The Dark Somnium - "Paperweight" Creepypasta | Scary Stories

Episode Date: March 6, 2021

this creepypasta scary story is from the nosleep subreddit, written by Anthy Vin--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/darksomnium/message 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.

Growing up, Mother showed me and my sister how to balance a pebble on our foreheads when we were lying in bed at night. We had to try our hardest to keep it there through the night and into the safety of morning. She reminded us so that the evil fairy would not take us away while we slept. The evil fairy, she told us, was evil but not very bright, and she knew that people put paperweights like pebbles on light flat things to keep them from full. flying away.

And since we were both light and little and lying flat on our backs, the fairy could have easily taken us away like the wind, if not for the fact that we were safely weighed down by the pebbles on our forehead. Mother always tried to smile when she told us this story, though now I think that must have been hard for her to do. We were young enough to believe her, young enough not to be scared, only afraid of disobeying her. The pebbles had to be right where she could see them, glowing faintly in the dim radiance of our nightlight. This, she told us, would be our protection. Sometimes, when we were still

learning to balance, mother would dab a bit of white glue or toothpaste under the pebble to hold it in place, and we would have to wash it off in the morning. We couldn't do more than that, though. No ribbons, no elaborate restraints, since anything of that scale would clue in the fairy that this was no longer a paperweight, just an extension of ourselves, like a headpiece, and readily take us away. Claudia, naive and pure as she was, giggled every time my mother told us this disturbing story while tucking us into bed in the room I shared with my sister. I used to laugh as well, at least in my mind, but later on I was old enough to notice

the tired look in mother's eyes. The dull gleam of fear, the way she never missed a night to remind us, warn us, of our little bedtime ritual, even when she was working overtime at the factory and would be home late. Later than our bedtime, she would call ma'am, our grandmother, after dinner, and have her remind us of our little routine before bed, and she insisted on it. Ma'am thought it was rather silly, telling us that our mother had always been a very imaginative little girl, and that she was allowing us to grow up the same way. Whatever she thought of it, she let it continue, always dismissing it as a bit of good-natured foolishness, but I knew otherwise.

Mother was trying to tell us something important. She wouldn't tell us more than what she told us every night, even though she could tell I was beginning to believe her and could be trusted with the truth. Perhaps that was the truth, nothing more or less. As a good elder sibling, I tried to help out and make sure little Claudia did as she was told. I tried to take it as seriously as I believed mother took it. Even as early as then, I knew that for as long as I lived, I would follow the pebble ritual at bedtime. During the daylight hours, I could still almost feel the cool, reassuring weight of the

pebble on my forehead as I went about my business. That sensation was the feeling of having survived another night. night. It grew to become a palpable feeling. It was almost like I could glance into a mirror and see the round impression on my skin. It was a mark of honor, of duty, of memory, of life. Despite all that, I'm not quite sure if I ever obeyed out of any real belief, at least not when I was younger.

Call it superstition, old habits perhaps, or a reminder of our mother after she had died, even after ma'am did. I'm sure Claudia would have continued to follow in my footsteps if she were still around. I was quite sure of that, but I wasn't sure of other things. I wasn't sure if all this time Mother had been hiding the warding off ritual underneath the guise of a children's game. She kept it up for as long as she could, while the age of gullibility still hung over us. She said that we could stop when we were older, when we were too big for the evening.

evil fairy to carry away, pebble or no. I'm not sure whether she also used the idea of an evil fairy to hide something far worse. She called the fairy evil because she believed children could understand the concept of evil. It was in every fairy tale, even the ones that were bleached of all their traditional morbidity. But I think now that while she had been honest about the evil, she wasn't entirely truthful about other things. Whether it was even a fairy was up for debate, but whether it was evil, there can be no doubt. For instance, I find it an evil thing to leave no body behind the next morning in any condition,

only a terrible and permanent confusion, a deep disorientation for anyone left behind, a swift and permanent kidnapping with no ransom note, no note at all. You can't quite move on without proof of death. Neither can you stay rooted in this one moment in time when you had woken up at dawn to find your sister gone, leaving only the pebble on her pillow from where it had slid off her forehead in the night. Perhaps she had done it on purpose. I wondered endlessly since then. Who wouldn't be tempted to?

I'd had the same thought myself in my occasional rebelliousness as a young growing child, curious about the boundaries to rules whose dangers were not yet clear to me. It was easy enough to achieve a mere tilt of the chin, a slight turn of the head, and the pebble unglued would slide right off. We were old enough by then, 12-14 respectively, and we could be defiant if we wanted to. Only she, sweet and sour Claudia, had decided to follow through with what to me had merely been a thought, a passing fancy. But I'm sure that if she had come back from wherever she had been taken, she would have continued to do as I did. I wrote her name on the pebble

along with a little heart, and kept it on my nightstand for years until Ma'am died. I was truly alone then, and I made up my mind to bury it in lieu of a body. But I wouldn't bury it Next to where I buried my mother's and grandmother's ashes in the plot of ground behind our little house, Claudia did not belong there. In life, Mother insisted the pebbles stay simple, unpainted, unadorned, as smooth and perfect as the day we fished them out of the old wishing well, really a fountain in the old park that had shaped them beautifully over the years when the water still ran. We had to find ones that didn't have names scratched or painted on them.

If we accidentally pulled the named pebble out of the water, we had to kiss it before tossing it back in. We were four and three years old when we chose our pebbles. We kept the same ones for years until my sister disappeared. I don't think anybody ever told us why some pebbles in the fountain had names and some didn't. It seemed right for some reason, like it was exactly as it should be. I do recall wondering about it, of course, and if I had ever been.

ever asked aloud, I'm not sure. Mother must have given us one of her famous non-answers because I don't recall the reply either. She got the same way whenever we asked about our father, whom Claudia and I had absolutely no memory of. She had no end of non-answers then. Ma'am would outright clam up and tell us in her rare, cold voice not to speak of it again. I cried once when ma'am gave me that voice, and later that night, as if to apologize

on her behalf, mother told us a different story to explain why we didn't have a father. It was because a fairy had given us to her when we were babies. A good fairy? Asked little Claudia, and mother paused, thought about it. Then she smiled. Yes, dear. A good fairy. She said she had made a wish at a wishing well.

After she had me, she was so delighted she went back to the well two years later and got my sister. I liked the story, and so did Claudia, until we were just of age where we knew where children came from and began to understand as well why ma'am had been so disappointed in our lack of a father in the picture. Some of our classmates had the same situation at home. The only difference was they didn't have to hide under a pebble to keep their mother's secret.

I think that was when Claudia let the pebble drop. Years after that empty morning, when I was sure my sister would not be coming back, I knew I had to write her name on the pebble she had left behind. Like everything else about the fountain, the pebbles, the fairy, both good and evil, it made sense to me without explanation. I suppose I got that from my mother and her imagination. was convinced Claudia had run away, eloped with a boy from class who had given her her first kiss. But the timing was strange to me, and nobody at school, not even the boy, had heard

of her again. We had no suspects to offer the police, no leads to offer the search party, no motive, no trace, no answers, just the pebble. And that I couldn't explain. Not without repeating, word for word the fairy tale mother had used as our only explanation for what was going on. And fairy tales are not something you tell police officers if you want them to take you seriously. So, I said nothing. Ma'am started going senile and didn't seem to mind I had stopped going to school to take care of her. It was hard being in that house after mother died.

Namonia, just two years before Claudia disappeared. But it was harder to be at school. for some reason. I slept for days and cried for nights. Sometimes I would wake up feeling the gentle weight of the pebble on my forehead, perfectly balanced after years of practice, and flicked my eyes to the side, peering past the nightlight to see if my sister had reappeared in bed. Sometimes I thought I saw a shadow. Once in a suffocatingly warm night in June, I had left the window open, another of mother's no-nows. My sleep had become fragmented, and I was used to waking up several times in the night, also

checking to see if Claudia had come back. That night, I woke to see the curtain blowing inward gently, silently in the summer breeze like someone breathing into the room. I waited for it to float back down so I could see my sister's bed across the small room from me against the other wall. The waving curtain had obstructed my view of the bed, and when I found it. Finally waved back down the passing breeze, I thought I saw a shadow. A trick of my mind, desperate to see Claudia again.

Half asleep, I tilted my head to the side, ever so slightly, straining to follow the shadow, and the pebble began to slip. In reflex, I reached up to hold it against my forehead and rebalance it, but as I did so, my hand brushed against something cold, unusually cold for the warmth of the night. It felt like a pocket of dry, frigid hair hovering just over the pebble, as if a ghostly hand had reached for it at the same time as I had, brushing its chilly fingers against mine. I sat up quickly, the pebble now clutched in my hand and swerved to turn on the side-lamp. There was nothing unusual in the room, and the curtains continued to heave gently in the breeze

of the night. My sister had not returned. I was utterly alone. In the drawer of the nightstand, I found the little bottle of white craft glue mother had used when we were much younger. The glue was mostly gone, and what was left had nearly dried out completely. But there was enough to reassure me. Still, I couldn't go back to sleep.

With my eyes shut tight, feigning sleep, I could feel a gentle, cool, steady breeze, washing directly against and over the pebble on my forehead and nowhere else, as if something were trying to blow it off me or trying to test its weight. The curtain did not move. I had closed the window again. The second time it happened a few nights later, I ran from the room, crying in fright. The pebble had nearly fallen off my forehead, though the windows were shut and I hadn't moved a muscle. The glue had stopped working, and I couldn't get myself warm in the sudden chill, couldn't stop my hands trembling. I ran straight to Mam's room, which she used to share with my mother when they were both alive. Mam had still been alive at the time, if you could call that alive.

She barely knew when she was awake, but she was lucid enough to recognize me when I flew to her room in a fit of panic, not wanting to be alone. She stroked my hair as I crud. I died with my head on her lap, not asking what was wrong, perhaps not realizing anything was wrong. Perhaps she believed she knew why I was upset. It had been a few short weeks after Claudia's disappearance, the longest short weeks of my life. It wasn't uncommon for me to wake up crying.

When I had quieted down, I continued to lie on her lap in a daze. I whispered, ma'am, do you believe fairies exist? She tapped my head once. Once, smartly, as if to say, now don't you start with me. Do you? I pressed. You shouldn't ask anything from fairies. She said simply and with finality.

They never really give things away. They always take back what's theirs. I fell silent at that. It didn't seem at first that her answer had any relation to my question, but when I thought about it, the answer must have seemed so obvious to her. She didn't bother mentioning it. Instead, she answered a question I hadn't asked, a question I never would have thought to ask. She died peacefully in her sleep four years later.

I found her in the morning. Soon after, I visited the old fountain, though wishing well, the place of my birth in the now abandoned park. I kissed the stone with my sister's name on it and laid it to rest under the murky, moss-green water, among the names of other children that the evil fairy thought were just light and flat enough that the breath of a sleeping baby or the warm, gentle breeze of summer, could whisk them away to Never, Neverland.