The Dark Somnium - When The Siren Came

Episode Date: August 15, 2023

This creepypasta scary story is from the creepypasta website, written by Dave Cash, make sure to check out the original story and support the author:When The Siren Came: https://www.creepypasta.com/when-the-siren-came/ Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Indirectly watching two older ladies scurry across the empty street as wispy, powdery rain filled the air, Damien Jones sat on a bench, unsure of what life would be like for him now and how much he would want to experience it anyway. The ladies, sensing his gaze, stopped briefly and glanced back towards him, peering over their slightly oversized wraps of scarves, noting the grim, motionless look across his face. A face that was supposed to be thirty-five, but had aged a dead. decade in a matter of days. His reddened, sore eyes followed them and widened slightly to acknowledge their stare.

Of course, they immediately averted their gaze awkwardly, looking nervously instead to the darkening skies that seemed to spur them into activity, and hurriedly, they entered their nearby home. The front garden of their house was filled with dead, limp grass and patches of yellowed lawn. Nothing grew here anymore. No one tended to the small pleasures the way they once had. Even the copes of trees at the top end of the road seemed barren all year round. The fine drizzle clung to Damien's thick, grisly stubble, the masculine droplets making

his beard look even more gray than it already was. In his hand, he tightly held a toy car, a metallic, sky-blue American muscle car with an oversized spoiler in the word speed written in red and yellow italics on the bonnet. As Damien continually rubbed his thumb across the car with absent-minded repetition, the word had cracked and faded, and in places even the metal had begun to show through. The pad of his thumb now sore and red and almost smooth. This small car no longer a child's toy, but a totem of loss. The sky darkened prematurely above the town as the constant fog of fine, misty rain, whipped

into swirls by the wind, continued. The street lights buzzed and flickered on intermittently, within seconds, sending their sickly glow into every recess of the neighborhood, except, seemingly, between the black trees up the street, casting the whole town in an ugly, nicotine-yellow hue. But Damien didn't move. He didn't go home or to his friend's house. Even if the pubs still opened around here after dark, he wouldn't have gone to one. Everyone knew his business just as he had known the others before, and undoubtedly everyone

would know the misfortune of the next lost soul. Though the townspeople would all feel dutiful sorrow for them, they would all feel a greater sense of relief, relief that it wasn't their turn when the siren called. From the warmth of his home office, the upstairs box illuminated only by a low-wop bulb in the desk lamp, Fletcher Reese listened to music on his wireless headphones and watched Damien sit in the rain under the laden skies and felt a swell of sadness ball up inside him. Sadness for Damien, sitting on that bench a few dozen yards of the street, hunched over, looking at something in his hand. Sadness for the town and the blight that had the fall on it. Most of all, sadness for himself, trapped here at the mercy of the siren and the

phantom of Harry Fogg. Fletcher remembered the days when Harry was just a story, a boogeyman, kids thought. A story their parents would tell them, for some misdeed. their parents claimed they could invoke the shade of old hairy fog or foggy who would arrive with a knock at the door and take them away. But even the parents couldn't have known the truth behind their stories. The truth of the horror that once visited this town. The nightmare that came when the siren called. They hadn't been a part of that generation. The collectively labeled wartime generation who worried about German aircraft that would swarm overhead,

bombs trembling to be set free in the belly of the village of the army. each one, yet truly living in an absolute fear of the twisted tear of a man who dressed in a pseudo-official disguise. A warden of sorts, Fletcher had been told, complete with war office-issue helmet and dressed in a blue-woolen battle dress, a top of which he wore a brown leather sleeveless jerkin, and his face was hidden beneath an unusual, tattered canvas gas mask. He was no more a pretend-buggyman now than he was a real warden then. He was a costumed curse.

Fletcher continued to stare out of the window through tired eyes, whilst the soft music took the edge from his shattered nerves. He knew Damien from school, or at least as well as anyone knew him. He was a boy with a fearsome reputation, one that followed him into adulthood. The scars on his face, the boxer's nose, and the rock-like knuckles on each hand were reminders that he was a scrapper not to be toyed with. Yet, despite the years of carefully crafted intimidation, he was now a broken, humbled wreck, having lost the one thing that still tethered his last shreds of decency to this world.

Fletcher paused the music and slowly removed the headphones, placing them on the window sill before gently flipping the light off on his desk and watching out the window as one by one, all lights in the windows were snuffed out, and signs of life vanished across the town. Damien, beneath a custard yellow street light on a bench in the rain, remained out there when the night's siren began to clear its throat and crackled through the streets like a well-worn recording from decades ago. It sounded like an old war movie, people thought, when they first heard it on that night ages ago.

People even came out of their houses on that evening, as did Fletcher, looking around, wondering what to make of that noise. All felt a shiver of excitement at the noise which seemed to emit from nowhere. and everywhere at once. A few were nervous, but still smiled along with their neighbors. The tone of the siren was an uncomfortable thing to hear, but many did so with a grin. That is, except the older residents. In an instant, the wartime children, now old men and women, recognized that tooth-clenching

noise, and in terror they closed their doors tight, drew curtains and closed blinds, instinctively ensuring not a sliver of light could escape their homes. The war was a long time ago, but Harry, in the anonymous circular eyes of the mask, were as fresh in their minds as that morning's breakfast. Now, all that time later, everyone knew what that droning sound brought, and everyone knew who Harry was. They knew his rules, and no one dared break them, even if he came knocking on their front door. Fletcher sat in his leatherette office chair, too tense to lean back nervously, breathing into the dark as the The siren eventually faded, leaving behind a crisp, maddening silence. Every slight noise, a crack somewhere in the walls or a tap of water dripping from the guttering

made him wince. Hours passed by, and Fletcher wondered if Damien was still out there, sharing the intolerably quiet empty streets with the master nightmare. But he wouldn't dare look and risk breaking the rules. Fletcher wasn't sure how long he had sat near statue-like in the dark, but his ears suddenly found a sound to adjust to, a familiar metallic clink. His mind ran through everything that made a metallic sound in his life from cutlery falling to coins to the gate latch. At the front of his home, his short wooden gate had a latch that made a distinctive clink as it opened and closed. Now, was it

closing? Did the wind push it closed? Is that what he was hearing? Or did it just open? If it opened, That meant someone had to... Oh, God. Thought Fletcher. He's here. He's at my door. He's at my door. The rules.

He tried to remind himself, what were the rules? No lights. No looking. No noise. What had he done? His trembling body wouldn't move, but his eyes darted around the room, whilst his mind scanned desperately anything he could remember around the house. He had closed the curtains, rigorously taping them closed in most cases.

and he had locked the windows. He had switched off each light and unplugged everything that emitted even the slightest glow, even if it had so much as a digital timer, it was off and left off. Then, in a silent scream, Fletcher's eyes widened until they became stark white balls balancing in their sockets, tears tumbling over and down his face. Just barely visible in the yellow glow seeping in from the street below the curtain was a greenish-blue, flickering tinge. The headphones. The tiny blue light that flashed above the charging port when they were in wireless mode. Suddenly, instinctively, foolishly, he leapt to his feet and over to the window,

throwing the curtain across to unveil the headphones. The blinking blue light reflected in the cold window, mixing with the oar from the street, it became incredibly slight. Unnoticeable, unless happened upon. He thrashed at the headphones, throwing them behind him only to realize what he had done. The curtain was now open. He had broken another rule. He had looked, and down there in the unkempt garden, Harry had looked back. Glancing down into the small front garden, halfway up the concrete path, Fletcher's eyes met with those two perfectly round lenses that were as yellow as the streetlights they reflected. They stared back at Fletcher, who by now was beginning to emit a sob from his throat, and his nerve endings began to fizz with terror. The two locked up.

Gazed for all of perhaps twenty seconds, but each second was etched onto his soul like a year. Taking in Harry's form, this marked the only time Fletcher had seen the figure in person. He was lanky, undoubtedly skinny beneath the thick clothing. He wore the helmet and the battle-dress blouse, as well as the oversized jerkin, just as the rumors told. But the mask was the most appalling apparition in and of itself. Sat beneath the mask. It was more of an inverted sack made of thick, patchy green canvas.

Large, clumsy stitches here and there betrayed it to be handmade, and even the out-of-place buckle on the cheek showed that it had once been some sort of satchel, or maybe two. The mask sagged under the weight of the rubber hose, emitting from some sort of outlet where the mouth would be underneath. The hose then drooped down under the jerkin, unlikely to have been connected to any real filter. With those round lenses, the size of cricket balls reflecting the light beams like torches, it was obvious this mask had no other purpose but to terrify those who looked upon it, and it terrified Fletcher. A sudden lurching movement by Harry toward the front door jarred him out of his

mesmerized state. Harry was coming in. Fletcher was certain, and he's second now. He could hear the wooden door split, and Fletcher considered smashing the window in front of him, throwing himself into the gloom to escape when, in a moment, the crashing stopped just as the siren again began to wail, the long, all-clear signal. The gloom he was prepared to leap so blindly into was now, in fact, a pale gray, and over the houses, a hazy sunshine was spreading. In an instant, Harry, apparently obeying the siren, turned in place and marched away. The figure cutting no less of a nightmarish presence, even in the early morning light, as his

boots thumped and clicked away. As his mind raced and his vision blurred, the knots in Fletcher's stomach remained tight, and his jaw chattered, his teeth tapping an uneven rhythm. The next sign of movement out there barely registered with him at first, as he tried to control the trembling of his every fiber. Like a quintessential ghost gliding up the street, a scant figure moaned and cried. She was a lady whose age, Fletcher eventually guessed, would have been in her mid-80s, perhaps older. Her thin, snow-white hair had partly escaped a ponytail and fluttered in the breeze. Her feet were bare and dirty, and they flicked at her long, off-white nightdress as she clumsily strode, seemingly after Harry. Within seconds, Fletcher found himself clattering through the remains of his front

door that was split almost from the top to the bottom down the middle, and then into the street after the old lady. He could hear her clearly now, as she howled with Augusto that belayed her age. No more, you old swine! You monster! No more! She suddenly stopped, as did Fletcher a moment later, at the side of Damien, and she pulled her hands in close to her chest. The man's cold husk now keeled over onto its knees. The mouth was as black as if he had gargled soot, and the eye sockets were vacant and as colorless as charcoal. His brow was frozen into an exaggerated ruffle, giving him a tortured, fixed expression. One hand was open in front of him, and each finger was twisted at the knuckle into unnatural angles, like the gnarled branches of a tree, as though his clenched fist were wretched open with immense

violence. Fletcher vaguely recalled that he had seen something in Damien's hand the night before, but whatever it may have been, was now gone, and losing it seemed to have been the final torture the man would ever experience. Oh! sobbed the woman meekly, Fletcher now catching up to her. Oh, that poor man! Her voice was just a whimper, but still loud enough to hear.

That poor. She began to cry, and her knees trembled and buckled beneath her. Though still dazed himself, Fletcher instinctively stepped forward and caught her securely. She was almost weightless, thin, and cold. She seemed musty, but with a hint of sweet tobacco. For the first time, she seemed to notice him and smiled as her wide blue eyes investigated his face. Oh, you've seen him. haven't you?

But... She paused, her smile fading, looking suddenly confused. He didn't take from you. Where do you live? Fletcher asked softly, ignoring her comments, though not entirely understanding what she meant. As his heart continued to race from his all too recent encounter with fog, she continued to stare into his eyes with a confused, sorrowful expression, her thin lips quivering. It took a moment for him to notice her hand.

hand pointing back down the road, nodding, he lifted her up carefully into his arms, feeling every shifting bone beneath her thin skin, and the even thinner nightdress, and then followed the direction in which she pointed. Arriving at the home of the old lady, nothing appeared out of the norm, at least for a town where the norm had become a perpetual season of madness. Her garden was thick and matted. Muddy grass, and here and there potholes had been dug by foxes and filled with sludge. It's open. The lady sighed in Fletcher's arms.

It's always open. Fletcher almost reacted with shock at the idea of someone in this forsaken place, leaving their home unlocked. However, he was so beyond emotional outburst right there and then, so he let her words pass him by, pressing the toe of his shoe against the door and feeling it open with a click, easily and smoothly. Inside, he could smell that same comforting musk of sweet tobacco. The door opened immediately into a lounge, and the room was warm and filled with daylight, which streamed through the windows, forming luminescent bars of gray through the dust that hung in the air.

Gently setting the woman down on the armchair, pre-prepared with a bottle of water and a small end table, along with two brown bottles of expired medicine, she winced a little as her frail body settled into the supportive horseshoe of cushions that she had built around her over time. Eventually, she opened her eyes and smiled, looking at her young companion. Emily. She said, Fletcher raised his eyebrows before understanding. Fletcher, it's a pleasure to meet you. He wasn't offering hollow platitudes at this point. It occurred to him that he hadn't spoken to another person in weeks. Even then, it was a glancing interaction with Mr. Abassi, who opened his little shop occasionally, offering a scant range of canned goods, stale tobacco products, coloring books, and even water

purification tablets, but little else. He didn't offer scintillating conversation for any price, not even a friendly demeanor, so it really was a pleasure to meet and converse with Emily. Please. She said weakly, gesturing toward the couch. Gladly, Fletcher accepted the invitation to sit and rest his body, which felt like it was weighed down by concrete. He had endured an explosive rush of fear and adrenaline, unlike any in his life, and now the energy inside him was sapping away.

He collapsed without even a hint of grace onto the soft gray sofa. Emily looked across at him and chuckled. A well-earned rest, Fletcher. She smiled. I don't weigh so much, do I? I don't think I've ever felt this drained. He replied. Oh, he will do that to you, that old demon.

Takes the life right out of you. The familiarities of Emily's statement caught Fletcher's attention. Have you seen him? Were you here in the war? She rolled her eyes and gasped. Oh, yes. I've seen him. And I was certainly here during the war.

What happened back then? How did it start? I can't say how it started. But I remember the whole town felt different when he began his rounds. She paused. not noticing Fletcher tilt his head at the term rounds, gathering herself and looking down at her crossed thumbs, in between which was a well-worn handkerchief, she went on. I remember the sirens first. As children, we laughed and played at the excitement,

and everyone would rush into shelters or get under tables and beds. All of the grown-ups feared the Germans, all that way up in the sky, not really knowing the one they should have feared was a man that lived amongst us. So Harry Fogg lived in this town? Said Fletcher, now bolt upright in his seat. He had never considered that the figure in the mask was once just another local. Yes. Emily nodded.

Oh, yes. He lived here a long time. Never bothered anyone at first, and no one ever bothered him. So what happened? Why? Did he change? Interrupted Emily. She shrugged.

Who knows? The war brought something out in him, perhaps. I brought something out in a lot of the old men in town. She noticed the quizzical look on his face, and so by way of explanation, she added, The old men who had seen the first war, just like him. But they didn't go out and kill innocent people, did they? Fletcher erupted, unaware of the condescending and confronting tone. known in his voice or the effect it had on Emily and the pained wince in her expression.

She retorted angrily. No one knows what he saw over there how any of them would react when the war came. When it came to their homes, to their town. Noticing the annoyance in her voice, Fletcher, though still unhappy with her apparent attempts at defending the creature that brought such misery to so many, backed down. Notting, he broke eye contact and sighed. too eased up but continued. The sirens.

Those awful sirens. They meant the war was over our heads. The war came to us now. To him. I suppose he couldn't accept that. Perhaps. Perhaps maybe he felt the need to visit the horrors he'd seen onto others. Something began to stir inside Fletcher, a sense of unease as he continued to listen.

Maybe at first. He even thought. thought he was helping, going out and making sure people weren't opening curtains, letting light out, peeping out at the bombers, letting the Germans know where we were. Emily raised her eyebrows and slightly tilted her head to look at Fletcher, though he wasn't looking back. She continued to speak. So he went out in that uniform of his, banging on the doors of anyone who broke the rules.

What did you do to them? The rule breakers. The question seemed crude and stuck in Fletcher's throat. He almost choked as he asked and watched Emily sink into her chair, trembling slightly. Nothing at first. People said he would stand and stare at them, frightening them because of his ugly old mask. But after a while, he must have felt that his warning people wasn't enough. Fletcher's mouth was dry.

His tongue stuck to his teeth. teeth as he spoke. How many did he murder? The word murder seemed to draw a brief, uncomfortable stir in her age-weary face as she stumbled for a reply. It's hard to say after so long, maybe more than we'll ever know. But he didn't do that to them all. I don't think so anyway. He only, I suppose, hurt the grown-ups. What do you mean? His head swam. His head swam. and echoed with her words. He couldn't look away as the old woman's soft voice was so at odds with the detail she imparted. When the grown-ups stopped answering the door to him, he would wait.

Sometimes a minute or two later. If he waited quietly, the children would open the door instead, before their parents could stop them. Then he just... She looked to Fletcher with great torment in her eyes. Took them. In horror, Fletcher rocked in his seat. shaking his head. His mind pictured Damien on the bench, and he felt the knots in his stomach

tighten again. Took them where? Where are they, Emily? He wasn't sure why she had all the answers, but he needed them. He desperately needed to know now. Emily sobbed loudly and covered her mouth with her handkerchief. I don't know. He always said he took them to those woods and he would set them free. Again she wailed, pained by memories and the realities she had ignored for so long. But they never came back, Fletcher! With the words he said, resounding in his mind and resisting the temptation to reach out to comfort the sobbing woman. Instead, Fletcher's eyes darted around at the collection of unusual items here and there. One item to another. Old toys, a plastic rose, an ornament of a cat, stacks of cigarette boxes.

Some seem to be decades old. His frantic gaze flitted around the room before they settled on a sepia photograph in an unusually thin copper frame. It sat amongst old, tired books and roughly made metal toys on a unit in a particularly dusty corner of the room. He became so engrossed by that image that Emily's voice, now more composed and relatively calm, had faded in Fletcher's ears until it was a tinny background noise. as his mind started racing. He made it himself, you know, that warden uniform. He was good like that, making things with his hands. She seemed lost in a memory that instilled some long dormant feelings of faint pride.

The curiously unsettling photograph was a portrait of a family, stood straight and rigid. In front stood an unsmiling young girl, wearing a long ribbon in her long, fair hair, and an equally expressionless woman in a long dark dress with a wide white collar. With them was a tall, gaunt-looking soldier. His face appeared lost beneath a blemish on the film. He loosely rested a hand on the shoulder of the little girl. Men didn't make do, they would say. He was a soldier from a lost generation.

He took his old uniform. A soldier from the First World War. He dyed it blue. He painted that old helmet white. A tall, imposing artillery man. And, for good measure, he threw on his old. The soldier wore a tattered, sleeveless. Leather jerkin.

Some were out of sight, down a dark hallway behind a half-closed door. The back door of the house clicked open, and the sound of heavy boots briefly filled the air. We stopped him in the end, Fletcher. For a while, mother and I did the unthinkable, but we stopped him. The back door then clicked again as it closed. Fletcher knew someone else was now in the house, and he craned his neck to peer inside the darkness of the hall corridor, through the narrow opening in the doorway.

But then those awful sirens came back, for whatever reason, after so long those bloody sirens came back. The sound of the boot started again. And so did he. The door swung open, and the frame of the doorway was filled with the ungodly, silently oppressive figure, clad in a dyed blue uniform with a painted helmet and a tattered old jerkin. He held something familiar to Fletcher in his hand. The room became freezing cold, and yet Fletcher could feel the air in his lungs begin to burn. Emily glanced up with exasperation

in her sad, tearful eyes, yet not looking toward the monster in the room, nor toward the squirming man on her couch. You came home, didn't you, father? That mask with the crickety ball-sized eyes no longer reflected any light in the dull and dusty room, but still they were dull and lifeless. Nonetheless, almost invisible behind the murky glass, two impossibly old, yellowed eyes pocked with ruptured blood vessels regarded Fletcher with unfathomable wrath. Those eyes had beheld a great cataclysm of industrial barbaricism carried out on an impossibly enormous scale. They had taken in the sight of the machine of war and bore witness to its end produce, the unparalleled slaughter of a generation, and now, reflected back, was the black look of an inhuman, entirely scarred,

enraged devil. But Fletcher didn't see the dreadful eyes that stared at him now. Instead, his entire existence was overcome as the excruciating burn in his lungs became like fire, and the searing heat began to seep out of his swelling, blistering throat, drying and cracking his teeth like glass. His eyeballs too started sizzling, cooking in their sockets before one, then another ruptured with intense heat. He gargled in pain, but the sound was stifled in brief. The charred holes left behind emitted thin columns of black smoke. Whoever released you from hell? Wept Emily Fogg.

May they for ever! Finally, a burst of swirling smoke erupted from Fletcher's mouth as he writhed and twitched, coughing in his last agonized moments. Harry Fogg's shape now tossed the object in his hand on the floor next to Fletcher's gagging, coughing, and finally settling body. The wireless headphones. Another collected trophy, just like all the other random trinkets in the room. A golf ball on the shelf.

A signed book on the coffee table. A doll on a chair. And on top of the old wireless radio was a small blue toy car with an oversized spoiler and the word speed just above visible on the bonnet. Emily hopelessly sobbed, looking at the soulless remains on her floor. Reaching for Harry's ice-cold hand, she whispered in a broken voice.

Why did you ever come home, you old monster?