robbed. So they like to rig their homes with traps. They get inventive with whatever's

lying around. Shards of glass on spring-loaded broom handles. Trick floorboards over boxes of razor blades. Shit smeared knives hidden beneath false window seals. Every now and then, I find a trap that's been set off. The baseball bat rigged to lash out at anyone entering the kitchen, blood and hair dripping from the bent nails hammered into the wood. No sign of the poor fucker who set it off. Just a grisly trail of gore leading out of the house and into the nearby woods. Most likely candidate is the guy who set the trap. These addicts stay up for days and pass out. Then when they wake up, the first thing they do is head for their stash, not remembering what they left behind. One time, I found the guy lying a few feet away from his own trap. He kept his money in this old metal lunchbox at the back

of the cupboard, and he'd rigged it so anyone reaching in would get a hell of a surprise. The blade went in at his elbow and left just before the knuckle on his thumb. No helping him after that. He died bleeding out on his late grandmother's cold linoleum. What a god-awful way to go. In his little lunchbox? On the ground, an empty of everything worth taking. Police reckoned someone was with him when it happened.

Must have gotten scared. So they took the cash and left him to die. It had taken a full month before I found him. And no one even reported him missing in the interim. You think the kid would be angry, but he wasn't. He just looked like he was scared. 19, going through withdrawal and dying slowly. Curled up like a baby.

One hand gripping his opened wrist. You can't trap the ocean in your fist. It leaks through your fingers. That kid knew what was coming. I could see it in his eyes. Terrified. Fucking terrified. Meth is a hell of a drug. These poor guys fry their brains out in the middle of nowhere. I can't even begin to imagine what they think they see out there, what visits them in the dark.

Found this trailer once that'd been rigged with damn near a hundred traps. They weren't particularly sophisticated, but they were numerous and vicious and desperate. And they circled the lone motorhome out in the middle of the desert like an invading army, made of knives and bear traps and stolen guns and even a few hastily made IEDs. Took me and a bomb squad a week just to get to the front door, and by the time we opened it, we were all fairly certain of one simple fact. This place hadn't been rigged to keep thieves out. Whoever had set the traps had been scared of something leaving. Probably just drug-fueled paranoia on behalf of whoever set them, but I think the idea that something was in there waiting for us

got under our skin anyway. During the operation, we'd sometimes get shattered reports of someone moving around in the trailer, and the whole sight would go to hell, armed men and women lying on their bellies, iron sights lined up on the front door, hand-shaking. I guess we kept asking ourselves over and over what's it? in there that had someone so scared they set up all these traps. When we finally got our answer, the first thing we found was a meth lab, pretty par for the

course. Less normal was a body that had been torn to fucking pieces. Halfway to dust after all the time in the heat had passed, but it was strewn all over the interior. Walls, floors, ceiling. Couldn't argue that it was a natural death or a product of scavengers, not unless coyotes can work a lock and key. What was left of his head and torso looked like he'd gone through hell. I'm hardly a forensic expert, but it looked to me like he'd died slowly and painfully. Missing fingers, teeth, one eye plucked out. Torture is what it made me think of. Even stranger than all that, though, was what we found sat on the kitchen counter. next to all those broken beakers and stained chemistry equipment.

A doll. Not like a kid's doll. Porcelain. Like a collector's item that had seen better days. Scared the shit out of me, given the circumstances and all. Couldn't shake the feeling whoever had made all those traps had done so with that thing in mind. Which begged the question,

who was the poor guy stuck inside the trailer? and what had happened to him. Cops wrote it off. Meth is a hell of a drug, so they say. We all knew that. Only, I wasn't so sure. I've seen a lot of weird shit. Who knows what visited that poor guy out in the wild,

so far from civilization. A lot of life gets lived out in the world. Out on the plains or out in forests and amongst hills. far from prying eyes. You get a sense of it in my job. The sheer quantity of untold stories. Failed dreams, great triumphs. Abandoned canvases.

Well-worn guitars. Haydays that came and went, or simply never came at all. Most stories follow a rhythm. Most. Some, like that doll, raise profound questions. Others aren't really stories at all, so much as nightmares just waiting for the next victim.

This world is full of hidden needles waiting for probing hands. There are rare occasions where I'll advise the bank to not sell a property. They become part of a kind of no-go zone the government has set up around the country. I only see bits of this machinery at work. Whatever bureaucracy manages it is way over my pay grade. but there is a system in place for managing the worst of the worst. I'm not talking ghost either. None of the examples I've given so far would be candidates.

Sounds fucked up, I know. Scrub the blood, scrape the brains, pick the shotgun pellets out of the plaster. If the next family who moves in has to contend with the ghost of a few clumsy meth heads or disgruntled former owners, well, so be it. No. For a place to be deemed a no-go, it has to be beyond recovery and an active threat to life. I'm talking factories with bottomless holes that pump out enough radiation that the government has to build a nuclear dump site just to make a convincing cover. Although that is a bit of an extreme example. Most of the time, we just blame it on radon, or meth fumes, and condemn it. had this one place, a farmhouse where a family of five had lived for nearly 60 years.

By the time I got there, the kids were adults, and the parents had been dead for a while. The children had resisted selling the family home, tried to keep up with the payments. But they had their own debts, and in the end the bank got its pound of flesh. At a glance, the house didn't look too bad. bit run down, sure. But my standards are low. Cracked in low. Windows were intact. No graffiti. Roof hadn't been stripped. Satellite dish was still up. From where I sat in my car, gulping down a lukewarm bottle of water that had spent the drive tumbling around in the passenger footwell, the house was relatively untouched by anything except nature and time. Something about that gave me pull.

Pause. Shame, I didn't listen to the gut feeling, telling me it was all sorts of weird that an isolated house had gone unmolested for so long. I grabbed the keys the sheriff had given me and went inside, hoping for an easy gig. Three hours later, and I was crawling out of a kitchen window I'd smashed. The shirt and skin on my back cut to ribbons. I stumbled to my car, chest near bursting from the pounding of my heart. And my eyes fixed on the empty window. window frame I'd just escape. A lone figure, barely visible with the bright sun in my eyes, but still too substantial to be a mere ghost. My wounds were a testament to that. Once the doctor had finished patching me up, I sat in the waiting room and tried calling the former owners,

the siblings. One after the other, I wanted to know what had attacked me, and if anyone knew what I was walking into. There'd be hell to pay if so. The oldest son was the first to answer. I didn't go all in straight away. I asked probing questions. Took my time before I mentioned the basement. The guy laughed when I brought it up. Told me he hated going down there as a kid because he'd hear the weirdest noises, like someone moaning. They all thought a ghost lived down there in the dark, and to keep them from hurting themselves or playing around with the stuff they shouldn't, their father had embellished this ghost. Given in a name.

Marion, he called her. Marion lived in the basement, hiding amongst the crates of old photos and clothes. She lurked behind the half-disassembled lawnmower, scuttling always to the dark places at the very edge of your eyesight. Marion had long fingernails. and a haggard flower-sack dress. She had black lips, and a pointed nose,

and a wart the size of your thumb. Marion ate children, their dad had told them with glee. And if Marion knew that there were three bite-sized kids living just above her, she'd come out of the basement and come crawling up the stairs with arms as long as her body. And she'd slink her way into their bedrooms

using the shadows as cover. And she'd start by taking tiny little bites out of any bare feet that lay dangling in the cold. What about the freezer? Did you ever use it? I asked. Oh, God, no. He said. Even now, that basement gives me the creeps.

And that freezer was where Marion lived, or so we figured as kids. So we stayed the hell away from it. It was just always there in the back, looking old and forgotten. I think Dad used to go hunting whenever we were little, and that's where he'd keep the meat. But he'd phased all that out before I turned five. He seemed sincere. So I didn't tell him what I'd found in the house at the end of my inspection. He didn't know that behind that freezer was a false wall.

And behind that wall, basement number two. Homemade. God knows how the father managed it with no one noticing, but he dug it out and made a private, soundproofed space. Hulled out a room about the size of your typical jail cell. The furniture was threadbare, deliberately so. A single mattress propped up against one wall. An iron shackle bolted into the foundation. A dentist's chair modified with restraints.

and a stain, a vague Rorschach blob of ancient browns and almost greens that pulled outwards from a patch in the corner. It had texture. I knew that stain. I'd seen it before. Residue left behind after the professionals had finished peeling a desiccated corpse off of a hard surface. At first, I assumed someone had moved the source of that stain. There were even footprints. But they didn't look right. Something about them made me queasy. They had not been left in the residue. They were made of it.

Something or someone covered in that stuff had been stomping around down there. Until that moment, the inspection had been mundane and boring. But it isn't every day you stumble across a hidden dungeon. Now I was suddenly present. with a hell of a family secret, and one that didn't quite make sense. I stood there for a good minute, trying to make the pieces of that puzzle fit. Had someone moved a corpse and gotten covered in the rotten flesh, then walked around leaving a trail? Why the fuck had they done it barefoot?

And why not clean it up afterwards? And how had they been so clumsy, yet so clean as well? There were no drag marks. I took another look at those prints, and something inside my gut soured. Small feet. A woman's. We all know this story. Don't make me go over it.

Basement out in the middle of nowhere. Restraints. A family man that no one suspects. He'd hunted all right. Sick, fuck. So who had died in that basement? and who had left those prints. Not all of them were on the floor either.

With an increasingly shaky hand, I tracked a few to the wall where they mounted the vertical surface and continued upwards and on to the ceiling. Just like that, a cold sweat gathered on the back of my neck, and a powerful sense of the uncanny ran over me like ice water. Somewhere overhead, the wind of the wind of my neck. blue, and the boughs of trees groaned in the yard. Sounds of another world. I could see it in my mind, up there, not far away. My car is sitting in the shade. Those images felt like they belonged to

another world. I desperately wanted to rejoin it, to leave this squalid little hole behind. All I had to do was walk out of that basement and make for my car. Only I wasn't. I wasn't so sure I wanted to move at all. Felt like I might break something brittle. The notion that the creeping dread I felt was all in my head. A product of an overactive imagination. Nothing more. And yet I got this feeling that if I tried to run,

the nightmare would spill out into the real world and give chase. I even tried telling myself I didn't know what happened in that room. Not for sure. It could have been a game. One played between him and the wife. But then I looked at the chair again, at the cracked and frayed leather of ancient straps. There were teeth marks on some of them.

I took a deep breath and regained control of my legs. Unless I saw something alive down there, I had to assume I really was alone down there. So I turned and began to walk. Eyes forward. mine steeled against the myriad of little groans and creeks that felt as if they followed me, going from shadow to shadow. I couldn't stop myself from filling in the blanks of that basement's history,

even as I told myself to stop. Maybe she died first. Maybe he did. Maybe he got bored and left her to starve. Or maybe he nearly got caught and decided to put it all to an end. Maybe she snuck something sharp and killed herself. But she died for sure, and she stayed dead a long time. At least a couple of months for that kind of liquefication.

She lost cohesion, skin, muscle, blood like the plug of mold that forms on top of a forgotten coffee. I could see it in my head. Her collapse. A claymation time lapse. a riot of colors. Only somehow the natural cycle broke. She didn't go away completely, and no one came to take her away.

Those were her prints on the floor and walls and ceiling, weren't they? She laid down. She died. And then somehow she got back up. By the time I reached the top of the basement steps, I'd scared myself so bad that sweat was pouring off of me. So far, the only things I'd seen on my way were just old boxes and crates and ancient bits of crap,

weed whackers and leaf blowers, with cobwebs and defunct logos fading away. But that didn't mean I was alone. There was something wrong with that place. I could feel it. A radiant heat. Poppable or... of hatred, even in the absence of anything seemingly real. It was so bad that as I opened the door, I actually felt a moment of childlike relief, a little like how you might feel racing back to

bed after going to the toilet in the middle of the night, convinced some ghost was just inches behind you. I laughed, and something cold and hard wrapped around my ankle. A hand had reached up between the slats of the stairs, like it was reaching straight out of the world of make-believe and into this one where things are real. I stared down, heartbeat like thunder in my ears, and slowly began to process what I was seeing in bits and pieces. First was the hand, gnarled, black, like a badly sketched shadow visible only because it caught the light coming through the open door. And then beneath it, in the shadow, a face like a skull wrapped in a garbage bag.

The plastic pulled tight so you could see the suffocating outline of empty eyes and a gaping mouth. I'd expected something wetter, something straight out of a bad horror movie. In reality, whatever was in that basement had undergone a strange transformation. I only ever saw it in parts. so I can't say for sure what all of it was like. But as sure as shit didn't look like a ghost or a corpse or anything else I'd ever seen, or thought I'd seen in life or movies,

looked like a monster, the real deal. And I reacted like a child seeing the boogeyman. I made some weird, half-muffled groan of fear and ripped my leg away so quickly that I surprised myself and got free. But whatever was hiding under those stairs was quick. Before I had time to take another step, it had left its hiding place, climbed the stairs and was already driving me to the ground. The last thing I saw before my chin smashed into the kitchen floor

was that Marion really did wear a flour sack dress. At the time, this strange detail passed over me without notice. But in hindsight, the fact that the sun would later recount that particular, item of clothing, convinced me his father had been the man responsible for that hidden basement. It wasn't like it had been waiting undiscovered when the family moved in. And on top of that, the father must have been a real piece of shit to inject that sort of sickening detail into a story he told to his kids. He'd likely done it, so if his prisoners ever escaped and his kids saw their first instinct would be to scream for their lives and run.

I didn't know any of this at the time, of course. I had only vague notions of what had attacked me. Something hateful, for sure. Something that had died in that awful room and had come back to life. God, she was fucking angry. She pinned me, knelt on my back, and howled like a banshee that had been hit by a car. I pissed myself at the sound, at the feeling of helplessness,

at the realization this was a nightmare I couldn't wake up from. She went to work on my back with fingers I couldn't see but could feel as white, hot, tattoo needle pain. It lasted only a few seconds. The agony was enough to send me into spasms that knocked her off and onto the floor. That tiny moment of freedom was all I needed.

I crawled to my feet and jumped head first out of the nearest window. I didn't give a fuck about any cuts I might acquire. If you could have felt what I felt, you wouldn't have either. These weren't just scratches. Doctors compared my wounds to those left by a box jellyfish. The kind of thing that causes the muscle beneath to wilt and wither after a million hypodermic needles have turned the flesh to a porous sponge.

I had to get skin grafts. I had to get rid of my car because they couldn't scrub what I'd left of my, my skin from the leather seats. Even now, my back looks like I got run over by a mower. Still hurts when I put my top on each morning. Somehow, they're not even the worst of my wounds. Just the biggest, the most visible. At least those scars made it easy to convince the bank not to sell. Normally, it takes a lot of effort, but they took one look at the doctor's reports and agreed to condemn it thoroughly. Pass the land onto whatever strange governmental department handles this kind of thing.

That particular house has been left to crumble. No piece of paper or deed or a mortgage payment is taking it back from Marion. We can only shut it off. The land is fenced, and every window has been slapped with so many toxic gas signs that I can only hope no one else is stupid enough to ever go back inside. Looking back, I really should have listened to my instincts. Squatters don't leave a place alone, without good reason. For more information on this podcast, including how to submit your own story for consideration,

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