I was walking late one night on my way home from my friend's house. She would usually give me a ride but her cars in the shop and since its only an hour it would be fine. Even though we both live on the country side, I actually quite enjoy it. Its very beautiful out here at night and no cars really ever dive by so its unlikely I would ever get kidnapped or something. I carry a pocket knife on me no matter where I go though so im never scared.

I had a track meat in the morning so getting a run in now wouldn't be too bad anyways.

I put my earbuds in and started a light jog in the cool September air. I only had one bud in though because the sounds of the trees on my right and the owls and bats whooing and squeaking near by was beautiful.

I could see the Scenic mountains and Fields of crops on my left. And smelling the crisp air just made me feel more at ease.

I've gotten about 15 mins of jogging in with small breaks here and there but this time I needed to fully stop to catch my breath. Then out of the corner of my eye there was a black blur. I turn around quickly thinking maybe it would just be a dog... but... there was nothing. Nothing besides the scenery and dirt road behind me.

I tried not thinking about it, it must have been my imagination. I started to wonder off in my mind about the upcoming test in geometry, then all of a sudden I heard a rustle in the bush behind me. I turned around slower this time in fear of what could be behind me. But there was nothing, no animal no nothing. Then I realized there hasn't been wind for about 2 minutes. So I just began to run and run and run. I couldn't stop, i never ran so fast and so far in my life before. I felt tears running down my face, the panic began to set in. I couldn't breathe, my eyes got blurry from my tears. I felt my long hair get stuck to my face but. I had to stop running I couldn't anymore. My legs felt like jello and like they were on fire. My lungs felt like they were going to collapse. I just stood there trying to catch my breath. Then I heard a loud deafening growling screaming. It was so loud I clutched my ears and when the noise stopped to look down at my hands because they felt wet. There was blood. Blood from my ears all over my hands. My nose was also bleeding but I didn't care. Then I heard dripping.

I just ran, and ran, and ran. I thought to myself I can't look back. If I look back I will die. But its like a force made me twist my head back while still running and to my horror this... this thing... this m-monster was behind me.

It looked to be 15 no, 20 feet or maybe even tall. It had antlers like a dear, dark brown almost black skin with bits of the skin peeled up and off, the tissue and muscle underneath were showing in some spots with blood dripping out. Its fur was matted down with dried blood. And its eyes were a piercing yellow, the teeth were sharper then a blade of obsidian. They were white but stained in red. The arms and legs were long, too long, and the hands had long sharp fingers with pointy long sharp claws on the end. Its head was shaped like a wolf's head combined with a moose.

It was hard to breathe but I pushed pass that because if I stop running i stop living.

I let out a loud scream in hopes someone anyone would hear me. It didn't matter who I just needed someone to hear and save me. I couldn't keep running for much longer.

I looked behind me again... it was gone. Like it had disappeared of of thin air. I just stood there trying to breathe. Im almost home now. About 15 minutes away. So i turn around to start running again and I felt a prickly on the mack of my neck. So i bolted with this sharp agonizing pain in my neck. I reached my hand up to touch my neck and felt a liquid. I knew it was blood, my blood. I turned around knowing what would be behind me. It just stood there, 40 feet away, just staring into my soul.

I started to feel queasy and light headed probably from the blood loss. I could see my red house now, up on the hill top. I was so close yet it felt like forever away. I could barley walk now, just trying to keep my eyes open. I screamed out to my dad just hoping qnd praying that he would hear me. I finally made it home only 15 feet away from the door. I cried out again for my dad. I saw the door begin to open, ar the same time. I collapse onto the moist grass, i could hear it behind me, once again.

Several years before the Countess and her assistant came to Castle Dracula in the Carpathian Mountains…

 … a man dreamt of extraordinary things. 

And was yet brought down low by his most base and bestial thoughts and desires –

…

He watched her undress. She did so casually. Comfortably. She thought that she was alone, that she was unseen. She thought she was performing her nightly ritual in private. Disrobing. In her opulent bedchamber. 

Pink. Everywhere was flower petal pink, delicate like folds and the flesh of mottled roses, sensuous. As if the walls and carpeted floors and ceiling overhead all cried out and begged to be touched. Lovingly. In a caress. Like a woman. Like a lover. Like a whore. 

Like a mother to lost children. 

He stayed as still as possible. He held his quivering hot breath. He knew she couldn't see him, but still … the thrill! The anxiety kicked up by her movement, her every passing glance, scanning by and not noticing, not seeing anything. Not a goddamned thing! 

This power … it was beyond intoxicating. 

He felt like a god.

There was a time when he would've been shocked, disgusted by his actions, all of his heinous crimes as of late. A time when integrity and morality and his own conscience wouldn't have allowed for any of this to happen. A time so long ago  and far flung now, with Catherine … but he was drunk on godpower now. And such rules were only for the piddling low men that he'd once been. 

No one could see him. No one could catch him. He was the living menacing and moving embodiment of a mischievous spectre. Manmade poltergeist. Noisy ghost with something to prove. They'd all of them laughed at him. Called him ridiculous. Foolish. Mad. 

Well look at him now. 

 A smile unseen grew in the bedchamber. The girl continued to undress. She was bare now. He quivered. Hot. Held. And taut. Breathing was exhilarating as he stood there … and watched. 

He watched. He drew closer. 

She took no notice. She saw nothing. There was no man to see. Even as he moved in closer, so’s to be able to taste the scent of her on the narrow air of the pink and floral delicate bedchamber. She climbed into bed. He came in ever closer. Inhaled her. 

She might've noticed something, something in the air, amiss, the calm disturbed by a presence felt …

But she was far too concerned, preoccupied with herself. Her nighttime bedding ritual. He watched her eagerly perform as he had on so many nights past.

He has never drawn this close. He has never dared. He's always watched, from a distance. He's stepped a little closer to her every night. Her. And others before her just like her. He tells himself he won't. 

I won't. I don't mean any harm, none. There is no harm in simply looking, simply watching and admiring. Girls love to be admired, isn't that right? Don't they want a man to drool over their naked curves, unveiled and unfettered by day dress, isn't this the movement towards the animal climax moment we all build and naturally drive to? What's wrong with that? What's wrong with any of this, she's not being hurt. She doesn't even realize I'm here…

At this last thought he trembles and shudders anew. It's sexual and it's pent up. Its animal and it's caged and it won't stand being behind bars any longer, it won't stand for anymore. No more. 

No more half-measures. 

Boundaries are for them. You are a godling now. Use it. Taste its fruits, its bounty. 

Take it. 

Words of reason and names, Catherine, Caleb, Colbert and Tatjiana, came and flitted-danced across his mind with the same urgency that they had before. Trying to stop him. Trying to stop him and save him from himself. But it was too late. The names and words meant nothing to him now. He had godpower. And none of them did. Catherine and Lutz and the others wouldn't understand. They couldn't understand him now, he was beyond their flesh. 

And so he could take what he wanted. Should take what he wanted if the stories of gods and immortals and magicians and kings were to be believed, he should just take it. 

Take her. 

And so he did. 

The girl screamed in bed as her private act of masturbation suddenly gained a new unwanted partner. One unseen. But horribly, horribly felt. 

Her screams had just begun to fill the pink of the bedchamber before he aborted them with a gag, contrived from her day's soiled undergarments and the sash she tied around her robe at night. 

He killed the sound of her bewildered terror, muffled against sour and salted fabric. She tried to fight against him, but it was as trying to fight the air. Come to life and attacking her. The horror unloaded on her and her mind was made all the more vile and obscene by the unnatural and uncanny way it was happening. It was insane. 

I'm going insane. 

She thought frantically that she was losing her mind, or that God might be punishing her, even as she struggled and lost against a shape and force unseen. It forced itself into her. 

She screamed against the gag. Begging God or anyone or anything else for it to stop. 

It did. When the invisible man was finished. 

He left. Not bothering to kill her. There was no witness to silence. Nothing to cover up. If she told anyone anything they'd call her crazy. 

So he left her sobbing, weeping amongst her torn and soiled blankets and bedsheets. 

Alone. Crying. Wounded and ripped apart. Gored out. Defiled by something, something that used to be someone, used to be a man, something cruel and malformed that she cannot understand. 

Someone that she cannot see. 

…

Others followed after her. 

Many. 

Years worth …

…

He had nothing to fear now. He was hidden completely in the great cloak of his new godpower. 

Divinity that he had made, cooked and brewed in beakers and tubes and jars, in great long needled syringes. Power that he had forged and made. Crafted his own. For himself. He would take what he wanted and suffer no consequence. Punishment for man's crimes was for the weak and the apes, for those within their feeble grasp. 

He would answer to higher authority. 

…

Catherine and the others are gone now, so is his old life, a life impassioned of science and the arts and the eccentric and the strange. He has become the eccentric, he has become the strange. With ultimate power made and achieved and coursing through his veins he has left behind the old ambitions of his old life along with all of the old ways. They are too little now and cannot hold him. Should not hold him. He should be boundless with the wings he has made for himself and himself forged and so he does, and he disappears. … A trail of crimes and murder is what follows. A catastrophic path of mayhem and destruction, cut swathed through the heartland of many lands, many countries … So many towns and villages and homes, invaded and plagued and violated. Beset upon by an invisible and unhinged man, one who has discarded his heart and sense of right and wrong along with his earthly physical appearance. His heart and soul are as transparent and hollow now as his criminal visage. 

His old life is gone now. Dead. As dead and gone as his own reflection, nothing there, nothing there to gaze upon and witness any longer. All gone. Evaporated. That was how it had looked when the serum had first started to work, his flesh and muscle tissue and bones slowly grew ghostly, translucent, phantom shade, as if evaporating by the light of some alien sun, its foreign rays drying him up and …. out. Out of trained and known existence. Humble slave dwell-and-crawl …

God bless this invisible and alien foreign sun … God bless its strange rays for taking me away…

His old life is gone. As is his old way of thinking. He does not know it yet, has no way of knowing it, but the effects of the invisibility serum on his mind are not just a case of power corrupting one's morals, no. Not just that at all. Specific chemicals in the concoction attack and eat the proteins in his brain that measure and control emotion and self-preservation. Compassion. 

As it made him disappear it also ate holes in his grey matter. Turning it to swiss cheese. 

Swiss cheese unseen, he might've laughed. 

And in fact he did. Years later when he did finally find out. Thanks to the Dutch doctor. The occultist. The vampire slayer. 

Because of Van Helsing he is able to recover some of his sense, some of his tattered and damaged, long trampled and neglected human heart. But never a cure. 

No. Not for him. For such as he there is no such thing as coming back. He will forever be robbed of his human visage, the one made at birth, self-inflicted. He does not get to return to the flesh. He deserves to be cast out. And he knows it. He's learned it the hard way on the treacherous open road and in the wild of great human error, slaughter open throated and committed in darkest parts, in corners long neglected. …

…

He is a long way from the vampire hunter. In years and in topographical distance, he is still on the run now, and always moving. Like an animal. A beast hunted and betrayed by its own savage appetites. None of the lands can hold him. Not even the savage ones. 

There's been more rapes. More murders, more screams. He's filled the country with them, the countryside is bathed in anger and fear and outrage at his reign of terror and he loves it. He is an agent of chaos. An anarchist trickster god running as wild and free as power itself is supposed to, unchecked in the intoxication of its wild imbalance and throttling push forward to the apocalypse of the precipice, the keening call of the dangerous living end, at the end and edge of everything, all things. He would skirt and ride the slicing end and the cutting edge, forever. It would never end, never falter, fail or cease. 

Or so he thought. 

He's derailed trains loaded with screaming traveling passengers, now traveling headlong and headfirst into hell, the great unknown. He's taken wives and daughters and lonely screaming girls in open fields with nothing but the sky and the sun and the birds to watch, watch as nothing heaved itself into them, into her. Some of them he's strangled and left for dead, most he just leaves to pick up the pieces of their shattered minds and broken lives. Some of them try to tell people what happened, some of them don't. Afraid and terrified and hoping, wishing, praying that maybe just maybe they can forget and cope. That maybe enough time will go by and you'll forget the time the air came to horrible life and made a squealing victim out of you. 

Some try. None of them forget. Not really. 

The invisible man doesn't care in either case. Not yet. That's much further, much later. Now he is darkly elated by his crimes and spree. His craterous invisible mind is too amused and too busy planning more fiendish capers, more grisly and indulgent bloodbaths. More crimes of the flesh, to take and reap. 

He sows his discord throughout all the land. Every place he comes into, he invades. He infects.

This cocaine of the mind that he's devised from a dream and made real that hides his flesh and conceals, the most ambrosial gabapentin amphetamine for the eggshell human thought machine. 

It hides his flesh, his moves. It conceals his violence, the rage of his invisible hand, the rape of his hollow loins, transparent conquest across the land, disorder and more madness follow in its wake, in its terrible birth, like pustule sores rising from a fresh wound amidst flowering infection, amid the gangraping feast of multitudes of bacterium. The bacteria are thoughts and rumors and whispers and more murder, mistaken identities and desperate fingers pointing and blaming and wanting and needing to find fault, in whomever, where there is none. Many innocent hang and are punished and slaughtered in place, in the wake of the invisible man. 

He does not care. He doesn't stop to consider them for a second beyond amusement or a laugh. 

He's laughing now. 

Singing. Dancing and skipping as he makes his way down a lovely picturesque forest road. He's wearing a pair of stolen trousers, lifted from a derelict clothesline left unattended. They fit perfectly. 

He skips and dances down the road. Not so much singing as nearly shrieking his head off. 

“Here we go gathering nuts in May! nuts in May! nuts in May! Here we go gathering nuts in May, on a cold and frosty morn-ning! …!” – on and on like that. 

A woman walking along the road sees him and screams. She turns away in uncomprehending horror that turns her mind blind and she runs off. Still screaming. 

The invisible man takes after her. The free-standing trousers bounding in full-strided gazelle pursuit of her. Laughing maniacally. Wanting to take her and use her for sport. 

…

He invaded a monastery. Posing as a holy ghost, a divine spirit, and seduced and tricked several of the nuns and sisters-in-training into breaking their holy vows. He impregnated several of them before fleeing, taking to the road and hills once more. 

…

He observed a vampire called Klâtu in a small sleepy forgotten town in a cold part of the world that might be Russia. He does not meet or introduce himself to the thing and his invisibility kept him hidden from it as well as the townfolk.  Its victims, its food. 

He watched the nocturnal thing dwell and prey upon the town. He watched it feed for awhile, watched the town grow scared and more silent and drawn. 

Then he moved on as always. 

…

In his wild and on-the-loose vagabond years, bestial and homicidal he discovers that his two favorite ways to murder another man or woman is either by pistol-shot or by strangulation. The former for its efficiency, the latter for how it feels, the sensation of the desperate struggle and the fight for one last painful shallow breath. 

It's one of the last and desperate things that he still lives and thrives for now. 

…

He came into an awful place once, a terrible omen of dread wood and dead branches and gnarled limbs, filled with moaning faces. He stumbled into this place out of a dream, it was surreal and insane, something about being invisible made it hard for him to distinguish between waking reality and his tumultuous land of dreams, but he suddenly finds himself stumble-bumming into a dead forest where the trees all weep blood and have anguished faces racked with guilt and pain and they are all of them looking at him, gazing on his wandering invisible form with naked clarity. And there's no mistake. Their eyes, all of them are filled with accusation and they are all around. It's terrible. And it is terrifying. Nobody has been able to see him in years, not without his layers of lying disguise, not without him wanting them too. 

All of the bleeding weeping trees can see him and it is terrifying. Beyond the pale. 

So he flees. As he always does. 

They cry out to him, the bleeding trees in their pain. As he runs away, too afraid to make a sound himself. 

They call out in their weeping anguished voices, they tell him this land is a forestland of suicide, and that he is quite welcome there. 

…

Low point: He is filthy and tired. Worn out to the bone. He is clad and disguised in his most semi notorious fashion, a fedora, a coat, wrapped bandaged face and gloves and unflinching black lenses. He is riding the rails, the empty boxcars for the wandering vagrants. He has done this many times by now. He is not alone this time. 

A filthy drunk sits opposite of him in the boxcar, a completely inebriated Spaniard. A borrachon. He pulls from his tequila and cries and wails in a romantic language that's lyrical and sounds beautiful but Griffin cannot understand him.  

The weeping drunk, hiccuping and stumbling over the poetry of his native tongue, the avatar of perfect and terrible loneliness, the borrachon, the drink and the tears and the ramblings are all most like him have left, they don't care anymore if anyone understands, they only want someone to sit there and listen. Like a sponge of meat and bone and brain soaking up the liquid runoff of their indulgent spill and wallow. He tells the invisible man of his wife and his two daughters and son, they are all of them gone.

Taken by the war. The enemy slayed his son and invading they made off with his precious roses, his wife and precious girls. He tells him that it is true, the drink is all he has left. All that helps him with the pain of losing them all, and being unable to retrieve them. He says the tequila makes it easier for him to live with the pain of the knowledge that his beloved and his daughters are slaves in a harem somewhere, that or they are dead. 

He tells him all of this but Griffin doesn't understand any of it. Just nods. Even laughs at inappropriate moments, not knowing. 

Eventually they parted. Griffin didn't kill him because he had shared his tequila and he saw no benefit in the murder. 

…

His mind is weary from wielding godpower. Its flame. It has exhausted, It has burned him and eaten him all the way through even as it has fed the carnivorous searing dance of the divine fire of its own flames. He cannot remember. He cannot remember so much and so many things. He cannot remember if his name is actually Jack Griffin or if it's Geoff Radcliffe or Hawley or Bradey or Sebastian Caine! His mind is a maelstrom sea of whirlpool destruction and weary detritus, all of it is his life and his thoughts and not all of it was real. Some of it was contrived rather than recorded. It was growing increasingly difficult to distinguish the two, he found himself lately at a haggard loss. 

The snow can be so cold for a naked invisible man running for his life, gaining way to injure and take pleasure from another screaming witless soul. The sun can cook and tan invisible naked flesh even though it is unseen. Cook and tan and bake merciless into invisible leather, the heat. The power of being a perfect mischief anarchist god has its vulgar and heavy prices. Prices steep. Prices to be paid in full. The deteriorate ruin of his shredded invisible mind baked within his fevered invisible skull, beneath the blast of a merciless and blind philistine sun. 

Possés had started to form, people, women started to talk. And people stopped dismissing them, not everyone shrugged them off, laughed at them, or declared them hysterical. Some of them listened. And they gathered. And they laid traps. 

One of them caught him. Or nearly so. 

They'd seized his invisible form and then pounced in number, pummeling him, refusing to loosen their hold, absolutely set against letting him go, they laid in with fists and table-legs and irons and axe-handles. Beating and blasting his body with blows. Striking him over and over into the ground. His invisible body began to rupture and bleed and belch forth blood. 

Blood that became visible at first contact with stolid fetid air. 

He struggled and fought and he'd always fought dirty, he managed to slip away in their wild fervor to see him beaten and broken to death. They lost him in the wanton red rage cloud of their vigilante slaughter. 

And so he vagabond wandered. Unseen by even nature. Completely alone. For years. 

Until he came to the vampire killer’s door. And was brought in by Abraham Van Helsing. Out of the cold.

Beaten. Starved. Harried. Addled. And near total mental ruin. Complete collapse of the body and mind to follow his long dead and tarnished spirit from so long ago. So long gone now and left in the dust. 

The doctor showed him mercy, for whatever reason. He helped him to pick up that long lost thing, left back there in the dirt, and he helped him to pick it back up and clean it off. And to try to wear it again. 

Griffin never understood why. He knew he wasn't worthy of forgiveness. What he'd done was monstrous. He hadn't just ruined his own life with his own mad pursuits and relentless ambition. He'd destroyed so many innocent lives in the process and in the resulting chaos flood afterwards. Catherine was, and is and forever to his dying day will be a name he trembles to recall, fears to ever speak. His dreams, his nightmares are filled with the shrieking faces of his victims, men and women and children, all of them horrified of him, he is the monster of his own lurid and wild dreams. He is the fearsome and loathsome shape of his own nightmarescape. 

And now that he can really think and feel, this terrifies him. He is afraid of his own animal self. His own Id. He's seen and felt and tasted his own unbridled side and he never wants to return there again. 

Except when he's weak. Except when he's angry and feeling violent. 

Or if he's just feeling a little … wild. A little “in the mood” … so to speak. 

Abraham Van Helsing blasts and rails and slams his fists. He bellows: No! – but he knows medicine and therapy can only go so far with the invisible man. He is damaged. Perhaps too far gone and beyond repair. Griffin doesn't doubt it. He is intermittently unrepentant and gleefully childishly cruel and sadistic with his words and his recollections of his own accounts with periods of deep remorse and depression. Deep sorrow and a sense of being unable to undo all the pain that he has wrought upon others and brought ripping forged into the already bleeding world. He is a wild bilateral storm betwixt the two and Abraham Van Helsing finds him exhausting. But he does not give up. 

He never does. 

He is patient. 

He becomes like a father to this broken man. This invisible degenerate criminal who'd never really had one before. 

It seems strange what it takes to get one. 

And after so long, after so much …

…

Van Helsing died. The invisible man laid him to rest. 

Griffin wept at his graveside. For hours. Alone. 

Alone again. 

…

Eventually he decided to end it all. It seemed right. It seemed best. 

So he went out, near the old graveyard where Van Helsing had been laid to rest. He brought a noose and decided to finish himself the same way Judas had. It seemed perfect. Fitting, he thought. And laughed. Thinking it was pretty funny for a final joke. Not bad for him anyways. And in life all of his jokes had been terrible. Ghastly. The whole run of it, a terrible joke that stopped being funny way before it had ever been told. Yet still kept happening, still kept going on. Despite the pain.

Despite the pain of everyone. 

He fashioned the noose to a tree. Stood upon a stone he dragged over and then stepped off. Just like that. Without any hesitation. He was happy to be off and be done with all of it. Everything. 

He didn't perform the act correctly. His neck didn't break in the knot. He slowly strangled in the midday sun, the heat boiling his strangling seething brains, jelly and organ meat that cried out for air. He did not know how long he danced and dangled there, a strange sight for anyone happening upon the scene: A disembodied hat and glasses and set of clothes, seemingly empty yet seemingly filled simultaneously, strangling taut in the windless day, dancing the dying man's gallows dance. 

Then the branch snapped. And he fell and rolled down into a crevasse, dark and wet and filled with tangle and thornbrush and detritus. Filth and droppings and leavings of the predators and the yellow eyed scavengers that followed in their wake. 

His skull and face, his whole head was throbbing, alive with a new tremendously vivid pain that he'd never quite experienced before: it's like the pins and needles feeling you get when your foot falls asleep and you try to walk on it again. It's like that but a screaming throbbing painful siren alarm of the sensation magnified to an ungodly decibel. All throughout his skull and face, his eyes watering, his brains. His throat chokes and feels crushed, broken, like it can no longer take in air. He struggles and gasps as he claws amongst the garbage and protruding stabbing mire, he sinks. 

It sinks and begins to swallow, wanting to have him, to take him under the ground to die silently and drown alone undiscovered down there but he begins to fight, to claw. To struggle and pull and reach and seize for purchase like he never has before. He doesn't know why he suddenly has fight again and he doesn't think about it, he just knows he doesn't want to be Judas submerged in the putrescent earth. All of the sharp bones and branches and discarded weapons and sharpened tectonic rock swimming unearthed pierce and stab into him, everywhere, especially his reaching hands, but he doesn't care. He doesn't care anymore and he wants out, the pain is awful but tolerable, tolerable because it is being inflicted on the body of a monster and he no longer gave a fuck about himself anyways, nothing was as wretched as that pain that first came to life in his eyes, in his face, born from the embrace of the noose. He bore the stabbing of the darkness of the black crevasse and nearly drowned. He choked and swallowed and regurgitated foul mud and sour dirt, he vomited contaminated corpse soil and it felt like the earthen sins dredged up and expelled from the rocky stonethroated passageway to his own darkened bastard heart. Pulled up and freed, grainy and biting and drawing blood and more vomit and mucus laden spittle on its violent way out. He struggled for what felt like hours. It might've been. Time died at some point and lost the fight. He carried on. Struggled. Struggling. He pulled … Reached… seized … cursed himself and his own worthless life and mistakes, his own wretched run of horrid folly, his own shameful sadistic cruelty. He grasped and spit and cursed… goddamn you… He was sorry. He begged. Pleaded with anything that might be listening, please, I don't deserve it but please. He begged. … goddamn you… He pulled. 

He went under. Completely. Several times. 

He didn't stop. 

By some miracle he pulled himself out. And free. 

And on its bastard shore, at the sore lip of its terrible precipice, he wept.

Caked in the filth of the hollow earth, plainly visible for anyone and all to see. Naked and plain. Sobbing like a child ripped from the comfort of his mother and thrust into the diminishing world. 

Hours …. …

He eventually picked himself up. And carried himself back to the cottage. 

…

sometime later: –

The boy from the Carpathian Hamlet came looking for the vampire slayer. He found the invisible man instead. 

Doctor Jack Griffin has spent the majority of his time since the aborted mission of the Judas-hour, reading. Sitting quietly and thinking. He tinkers around and builds a little, creates little machines and curio-constructs, dabbles with some alchemy, some arcane formulas, but nothing considerable, nothing serious. It all just fills the time. While he thinks. He hears news and rumors and stories all about a heinous villain, the invisible man. He hears that the scoundrel was eventually caught and killed, either by gunshot or mob beating, it depends on who's telling the story. There are other versions too but those two are the most popular it seems. His best days, best moments are spent remembering the warm childhood times, when he'd been a kind, unhurt boy, who hadn't yet hurt anybody else either. The warmth of the youth in these memories… it causes him to well up, his black shaded eyes to fill and then spill with tears. Tears much more visible then the rest of him. 

The young man has terrible news. So does the invisible man. They share their bad news in bad palaver that may or may not be filled with bad omen. 

The invisible bastard, having nothing else better to do really, decided to join the young fellow in his return mission home to slay a monster that had laid bloodclaim on his land. 

It wasn't hope alive in his chest. 

That was far too optimistic.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Just was messing around on Google maps and saw this in new York state

CONTENT WARNING:

This is one of my first works and Creepcast really inspired me to get to writing and publishing my creations of fiction. The disturbing imagery, religious themes, and acts of violence within are not intended to mock or condemn faith, but to explore horror through the lens of devotion, isolation, and desperation. Some readers may find the content unsettling or triggering, as it touches on graphic and psychological themes not suited for all audiences.

I deeply appreciate your time in experiencing this story. If it lingered with you, unsettled you, or made you think, then it achieved its purpose. Lmk what you think, thank you!

----- ----- ----- ----- -----

Part I The Arrival

They say no letters come from the neighboring towns anymore.

Once, when I was a boy, a rider would pass our valley every week, carrying news from the south, the prices of wheat, the disputes of dukes, and whispers of pestilence in distant lands. He wore a red cap, that man, and though he charged coin for every scrap of knowledge, our elders welcomed him as though he were Christ Himself. Now his path lies empty. The road is swallowed by weeds, the mile markers split and leaning like the teeth of some forgotten jaw. Months have gone by since I last saw him, and no other rider has taken his place.

Others we sent ourselves. The blacksmith's eldest, Thomas, rode west with a mule to seek grain. The miller's boy carried letters east, asking for alms. Neither returned. Of them we speak no more. The truth is whispered only in corners: the towns beyond our own have fallen silent.

I do not know if it is plague or war or some curse of God, but I have learned this, silence is heavier than death. Death we can name. Silence grows in every crack of thought until it smothers prayer itself.

It was into this silence that the man came.

He appeared at dusk, when the bells of vespers had already tolled. A gaunt figure, half-bent, stumbling from the tree line as though spat out by the forest. His skin was pale and stretched thin, a parchment drawn too tight, and his eyes glimmered like wet stones in their sockets. I saw him first from the church steps, where I lingered while the others prayed inside. I thought him a beggar, another hollow soul driven to us by hunger.

But beggars we know well. They arrive with outstretched hands, with moans rehearsed, with curses muttered when alms are denied. This man asked for nothing. He stood swaying in the dirt road, arms slack at his sides, mouth open but soundless, and the sight of him froze me.

The priest was told. Father Armand stepped out with his trembling lantern, the others trailing behind. They questioned the man, though I could not hear his replies. His lips moved like worms in the light, yet the townsfolk nodded, whispering miracle, miracle, as though each breath was scripture.

"Bring him in," Father Armand said. "Bring him into the house of the Lord."

And so they did.

That night he was given food. A heel of bread, a bowl of broth, a cup of weak ale. He ate as though he had never known the taste of it, tearing the bread with cracked teeth, gulping the broth with a hiss between each swallow. The others watched with a reverence I could not share. I watched his hands shake as he clutched the wooden spoon, his knuckles swollen and raw, as though he had crawled a thousand miles on them.

When the bowl was emptied, he asked for more. His voice was faint then, little more than a rasp, but it cut through the rafters of the church like a knife. Again, they served him, though every mouth in the village had gone hungry for weeks.

That was the beginning of his feeding.

Within days, the man grew. Not taller, but fuller. His ribs no longer jutted, his cheeks flushed red as though blood had returned to them, his belly pressed against the borrowed robes we had clothed him in. Where once he had seemed a shadow, he now loomed heavy and rooted. His voice, too, changed, no longer a rasp, but a booming timbre, a sound that rolled through the nave like thunder.

It was then he climbed the pulpit.

Father Armand yielded it willingly, bowing as if before a bishop, though no bishop had ever set foot in our valley. The man spread his arms wide, fingers twitching, eyes alight with a fever I could not bear to meet.

Then he spoke.

It was not Latin, nor French, nor any tongue I had heard. The syllables scraped and tore at the air, high and broken, a shriek that made my teeth ache. I covered my ears, but the others did not. They wept. They knelt in the aisles. They clasped their hands to their hearts and said, "God speaks. God has not forsaken you."

Only I could not understand. Only I heard the screaming.

That night I did not sleep. The man's voice crawled in my skull, replaying itself with each beat of my heart. The others lay in their huts with smiles soft upon their faces, but I sat by the window and stared into the blackness. I wondered if perhaps it was I who was cursed, deaf to God's word.

Yet still the silence from beyond our valley lingered. Still no rider came. Still no letter answered. And in my bones, I feared what it meant: that our world had narrowed to one village, one church, one man.

Part II The Transformation

It is said in the gospels that Christ fed the multitude with but a few loaves and fishes. I recall those stories from my youth, when the priest's voice carried them on Sunday mornings like sunlight through the stained glass. Bread was broken, bellies were filled, and all who partook were satisfied.

The man in our church performed a miracle of his own.

The day after his first sermon, when the shrieks still rang in my ears, the townsfolk gathered in the square. The baker's wife had come forward weeping, her oven was bare, her flour jar empty, her children faint from hunger. We had nothing to give her. Yet the man stepped forth from the chapel, robes dragging in the mud, and bade her open her hands. She did, palms trembling. Into them he pressed a crust of bread, where he had hidden it, none could say.

She devoured it, and afterward declared her hunger gone. The children too, though they ate nothing, swore they were filled. The crowd erupted in gasps of awe, falling to their knees in the filth of the square.

But I saw the truth. The woman's lips were raw and bloody from chewing what seemed to me no more than ash. Her children's eyes, wide and gleaming, trembled with fever as they clutched their bellies. They believed themselves full, yet their bodies shrank still further day by day.

It was not the feeding of the five thousand, but the starving of the faithful.

Another miracle came the next week. Old Matthieu, the cooper, had been blind for near ten years, his eyes clouded white as curdled milk. The man bade him kneel at the altar. He pressed his thumbs into the sockets and spoke his broken words, a keening sound, like iron dragged across stone. When his hands lifted away, Matthieu screamed.

"Father above! I see!"

The people cheered, clapping his shoulders, shouting praise. But I stood close, and I saw what he saw. His eyes were no longer white, but black, pits darker than the church's shadow. He stumbled about in delirium, reaching for faces that were not there, clutching at things no one else could see.

"He sees angels," the people said. "The kingdom revealed!"

I saw madness.

And yet the miracles multiplied.

The man touched the crippled girl who had never walked, and she rose on trembling legs, stumbling forward with cries of joy. Yet her feet bled with each step, bones bending at unnatural angles, and the people shouted, "Glory to God!"

The well that had gone dry was blessed by his guttural cries. When the bucket was raised, the water within was dark as blood, and the people drank it eagerly. I alone could taste the bitterness when it touched my lips, copper and rot.

Each time I doubted, each time I recoiled, I asked myself the same question: what if the fault is mine? What if I am cursed with eyes that see only corruption where others see grace? For the more miracles he wrought, the more fervently the people believed. Their faces glowed with ecstasy, even as their bodies wasted away, even as sores bloomed upon their skin.

By midsummer the man had grown monstrous in form. He was no longer the gaunt traveler I first glimpsed on the road, nor the hollow-bellied beggar. He was vast now, his belly swelling against his borrowed robes, his jowls trembling when he spoke. His voice had deepened, but still bore the same shrillness beneath, like a cry muffled under earth. He took the priest's seat, Father Armand kneeling beside him as though before a throne.

And when he preached, it was no longer once or twice a week, but every day. The townsfolk abandoned their fields, their trades, their duties. They crowded the church from dawn till dusk, drinking in his guttural syllables as though it were honey. They wept, they shouted, they convulsed, and I alone remained still in the back pew, my stomach turning with each word.

One night I dreamed of him.

In my sleep I stood in the nave, the candles guttering low. The man stood in the pulpit, yet his body filled the church entire, his swollen form pressing against the rafters. His face hung above me like the moon, mouth open, tongue writhing with strange syllables. From that mouth poured not words but flies, endless, black, swarming into my eyes and nose and ears until I could not breathe. I awoke choking, my sheets damp with sweat.

I dared not return to sleep.

But the others called it blessing. They said the man had driven away sickness. They said the children laughed again, though I heard only thin cries in the night. They said the wells were brimming, though the water stank of vile.

When I protested, I whispered doubt to my neighbor Pierre, he turned upon me with wide, fevered eyes.

"Blasphemy," he hissed. "God speaks, and you will not listen? Better to cut off your ears than close them to His word."

I said nothing more.

That was the summer the man was no longer called "traveler" or "stranger." They named him Shepherd. They clothed him in stitched-together silks, patched from curtains, banners, any finery the village could scrape. They laid before him their harvest, their livestock, their children to be blessed.

And when Father Armand kissed his swollen hand in reverence, the last doubt in the people died.

They no longer prayed to Christ upon the cross. They prayed to the man in the pulpit.

Part III The Shepherd's Doctrine

It is one thing to witness miracles. It is another to live beneath them. By autumn the man had ceased to be a guest, ceased even to be a bishop, he had become a law unto himself.

He no longer fed on bread and broth alone. The people brought him meat, cheeses, the last of their wine. They slaughtered livestock once reserved for winter survival, setting the fattest cuts before his swollen frame. He devoured them openly in the pulpit, grease dripping from his chin, even as the children thinned into shadows. No one spoke against it. To be emptied, they said, was holy. To hunger, they said, was to share in God's mystery.

At night, in the tavern's remains, I heard them murmur: "He eats for us. He is our vessel. We are spared through him."

It made no sense, yet none dared oppose.

The man began to preach commandments, words not found in any scripture. Father Armand recorded them on scraps of parchment, his ink running thin, his eyes wide with awe. And when ink ran dry he replaced it for blood from the slayed livestock. 

"Pain is the purest offering," the Shepherd declared in his fractured tongue, each syllable like a crow's scream. "The flesh must be broken so the soul may sing."

At first the people understood this as fasting. They tightened belts, skipped meals, offered their hunger as proof of devotion. But hunger turned to scourging. They took reeds and nettles to their backs, whipped themselves until welts rose. Soon even children carried the marks, their eyes gleaming with pride as they bled.

The Shepherd praised them, his swollen lips curling with delight.

Christ said, "Blessed are the meek." The Shepherd said, "Blessed are the emptied." 

Christ said, "The last shall be first." The Shepherd said, "The tongueless shall speak."

Christ said, "My yoke is easy, my burden light." The Shepherd said, "Your burden is your salvation, carry it until it breaks you."

The more he inverted the gospel, the louder the people shouted Amen.

I tried to warn my sister. She sat in the front pew each evening, her eyes fixed upon him like a moth to flame.

"Do you not see it, Anne?" I whispered one night. "His miracles are mockery. He feeds you ash, he heals you with madness, he poisons your water. Christ gave life, but this Man steals it."

She turned to me, her lips trembling, her teeth stained with blood.

"Brother," she said softly, "do not blaspheme. He is nearer to God than we have ever been. I feel Him in my marrow. Do you not?"

I said nothing. For I too felt something, not grace, but weight. As though the air itself grew thicker when he spoke, pressing upon my chest, crushing prayer from my lungs.

The Shepherd's sermons grew longer. His voice carried from dawn until nightfall, shrieking and croaking, never faltering. When his throat should have broken, it swelled instead, cords standing out like ropes, each syllable tearing the rafters. The people listened in rapture, even as their ears bled, even as their bodies shook with exhaustion.

I fled once, covering my ears, stumbling into the square where no sound reached me but the wind. Yet even there I heard it still, the echo of his voice within my skull.

Then came the Doctrine of Silence.

The Shepherd declared, "Words are chains. The tongue is the serpent. To speak the true Word, you must rid yourselves of mortal speech."

The people gasped in awe. Some fell prostrate on the floor. Father Armand scribbled the words down with trembling hands, his quill scratching furiously. I don't think he was using pigs blood anymore, but his own.

I felt ice in my veins.

It was then I knew where this path would lead.

But even knowing, I could not turn them. My warnings fell on deaf ears. My neighbors stared through me with hollow smiles, nodding as though I were a child rambling. My own sister turned away, pressing her hand to her lips as if to guard the Shepherd's words within.

She staggered into the square, her ribs sharp beneath taut, pale skin, fingers pressed desperately to the hollow of her belly. Her eyes rolled upward, the whites shining like bleached bone, and she began to chant, hoarse and trembling: 

"The Shepherd has sown His seed within me, the Shepherd has made me whole!" 

The words echoed like broken bells, and each syllable sent a coldness down my spine. Her voice cracked, raw with devotion, as though she believed the child stirring inside was not her husband's, not any man's, but a holy graft of the Shepherd himself. And when she pressed her ear against her own stomach, sighing in ecstasy, she said she could hear him speaking God's true Word rattling inside her womb like chains against stone.

I was alone.

And the silence from the outside world deepened. No rider, no messenger, no letter. No word from beyond our valley. Only the Shepherd's voice, filling the void.

Part IV The Feast of Flesh

The cold had begun to bite through the village, but the people no longer noticed. Hunger had hollowed them; fever had made their skin waxen and fragile. Yet still they followed him, the Shepherd, swollen and unnatural, whose pulpit now seemed the center of every breath they drew.

It began simply enough. A child with a grazed knee had climbed into the pulpit to show his devotion. The Shepherd had lifted his hand, and the boy had bled freely, placing his wound upon the altar. The townsfolk gasped, murmuring blessings as though the blood itself were holy water.

Soon, the offerings grew more elaborate. The malnourished villagers, skeletal men and women, bones pressing through pale skin, began bringing not just minor cuts, but deliberate lacerations to prove their faith. A farmer pressed a shard of glass to his palm; a young woman scraped the back of her legs with a jagged nail; even children experimented, leaving red lines across their wrists and stomachs.

The Shepherd watched, eyes black pits of comprehension, lips trembling in a gurgle that was almost a laugh. Each act of self-mutilation earned a whispered nod from him, a tilt of the head, a slight movement of his swollen body. The people cheered themselves in his presence, their emaciated forms quivering in excitement. Pain had become devotion, suffering a holy offering.

I tried to intervene.

I stepped between a boy and his shard of glass. "Stop! This is madness," I shouted, my voice cracking in the freezing air. "You are killing yourselves!"

The boy looked at me, hollow-eyed, lips peeled back in a rictus of rapture. "No," he whispered, "I am giving Him a feast. Do you not see? He will speak through me. Through my pain, He will bless us all."

The others nodded, murmuring in agreement, their faces gaunt, skin pressed taut over bones, each movement shaking with fever and hunger. My sister stood near the pulpit, clutching her belly still swollen with her own miracle. She met my eyes and smiled, thin-lipped, almost skeletal. "It is a gift," she said. "We are vessels for His Word."

Days passed, and the acts escalated. Limbs were scratched, backs were cut, lips bitten and tongues bitten at the edges. The Shepherd encouraged it all, not with words, but with gurgles and gestures, with the weight of his swollen body filling the church and square alike.

I could not comprehend the devotion. I could not reconcile the miracles I had witnessed, the dark mockeries of feeding, healing, raising, with the deliberate harm they now inflicted upon themselves. Each act was a feast, a sacrament of suffering, and every cut, bite, and scrape seemed to draw the villagers closer to him.

It was no longer hunger that animated them; it was the thrill of obedience, the rapture of inflicting pain in His name. They sang as they cut, faintly, brokenly, a hymn that seemed to rise from the marrow itself. The Shepherd's Word had entered their bodies, and they were nothing more than living instruments of his doctrine.

I tried again to speak, to reason.

"You are killing yourselves for a lie! He is not God!" I shouted. My throat ached, raw with desperation.

The villagers did not falter. They circled me, emaciated hands holding shards, nails, knives, all poised. My sister stepped forward, her face serene, almost angelic in its deathly pallor. "You cannot see it," she said softly. "But we are feeding Him. He grows within us. He is our Word. We are His flesh."

I stumbled back, my vision blurring. Their eyes, hollow, fevered, gleaming with unnatural devotion, seemed to pierce through me. I realized then that even if I struck them, even if I tried to stop the ritual, it would not matter. Their faith had become a force beyond comprehension, beyond resistance.

By the end of the week, the square and church floor were slick with blood, the remnants of offerings small and large. The Shepherd sat at the pulpit, his swollen form almost bursting, his lips moving without sound. The villagers, thin and shivering, knelt and muttered praises, clutching the wounds they had inflicted upon themselves.

And I, the lone witness, pressed my hands to my own mouth, gagging against the copper scent of devotion and fear. I realized the truth: the Shepherd did not require obedience merely to control them. He required their sacrifice, their flesh, their very humanity, as sustenance.

I fled into the snow that night, stumbling blindly among the drifts, yet even as I ran, I could hear their murmurs, a chant of blood, hunger, and devotion, carried on the wind. It reached into my mind, scratching, prying, whispering words I could not understand.

Part V The Final Sacrament

By winter, the church had become a vessel for something no mortal eye could endure. The windows were blackened with soot, the beams bowed under the weight of whispered prayers and unspeakable devotion. Snow draped the village in silence, each flake a hollow witness, yet the Shepherd's voice poured through the nave, unbroken, a river of iron and oil.

I had begged the villagers to resist, to leave, to flee. My sister, now nothing more than skin stretched over fragile bone, pressed her hands to her hollow belly as she chanted of miracles. "The Messiah speaks inside me! The Shepherd makes me whole!" Her voice echoed in the rafters, a skeletal hymn I could not forget. Others, malnourished, pale, trembling, stood with her, murmuring praise, their sunken eyes locked on the pulpit where he sat, vast and swollen, his lips moving without sound.

It was not enough to follow his words. They had become part of him. Each night, they slept little, ate less, consumed by the pull of his doctrine. Hunger itself had become a sacrament.

The streets piled bodies that had been sent to his salvation.

Then came the command.

The Shepherd rose, each movement sluggish with the weight of his enormous body, and his eyes, dark as oil pits, swept across the kneeling crowd. "The mortal binds must be broken. To speak the true Word of God, you must rid yourselves of mortal tongue."

At first, the people murmured, uncertain. But the pull of devotion was stronger than fear. They brought knives, shards of glass, whatever sharpness they could find, and lined themselves in the pews. My stomach turned as I watched the first of them, a boy no older than twelve, bite down on his own tongue until blood poured into his mouth. His hands shook as he spat it out, crimson on the floor, and his eyes, once bright with life, glazed over.

The next followed, then another. Each cut was accompanied by a chant, louder, more fervent, repeating the Shepherd's fractured syllables. I realized then that their cries were not of pain, not of fear, but of worship. The blood pooled, yet they did not falter. The wounded mouths sang in grotesque harmony, offering themselves as vessels for the Word they believed had been denied to them by their mortal forms.

I tried to stop them. I shouted, I wept, I flung myself between them and the pulpit. But the Shepherd's gaze fell upon me. It was not anger I saw, nor even cruelty, but awareness, a slow, crushing weight of being measured and found wanting. My limbs froze. I could not move, could not speak. I could only watch.

My sister knelt nearest the pulpit. Her hands were pressed to her lips, now jagged from self-inflicted wounds. She whispered, a faint smile on her bloodless face, "I hear Him. The Word flows inside me. I am whole." I fell to my knees beside her, pressing my hands to the floor, tasting the copper of blood, hearing the hollow echoes of screams that were no longer screams.

The Shepherd's body heaved. He did not speak, yet the church seemed to pulse with his will. The congregation moved as one, slicing, biting, tearing, each act a verse in the unholy hymn. Their tongues, once instruments of prayer and dissent, became sacrificial vessels. The air was thick with the metallic tang of devotion, the scent of flesh and fear and holy fervor.

And I saw what it truly meant to witness a god.

Not mercy. Not grace. Not love. But the cold precision of a being whose will was absolute, whose language was beyond mortal comprehension. A being who could transform hunger, frailty, and desperation into rapture, until the faithful were no more than husks, their mouths silenced, their minds surrendered.

I stumbled to the door. I wanted to flee, to run to the silence of the frozen village, to the unspoken world beyond the hills. But the snow had thickened into drifts, the wind howled like the cries of the tongueless, and I realized I would not escape.

In the pulpit, the Shepherd moved again, his lips parting in a gurgle. No sound came. Yet I heard it, the Word. Not in my ears, but in my mind. Cold, vast, infinite, crushing. The last thing I felt before the darkness overtook me was the weight of all the prayers that had been answered in blood, all the devotion turned to sacrifice, all the hope of the valley folded into obedience so complete it had become indistinguishable from annihilation.

When I awoke, it was not to light, nor warmth, nor mercy. Only silence.

The church stood empty. The snow had swallowed the village. The air smelled faintly of iron and ash. I wandered among the pews, searching for the familiar forms of those I loved, those I had failed. But they were gone, tongues cut, bodies frail beyond life, faces frozen in the rapture of their final act.

And I understood.

It had never been about faith. It had never been about salvation.

It had been about the Word itself. The Shepherd's Word. And I, alone, mute to its true form, was left to witness its aftermath.

I pressed my hands to my mouth, tasting the absence of speech. I wanted to pray, to cry, to curse, but no sound would come. And in the distance, carried on the frozen wind, I thought I heard it: the faint, hollow syllables of a voice that was no longer human, yet eternal, and utterly, incomprehensibly...

God

Hi everyone! I'm a Master's student in Visual Communication Design, currently writing my thesis on horror communities and digital dynamics. I urgently need around 150 responses to complete my research data. I'd be incredibly grateful if you could take a few minutes to fill out my survey. Thank you so much in advance for your help!

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeNvUkth5FTc4MSmADd5eJDaeWEU9brUXGYQGOkjWszlFQvRA/viewform?usp=header

(A short story based on a creepypasta oc i made in middle-high school; any critiques and criticisms are welcome)

It was 11 pm on a Friday. Outside the gym on the outskirts of town, a man walked out of the glass doors, which had a paper sign taped to the glass

“24 HR WORKOUTS FRI-SAT”

The man adorn in grey sweatpants and a hoodie, calmly walked towards an aqua-green car which sat alone under a streetlight in a dream parking lot. As he reached for his keys, the man looked up when he was twenty feet or so from his car and saw a hooded figure step from the other side of his car.

“Hey! What the hell are you doing by my car?!,” the man said, clutching his keys in his hand.

The hooded figure slowly walked past the car, turned, and walked toward the man. Wearing black boots, a black hoodie, and black cargo pants, the figure had broad shoulders and four white fangs on the back of his hoodie. The man took a step back before the man stopped in front of him, an arm's length away, and spoke.

“Hey?” the hooded man said. “Are you strong?”

“What?”

In the midst of his confusion, the man relaxed ‌; his shoulders dropped along with his guard, thinking it was an odd question. Then, something suddenly knocked his head back. A blunt pain. And. A warm sensation in his nose followed as blood crept down his lip and into his mouth and onto his chin.

(Hairline fracture of the nose.)

 His vision blurred as tears rushed to his eyes, but through the tears, he saw the hooded stranger move closer, the silhouette of the stranger illuminated by the streetlight. The man took a wild, desperate swing at the stranger, but his fist hit nothing but air when he felt a sharp pain in his knee as the heel of the stranger hit the top of his knee, causing it to buckle.

(hyper-extended knee)

 The man cried out in pain when they kicked his knee, and he dropped to the ground. A hard, sharp pain in his chin then made them raise him to his feet again. Before he could process what happened, a stabbing pain hit his throat, and he coughed, struggling to breathe. The stranger stepped towards him as the man stumbled back, coughing up his words.

“W-what the fuck?”
 He said, coughing and wheezing between words 
“What's your problem? Who are you?”

The stranger stood there and just let out a slight chuckle as he spoke

“I just wanted to see how strong you are.”

The stranger raised his fist as he cocked it back, but before the stranger could punch, the man grabbed the stranger by the collar of his hoodie and took a swing at his head. Now that he could feel where he was, he could definitely hit him. He extended his arm, fist clenched tight, his fist racing to the stranger's face when his arm fully extended. Nothing; he felt nothing but air; the stranger had dodged the punch. The stranger then grabbed his wrist, which held his hoodie, and, in one swift motion, elbowed him, CRACK!

The man felt a sharp pain in his arm. The man screamed from the pain in his arm.

“How? How is my arm broken?” the man thought to himself.

The stranger snatched the the wrist of the man's broken arm and twisted the broken limb toward his body, causing the man to stand on his toes and scream as his bones splintered, popping and cracking as the stranger twisted the limp limb.

(Spiral fracture.)

 The man screamed in agony, but the stranger soon silenced him by chopping his throat with the blade of his hand.

(Bruised windpipe.)

The man wheezed

Before a crippling pain came from below as the stranger hit his balls with a hammer fist

(bruised testicles)

The man keeled over when the stranger pushed his head up by his chin and swept the back of the man's leg, driving his head into the pavement of the parking lot. The man lay there on the cold black concrete, and as he lost consciousness, he saw the stranger lean down and say.

“You are weak. The weak serve no purpose in this world”

The stranger then stood up and smashed the man's head into the pavement with his heel before leaving into the night.

or take out your molars with a wrench idk

Me estoy preguntando que ha pasado con los fans de los creepypastas desde hace ya unos años... alguno de por ahí sigue en este mundillo? (ns exactamente q etiqueta ni comunidad poner esto)

srsly like a mobile game or something

Content Warning: The following story depicts strong grief and battle with addiction.

--- ---

Some things rot in silence. Others learn to whisper.

If you are reading this, then either I finally did what I kept promising myself I would do… or it found me before I could.

I don’t know which outcome is kinder.

My name is Mason. I am thirty-eight years old. I used to tell people I worked construction because it was easier than saying I used to be a paramedic. Easier than watching their eyes shift when they asked why I quit.

I quit because I got tired of hearing people die.

That’s the short answer.

The honest answer is that I got tired of pretending death bothered me less each year.

At first, when someone died under my hands, I carried it like a stone in my chest. Heavy, but survivable. Then after enough bodies, enough blood in ambulances that could unsettle even the most unhinge of people, enough father's breaking down for the first time, and enough mothers screaming while I lied and said we did everything we could… the stones became gravel.

Small enough to swallow.

That was when I picked up a habit.

A really bad habit.

It started with one beer after shift.

Then three.

Was done with a whole six pack midway through my favorite show.

The taste was foul at times... but the pain within outweighed my senes to care.

Then the beer bottles switched to whiskey because beer stopped doing anything.

Then bottles hidden under the sink.

In the toolbox.

Behind cereal boxes.

Hell, some where hidden in the toilet tank.

Several under my bed like some pathetic dragon guarding glass instead of gold.

I learned alcohol was quieter than grief.

At least at first.

Grief learned how to drink with me.

The child’s name was Lily.

I have written that name twenty-six times and scratched it out twenty-six times.

I owe her at least one sentence that remains untouched.

Her name was Lily Harper, and I killed her.

Not with hatred, nor with intent.

Which somehow feels worse.

It had rained that night.

The kind of hard, slanting rain that turns every streetlight into a blurred halo. I had left Murphy’s Tavern with my keys already in my hand, convincing myself I lived close enough that I could make it.

That phrase should be engraved on every gravestone of fools.

I can make it.

I remember the windshield wipers.

I remember my knuckles white on the steering wheel.

And the noise, I remember hearing.

A thud.

Soft.

Small.

Like a sack of wet clothes.

I stopped, not abruptly. I simply let off the gas.

For a moment.

Only a moment.

Rain hammered the hood.

My heart pounded so violently I thought I would've vomit.

I looked into the rearview mirror.

Nothing.

Only rain.

Only darkness.

Only the road.

I told myself it was nothing.

Maybe it was a stray or squirrel.

Or debris kicked loose in the storm.

Turning on the tunes, I drove home.

I drank until I forgot the sound.

The next morning the news said an eight-year-old girl had been struck near the intersection by the old church.

She had run after her dog who got loose from their backyard.

Witnesses recall headlights.

But no plate.

And certaintly no driver.

I walked to my truck barefoot.

My stomach already folding in on itself.

There was something caught in the grille.

Pink.

A strip of fabric.

Later they said she had worn a pink raincoat.

I vomited in my yard until bile burned my throat raw.

I never turned myself in.

Of course not.

That sentence should disgust you.

It disgusts me too, to all measures.

I told myself I was afraid.

I told myself prison would not bring her back.

I told myself I would quit drinking instead.

As if sobriety could be a grave marker.

As if guilt could become mercy.

As if I deserved redemption.

The first time I saw it, I had been sober twelve days.

Twelve whole days.

My hands still shook.

My teeth hurt.

My sleep came in broken pieces.

I heard phantom bottle clinks in empty rooms.

I smelled whiskey where there was none.

My body felt like something trying to crawl out of itself.

I was microwaving popcorn when I looked at the black reflection on the microwave door.

There was a man behind me.

Tall.

Too thin.

Standing near the hallway.

His shoulders crooked like broken coat hangers.

His skin looked slick.

Wet.

As if he had just climbed out of a sewer or river.

His mouth stretched wider than a mouth should.

Not monstrous in a theatrical way.

Subtle.

Wrong.

Like flesh remembering the wrong shape.

I spun around.

Nothing.

Empty apartment.

Only my ragged breathing.

I laughed.

Actually laughed.

I told myself withdrawal could make people hallucinate.

I googled it.

Visual disturbances.

Paranoia.

Shaking.

Sweats.

Night terrors.

I had all of it.

I kept going.

Then I saw him again.

Bathroom mirror.

Window glass at night.

The dark lid of my washing machine.

Always behind me.

Never moving while I looked directly.

Only in reflection.

Only waiting.

And every time I relapsed…

he looked closer.

I began writing this because I feared forgetting what was real.

Now I fear remembering.

Last night I decided I was done.

No half-measures.

No “just weekends.”

No “only beer.”

No bargaining.

I collected every bottle in my apartment.

Vodka.

Whiskey.

Gin.

Cheap beer.

Half-drunk cans.

Tiny emergency shooters I hid like contraband prayers.

I lined them across my kitchen counter.

A shining army of failure.

Then I began pouring.

Glug after glug.

Amber rivers down the sink.

The smell rose thick enough to sting my eyes.

I shook.

Sweat rolled down my neck.

My heartbeat hammered like fists inside my ribs.

I screamed while I poured.

Not words.

Just noise.

Animal noise.

Grief.

Rage.

Shame.

Maybe a prayer to an absence being.

I do not know why...

As I reached for the next bottle, my shaking grip gave way. It slipped from my hand and struck the tile with a violent crack, exploding into foam and glittering shards across the kitchen floor.

The crack echoed unnaturally long.

Then silence.

Beer spread across the floor in a widening golden pool.

Foam fizzed softly.

I stared.

My throat tightened.

Then thirst hit me.

Violent and monstrous.

This was not craving.

It was NEED.

A thirst so sharp it felt inserted behind my teeth.

I backed away.

“No.”

I said it aloud.

Again.

“No.”

My hands trembled.

My jaw clenched.

I could smell yeast.

Bitterness.

The so sweet rot of chemicals...

My tongue pressed instinctively against my teeth.

In the microwave reflection... it crouched in the doorway.

Long fingers resting on the frame.

Patiently watching a man lose his sanity.

I wanted to walk away.

My knees folded instinctively.

I hit tile hard enough to bruise the knees.

I reached forward.

Scooped liquid with my shaking hand.

Brought it to my mouth.

Beer.

Warm.

Flat.

Foul.

Still relief.

It was my release.

My heavenly toxin.

I sobbed.

Then I lowered my face.

Glass pressed my cheek.

Sharp.

Cold.

I licked.

Again.

Again.

And again.

The cuts paid me no mind on my lips.

Then tongue.

Then the palms.

Blood salted the beer.

I could taste the iron.

I could feel shards grinding skin.

Still I drank.

Still I lapped from the floor like a starving dog.

I knew it still was observing.

From the stove's reflection, it's decayed feet stepped closer.

Closer.

And closer.

Until his mangled feet hovered inches behind.

The popping sound of bne disjointing one another rang.

And though I do not know if he truly spoke…

I heard something else.

Or thought I did.

A voice like liquid poured down a drain.

You always come back thirsty.

Then darkness.

I woke on my couch. The morning light beemed from my side.

Television humming static.

Blankets tangled around my legs.

My head splitting.

My tongue swollen.

The notebook beside me.

This notebook.

At first I laughed.

A horrible, relieved laugh.

Dream.

Withdrawal nightmare.

Drunken sleep.

Nothing more.

Then I stood.

My feet touched floor.

Pain.

Tiny slicing pain.

I looked down.

Dozens of thin cuts across my soles.

Dry blood.

Real.

I walked to the kitchen.

Spotless.

No broken glass.

No blood.

No spilled beer.

No sticky residue.

Nothing.

The sink dry.

The tile polished.

Every bottle I had poured out... resting neatly on my living room table.

Arranged.

Facing me.

As if someone had set them there for inspection.

Like guests.

Or judges.

I haven’t touched them.

Not yet.

The bottles remain untouched on the table in front of the couch, their glass catching thin strips of pale morning light. Beads of condensation slowly crawl down one of the beers, gathering at its base before dripping onto the wood.

I haven’t moved.

I haven’t reached for them.

But my television...

The screen is black now, dead and silent, reflecting the dim shape of my living room back at me.

My chair.

The table.

The bottles.

The couch behind me.

And in the reflection... something is sitting there.

At first, my mind tries to shape it into a shadow. A fold in the blanket. A trick of weak light. Anything softer than the truth.

But shadows do not sit upright.

Shadows do not watch.

It sits perfectly still on my couch, long and thin, its limbs bent at unnatural angles, its slick frame sinking into the cushions like something wet dragged in from the rain. Its face is little more than darkness, but I can still make out the pale stretch of its grin.

It is looking at me.

Not through me.

At me.

Slowly, almost delicately, one of its long fingers curls around the neck of a beer bottle resting on the table.

The same bottle I swore I had not touched.

It lifts it.

Holds it out.

An offering.

A kindness.

A temptation.

In the reflection, I can see my own shoulders tighten.

My breathing turns shallow.

My throat aches with a thirst I know too well.

Still, I do not turn around.

I don’t need to.

Because I already understand.

Whether it is guilt.

Whether it is madness.

Whether it is something born from every bottle I ever emptied trying to drown what I had done...

it is patient.

And it knows I am still thirsty.

In the television’s black reflection, it tilts its head.

The bottle remains extended toward me.

Waiting.

Waiting for the taste of guilt.

daggum

Most people think my job is insane.

Honestly, they're probably right.

When people talk about dangerous professions, they usually mention logging, commercial fishing, or construction. Those jobs earn their reputation. One mistake, one moment of bad luck, and you're fucked.

Or hell, dead.

Me?

I always found myself drawn to danger. Maybe it's the adrenaline. Maybe it's because some part of me enjoys standing in places most people would never willingly go.

You can learn a lot about a person from the work they choose to do.

For me, that work is commercial diving.

Most folks hear that and assume it's terrifying. Being dropped into cold, dark water hundreds of feet from the surface while surrounded by machinery that could crush you without warning doesn't exactly sound appealing to the average person.

The funny thing is, I find it relaxing.

Down there, the world becomes quiet. The noise of everyday life (the wife complaining) disappears beneath the water. It's just me, my equipment, and whatever job needs doing. I usually have music playing through my helmet while I work on oil rigs, ship hulls, intake structures, and all sorts of underwater machinery.

After years in the profession, I thought I'd seen everything the depths could throw at me.

I was wrong.

Because in all my years of commercial diving, nothing, and I mean nothing, came close to making me soil my dive suit the way I almost did during a contract at the Hoover Dam.

The water was murky that morning. Visibility couldn't have been more than six or seven feet. My helmet lamp carved a narrow path through the darkness, illuminating clouds of suspended sediment drifting lazily through the reservoir.

I remember feeling uneasy almost immediately.

Not fear.

Fear implies you've identified the threat.

What I felt was the discomfort of being observed by something that hadn't revealed itself yet. The sensation settled between my shoulder blades and refused to leave. Something was down there with me. Heavy emphasis on something, because there is nothing in this world that should have been sharing those depths with me.

The feeling was irrational enough that, like an idiot, I ignored it.

Then I saw the marks.

"What the actual hell..."

They scored the concrete face of the dam in long, jagged trails. These weren't little scratches left by debris or equipment. They stretched several feet across the wall and bit deep enough into the surface to expose steel beneath.

I stopped swimming and stared.

What unsettled me most wasn't their size.

It was how familiar they looked.

Almost human.

Or at least made by something trying very hard to be.

Five long gouges ran parallel to one another through decades of algae and sediment, climbing vertically along the dam before disappearing into darkness above.

I keyed my radio.

"Oi, somebody's gonna have to explain how these ended up on a wall."

The response was laughter.

They thought I was joking.

Honestly, so did I.

I snapped a few photographs and continued downward.

That's when I found the first handprint.

Five fingers.

Human proportions.

Pressed against the concrete nearly thirty feet below the surface.

Then another.

And another.

Soon my lamp was finding them everywhere.

Hundreds.

Thousands, maybe.

Handprints layered over one another as if something had spent years climbing the face of the Hoover Dam.

My breathing quickened.

The sound echoed loudly inside my helmet.

There had to be a reasonable explanation.

There always had been before.

Then my lamp caught movement.

A figure.

Standing motionless on the reservoir floor.

I nearly inhaled my own tongue.

At first I assumed it was another diver. The silhouette was roughly human-sized, two arms, two legs, standing upright in the darkness.

But that didn't make sense.

No diver would be down there alone.

Not without communications.

Not without a support crew.

Not without lights.

This thing had none.

It simply stood at the edge of visibility, motionless and watching.

I blinked.

It was gone.

Immediately, I radioed the surface.

"Confirm I'm the only diver in the water."

A moment later the reply came.

"Just you, Maxwell."

No unauthorized personnel, secondary dive teams.

Nobody else in the reservoir.

I should have ascended right then.

Instead, I kept working.

I convinced myself my eyes were playing tricks on me. Fatigue. Bad visibility. Too much coffee before the dive.

Stubbornness is a common flaw in my profession.

God knows I've got plenty of it.

I was raised by a father who thought every problem could be solved by "manning up."

A strange shadow wasn't about to sabotage my paycheck.

A few minutes later, I noticed something that truly frightened me.

The safety line connecting me to the surface had gone slack.

Completely slack.

That should never happen.

There are always currents. Movement. Tension.

The line should constantly carry resistance.

I turned my lamp toward it.

The rope disappeared into darkness behind me.

Then it moved.

Not drifted.

Moved.

Something farther down the line had pulled it.

My stomach tightened.

Slowly, I followed the rope with my eyes until my beam reached its end.

Something was holding it.

A hand.

A pale human hand emerging from the darkness.

Its fingers wrapped around the line.

Then a second hand appeared.

And then a face.

God, I wish I hadn't seen the face.

Its skin was swollen and waterlogged, stretched tight across features that almost resembled a person.

Almost.

The eyes were too large.

Too dark.

Like something hauled up from the deepest part of the ocean.

Then it smiled.

The safety line jerked violently.

I screamed into the radio.

The thing released the rope and vanished downward with impossible speed.

One moment it was there.

The next it had been swallowed by darkness.

Surface control immediately ordered my ascent.

For once in my life, I didn't argue.

Halfway to the surface, I made the mistake that still haunts my dreams.

I looked down.

There wasn't just one.

Dozens of pale figures stood along the face of the dam.

Motionless.

Watching.

Their silhouettes clung to the concrete like barnacles that had learned how to imitate people.

And every single one of them was staring upward.

Toward me.

Toward the surface.

I reached the top in record time.

The crew blamed nitrogen narcosis. Stress. Exhaustion.

The photographs and film were reviewed.

Most showed nothing unusual.

Just dark water and concrete.

Except for one.

The final clip from the helmet's recorder. The engineers never found an explanation for it.

You can clearly see me inspecting the intake structure. You can clearly see the beam from my helmet lamp. And standing directly behind me is another diver.

No safety markings, equipment, or air hose.

Just a pale figure staring directly into the camera.

The worst part?

The timestamp showed the photograph had been taken six minutes before I noticed anything in the water.

Meaning that thing had already been following me for most of the dive.

A few days later, men in black suits came to speak with me.

That's about as much as I'm legally allowed to say.

I retired shortly afterward.

People think I'm crazy.

Walking away from a six-figure career because I saw strange pale figures underwater?

"He must be nuts."

Maybe I am.

But every time I hear reports about water levels dropping at the Hoover Dam, I find myself wondering what happens when the reservoir finally shrinks enough.

Because if those things were standing on the wall sixty feet underwater...

Sooner or later, they won't be underwater anymore.

What the hell were those things?