Creepy - The Version That Stayed

Episode Date: September 28, 2026

The Version That Stayed***Written by: JQ Leonard and Narrated by: Jimmy Ferrer***The Cries of Long Dead Beasts***Written by: Juan Cardenas and Narrated by: Alicia Atkins***Scratch***Written by: Shaun Jex***Support the show at patreon.com/creepypod***Title music by: Alex Aldea Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I'm John Grills from creepy, and I listen to the Be Afraid Podcast Network. 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, our simply fabrications is for you to decide. These stories may contain graphic depictions of violence and explicit language. Listener discretion is advised. Hey everyone.

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Here we go. Like I said, the 31 days of horror is days away. I know I messed up how many years we've been doing the show earlier this year, but I'm fairly certain this is the 10th time that we've done the 31 days of horror. What a ride. Some of you may know that the first 31 days of horror we did back in 2017 was meant to be the end of creepy. That was burnt out. The show was just something I wanted to do to narrate the creepypastas I loved so much.

Then, longtime listeners will remember the bad days. Oddly enough, it was the bad days that made the show what it's become. You never know when you're in the middle of something that feels terrible? that something amazing can come from it. You just keep moving forward. Then one day you look up in this life. It isn't a life you ever expected or even thought you deserved. I'm so grateful for the time I've been able to spend on this show.

The people I've met, the listeners who have reached out. It feels fitting that. All right. Make sure to delete this. Okay, just delete all this stuff. after the Patreon read and jump to the story intros. First up, a man digitizing old family VHS tapes discovers a mysterious boy who looks exactly like him.

And as the boy begins invading his recordings, memories, photographs, and family life, he realizes something is slowly replacing him. From writer JQ Leonard and narrated by Jimmy Ferrer, Creepy Presents, The Version That Stayed. Creepy Presents, The Version That Stayed. Written by JQ Leonard, and narrated by Jimmy Ferrer.

I work for an IT company that prints labels. Not the interesting kind, mind you. If labels even come in an interesting kind. I'm talking about the peel and stick sort of that end up on shampoo bottles, quartz of mortar oil and little glass jars of oregano that nobody finishes. Three days a week, I do the job from our spare bedroom. But on those days, I can go from the first coffee to the last ticket of the afternoon without speaking a complete sentence to anyone over the age of six. I'm good at it, though. Believe me, that's not a brag.

Being good at something you don't care about is a quick way to burn through the years. I reset passwords. I walked the same people through the same problems they had last month. Tell them to turn it off and turn it back on. Most of the time, that's the entire fix. Most of the time they thank me. We hang up. And I could not tell you five minutes later who I had talked to.

Lisa, my wife, says I've been somewhere else lately. She doesn't say it like she's looking to start a fight. She says it casually across the kitchen on a two-year. Tuesday evening with the dishwasher running. In the same voice, she'd used to tell me we were low on milk. I'd tell her I'm tired. And the trouble is, I'm not lying. I am tired.

It's not just exactly a physical kind of tired. Our kids are four and six. Nora and Sam. In the evenings, I read to them and do voices. and when an appropriate amount of time has passed, I turn off the lights. There are nights where I get to the bottom of the stairs and I can't remember a single page. My mouth did the reading. I have been up somewhere over my own shoulder,

watching a man sit on the edge of a small bed, read to his children, thinking it looked like he was doing it right. My parents are selling the house I grew up in. 40 years. They want something smaller. On one floor, no stairs. A yard, a man can mow in 20 minutes. I was voluptold to help clear it out.

So on a Saturday in October, I drove to the house, spent the morning carrying my own childhood to the curb in contractor bags. It's a strange thing. Throwing out the toys you can still feel in your hands. I didn't let myself slow down. You slow down on that particular job, you don't finish. I found the box in the whole closet. Behind the winter coats nobody had worn in a decade.

A liquor store box. Soft at the corners. Heavier than it looked. Inside were the tapes. VHS in a few of the smaller H.I.8. Two dozen of them. Each one label on the spine of my father's blocky all caps. Christmas, 93.

Sam's baptism. Which is my dad, not my son. The names just circle back around in the family. Camping birthday. A couple with only a year and nothing else. My dad found me sitting on the closet floor with the box open in my lap. He said he didn't even have anything to play those on anymore. He said take them, do something with them, before they turn into dust here.

So I did. I had the gear already. That's the part that feels like a setup now. But at the time it was just true. I built a little capture rig a few years back for a job and never tore it down. A deck that handles the VHS tapes with an adapter, a USB capture card, and an old camcorder for the H.I.8. All of it feeding into a laptop and a four-trabide drive that does nothing but sit there and hum. So once the kids were down, I'd go out to the office and run a tape.

It's slow work, real time. You can't rush a transfer. The machine plays the whole thing back at the speed it was recorded. No matter how much you wanted to speed up. I'd start one and half watch it on the laptop while I clear the day's work tickets out of my inbox. The first two went smoothly, Christmas mostly. On it were people I wasn't even sure existed anymore. My mother, 20 years younger, my father behind the camera narrating in that low mutter people used to do before they understood the microphone caught it. Me at seven or eight in pajamas, doing the things kids do on Christmas morning. It was nice.

I'm not made of stone. I sat there at midnight watching my own small hands tear paper and felt something moved deep in my chest. It was on the second tape that I first saw the boy. He was in the background of a shot at somebody. his cookout, off to the edge of the frame near the fence. He wasn't doing anything necessarily, just standing loose. The way kids stand when no one's told them to do something yet. Eleven, maybe 12.

Older than I was in the rest of the footage. And he looked like me. Not like a cousin version of me. Not a family resemblance. He looked like me at 11. That was the trouble. I remember being 11. I do not remember him.

I reround the tape. The tape deck obliged with the mechanical complaint they make. I watched the boys stand at the fence again. He didn't do anything the second time either. I told myself it was a neighbor kid. There was always a neighbor kid. I made a note in my head to ask my mother. Then I let the tape keep playing.

And I forgot about him by the time it ended. The way you forget about a face in a crowd. The third tape is where the file went wrong. Nothing dramatic. The transfer finished, the drive light settled. And I want to rename it from the date stamped the software assigns to something I could find later. Force a habit.

I opened the property first. I always check properties. Twenty years of IT and you learned that a file will tell you things that doesn't mean to. The real story of a document lives in parts that nobody looks at. The created day at the device string. Little fields that get written automatically and never read. These were corrupted, garbled. Where there should have been a codec name and a clean timestamp, there were broken characters.

The kind you get when a header takes damage, half of it nonsense. But one field wasn't nonsense. Down in the extended properties, in a tag that should have held the capture device, there was only one word. One word spelled out, clean, and whole, In the middle of all that broken text. Sitting there like it had been typed by hand. A name.

Not a stranger's name. A name I knew before I finished reading it. Like it was already in my head. Derek. I sat and looked at it for a while. Out in the house, the heat kicked on and the vents ticked. Somewhere upstairs, one of the kids turned over. I closed the window, opened it again.

Again, the name was still in the field. I told myself the same thing I'd tell people who call me at work. Bad data. A glitch in the capture. Turn it off and turn it back on. I went to bed. I didn't rename the file. In the morning it was easier.

Daylight will do that. I had coffee in a full-ticket queue, and a four-year-old who wanted her cereal in the green bowl. not the blue one. And by the time I went out of the office to keep going on the tapes, I had mostly decided the night before, had been a tired man, reading too much into a broken header. I named the file before bed after all. I remember doing it, Camping 91,

because that's what the spine said. So when I opened the folder, and the file sitting there was named Derek, all lowercase, no date. I stood looking at it with my coffee going cold in my hand. Doing the work I do. I can't overstate how impossible this is. A file does not rename itself.

No glitch does that. A name in a corrupted field? Sure. I could build you three stories for how that happens. They're all very boring. But the visible file name? The thing the operating system shows you? That changes because something with hands changed it.

And the only hands in that office were mine. I renamed it back. Camping 91. I closed the folder, I opened it again, just to be sure. It did say Camping 91. And I felt equally foolish and relieved. I went back to work. The file name read Derek again by line.

After that, I stopped renaming, though. I'll tell you why. And it isn't brave. It was because every time I changed it back, I was admitting that I had seen the change. As long as I left it alone, I could mostly convince myself it was normal. So I let the file sit there with this wrong little name. I kept capturing the others.

The name began turning up another's too, not the file name. those stayed unchanged in the properties, deep in those extended fields where nobody looks. On tapes I had transferred cleanly days before, the same word, sheeted in the same broken text. I'd transfer a birthday party with no trouble at all. And three days later the device tag on it read Derek, and the timestamp was garbled around it. And the boy was in the birthday party. party. He hadn't been. I'd watch that one start to finish while I answered emails. There had been

no boy at the fence. No boy anywhere. Just my family in a backyard I half-recognized. Now there was a boy near the back step. Closer to the lens than he'd stood at the cookout. Close enough that I could have told you the color of his shirt if the tape was any good. He wasn't looking at the camera. He was looking at the people the camera was focused on. Like he'd been invited, I was waiting for somebody to notice him and say his name. I called my mother on Wednesday. I kept it light.

I asked her how the new place was coming along, and I let her talk about the carpet and paint for a while. Then I asked, as if it had just occurred to me, whether they'd ever thought about naming me something else before I was born. Whether there been another name on the list, the pause was too long. When you spend as much time on the phone as I do, I learn to read things. Someone who can't exactly put into words the problem they need me to fix at work, for example.

I can pick up on the silence when someone is thinking hard about what they need to say. I heard that silence in my mother. Then she said, very carefully. Then yes, there had been another name. They had first thought of the name, Derek, she told me. Dad had really fought for the name, but in the end she went out. She said she'd forgotten all about that.

Wonder why I was asking. I said no reason. Said I'd seen it written down somewhere and got curious. And I asked her about the carpet again. She let me change the subject, but she did it slowly. Right before we hung up, she asked if I was sleeping okay. And the voice she's used since I was small. The one that means she's worried and won't say no.

I told her I was fine. I told her the kids were good, and I got off the phone and sat in the office for a long time without turning anything on. It was that night Nora woke up. She does it sometimes. gets to the top of the stairs without really walking, stands there in the hall light until one of us steers her back. I found her at the railing with her eyes mostly closed and her thumb near her mouth. When I crouched down, I asked her what was wrong.

She said a name. Quiet. Almost no breath in it. She didn't say daddy. She said another name. She said it like she was answering a question that I hadn't asked. Then she let me pick her up and carry her back to bed. In the morning, she didn't remember being awake at all.

Kids repeat things. They pick up sound off the air, roll it around. I'd probably been saying it out loud in the office without noticing. That's something a tired man does. I decided that was the answer and I held on to it. I went through the files properly after that. Open the real metadata viewer. The kind that lays everything bare.

Every field of the file is hiding. I told myself I was going to find the cause of corruption and understand it. Then that understanding will let me stop thinking about it. I do that. I think if I can name the mechanism, the fear will have nowhere to stand. What I found was worse than me. a glitch. Because at least a glitch has logic. There were new fields. Fields that had not been in those files the day before. I know because I looked the day before and copied down what I saw.

Comments field on a tape I hadn't even opened since the transfer. Three words in plain text with no formatting and no source. I've been waiting. And on the camping file, the first one, the one that started it, a tag I didn't have a name for, stuffed with the same word over and over down a column. Derek. Derek. Derek. And beside each one, a date. Not random dates.

days in the summer of 1995. Fourth of July, a Sunday in August. A day in September that I looked at for a while before I understood why it sat wrong with me and then understood that it was three days after my own birthday. The year I turned 11. I closed a laptop. I sat in the dark office with a drive ticking.

And I did the math I'd been refusing. to do, which was simple, which a child could have done actually. The boy in the footage was 11, maybe 12. The dates were the summer I was 11, and the name was a name I could have had. I slept poorly, and I dreamed. There wasn't a clear story to it. I was in my parents' house, the old one, the one I'd spent the weekend empty, except it It was full again.

The coats were back in the closet and the light was on in the kitchen. I was standing in the hall, looking at all of it. And all of it was wrong. But it took me the whole dream to work out how. The doorknobs were too high. Counter came up to my chest. I was seeing the house from a few inches lower than I'd ever seen it. the height of a boy. Then somewhere behind me in a room I couldn't turn and see.

Somebody was waiting for me to come in, and they were patient about it. They had all the time in the world. I woke up with the name on my tongue as if I'd been about to say it. Lisa was asleep beside me. The monitor on the nightstand showed Nora's room in the grainy green night vision. Both kids fine. The house quiet. I lay there until daylight. I didn't say the name out loud. I was afraid that if I did,

something in the house would finally hear it and answer me. Like it had been waiting at the bottom of the stairs, this whole time for me to learn it. The next morning I started with the only thing I knew how to do. When a system is misbehaving, you don't argue with it. You troubleshoot it. You measure. So I stopped reacting and started keeping records.

Because a record is something tangible, you can track from one day to the next. I ran hashes on every file. Long string of letters and numbers that change if so much as one bit of a file moves. I copied them down in a notebook on paper Because I no longer trusted anything that lived on that drive I made a clean back up to a second disc and put that disc in a drawer I learned to strip metadata To tear files hidden fields down to nothing

I did it to all of them every tape scrubbed clean And I checked the hashes after and the files were what they should be. I slept a little better that night. In the morning, the fields were back. I don't mean back where I had stripped them. New ones. In new files. The name spread into tapes it hadn't touched before. Like I'd squeezed one end of something and it had to come out the other. The hatches I had written down didn't match anymore. The files had changed on a drive that had been sitting closed in a dark room with nobody near it.

I checked the backup in the drawer or two. The backup had also changed. So I burned it all down. That's the only honest way to say it. I deleted every digital file I reformat of the drive. a full format, the slow kind that writes zeros over everything and takes a whole day.

And I stood there and watched the bar crawl across the screen until it was done and the drive was empty as a drive can get. Then I started the captures over from the original tapes. Clean machine, clean disc from scratch. The corruption was on the first file before the second one even finished transferring.

That's the night I stopped believing I was looking at something that was broken. A broken thing doesn't wait for you to finish. I'd reformat it and it would come back. And not just come back. It would come back having already accounted for the reformatting. The name a little deeper in. The boy, a little closer. As if every move I made was a question you already knew,

I had prepared its answer to before I asked. I'd tested and the test would come back wrong. And I realized the wrongness itself was a reply. I was not debugging anything. I was being answered. I did one thing that worked, if you can call it that. I played the original tapes on the old deck, straight to the little tube TV my dad threw in the box.

No computer anywhere near it. And they were fine. They were just my childhood. My mother, young, my father muttering behind the lens. No boy at the fence. No boy on any step. Tapes are clean. Whatever the boy was, he wasn't on the tape.

He came in somewhere between the tape and the file. The place where the old footage got turned into something that could be copied forever. Classic ghost in the machine. I sat in front of that little TV with a clean cassette, playing and understood that the only safe version of these was a version that could rot. The moment I gave them eternal digital life, I gave him one too. I call my cousin Marie. She's nine years older than me, so she was a teenager when I was a kid. Told her I was going through the family tapes and asked what she remembered about those summers.

The cookouts, the camping, etc. I kept it gentle. Fishing without telling her what I was fishing for. She remembered all of it fondly. She remembered most of what I remembered. And then she said the thing. Easy. No weight on it at all. Just an old woman of a fond little boy long ago.

She said I'd been such a quiet kid. Always off at the edge of things. She said, watching everybody. You stand at the back of the yard by herself and just look at us. Like you were trying to remember it for later. And your mother used to worry you didn't have any friends. That isn't who I was. I had friends.

I was loud. I was in the middle of everything. I have a hundred memories of being in the middle of things. But I knew before she finished talking, exactly where in the yard the boy stood in the footage. And it was the back of it, the edge, watching all of us. Marie wasn't misremembering me. Her memory had been moved to fit him.

And she'd never know. And I could never tell her. And I got off the phone and sat with the fact that it wasn't only the files now. It was creeping into people's memories. It was in the soft place where people keep what they think is true. Lisa had started watching me, not unkindly. She'd come to the office door with a cup of tea I hadn't asked for and stood there a second longer than the tea took to hand over,

looking at my face like she was checking for cuts and bruises. She asked, more than once, if the tapes were getting to me, with her digging through all the old family stuff had stirred something up. I said maybe a little. Just nostalgia, I said. It was the closest to the truth I'd come with anyone. She nodded and didn't push. But she kept looking for something.

Once when I came into the kitchen, I caught the tail end of an expression on her before she put her usual one back on. And the expression underneath did not know me at all. It was Sam who finished it. He came into the office on a Sunday. day with a piece of paper held up in both hands. Proud.

The way he gets when he's made something he thinks is good. A drawing. He'd drawn our family. The stick figures kids draw. Sun in the corner with the lines coming off of it. Except there were six figures. Two of them, as he explained, were me. Same brown scribble of hair.

Same blue for the shirt. Side by side and identical. Drawn twice. Under one of them he'd written Daddy in his careful uphill letters. Under the other one, he'd written a name, sounded out the way a six-year-old sounds things out. The letter's not quite right. D-E-R-I-K.

There's no mistaking. I kept my voice level. I asked him who that was. The second one. He said, That's Daddy too. I asked him which one was me, which Daddy was the real one.

He looked at the drawing, then he looked up at me. It took him a beat too long. I watched my son stand in my office, look back and forth between the picture and my face. Working at it. The small machinery of his brain trying to match the man in front of him. To one of the two men he had drawn.

Not being sure. He's six. He knows me. He's known me every day of his life. And for three full seconds, he could not tell me which one of us was the father. And when he finally pointed, he pointed slowly. and he watched my face after he did it to see if he'd gotten it right. I simply told him it was a great drawing. I put it up on the fridge.

Because not putting it there would have told him something was wrong. It's still there. I walk past it a dozen times a day, and every time I check it, and make myself find the one with Daddy underneath. I make certain it's still under the right one. one and not the other one. The one wearing my face was someone else's name, standing in the only family.

My son has ever known. There was only one tape left in the box. I've been putting it off without a minute I was putting it off. There were no words on the spine. Only a date in my father's blocky handwriting. A day in the summer of 1995. and I knew before I loaded it that it would be one of the dates from the column. And it was.

The footage just showed the boy. No cookout, no family, no yard. A bedroom. Camera set up on something across from the bed, so it caught him sitting on the floors with his back against it. He was looking into the lens and talking. The audio was almost gone. That high tape hiss with a voice.

somewhere under it. So I did what you do. I turned it up and leaned in close to the speaker to catch the words. He wasn't telling a story. That's what took the floor out from under me. He'd say something, and then he'd stop, and he'd wait. His eyes on the lens, patient. And then he'd nod a little and say something back.

And the shape of it was a conversation. He was leaving gaps for someone to respond to him. And the gaps were just the right length. I caught myself making a small sound at one point, just a breath, just a flinch in how wrong it was. And on the screen, the boy looked up sharply from where he'd been looking down, dead into the lens, right as I made it. Not before, not a second after. He heard me.

Thirty years down a tape and a wire and a hole in the world. He heard me flinch. And he looked up to see if I was still there. I knew the room. I didn't want to. And I tried to convince myself that I didn't. But I knew it. It wasn't a typical boy's bedroom from 1995.

There was none of that. No posters, no toys. The furniture all wrong for it. Light switch was on the far wall by the closet. The window was on the right. High. What the cell of the height is when the room is meant for somebody small. I stood in that doorway every night of my children's lives.

It was Sam and Nora's room. The boy was sitting on the floor of my kids' bedroom 30 years before my kids were born, talking to me and waiting for me to talk back. But near the end, he stopped waiting. He leaned toward the camera so his face filled it. He said two things with no sound at all. Just his mouth, slow. making sure I could read his lips.

I wish I had turned away. I wish I hadn't read his lips as they moved. He said my daughter's name first, and then my sons. I don't remember turning it off. I remember being in the kitchen with both hands flat on the counter, shaking. After that, I stopped being careful and started being violent. about it. Which is its own kind of useless.

I reformatted again, twice. I ran recovery tools backwards, trying to make the drive forget instead of remember. I took one of the original cassettes, the camping one, the first one. And I snapped it over the edge of the sink. Pulled the tape out in a brown tangle and ran hot water on it until my hands were boiling. It changed nothing. Because the thing I was breaking was never where the boy had lived. It was leaving the tapes now.

It was in everything. I opened a work file, a spreadsheet, the monthly numbers for a client who sells labels stocked by the palette. And three of the cells partway down a column weren't numbers. They were the name Derek. Where quantity should have been. In a document that had nothing to do with my family or my childhood or any of it, A document about adhesive in a warehouse in Ohio. I closed it and I didn't open it again.

And I haven't been back to work since. Nobody has called to ask where I am. Which I try not to think about too hard. Because the answer to that is a door I'm not ready to walk through. I went looking through photos, finally. The recent ones on my phone, the thousands of pictures of the kids that pile of... up without you realizing.

I went slow. The first few were fine. Then there was one from the spring. A selfie of the four of us at the lake. Lisa's arm out holding the phone. And behind us on the water. Far back where the light goes flat. There's a shame.

You'd call it a swimmer if you weren't looking hard enough. I looked hard enough. There were more after that. A reflection in the storm door in the picture from Sam's birthday. Standing in the yard behind the people. A shape at the end of the dark hall in a photo, Nora took herself. He isn't doing anything in any of them. He isn't reaching for anyone.

He's just in them now. At the edge. Back of the yard. Like he'd always been there. And I only just now have been given the eyes to see family that had been standing in the family pictures all along. I knew it had finished moving when Lisa called me by the wrong name. It was nothing. That's what I can't get past.

How much it was nothing. She was at a stove when she asked me to grab the milk. She used the name. The other one. In the middle of the sentence. She didn't correct herself either. She didn't hear herself do it. She went right on to ask whether Nora had eaten enough at lunch.

She's called me by my name for 14 years. She said his instead. And it didn't cost her a thing. because in the kitchen she was standing in. It had never been any other way. And the kids, the kids had started acting careful around me. Not scared. I wish you had just been scared.

Because scared I could have worked with. Scared would have meant they knew. They weren't scared. They were polite. They watched me a half beat before they answered. Friendly. working to get it right. A small good manners children use on a relative they've been told to love,

but don't quite know yet. The uncle from far away who's staying a while. Sam looked at me over breakfast. The patient kind way you look at a guest, while you wait to feel something you know you should. Nobody had to tell me. That's the part. The boy never had to explain and never did.

I worked it out alone, same as I work everything else out. Sitting in my own house among my own people while they slowly stopped being my people. I wasn't being haunted. A haunting is something that comes and goes and leaves you with what's yours. This was something else entirely. The house was making room. It had a version of me it liked better One I had been holding all this time

At the edge of the footage And the back of the yard Waiting And I was bringing him in And to bring him in Had to put me Where he had been all that time I made one last try

And I knew it was the last one while I was doing it which really killed any hope I had left. I waited until the small hours when the house was asleep. I could move through it without anyone watching my face to see whose it was. I gathered all of it. The originals. What was left of them? The broken one in its brown tangle of tape.

The drive. I put it all in a milk crate in the truck. I drove out into the dark to my parents' house, the empty one. The first sale sign was already cooked up in the yard. Because if it was going to end anywhere, it felt right to end it where it all started. I had a can of gas and a shovel. I was going to burn what would burn and bury the rest. let the new people mow over it.

I sat in the empty driveway, and I played the last tape one more time. I brought a little battery player for it. A dashboard screen. So I could watch it before I put it in the fire. Some part of me needing to see him one more time before I tried to kill him. Oh, you can't really kill a thing like that,

and deep down I knew it. The footage had changed. Again, of course it had. The boy wasn't in the bedroom anymore. Camera was in the hallway now. My hallway. My house. Looking down it towards a door,

left open a few inches with the nightlight glow coming through. And he was standing in the doorway with his back to the lens, the boy. Looking into the room where two small shapes slept under the covers. I tucked them under. every night. He stood there easy. He stood there like he had every right to. He was watching my children sleep in my house. While I sat in a dead man's driveway 40 minutes away with a can of gas in a shovel, watching him do the one thing I do, the last thing I do every night before my own bedtime. The thing that had been mine. I didn't burn anything. There was no point of lighting a fire

under a window that was already open from the inside. I left the crate in the truck. I drove home with the sky going from black to drain gray that it does before it gives way to morning. I've parked across the street from my own house and I couldn't make myself go in. The kitchen The kitchen light came on while I sat there. I watched it through the window over the sink, the warm square of it in the gray. Lisa moved into it in a row and filled the kettle and stood waiting for it with her arms crossed. It was so ordinary. So much.

My whole life, that for a second I forgot why I was on the wrong side of the glass. Then she looked up and saw the car. She didn't start all. She lifted a hand to the window and gave an easy little wave. The wave you give somebody who lives there. Somebody you were starting to wonder about. Glad to see the car back in his spot. She sat down whatever was in her other hand.

She came around through the kitchen. I heard the back door open across the quiet street. She leaned out into the cold in a row. She called me a name across the yard for me to come in before the coffee got cold. It wasn't my name, of course. It was the other one. And it did not sound unfamiliar or uneasy when she called it out. She called it like she'd been calling it a thousand mornings.

Born smooth. No thought in it at all. A name that has always belonged to the man in the car in front of the house. Married to this woman, with these two children sleeping upstairs. I put my hand on the door handle. You know, the thing nobody tells you about losing is how gentle it could be at the end. I'd been bracing for a fight that never came. There was just a warm kitchen and a woman in the cold doorway.

And my new name, his name. the only name on offer. And the truth I'd been working towards since the first broken file. Which is, that the easiest thing in the world, the most natural thing, the thing my body wanted to do more than has ever wanted to do anything, was to answer to it. So I sat, with my hand on the handle in the gray light, and she called it again.

Patient, certain. And I felt myself begin to turn towards it. Next. A mysterious sensory deprivation pod allows people to experience life in Earth's distant past. But one person's obsession with escaping modern life leads to a place so much worse than they imagined. From writer Juan Cardenas and narrated by Alicia Atkins. Creepy presents, The Cries of Long Dead Beards.

You know what I find quaint? Have you ever heard that sentiment I was born in the wrong decade? It's commonly uttered by a quirky person and a t-shirt from a band that was before their time, Gen Xers that find the 50s to be quaint, millennials who adore the 60s counterculture movements, and, my favorite, gen alphas that discover grunge. I have that. But it is something to an extreme degree. Very extreme.

I don't know how to explain it without explaining the pods, those being some sensory deprivation pods, hidden deep in a nearby forest. Walter said was heavily gate-kept by some acquaintances of his, many of whom have passed on. Lacking any buddies to go with, he felt like I might appreciate it. So Walter took me on a hike. We drove well out of town, towards the hills, and deep, still. I was never much of a nature guy. In fact, I grew more and more terrified as the road

became more and more rugged and bumpy. Once we stopped and started our trek, I hesitated, looking back at the trail that led back to civilization. I couldn't turn back, though. I kept moving forward. Something made me move forward. He had promised me something new, something weird, and I wanted to be a part of it. I fell or tripped over a dozen times from then on, but I persisted. Walter helped me up, extending a giant forearm to me. I was grateful, meticulously wiping mud off myself. He said the first session was always the most difficult trek, but it gets easier.

He leads me past the creek, past the pointy rocks, the felled logs, and the buzzing, angry swarm of colorful bugs that sit and shimmering, iridescent hordes of swirling colors. When we got to the chambers, we had been walking for almost three hours. My feet hurt in my soggy boots. My leg muscles were screaming, and the hunger in my stomach was making me dizzy. Out of nowhere, there's this pool. Seemingly man-made, perfectly rectangular. The closer I get, I can see the concrete roughly poured out.

No tile work, no ladders, no frills. And inside this pool there are some floating chambers. Again, seemingly man-made, just sitting there in the middle of the forest. There is a surreal element to the structure in the middle of such dense foliage. There's not a single sound. No birds, no leaves rustling from unseen rodents. Even the breeze seemed hesitant to disturb this place. Walter is excited.

He puts his backpack down and then indicates that we get into the forest. water. The water of the pool was unnervingly clean and still. I half expected it to be something besides water, like acid or gel. But as Walter stripped down to his skivies and entered without a problem, I could say that it was water. It did sizzle for a millisecond, like the buzz from cola. Instead of burning, it also had that faint Earth-Epsum salt smell to it. The chambers, though, Seeing these two coffin-like things floating in the water. Like one of those deep-sea buoys. I thought they'd be plastic or some other unnatural material.

But no, they were the smoothest and most meticulously polished and waxed wood. Opening one, I could see the craftsmanship, the care, and the weight of quality lumber. I clambered inside. It smelled of lavender and other wildflowers overwhelmed my senses. Inside was an ice-cold layer of still water. I was shivering a bit as the cold water sloshed and drenched me. Walter gave me a thumbs up and I reciprocated. Then he shut the lid.

My heart seemed slow. I could hear Walter, already inside of his, calmly instructing me, just over the rhythmic sloshing of the water in the pod. Close your eyes. Let the chamber take you where it takes you. I'll be outside to let you out if things get hairy. I nodded. The last statement put a little drop of fear in me,

but then I felt like I was falling. The water around me felt like it was deep, deeper than the bathtub's worth of water I was in earlier, and the edges of the pod were gone. At least it felt like it. Like I was no longer in a pod, but laying face up on the surface of a gentle sea, staring at the sky.

I glanced to my sides. It seemed I was in a vast and open ocean of endless possibility. But that couldn't be possible. It was ethereal yet solid, with weight and mass. But they were all like the first-formed thoughts of a dream. Blurry, muddled, overwhelmingly true, but lacking detail. Then the moon came out, in spectacular, achingly bright fashion. It was massive, large enough to take up almost a quarter of the sky.

Its presence made me shudder with fear. Goosebums ran up and down my arms and back. No, it didn't. It was a similar but different sensation. I didn't have skin. How's that possible? A cold sensational fear began to take hold. Where am I? What is going on? Then I heard the song. The first sounds were guttural and low.

That loud bellow rattled through me. It called to me. I think the best way to visualize it was like if you suddenly squatted down, found an ant, and began to converse with it. Only in this scenario, I'm the ant. My entire body was shaking. from these alien sounds and treble. The base of something so incomprehensibly large filled the water, the sky. My mind was a buzz with what sounded like whale song. The water vibrated in glistening vibrations. Every vibration in the water illuminated by that young, large moon. I realized then I was faced down. With some effort, I was able to turn over to peer down into the water. I don't know how to explain why it was so difficult. It's like when you've been driving a compact

all your life, and suddenly you're in a 16-wheeler. The sensation was unlike anything I have ever felt before. The water was not cold. It was oddly warm to me, and I was watching something in the peripheral of my vision. It was familiar, like a squid or a crab, but long and long and segmented. Too long. It crossed my field of vision. Its immensity was like that of a freight train passing through a railway crossing. That's when I realized. I was sinking. Slowly. The urge to breathe was gone. The sinking didn't stop. The vast blue beyond was growing dimmer, than lighter. I felt this waking dreamlike state where I could tell time was passing. sometimes achingly slow, sometimes quickly.

I sunk deeper and deeper. The days passed into night back into day. I felt no hunger. I felt no pain. I felt no joy. I felt no sorrow. I was one with the vast ocean. The odd, long-bodied creatures would meander past me.

Some were vast. monstrously so, some tiny, some odd-shelled creatures, some deep-sea monsters of barbed teeth and tentacled appendages. In time, I forgot, the way you do in dreams, and I felt that time pass. I felt the memories effusing me out into the water. I forgot the tedium of daily life, the sound of a curate coffee machine used to rule my morning routine. Now it was the bubbles that rush by me. Occasional blips of dolphin-like sound would travel by me. Messages relayed between anonymous parties of the depths.

It wasn't until I had spent a month of ignorant bliss in this space, my mind now fully primal in my old life a distant shade, forgotten like a dream, that I felt dread again. I could only see it in silhouette. I thought it was a gorge or a chasm. My endless plunge had become routine, but that was shattered by the thing in the horizon.

It was so vast and all-consuming. It emitted a low growl that vibrated the entire sea in front of me. After a week of plunging closer, could I make out the finer details of a tiny, details of its massive teeth. Its mouth was agape. Its motions were slow, but deliberate. It was skimming the ocean,

letting whatever creature was unlucky enough to be in the area disappear into its mall. And I was next. I felt bare, naked, alone. The body I inhabited couldn't move. It only sank, it only plunged. I pulled at muscles and joints that weren't there anymore. I didn't know what would come next. It was inching closer and closer. It went from the

horizon to my entire field of view. I thrashed and shook. I kicked and screamed. But none of that materialized. I had no legs, no mouth, no arms. The peace and calm evaporating into white-knuckle fear, as I struggle to steer out of the path into the giant monster's mob. The ocean is gone. Suddenly the bright sun is back in my eyes, and I squint as I struggled to comprehend what's happened. Memories and consciousness rush back like the air that fills my lungs. I gag and cough, unable to breathe for a moment. The lungs and arms and legs feel alien to me.

I don't even manage to properly sit up until Walter grabs me and props me up. Before I have the wherewithal to say anything, Walter says the first time is always the most disorienting. I agree with a nod. It is a few minutes before I can form words again. I was gone for months, I said. Minutes, Walter interjected. He told me time works differently in the pods. I'm shocked.

He said he heard me thrashing. in there and decided to open it. That's why you always go with somebody, because getting out on your own can be very tricky. The guy that showed him this place could do it, but he sort of disappeared before he could teach Walter how to do it.

We alternated now. Walter went in for about ten minutes before I could hear him struggling. He came out like he had been factory reset, unable to move, unable to speak momentarily. Then I could see

the memories and attributes clicked back into place. His eyes would focus and he'd grin. I was eager to go back in. I can't explain the appeal. You just sort of have to do it to really get it. It felt like taking a long break. It was a vacation from my own consciousness. Sometimes it was peaceful. I would be staring out at a cold desert from a vantage point of a cacti-like plant. The howl of a deep-chested beast somewhere on the horizon. The chirps of birds and scurry of insects resonated deep into my mind like music. The resonance, the vibration, all of it would envelop me, refreshed me, revitalized me in a way I couldn't describe. Walter seemed to feel the same, but he declined to tell me about his experience, preferring to keep it to himself.

After a few sessions that felt like years, we left. He promised me to meet up in two weeks to go again, and I eagerly agreed. But I couldn't stop thinking about it when I got home. I got these texts from my friends about some office drama. An ex was texting me about possibly meeting up, but none of it mattered. It was all hollow, surface-level bullshit that didn't amount to anything. I was in an office that Monday, typing words and making spreadsheets that didn't amount to anything. Food wasn't the same. Staring out at the moon and the zero stars of the city.

It lacked something. That primordial world was so much richer. The music of the rhythm of the ancient wildlife was missing in my life. my life, and I never knew it. I felt like I belonged there and not here. Then things got stranger. Each night, I dreamt of my time in the past. I saw the same places, and I felt the same disconnect from this time period, like I was visiting there. But when I awoke, something would be off. I would feel tired, sick, and if I did anything strenuous, I felt an odd sensation.

Like there was an invisible thread between me and that time in the past that was tugging at me and I could tug on it. And when I did, my perspective changed. I got so dizzy that I started to collapse, but I tugged on that string and the world slowed. The fall should have been an instant. It lasted an hour. I didn't move when I hit the ground.

I just sighed. I needed to go back, and Walter promised to take me again. The two weeks passed agonizingly slow. I eagerly returned to the sight with Walter, this time trying to mentally remember where the place is, making notes of the path in case I need to come back without him. This time I felt the time dilation more. I swear, I spent years as a creature that climbed tree-like cacti in a permanently red sky.

I had no worries, no anxieties, no concept of physical pain or sadness. Then I did something curious. I reached out, even though I had no arms. I tried to move my phantom arm that I knew I physically had. It took several full moons, but I managed to move my present arm and pull on that metaphysical string that connected my body and my consciousness here in the past. Suddenly, the pod opened. When the fresh modern air hit me, the rush of consciousness hit me again.

Walter was surprised. He said he'd never seen anyone get out of the pod all by themselves. It was one of my secret goals. I couldn't abide by Walter's timelines. I wanted to come here every chance I got. Relying on Walter was not acceptable. He said he was taking a work trip and wouldn't be back for nearly five weeks.

That was too long. I would have to come back on my own. In the interim, I thought of this spot. I drew it. The dreams intensified, like they were shadows, hinting at the images, but not the whole thing. And worst of all, they were silent. No wonderful soundscape of nature, a quiet, so profound and calming,

balanced with ambient sounds of ancient life. I don't know if the pods take me back in time, or just replay a stored memory of times past, like a big say-file of Earth's memories, something. But I know I wanted to go back already. Friends would call me. Out of a roped memory and, frankly, over-engrained curiosity, I would answer their calls. They said I was strange, aloof, quiet, different. I said I was. I was happy to be different now. I wasn't happy before. Now I know that such ideas make no sense in the grand scheme.

Time moved so slowly for me now. If I wanted it to, I could sit and examine the minuscule movements of a fly as it landed on my arm, then slowly lifted its wings in defiance of gravity. The struggle between the two forces played out like an epic battle of hours and days instead of seconds. I don't know how, but I had agreed to go on a date. I arrived at this restaurant and wound up sitting across from her. She kept speaking about the latest reality show she was binge-watching. Every word bounced off of me.

A plate of bread sat in front of me untouched. I hadn't been listening to a word she or anyone around me had said. In my mind, I was replaying the images and sounds of the millennial old forest, with the strange, tall fungi-like groats that stretched into the young sky, the heavy and burning air, the roiling warm oceans. She's standing in front of me. In my time, in the past, I've started experiencing time differently. For an entire week, she is speaking. Well, I experienced it all week. For her, it is a few. moments. When she stops and expects me to reply, I don't. I just stare at her. She's a collection

of neurons, flesh, minerals, proteins. The same ones that have existed for millions of years that form and reform, infinitely crashing like waves against the shore, those pieces breaking and reforming like a giant Lego set. There is nothing of consequence in this mid-priced Italian restaurant that was once a swamp, that will one day become a swamp again, that will one day stop, that exists in such a fraction of a blink of time

that it would not even be remembered. She's angry, but I'm five days into reminiscing. In about three days, she'd reached for a cup of ice water. For an entire month, it is splashing on, my face. I can see the individual drops flying towards me, and I knew then that I had to go back. I left for the pods right away. Processing the world in real time now, I had to get to the pod again. This was not the place for me anymore. I knew that Walter might stop me, so I had to act now. I walked on bare feet in the roots and rocks of the ground. I kept the pain of my heart. I kept the pain of

my aching, uncovered feet buried in my mind, deep inside, deep with the hunger pangs that were burning in my stomach. There was something better for me back then. It took some time, but I made it. I could smell the slight burning mineral smell, and it nourished me in a way. It wasn't until I hit the water, and the blood trickled out of my feet, my legs, my nose. that I realized how weak I was becoming. A bony arm struggled to open the pod. But I managed it. I climbed in, and the pod door closed.

Relief washed over me. I am home now. Darkness washed over me. A wave in the sea of time and space. I was in the mud now. The gray, red, and brown silty mass of the earth, around me, sloshing and squelching as I moved my body across it. The water washed over me, the ocean of existence, and its waves of time. I was now where I had sought to be. It was a muddy

landscape of infinite rain. The rain continued for days, weeks, months. It was unending. I didn't mind. I would slowly make my way through this landscape. Bits of plant material or small simple organisms would wind up in my gullet. It was paradise. I heard the creatures sing and call out to one another. No one alive has ever seen a blue and gray sunrise like I have. No one has heard the cries of long-dead beasts like I have. Then the dread returned.

I don't know what it was. Only that it moved fast. The rain and the mud obscured its location to me for some time. But now it was too massive to really be hidden. It was on all fours. It towered over me. I tried to move away, but what I call legs were so tiny, so stubby. The large creature, whatever it was,

stomped down on the ground with enough force to shone. shake me. The deep growl of its breathing was shaking the very earth as it approached. Its teeth, God, its teeth were bared now. They were like long, stabbing knives that I knew would pierce whatever carapace I had at the moment. I had to redouble my efforts. The music that kept pulling me here was like a cacophony of thunder, growls, and stumps. I was moving slowly, with primordial nub-like appendages that slowly moved me across the muddy floor, it would get to me soon. I would need to leave again, I thought, reach my arm and open the pod.

But that pull, the pull that I had used to slow time and remember this world, it was severed. I didn't realize it back then, but the present would tug at me here too. And now that was gone. Of course, I hadn't slept or eaten in days. Then I hiked for an entire day, bleeding from several places. I must be dead already. Or, at least incapacitated.

I had no love loss for my modern body. But I shuddered to know what happened when that thing caught me. I was struggling in the mud. The seemingly eternal rain was washing me away. and it had caught up to me. I could feel the first puncture wounds. And damn it, my perception of time slowed again. The teeth agonizingly permeated my outer coverings.

I could feel the sizzling hot and sharp protrusions. Every other drop of water fell in indiscernible patterns on me, and it in the darkness. I would live a century or more of pain, wishing, begging for an end. And finally, a man develops an unbearable itch that causes strange moss to rapidly grow across his body, driving him to increasingly horrific attempts to remove it before he loses control of himself completely. From writer Sean Jax, creepy presents, Scratch. The itch started during the weekly metrics meeting.

We'd gathered in the front conference room with the lights off. Catherine Dobbs, the head of digital marketing, led the team through a series of slides detailing our performance over the last seven days. It's boring as hell. But this sort of thing that the folks of corporate love, I typically pass the time by pretending to take notes as I doodle on my legal pad. I was playing myself a game of hangman when I felt it. an itch just above my hairline. It started as a slight tickle, but it grew sharper, like I'd been bitten by a fight rant. I reached up and gave the spot a vigorous scratch with the nail on my index finger.

It felt so good that a little moan of pleasure almost escape my lips. I can't imagine the looks that would have gotten me. I probably would have been sent to HR and fired for making orgasmic noises during an official work event. That'd look great down a resume. As a meeting dragged on, I'd occasionally drag my nails across the spot. It was like I shot of morphine, a few seconds of pure relief, followed by the agonizing weight until I could do it again. During one of the surreptitious assaults on my forehead,

I pulled my finger away to find a curious speck beneath my fingernail. It had the look and texture of moss. I stared at the gunk, wondering how it had gotten into my hair when Catherine interrupted my reverie. Hey, Stevens, are you okay? Your face is bleeding, she said. I reached my hand up to wipe the blood away and used the moment to get in an extra scratch. Spot still itch like hell, and when I looked at my hand, there was more that moss-like substance on my fingertips.

Oh, yeah, I said trying to sound casual. I just accidentally scratched myself. You should go clean yourself up, she said. There's a first aid kit in the restroom. I got up and excused myself, scooting past my coworkers. They were all staring, and I felt blood trickling down my forehead again. I tried to play a casual, smiling as I went. But I suspect that only made me seem like a total psycho.

In the bathroom, I looked in the mirror. The skin I've been scratching was raw. and there was a small cut in the center. A jigig of little rip that reminded me of a demented smile. Leaning in for a closer look, I noticed more of the green moss. It started at my hairline just above the top of the wound and spread backward. I ran my fingers through my hair and felt an entire patch of the velvety substance. It formed an island on the front of my scalp.

Exploring around, I found patches both above my ears and nexus. near the nape of my neck. I tried to wipe it away, but it clung fast in my skin. A tickling sensation spread through my hair as the centipedes were skittering over my head. Their myriad legs like minuscule needles. It made my heart race and an almost unbearable tightness spread through my chest. I've never been particularly rational when it comes to my skin. I got chickenpox as a kid and scratched so furiously that I gave myself scars.

My parents had to put me in mittens that were duct taped onto my wrists to keep me from making it worse. Luckily, there was nothing stopping me from scratching now. I reached both hands to my head and scratched with wild abandon, hoping I could clear the muck away. It felt like heaven. I was so lost in the moment that I didn't notice the bathroom door open. Dude, what the hell? It was Chris Johnson. member of our IT team.

He stood just behind me. He had a startled expression on his face, staring at my reflection in the mirror. I must have looked like quite a sight. My hair was a mess, and I'd opened a few more cuts on my scalp. Blood ran down my forehead and all over my fingertips. Seriously, what the fuck? Chris said. What did you do to yourself?

I had an itch, I said. I got sent home, and my best. The boss told me to take a few days off. Luckily, they didn't fire me. I guess there's no rule against itching yourself raw in the workplace, even in a right-to-work state. At home, the itch grew even worse. Instead of a scab, the wound on my forehead sprouted more moss. A thin layer crept its way down my face.

By the time the sun had gone down, it coated the tops of my eyelids, along the ridges of my cheeks and behind my ears. The itch was worse beneath the patches of moss, reaching out with long, prickling tentacles to the skin beneath my beard and down the sides of my neck. I tried to rip it away, and that left me with raw patches all glistening with limp fluid. As it dried, the glob crystallized in a way that reminded me of sugar caramelizing overheat. I searched the Internet to find a solution, but nothing appeared. I found a ton of skin conditions that make the skin itch and flake. Plexeriasis, eczema, sporic dermatitis, bitiriasis, rosé, I think that's how those are pronounced, but nothing that would cause a person to sprout

bryophytes like a moist log rotting in the forest. I have expected to start growing mushrooms from my pores, thick lichen coating the inside of my mouth and columns forming along the insides of my legs and arms. The thought made my stomach churn and forced me to scratch even harder, like I could rip the moss up by the roots. I tried showering to see if I could scrub myself clean, but the humidity made it worse. The moss crept further and further across my body as the steam in the bathroom wrapped me in its warm embrace.

The patches on my skin grew thicker. Their fibrous rise of its clinging to my skin in a death grip. They were on my shoulders and down the center of my sternum. I grabbed my lufo and furiously rubbed every bit of my body, pressing the sponge as hard as I could into the skin until it left abrasions. It cleared some of the moss, but more sprouted in its place, and twice as thick as before. By the time I stepped out of the shower, it had spread down my crotch in between my ass cheeks.

It grew so fast I could literally see it happening. It looked like one of those time-lapse videos in a nature documentary, the moss breaking through my skin and growing into a thick carpet. I was in such a panic that I started sweating like crazy. Fat drops of perspiration rolled down my forehead and under my arms. They say that stress sweat smells worse than normal sweat, so I must have reeked like a locker room in the summer. It acted like fucking miracle grow on the moss.

My face was almost completely covered. It grew thick as cudeso under my armpits. It's hard to explain how desperate I was feeling. Did you ever try to hold your breath underwater as a kid? Seeing submerged to see how long you could make it. Toward the end, it starts to feel like your lungs are going to burst and your mind starts racing, desperate to take a deep breath. Adrenaline shoots through your whole body and you can finally lunge for the surface,

taking the biggest gulp of air you can manage. It felt just like that. But there was no relief. I ran to the kitchen and dug through my cleaning supplies beneath until I found a box of steel wool. I pulled a pad from the box and rubbed it on my face along my neck and all over my upper torso. I could feel the wiry fibers tearing through my skin, scraping it away like soap scum on bathroom tiles. I transformed my face into a crimson mask. My arms and stomach looked as though I was dressed in a red latex shirt, the blood glistening beneath the knee of.

on kitchen lights. Bits of the wool stuck in my open wounds. I threw the pad to the ground and began scratching again, hoping to dislodge the minuscule fibers that bit into my skin like a thousand little teeth. It only made things worse. The moss returned even thicker than before. The tiny sprout sucked up the blood and grew in a thick pillowy blooms. It crept into my ears and grew so thick that the world went silent. I couldn't even hear myself screaming. It rolled over my lips and swallowed my gums and teeth before strangling my tongue and coating the top of my soft palate. In a fit of desperation, I grabbed my cheese grater and sawed it back and forth on my stomach, my nose, and my cheeks. Strips of flesh and muscle ripped away and fell to the ground.

I dragged it up and down my legs, tearing into the fabric. tissue and muscle that lay beneath the skin. But the moss grew back faster and faster, deeper and deeper, as though it were bursting out of the marrow of my bones and consuming the rest of my body. I don't know how long this went on or how loudly I was screaming when the police bashed through my apartment door. Officers swarmed in with guns out, shouting orders as though they expected to find a criminal torturing me.

They phoned me in the kitchen, standing over the sink, still grating my skin away. The first officer to arrive doubled over at the sight and vomited on the floor. The other screamed something into a radio. I couldn't hear a word, and the world grew dim through the veil of blood and moss covering my eyes. Everything went very far away as I fell unconscious to the floor. I don't know how long I slept. When I woke, I was in a hospital bed. Hands cuffed at my sides.

My body was wrapped in bandages and a doctor stood over me. Somehow I could hear again. He was seeing something about a psychotic break and a tranquilizer. But I wasn't paying attention. My skin itched beneath my bandages. And I desperately needed to scratch. For more information. on this podcast, including how to submit your own story for consideration.

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