Creepy - The Strangers
Episode Date: March 5, 2018When there are people all around you, you tend not to notice people acting...different. Or not acting at all. When your curiosity tells you to find out more...maybe it's best not to listen...***Subscr...ibe to the show on YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQ3SrH_3fsROXFAjomKcUtw***Please consider supporting the podcast at Patreon.com/Creepypod or creepypod.com/support***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.
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creepy part.
This is creepy.
A podcast dedicated to sharing
the most famous chilling
and disturbing creepy pastas and urban
legends in the world. Whether
these stories truly happened
or are simply fabrications
is for you to decide.
These stories may contain
graphic depictions of violence and
explicit language.
Listener discretion is advised.
Creepy presents.
The Strangers.
My name is Andrew Erics.
I lived once in a city called New York.
My mother is Terry Erics.
She's in the phone book.
If you know the city and you read this, find her.
Don't show her this, but tell her I love her.
and that I'm trying to come home, please.
It all started when I decided, around the time that I turned 25,
that it was time for me to give up taking my backpack into work.
It would make me look more mature, I thought,
if I weren't lugging around a book bag everywhere like a high school student.
Of course, this meant I had to give up reading them in the subway
in the mornings and afternoons,
since I couldn't quite fit my paperbacks into a pocket.
A briefcase would have been out of line since I was working in a factory.
Messenger bags always seemed a little, I don't know, fruity to me.
Too purse-like for my liking.
I had an MP3 player which helped pass the time for a while,
but when it broke, it would shut down at the end of every song if I didn't skip to the next track manually.
I gave that up too.
So every morning, I'd sit in the metro for a half hour that dragged on endlessly, with nothing
to do at all but watch my fellow passengers.
I was slightly shy, so, you know, I didn't like being caught at it.
So I'd surreptitiously watch people.
Interestingly enough, I quickly discovered that I wasn't the only person in the world
who was uncomfortable in public.
People covered it up in various ways, but I learned to see through them.
I divided them up into categories in my head.
They were the fidgeters who couldn't get comfortable, constantly moving their hands, shifting their weight, moving their legs closer to the bench.
Then further, they were the most noticeably nervous types.
After them were the fake sleepers who'd take their seat and practically close their eyes in the same second.
Most of them weren't really sleeping, though.
The real sleeper shifted more, came awake suddenly at stops or after loud loudestead.
noises. The fakes just zoned from the second they sat until the moment the train pulled into their stop.
Then there were the MP3 player addicts, the occasional laptop people, the people who traveled
in groups and talked too loudly. The cell phone junkies were either very popular or just
completely unable to shut up for more than two minutes at a time. Just as people watching was
threatening to get unbearably boring, I found my first incongruity. A middle-aged looking man,
brown hair, average size and weight, and dressed casually.
Oddly enough, he seemed almost too normal.
He had no remarkable features, no mannerisms,
as if he were designed to fade into a crowd.
It was that which led me to notice him.
I was intentionally trying to see how people acted on the subway,
and he didn't act at all.
Didn't even react either.
It was like seeing someone sitting in front of the television.
watching a documentary about fish.
They aren't excited, aren't engaged,
but they aren't looking away either.
Present, but not accounted for.
He was on the subway in the afternoons.
It was more than a month into the people watching an experiment
before he caught my eye,
because I didn't catch the same subway every day
and didn't consciously sit in the same car when I did.
I saw him for the first time on a Monday, I believe.
and for the second time on the Thursday the same week.
He obviously did catch the same train and sat in the same car, in the same seat even.
OCD much, I thought at the time.
Since he caught my attention so much the first time, I watched him more avidly than next.
He was, frankly, downright unsettling.
He didn't do anything at all.
He sat there expressionless, headless.
straight, no matter what happened. A woman with a wailing child entered the car and sat right
behind him and still nothing. He didn't so much as turn his head or frown in annoyance.
And that kid was fucking loud, too. By the time the subway reached my stop, I found myself
queasy. When I exited, the car, my hands were shaking like I was having a nicotine fit.
Something about that man was wrong. He was, I thought, some kind of
freak, a sociopath maybe. One of those quiet guys who it turns out is a dozen women's heads in
his freezer. The first victim is mother. I found myself intentionally dawdling after work in the
afternoons, stopping to browse in kiosks in the mall near the subway even when I didn't intend
on buying anything. For a couple weeks, I avoided catching that subway. When I found myself at the stop
when I was pulling in, I made sure to choose a train car as far from the one I'd see him in a
possible. Then, one morning, I saw another person who set off the same morning bells in my head.
A woman, just as plain looking, just as out of place, and hustle and commotion around her.
The moment I recognized her, and realized later, was when my obsession began.
My people watching, which began as a bit of a hobby to stave off boredom, became something of a religion to me.
I couldn't enter a subway or ride a bus without finding myself examining everyone, filling
out a mental checklist in my head.
Plain clothes of solid colors, no brands, check.
No expressions, no casual glances out the window or towards other passengers.
Check.
No bags, purses or accessories.
Check, check, check, check.
We've got another.
I started calling them the strangers.
I didn't see them every day.
After I started taking the metro more than I needed to, even when I found myself riding buses
out of my way in the evenings.
But they were there often enough.
Seeing one would sit my teeth on edge, make my palms sweaty and my throat feel dry.
If you've ever given a speech, you might recognize the feeling.
Even though they didn't pay me the slightest bit of attention, I felt like I was on display for them.
I could see them, plain as day.
How could they miss me?
They didn't, though, not in any way that I could tell.
And when eventually my curiosity overpowered my fear, I decided to follow one.
I chose the one that I'd found first.
The man in the afternoon subway always kept the same seat.
I got on and took his seat behind him.
We rode to the end of the line, and he rose and walked out before I did.
keeping distance between us I tailed him, but he didn't go far.
He took his seat on a nearby bench, his expressionless as always, and I turned a corner and waited,
trying to look nonchalant.
After a few minutes the next metro arrived and I watched him enter it and saw him take the same
seat.
I couldn't find the nerve to follow him again.
He hadn't gone anywhere.
He just rode the metro to the end.
end of the line, and then what?
Rote it back?
What possible reason would he, would anyone, have for that?
It nagged at me, long after I'd rode a later train back home and tried to get some rest.
I couldn't leave it alone, not until I could make sense of it.
I felt myself more than confused.
I was downright angry now.
Why was this uncanny bastard, this almost inhuman person?
riding subway trains back and forth going nowhere.
The mind, I once read, recoils from certain things.
Because the very sight of them is an affront.
Spiders set it off in a lot of people, particularly great big ones.
They just look wrong to us.
Alien.
That was the effect the strangers were beginning to have on me.
They offended my senses.
I followed him again the next day.
and the day after that.
Every day, for at least a week,
the two of us made our silent trips together,
though only I knew it.
By the end of the week,
I was following him for hours
until the last train that stopped near my apartment block that night.
We rode them from one end of the city to the other,
then back again.
I wasn't people watching any longer.
I was person watching.
I was stranger.
watching. I didn't have eyes for anyone else, though peripherally I noticed more than a few confused
glances sent my way. Other than that, we too might have been the only two people on the planet
for all I cared. I lost my job the next week. My manager was kind and timid, but firm. I wasn't
concentrating. I had no focus. Wasn't being anywhere near productive. It was actually quite a speech.
I think, but I could barely hear it.
All I could think about was my new work, my vigil.
What would that man?
No, that thing on the subway get up to when I wasn't there to keep an eye on him.
I left work for the last time at noon that day.
Normally I'd have to start tailing my subject at 5.30,
but I was sure that he'd be waiting for me.
I wish now that I'd paid more attention to that day.
Was it sunny?
It was summer, after all.
I could have walked around downtown, maybe checked out a few pretty girls.
Could have had an ice cappuccino and a smoke at an outdoor cafe and then gone home,
put my growing obsession out of my head.
Found a new job and taken to reading on trains and buses again.
Instead?
I waited.
More than one train goes up and down the line, so I say,
sat in the station for at least an hour until I saw him through a window.
I walked in the subway car and noticed that for the first time, my skin wasn't clammy.
My hands weren't shaking.
My heart wasn't pounding hard.
I sat for the first time right across from him, directly in his line of sight,
watched for a change in his face.
Would he recognize me?
If he did, I saw a notice.
sign of it. And I was looking hard. We must have made quite a pair, sitting across from one
another that afternoon, staring at and into one another. It was hard not to let the building
rage in me contort my face. But with effort, I was able to keep as still and as expressionless
as him. Inside, I practically screamed at myself. React to me, you fucking asshole. See?
me, damn it. I know you for what you are. I didn't, though, and my silent demands weren't answered,
not for the first trip around, or the second, or the third, or the tenth. We rode far into the
night together, and at each terminus, we got out together and waited. I sat right beside him on
the bench, watching him from the corner of my eye, and still got nothing from him. But two could play
that game as well as won. Finally, we made our last trip together. I had him and knew it. Last trip
of the night before the train stopped running. I'd always let him get away from me at that point,
because the end of the line is a long way from my home. The buses stopped running at the same time as the
subways. But this time, I'd follow him. Finally see what he was when the train stopped running.
I'd get some answers. Maybe.
The subway rolled on, the anticipation grew in me.
The car emptied out around us slowly, until it was just we two silent watchers below the city.
I fought to keep a manic grin at bay, and the subway train slowed to a crawl, and then stopped.
End of the line.
The stranger didn't move, still didn't react at all.
The car stood still, doors open.
I could dimly hear the last few stragglers making their way out of the station somewhere behind us.
Footsteps echoing in the silence.
Nothing.
The speaker system dinged to let anyone half asleep know that we'd reach their terminus.
Still nothing.
And finally, I could hear footsteps again.
A conductor or something, popping his head into each car to make sure it was empty
before taking the train wherever the hell it goes for the night.
I didn't take my eyes from my eyes from my car.
silent query. I managed to see the conductor from the corner of my eye when he finally reached
our car. He looked in. His eyes roamed over us and a puzzled look came over his face. He blinked
a few times and paused. I waited for him to speak and the moment stretched out, but then, with a
slight shake of his head, he left us. There was a car ahead of ours and I heard him stop to check
that too. And then a few minutes later the train started up again. We rode for a time,
then looped around and the subway was parked. I could see into the windows and more trains
on either side of us and through their opposing windows into even more. And then he smiled at me.
It was just a small curl to lip. It would have gotten unnoticed if I hadn't spent the last several
hours studying his face. So, he said in a round.
rough baritone.
Here we are.
I tried to respond but couldn't right away.
My throat had clamped shut.
Terror filled me.
I felt like the whole underground cavern we were in
and it just collapsed onto me.
I coughed and stammered and finally managed
with a raspy voice to ask a question that had kept me up at night.
It drove me halfway to madness and led me to this place
in this moment.
But are you?
He ignored me.
He stood in the train doors over.
Then, shockingly, he turned to face me.
He didn't wait for an answer, but walked out onto the platform.
I scrambled to follow.
Come on, damn it!
I shouted.
Talk to me!
Who are you?
What?
Why do you ride the metro all fucking day?
He didn't look back, or slow a step.
I couldn't see his face, but it's a little.
saved a guess that he didn't react at all, no more than he had to anything else.
I stalked after him, still shouting for a time, but eventually gave up.
Five words was all I was going to get out of him, I guessed.
I walked along the platform until we came to a junction, then turned.
Now we were perpendicular to the trains around us.
The path ahead was lit from above, and I couldn't see where it ended.
The trains on either side of us went on forever, as far as I could tell.
Far too many trains to service one day, I realized.
It wouldn't have mattered by then, I figured,
but I probably should have paid more attention to that at the time.
I'm not sure how long we walked.
I had a watch once, but it broke.
I took out my cell phone at one point but got no reception down there,
and all it would show me was no signal.
The stranger would stop every now and then
and look at a subway car for a minute or two,
but then pass on.
It took me a while to figure out why,
but eventually I saw that they weren't all the same.
Long lines of them would be similar,
and then we come to a different model.
Maybe a little larger or smaller
or have slightly different shape.
The cockpits, or whatever you call the front part
where the conductor sits,
were superficially different as well.
I didn't and don't know exactly what he was looking for,
But eventually he must have found it, because we turned again, and the subway doors opened
when my impromptu guide stopped in front of them.
We entered and took our seats.
Are you willing to speak to me now?
I asked him.
No answer.
I sighed with frustration and seriously weighed the pros and cons of punching him right in the face
for a time.
When suddenly the lights of the car came on and I heard the engines start.
starting up.
What the fuck?
He gave me a look that was almost sad.
You're not going to be able to go back.
What are you talking about?
Go back where?
Nothing again.
A stonewalling asshole.
The train lurched into motion, pushing off in the opposite direction than the one we came from,
I think.
The endless paraded them to thrown off my sense of direction.
I rolled for a few minutes and began to slow as we approached the stop.
His vacant gaze grew sharper, and for the first time I got the sense that he was actually staring at me,
rather than just looking in the direction I happened to be in.
Be still.
Be silent.
Don't get it.
The train stopped.
The door was opened, and they began to flood in.
I don't know what I noticed first.
The weird clothes, the two long arms with hands that almost brushed the floor.
the jet black eyes and angular faces or the blue-gray hue of their skin.
My eyes took in all those stimuli, but for a long second my brain refused to process it.
And when I finally did, I was barely able to bite down on the shriek that tried to tear its way from my throat.
I thought my heart was going to explode.
Hell, I thought I was going to explode.
I was like a strummed guitar string.
everything in me lurched and throbbed.
My sight grew dizzy, which I was thankful for.
And I vomited.
My mouth was clenched shut and I forced myself to swallow it, barely managing it.
My instincts were screaming his words at me.
Be still.
Be silent.
Don't catch their attention.
That day is a blur.
We rode the subway car up and down the line.
still and expressionless for hours, for days perhaps.
It seemed much longer than the line I knew,
the line I had followed the stranger along.
The hideous things around us seemed to pay us no undue attention,
though we must have stood out fiercely.
I was so petrified with fear that when we finally returned
at the endless cavern of trains alone,
I burst into tears.
I collapsed on the floor and just said,
sobbed for a long time.
The stranger watching impassively,
when I gained control of myself, I looked at him imploringly.
Take me home.
I croaked out.
Please.
I can't.
He told me.
Don't know which one of these will lead you back.
If any of them do.
He stood and walked out onto the platform,
and I rose wearily and followed.
followed him. He spun around sharply.
I think you followed me enough.
The rage I'd felt for him before, that the panic had temporarily buried, rose up in me.
What?
I mean rushing forward.
It grabbed him by the shoulders and with a burst of insane strength I didn't even know his in me slammed him up against the side of a Metro car.
You fucking son of a bitch, what the fuck did you do to me?
I slammed him again and again.
Take me back!
Take me back!
You bore it all passively.
And soon the flare of anger
and me guttered out, leaving me hollow.
Please!
I begged, please take me home.
That's not how it works.
He said.
If we stay together, it's more likely
that will be noticed.
Be still and be subtle.
And they'll think you're one of theirs.
How could you do this to me?
Why?
He gave me another almost sad look.
Had to.
He brushed my hands off his shoulders and turned to walk away.
It fell to my knees, suddenly out of strength.
I watched him leave.
At the junction, he turned back to face me.
I'm sorry.
And then he was gone.
I stayed there on the cold tiles for a very long time.
I curled up into a ball and wet.
for a while. After there weren't any tears left in me, I managed to get some sleep.
When I awoke, a subway train had come in and was gone, off gearing more blue-gray abominations
to wherever blue-gray abominations go. I couldn't handle going back there anyways.
I tried to find my way back to where I'd started, to find a subway that I recognized,
but I wasn't even sure which direction I should have been going in anymore.
I walked for an hour, then another.
Finally, I found one that might have looked familiar, or I was desperate enough to imagine that it did.
When I stepped up to the door, it opened for me, and I took a seat.
It started up, and in spite of being a lifelong agnostic, I prayed my heart out.
The train slowed to a stop, the door was open, and for a second I thought I was saved.
people, human beings, I'd be the most devout man in the world.
Then I noticed the eyes.
Specifically, the third large eye in the center of their foreheads.
Well, fuck you then, God!
I thought they were easier to take than the last bunch, though.
And I was thankful for that.
The third eye blinked independently of the other two, though, and that was nauseating.
and when one of them smiled or laughed or spoke with another,
I couldn't help and notice that their teeth were sharp and misshapen
and yellow green with filth.
But if I was careful and selectively blind,
I could pretend for a stretch that I was home
until one of them entered with a sandwich in hand.
And I realized with a start that I was starving and hadn't eaten or drink in what must have been days.
The next terminus I came to, I decided to try and find something
to eat or drink.
I don't know why I waited,
but it seemed important
to ride at the end of the line.
I got there,
and I could barely bring myself to leave.
I'd never seen the stranger leave the underground.
I'd never seen him eat or drink either.
My stomach would not take no for an answer, though.
I steeled myself
and tried to keep my face carefully neutral
and made my way out into the station proper.
And then I got confused.
I was looking for escalators or stairs or something like that.
But all I saw was holes in the ground, the walls and the ceiling,
gaping, irregularly sized holes, like I was in the middle of a beehive.
What was I supposed to do?
Leap into one?
It didn't make any sense to me.
Not until someone came through one.
He floated up through the floor, then floated by me.
He frowned for a second, or at least I think it was probably a frown.
But apparently whatever kept them from recognizing me as alien in the subway extended at least this far,
it did not, unfortunately, allow me to levitate,
which seemed to be the only way out of the subway station Beehive thing,
swearing, I made my way back down to the tunnel.
I was angry, lost, starving, and I had been abandoned to a fate that, if it wasn't worse than
hell, it was at least twice as stupid and three times as nonsensical.
I was not in the best frame of mind, which I feel excuses the mistake.
Normally, I take corners with a wide berth, because everyone knows that if you just dart
around a corner sharply in a public place, chances are decent that you're going to
gonna walk right into someone.
As I did,
I slammed into someone,
a woman,
and fell to the ground.
Without thinking, I reacted like any
New Yorker would.
Badly.
Jesus, fuck, you stupid bitch!
Watch where you're going!
I realized my mistake even before she did.
Her eyes grew quizzical and confused.
And when she really noticed me,
They bulged with horror.
She laughed while floated quickly, back from me, and let out something scream-like.
A little more yowly than I was used to, but I got the point.
Further down the tunnel, I saw alien three-eyed heads turning towards us.
I thought, suddenly, about all those sharp, filthy teeth.
And just like that, I was running.
The subway train wasn't there.
But there was a walkway along the tunnel, for the repairment, I assume.
Those who'd use it from where I was from anyway.
I took it at full speed and just kept running until each breath felt like getting stabbed.
I stopped panting and looked back.
The tunnel had curved so I couldn't see the light any longer,
but nobody appeared to be following me.
Going back, though, was not an option.
I continued forward in the dark front.
a long time. Eventually I came to a small opening in the wall and stopped there for a rest.
Hunger, despair, and a full speed, terrified run and left me absolutely drained. I probably would
have wept again, which seemed to be all I was capable of lately. But it just seemed like
too much work. I sat against the wall, legs splayed out, and imagined I was beating that
bastard stranger to death with a hammer. It was a relieving image.
A rat was shuffling around nearby in the dark.
Every so often I would kick out a foot to scare it away.
But after a time, I didn't even bother with that.
Rabies or any other disease it might have been carrying would be a lesson
compared to endlessly traveling through the subways of strange worlds, lost, destitute.
When it crept near me again, I didn't shoe it off.
Even when it reached and pressed against my leg, I couldn't bring myself to care.
Not until a train passed by.
And the lights of its car lit up the culvert I was in.
And the thing that I had thought was a rat.
It was rat-like, yes.
But not as much as it was spider-like.
If someone had bred the two of them together,
the resulting abomination might have been almost as horrible
as the thing nuzzling my leg.
I shrieked, flung myself up from the floor
and booted it like a soccer player would right into the opposite wall.
Its back made a sickening crunch and I watched it twitch out its last before the final car passed and the darkness returned.
The darkness.
A terrible thought came to me.
I wondered if it was edible.
I didn't want to and I gagged just imagining it, but I was hungry.
There was no guarantee that I'd be able to find food in this place or ever again.
Rat spider was my only option.
I held off as long as I could, but in the end, survival trumped squeamishness.
I had my lighter, but nothing to light on fire.
I picked meat off its carcass and cooked it little by holding it over the flame,
but it didn't help much.
Nothing could have.
Its meat was foul, more foul than anything you can imagine.
I've been that desperate for food since,
and eaten many other questionable things.
But nothing has ever been as bad as the rat spider was.
In retrospect, that's when I became a stranger.
Before I struggled to reach that expressionless state the others had maintained,
what I had taken for calm was numbness.
A sharp rock thrown in a river will, over time,
have its edges rounded off by the water beating over it.
And what I'd gone through had done.
the same, tearing up and eating a monster in the dark, below an alien world, the last of my
edges smoothed. By the time I left the darkness and came back into the tunnel, I was as expressionless
and empty as one who'd led me here had ever been. That was not the worst of it, though. The worst came
later, the first time I got stuck. The stranger had mentioned it, but in the state I'd been and I hardly
noticed. One night at the end of the line, I was asked to leave the train. The world was one of those
closer to normal ones. The people were almost human, as I recognized it. They were orange,
sure, and hunchbacked. But other than that, they were practically normal. After the last world,
the people had been hideously overweight, six-breasted hermaphrodites with no noses.
The orange guys were pretty much beautiful to me.
I thought at first that the conductor was talking to someone else,
but I was the only one in the car.
And moreover, I'd understood him.
The Orange's certainly hadn't been speaking English all day,
but nonetheless, I could understand what he was saying.
When I stood, I began to realize why.
I couldn't stand up straight.
I was hunchbacked.
And, as I saw in my reflection against the windows I exited, I pieced together the rest from there.
Stuck meant that I was trapped in this world for some reason.
The stuck looking like them as well, which would be handy if I wanted to take the opportunity
to leave the subway station, which is possible most times but requires a lot of care and is
quite overwhelming.
Alien worlds are a little revolting, I've found.
You try to compare them to your own, but the differences are so vast it just makes you sick.
I left the subway anyways because it was clear I wasn't returning to the central hub,
what I'd taken to calling the infinite line of subway trains that night.
Or any other night, I soon found out.
Whatever had let me go unnoticed wasn't working any longer.
I considered briefly staying, but this place wasn't home and never could be.
even if they looked like me, their culture was bound to be different.
That was a lesson I'd learned before.
Even the worlds where the people are absolutely indistinguishable from me are fraught with danger.
I was once on a world where the people looked just like me.
Well, actually they looked Brazilian, but that was more than close enough.
Learned the hard way that the gesture that to me means hello meant something gravely insulting.
Insulting enough that had been beaten half to death while a crowd looked on with approval.
Besides, even if that place had a culture I could fake, I didn't want to stay.
I wanted one of two things.
To find my way home, or find the stranger who'd set me on this path and beat the shit out of him,
nothing else would do.
So I wanted to move on.
I wasn't sure, though, if I could do it as some poor sucker would have been done to me.
Could I really force someone else to wander the eternal underground like me?
Turned out, I didn't have to.
After a few months, one of them did notice me, yes.
He began to follow me for weeks.
I very carefully made it seem like I hadn't seen him, just like the stranger had.
But I was torn between the desire to warn him away and the desire to bring him to the end of the line so I could leave his dismal world already.
the last night
he followed me to the end of the line
just as I had once done
he hadn't managed
to work up the nerve to sit across from me
though
as soon as the train stopped at the terminus he rushed
off
I waited
hoping the conductor wouldn't see me and I could continue on
but to no avail
I left the car
and the metro rushed off without me
it cursed inside
as I
walked around the corner towards a ticket booths young man who had been following me attacked.
He had a wicked, curved knife and should have caught me by surprise, but I've been traveling
through hostile alien worlds for several years. My reflexes were sharp. We struggled viciously
before I managed to wrestle the knife from him. I don't know how I got it in his neck.
I don't think I wanted to kill him. I hadn't even been that angry, remembering my
own building rage from so long before.
Afterwards, as he lay there, bled out,
I got pissed.
I kicked him repeatedly shouting.
You dick!
You were supposed to...
Kid.
Kid.
To follow me!
Kick.
I fled the scene of the crime, but not for long.
I was there bright and early the next day to catch the first subway of the morning.
And that night, when I wrote it through the end of the line, I was invisible to the conductor again.
I guess you can either kill them or bring them with you if you want to return to the central hub.
I was invisible again, but I was also orange and hunchback still.
I stayed that way until the next time I became stuck.
The next time I killed.
That one went much faster.
I didn't wait for her to follow me.
Once I was recognized as a stranger, I recognized her as the next one, and I made my choice.
I won't bring anyone else into this.
It makes me wonder, though, about the stranger who inducted me.
I wonder what he originally looked like, and whether he knew he could have killed me.
I wondered, too, about the others I saw back home, and there were a few I'd come across since I left.
Did they kill them?
take them.
Whichever one they choose do they consider it a mercy?
I can't bring myself to talk to them to ask.
We're damned either way.
The dam should suffer in solitude.
I've killed 15 of them now.
And I've gotten very good at it.
But I've made a decision.
I'm done killing.
Innocence, at least.
Before I return to the central hub, I filled a backpack with as much paper as I could cram
into it.
and I wrote this story.
Over and over again to be left in as many subway trains as I can.
A couple thousand messages and bottles cast into a sea of steel rails.
This is a request, not a warning.
My request above was that you find my mother and tell her a lie.
It's a white lie, don't worry.
Tell my mother that I love her and that I'm trying to come home.
It may give her some hope, or a small measure of peace.
I wish it were true, too.
But here's the thing.
I've been thinking of myself like Odysseus, lost in a drift looking to return to familiar shores.
But I'm not lost at sea.
I'm lost in endless tunnels, the labyrinths.
The difference is important, because labyrinths are designed, built.
somebody or something made this impossible place.
They must be held accountable for what they've done to me.
They cast me as Theseus, not Odysseus, but I won't play that part any longer either.
The strange rules of this place have turned me from the human I began as into something else,
then something else again.
They've made me a monster, and so I will be the minotaur of this labyrinth.
and if I can
I will tear it down
around me
and destroy those that built it
my warning
is that you should be very wary
in public places
of silent
expressionless men and women
keep your distance
they may kill you
or they may do worse
if you see them
run far and fast
more importantly
I warn you
I beg you, don't ride the train to the end of the line.
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