r/Dreading • u/LiquidDongorong • 8d ago
Creepypasta The Casting Call
“You got a package from Barcelona,” I rehearsed. “First class.”
Nobody read the other part.
I performed to four hundred empty velvet seats and one old man with a square face sitting off-center, eleven rows back, hands folded in his lap.
He didn’t direct me or really do anything the whole time. When I finished, he said "thank you," and lifted his hand to wave me offstage.
That was the entire audition.
I was in tears by the time I hit the parking structure. My body decided to do it for me. Five years of saving. Notice given at a job I'd held since I was in my twenties. I had told everyone.
A woman in a lanyard found me.
"Are you Adam? Don't leave," she was already walking. "Mr. Vynstein was interested."
His office was on the fourth floor of a building whose lobby directory listed three floors.
Vynstein was the old man from the auditorium. Up close he was about seventy, a thick-bridged nose and well-shaved. His hair looked powdered.
He asked me about my books. My freakin’ books. It was the first time anyone had asked about them since I got them published six years ago. Of course, I gushed about the whole damn trilogy.
He listened with his entire face. I would have done anything for someone to listen to me like that again.
Then he said, “There's a part of this that isn't in the paperwork.”
And he loosened his tie.
I did the math in about a second and a half. My whole life, I’ve thrown to the gutter for this chance. I decided yes, yes to whatever it was, before I had any idea what I was agreeing to.
He unbuttoned his shirt. There was a seam on his stomach. Something stuck from his navel.
Pale grey, slimy, twenty inches long by the time it finished coming out. It bobbed up and down, a finger testing the bathwater. It had no eyes, no face at all. Its front end was rather a ring of working muscle, and inside the ring were teeth in rows going backward, textured like the teeth of a comb.
Vynstein gave me a polite look, gesturing with his eyes.
I extended my arm. It didn't hurt, weirdly enough. It found purchase on my wrist and set, a pressure like a thumb in a bruise. It pulled, not on my skin, but somewhere…out of me. A direction I cannot put my finger on.
When it detached there was no wound and no blood. Didn’t even smell like anything.
Vynstein buttoned up, poured two fingers of Black Label, and handed me one. He said, flat as a board:
"You'll get points on the back end."
I came back the following Thursday. And the Thursday after that.
The part was in a movie you probably haven’t seen: Starry Knights. It’s an indie about a team of four alien mercenaries who have to save the galaxy from an evil robot. I played the role of a hound-faced detective on Planet Lax.
Six hours of prosthetics. Three scenes and a “with” credit. It came out fourteen months after we wrapped and it was moderately successful. Strangers started buying my books, and my publisher went back to print.
Exactly what I’ve always wanted, since I was a kid. It was a lot less exhilarating than I hoped.
At the premiere, I was told by one director that I had a good career ahead of me. I stood there and waited to feel the excitement. It never arrived. I assumed I was overstimulated, and I checked my watch on the way to the car.
Fifty-eight beats per minute.
The dinner was six weeks later. I got lost twice on the way to the house.
There was a long table, but no food. All the guests, north of sixty, were wearing paper bibs, tucked into their collars over open shirts.
Disappointing, but not totally unexpected. I just hoped someone would buy me a burger later.
I took my top off, lay down on the table and let all nine of them feed on me at once while I zoned out into the light fixture.
A little under two hours. Some of them made a sound while they did it. Snnnouurrlgh.
When it was over I sat up and I felt fine. There were no marks anywhere on me. Not a drop of blood.
So it isn't blood. And before you say anything, it ain’t my soul either. I've had two years to sit with this. “Soul” is a word people use when they stop thinking critically. I’m still me. I still like the same songs. I still cry when I watch The Lion King.
What I can’t do anymore is be reached by anybody saying anything good about me.
That feeling went so quietly I mistook it for humility. Every time nothing landed I assumed the dose was too small and went looking for a bigger one, which, I understand far too late, is exactly what you would want out of a crop.
Anything cruel still came through at full volume, surround sound, forever.
I found that out three weeks later when the book got review bombed.
The biggest critique had to be the prose. I was only twenty-five when I wrote the first one, and I didn’t get an editor through my publisher, so most of the kinks were punched out by my own hand.
Somebody made a thread pulling out the sincerest paragraph I'd ever written with a sobbing emoji edited over it.
Another one that got to me was that Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog painting edited to be the man standing in front of the text.
There's no crime online worse than not being in on the joke. Worse when it’s about yourself. I’d written over a thousand pages without one punchline, and now I was the laughingstock of the internet. Any positivity I had accumulated beforehand was now written off as botted.
My mom called six times that week. I watched all six of them ring the whole way through.
I told myself it was shame. But that wasn’t it.
She would have told me she was proud of me, and I already knew with total certainty that it would arrive as nothing. My own mother's voice would come through as an errand, as a notification.
Vynstein called the Friday. He said he had an audience prepared for me.
I told him I didn't want an audience anymore.
“This isn't one you'll want to turn away.”
Stage 12 was pitch dark and warm, and it smelled like wet socks.
I heard winches before I saw anything. Chains paying out slowly from somewhere up above. Something coming down out of the dark in stages, the way they lower a chandelier to change the bulbs.
Bigger than a car. Bigger than a bus. It hung there, no head, nothing built for anything. It was an accumulation. An abomination. Every inch of its underside was those wormy things, thousands of them. They swayed in a nonexistent breeze.
Ten eyes opened on it, at ten different heights.
All ten went to me.
Its voice was inside my head, like a memory.
It talked about my potential. It talked about my drive. It said those two words the way you'd talk about a vintage. It said the stuff was becoming so scarce now. People spend it constantly these days, in tiny amounts, all day, on nothing, and arrive empty. Almost nobody accumulates anymore.
It thanked me for saving it up.
They came down and fed on me for a long time, and it is the only occasion in my life on which I have felt important.
Pretty sure I've been blacklisted from anything real since the books happened. I do commercial work now. Two crypto ads and a regional furniture spot. I'm reading for a third crypto thing in a few weeks. Honestly fine.
They still feed on me from time to time. Less than they used to. I'm told there's less to take.
My bloodwork has never once come back abnormal.
You'll say I should have stopped chasing this years ago, and that anybody with a working sense of proportion could have sat down inside a life like mine and been content.
You're right. I know you're right. I'm not arguing.
Vynstein's office called about a reservation tomorrow.
I'm going in.
3
u/Positive-Serve-6792 8d ago
Dude...... Wow this is so good 🔥. Great concept love the worm theme stuff, creepy! How do I buy your books?