Being a citizen of the internet, you would think you have seen it all. Or read it all. However, there is no such thing when it comes to the web and everything it holds. There are dark nooks and crannies that the elite few are aware of and the rest remain oblivious. From amongst the darkest things that users of the internet have ever written, we collected 7 stories that are beyond disturbing and freaky. Can you go through them all?

ANANSI’S GOATMAN STORY

Here’s my story:

>be 16
>be black and have family down in Alabama
>they farm and own a huge amount of land down in Huntsville
>uncle owns a big house and a bunch of trailers they put out in the woods for hunting or camping
>down south cousins suggest that we go out there to camp
>know I’m a city kid from Chicago so they tease the f*** out of me
>collect food, kill a pig and some chickens, and bring necessities to camp out for a few days
>we get to the camp and it’s obvious something is weird
>air has this weird electric smell like right before a storm, like ozone
>we think nothing of it and unpack and go down to a little creek to swim for a few hours
>All of a sudden some older white guy and a white teenager come out of the bushes
>he has a shotgun in the crook of his arm and says hello and ask us what we’re doing this far back in the woods
>tell him about my uncle, who he knows, and say we’re camping out
>he tells us we need to be real careful out here and stick together there was a big animal in the woods
>His son, who is my age asks if he can stay and hang out with us
>he says OK

I’m going to stop greentexting because the story is fairly long and the format is harder to write in.

So we end up playing football. Dicking around with me, there’s the white kid “Tanner”, five of my cousins, and then four of their friends. In total, there were five girls and six boys. We all were around 15-17.

We ended up just dicking the day away. So, we head back to the camp and pulling out some stuff for a campfire, even though the trailers both had kitchenettes. Tanner says that his family’s property sits up against my uncle’s. He wants to run home and ask his dad if he can come out camping with us. My cousin Rooster says he’s going to go with him since it’s going to get dark soon. One of the girls also wants to tag along.

It’s about 7 o’clock, and it’s starting to get pretty dark. They take flashlights and take the trail toward Tan’s property. The rest of us chill. We make smores, drink and kiss on the girls.

About thirty or forty minutes later, there’s the smell of ozone again. You could smell it over the smell of the fire we had started. This really nasty, coppery smell like right after you’ve had a nosebleed and it’s stopped. It wasn’t exactly like dried blood, but it was that nasty metallic, back-of-your-throat smell.

We immediately think that it’s some kind of electrical malfunction, or someone left a hotplate on or some s***. We search the trailers and nothing is on, and we can all smell it. All of a sudden, we can hear people booking down the path toward us, and Rooster, Tan and the girl all come running into the clearing, out of breath. And they don’t even break stride; they all run into the trailer, right by where the fire is.

We all get the f*** outta there and into the trailers. They end up calming down; even Rooster is crying his fucking eyes out at this point. All the while, the fire is guttering lower and lower, so my other cousins say f*** it and are about to go outside to get the generator out of a shed between the trailers.

Tanner goes, “F*** no! Lock the front door, ain’t nobody else going outside!” He’s been crying too, and his eyes are bloodshot and puffy and his pants are dirty as s***.

He goes on to tell us that they went up to his house. His father said sure, he could go out camping, but to make sure they were careful on the way back, and that maybe they should take one of the hunting rifles just in case.

Evidently, Tanner had seen something in their yard a few days before. One of their pigs had come up, ripped up and half eaten. They assumed it was just some big cats or coyotes, even though they don’t usually f*** with live animals.

He had gone upstairs and packed his stuff, and told his dad they would be OK without the rifle because coyotes avoid people. So they started walking back toward where we were camping.

So, Rooster finally stops crying and shaking; the girl already had, but she was just staring out the window with a dumb look on her face. He says they had gotten halfway into the woods toward the camp when they started to hear s*** in the forest. It was almost pitch black by this time, so they weren’t sure at first what the f*** it was. The girl says that she heard something in the bushes right off the trail and they all beamed their flashlights over there and there was someone standing back in the woods in a little hollow. Rooster said they shouted at him and told him that he was scaring the f*** out of them and what a d*** he was.

He says that’s when he realized that the guy was facing away from them. So they keep walking, and they start smelling the nasty coppery ozone smell. They say that they look off into the forest on the opposite side, and it’s a dude standing in the forest, backward slightly closer to the path.

So now they start powerwalking and Tan keeps going, “I should have taken the fucking rifle.”

As they’re telling the story, the smell is still super strong even inside the cabin.

They say that after they started walking faster, a kind of low gibbering had started coming from both sides of the wood. And as they started booking it back to the trailer, the girl said she had flashed her flashlight out into the woods to the side of them and had seen something jerking itself through the woods. The gibbering just got louder and louder, and when they could see the light from our camp fire, something had come out of the woods about 40 yards behind them onto the track, and they had just flat out ran as hard as they could to the trailer.

So we’re out in the fucking woods, and we’re assuming at this point it’s some rednecks or some s*** trying to f*** with us.

All of a sudden, my other cousin, Junior, starts going on about how he went to school with a native kid that was telling him about the ‘Goatman’ or some s***. We promptly tell him to shut the f*** up because we don’t need any spooky talk right now.

But he just keeps going on and on about how it’s the fucking ‘Goatman,’ and how we’re in his woods and blah, blah, blah. Now at the time, I had never heard of this goat man or any of that, but then a couple years ago — the year before I graduated from college — I had a Menom for a roommate and I ended up asking him about it. And to sum it up, it’s basically a fucking man with the head of a goat and he can shape shift and he gets among groups of people to terrorize them. It’s also supposed to be kind of like the Wendigo, and it’s bad mojo to even talk about it and even worse if you see it.

Keep in mind, I didn’t know this back when I was sixteen. So my cousin is going, “The goat man’s going to get in and fucking get us.” The girls are all terrified and my cousins and I are all fucking trying to figure out if it’s just some hillbillies or if it’s some animal.

So all of a sudden the smell just goes away. Like to this day, I haven’t even experienced anything like it. Like, usually smells fade away or lessen. It just literally was there one second and then not the second.

So it’s after an hour, making it around 9 or 10. We’ve stopped shitting bricks enough to go back outside and stoke the fire again. We figure it was just some assholes trying to f*** with us, so we don’t go back home, because we think if we do, they’ll chase us through the woods or some crazy s***.

Nothing else weird happens that night. And we stay another night, and for the main part of the night nothing happens. At about 1 in the morning, we’re outside getting drunk and telling ghost stories. As someone is finishing some 2spooky story — I don’t remember what about — the smell comes back. It’s so fucking strong, that one of the girls literally starts vomiting.

I stand up, and you can actually feel how clammy the air is. I say we should get inside and this isn’t right; we should have just fucking left.

We all go back inside, and we’re standing around. My cousin just keeps going on about how it’s the goat man. And my cousin Rooster tries to shut him the f*** up, and all the while I’m just feeling that something is wrong, and I can’t figure out what the f*** it is.

We end up sitting in there for a while; the smell is just as strong, and we’re terrified and all huddled in this camper. We end up cooking brats for everybody because nobody wants to go outside. It’s one of those packs with four brats. We have a total of 3 packs. I grill them up on the stove and give everybody a hot dog. I get mine. After a while, one of my cousins gets up and goes over to the pot to get another one.

He starts grumbling about about how I get two brats and everybody else only got one, and I look at him like he’s fucking stupid. I tell him that everybody only got one because there were only 12 brats, if he wants more he should open up a new pack and cook some more.

That’s when the girl that had been out with Rooster and Tan just starts screaming, “OH JESUS, OH LORD, GET IT OUT!” She’s crying and shivering, and then it dawns on the cousin standing up what the f*** is wrong. Me and him both glance around the room, and then I feel my heart fucking sink. I run the f*** out of the cabin and the girl runs out with us. The trailer door is banging against the side of the trailer as everybody books out of the cabin.

One of my cousin’s friends ask us what the f*** was wrong. I start counting us. There’s only 11 now.

“I s*** you not,” my cousin verified. There had been twelve people in the cabin. But being that everybody didn’t really know each other well, nobody had really noticed the whole fucking time that there was an extra person. And then I realized earlier that I had kind of noticed something was off. You know how when you’re just dicking around having a good time that you don’t sweat the smallest s***, and you don’t always keep track of certain stuff? I’m dead sure that someone else had been in the trailer with us, and that they had been there for at least a fucking day, eating with us. What makes it worse is, I could figure out which one because I don’t think anyone ever actually interacted with the other person/the Goat-man.

The girl kept praying to Jesus and we’re all sitting outside; eventually we get big-ass sticks and go back in the cabin, but there’s nobody in there. We count again, and there’s 11 people. We go back into the trailer and lock the door. We explain what the f*** happened, and the girl says that she realized too, and that when he was about to say something, the person sitting next to her had grabbed her leg hard and leaned over toward her and said something she couldn’t understand.

So we are pretty much scared as f*** as we huddle together, and I fall asleep. When I wake up, the sun is just coming up, and half the people are asleep and the other half are packing our s*** up.

We all want to walk back home, but like four people want to stay until the sun is all the way up. And some people think that we’re just fucking around and still want to stay at the trailers. I just want to get the f*** out of the woods.

The girl’s name was Keira, the one that the Goat-man had touched. Anyway, I asked her if she really thinks it was something bad, and she says she just wants to go home and she doesn’t want to be out in the woods alone for another night.

So we decide to split up; the four that want to go can go, but I have to stay because I have the keys to the cabin and it’s my uncle’s and I have to lock up. I’m super pissed at this point, because I feel like people aren’t taking this s*** seriously, and I definitely didn’t want to be out in the woods for another night. I spend the rest of the day trying to convince the rest of the people — now 4 girls and four guys — to get the f*** out of dodge. Tanner leaves with them to go get a rifle and says he’s going to be back. So there are just 7 of us left by 4 PM.

At around 5 PM he hasn’t made it back yet, and we’re getting extremely fucking antsy, and the only reason I stopped begging them to go back was because he went to get a gun.

it’s about 5:30 PM or so, when the one cousin that did stay says that the girl Keira is outside. We all look outside, and sure enough, she’s standing by the firepit with her back to the cabin.

I’m thinking to myself, if she was so fucking scared, why the hell would she come back? And then I get this nasty feeling in my gut. Keep in mind, the whole time the coppery smell has been gone. Now I realize I can smell just a twinge of it.

I say this to the rest of them and everybody — and these are the people that wanted to stay in the fucking woods after we had the goddamn Goatman in our midst — is laughing at me and asking if I set this up to scare them.

I’m looking at them like, “I’m not fucking bullshitting you at all right now.” I ask them why the f*** would I play like that? So one of the girls goes outside to get Kiera. She gets halfway to her and stops cold. Keira starts heaving; I don’t know how the f*** to describe it. Sort of like if someone with their back turned was laughing without actually making any sound. It was this fact that made me realize there was not a fucking sound in the whole woods; it was dead silent.

This was like later in September, so it was still fairly hot at the time, but it was super chilly some days too. And you could usually hear big-ass geese honking or some kind of birds or squirrels chitchatting.

So I step out the door and tell her to come back in the fucking trailer right goddamn now.

She backs up into the trailer and we lock the fucking door. We pull down all the shades except one, and put a guy there in a chair to watch her. She stands there for another 20 minutes or so. The guy turns to say that she’s still there. And there’s a HUGE fucking bang on the door.

We all jump the f*** up and scramble around the living room of the trailer. The banging is super fucking loud.

So now my cousin is holding one of the girls and the other two are kinda giggling with nervous laughter and me and the other two guys are shitting brix.

Then we hear Tan. He’s screaming.

“LET ME THE F*** IN, STOP FUCKING PLAYING!”

So we go over to the door and open it, and he stumbles in with a rifle. There’s nobody else outside.

Evidently, he had walked up to the campsite. Nothing weird happened in the forest, but he had seen a girl. Mind you, he said it was not Keira standing there. When he had gotten to the edge of the clearing, she had turned toward him with the slackjawed look and just stared him down, slowly tracking him as he walked around the outside of the clearing towards the camp. He said it wasn’t till he was almost halfway to the trailer he had realized that she was getting closer to him. She had started off by the fire, and without him even seeing her move she had been turning, inching closer. He said he just ran the rest of the way back to the cabin thinking it would open. And when he got to the door and it was locked, he turned and it was about half the distance to the door.

He looks around the room and then gets super pale. He pulls me to the side and whispers in my ear, “You know there are only seven of us in here, right?” I get that feeling where you stomach drops to your nuts. It had been back inside the trailer while we were sorting out who was going where, and then when we all went outside to talk earlier in the day. It has just slipped right back in.

We looked out the window and there is nobody out there. So we recount everyone and then basically, I go over and ask everyone how many people were here earlier. And everybody says 8. I say, “Well, how many are here now?” They all do the count and then realize there are only now seven people in the cabin.

So Tan had brought back a couple boxes of ammo and his rifle. And he had told his dad that there was some kind of animal in the forest because he didn’t think his dad would believe him if he said it was Goatman. He says that his cousin is supposed to be coming down in a few hours and that in the morning we can all go back to his place and his cousin will drive us home.

Now I’m really fucking terrified, but I at least feel better because we can be American and shoot the f*** out of whatever it is if it comes back. But then my cousin gets into this huge argument with one of the girls because she thinks that I’m trying to be funny and prank them, and that she’s getting really scared and that I’m not funny. He keeps telling her I’m not that kind of person, and she says, “Well, how do we know the girl wasn’t just Tanner in a wig? Or if it’s really the Goatman, how do we know that this is the real Tanner and that Goatman just didn’t kill Tanner in the woods and take his gun?”

So we fucking get into a huge argument about this, where me and Tan are like, “we could seriously be in danger because at the very least someone has been sneaking themselves into our fucking trailer without us knowing and mingling with us, and at worst, something bad is in the forest fucking with us.”

One of the girls is crying and saying she wants to go right now, and we’re trying to tell her we shouldn’t because none of us are walking through the woods in the middle of the night. At this point the sun is starting to go down and it’s getting a little cloudy out.

We eat something and turn on the radio for a while, but we can’t really get a station out there with anything decent. So we turn it off at about the time that Tan’s cousin shows up. He was like 19, I think. At this point, the sun is just barely over the horizon and he has one of those heavy duty lantern flashlights and another rifle. He walks up to the trailer and we whisper to Tan asking if he’s sure that’s his cousin and he says yes.

The guy looks behind him and all around the camp, then walks in. He kind of glances at all of us and looks a little confused.

He says, “Where’s your other little buddy at? I figured she would meet me up at the cabin. Is she a little slow or something?” He also asked whether we had been cooking blood in the cabin, because it smelled like blood and hot pans all the way up the trail. We are all like fucking “NOPE.” But we ask him what the f*** he’s talking about with the girl he saw.

He had come down the same trail Tan had been using and he had come up on “one of youse guy’s buddies” standing in the middle of the trail, looking at him slack jawed. He had asked her a bunch of questions, but all she did was just look at him. Then, she smiled at him and he said he kept walking. She couldn’t seem to keep up with him and kept lagging a little behind him. He said he asked her if she was hurt or something, and if she needed any help. But, she had continued to stare. Eventually, he had been walking and turned around a bend in the trail. But when he turned around and went back to see if she was okay, the trail was empty. He’d assumed she had taken some short cut through the woods to our trailer.

We tell him the whole story of what’s been going on. I half expected him to say we were full of s***, but he just listened and then sat down on the couches in the living room.

Tanner’s cousin gets back to the girl. He says, when she had kept trying to lag behind him, it had kinda weirded him the f*** out, so he tried to keep her in front of him, but no matter how slow he walked, she was always lagging a little behind. And that he smelled this nasty smell, and it got stronger as he got to the camp. Eventually it got really strong. She had said something really low that he didn’t catch, and when he had turned around she had been right the f*** up on him, and he stepped back from her.

It was at this point he asked her if she was okay, and if she wasn’t, him to carry her back the rest of the way, and she just kept staring. He said he reached out for her, as in to grab her on the shoulder, but he must have “misjudged the distance” because she was off to the side of where he had put his hand, like she had moved while he was looking dead at her.

So at this point, we know this s***’s real, unless Tan is playing a joke, which we can tell he’s not because he’s almost pissing his pants.

So they load up their rifles, we eat some more, and we just kind of sit around until about 11. To this fucking day, every time I think about this, I really pray to God that it’s some huge prank that my cousins played on me and just never revealed so I would s*** for the rest of my life.

At ’round 11, the stink of copper turns into an actual nasty gross blood-like smell, like cooking blood and singed hair. Tan and his cousin, Reese, get the f*** up instantly and grab the rifles.

There’s like a half-knocking, half-clawing at the door, and I s*** you not, there’s this voice, and it sounds like when you see those YouTube cats and dogs whose owners teach them how to “talk.” It says in this halting, weirdly toned voice, “Let me the f*** in, stop fucking playing.”

It made my fucking nuts creep up against my body, and one of the girls just starts crying and calling on Jesus.

It was so fucking obviously not a person talking. It didn’t have the right cadence, and that’s some s*** that I never realized until that moment, but all people have a certain cadence when they talk, no matter what language. All people have a certain kind of rhythm to talking.

This s*** didn’t have any kind of cadence or rhythm. One of those YouTube cats, that’s what the f*** it sounded like outside the door. So now I’m in full on terror mode. We keep yelling outside, “Who is it? Stop fucking around, man!” and it just keeps saying, “in” or “Let me the f*** in” for almost 15 minutes.

It sounded like this almost, just not funny. Sorry for being on a tangent, but if you can’t imagine how this s*** sounded, then you can’t imagine how fucked up the whole situation was.

So then the smell goes away for a while. And for the next hour or so, you can hear someone basically creeping around in the woods and s***. Every couple minutes it’ll come back into the door, and say something.

Finally when the smell fades away, it’s around 2 in the morning right now. Reese says, “Man, f*** this!” and opens the door and walks outside with his rifle.

He fires a shot into the air, and says something to the effect of, “In the name of Jesus Christ, go away!” He fires two more times, and then from the woods right up against the river across from the trailer, it sounds like something is slowly jibbering and hooting.

Then it starts screaming and it sounds almost like a woman and a cat in a bag screaming together. Like I seriously have never heard any s*** like that, and you can hear the brush over that way start to shake, Reese fires over into the treeline and then starts backing into the house.

We lock the door, and we can hear this s*** keening and screaming. Reese says something had come out of the bushes, super low to the ground and crawling toward the cabin. He had shot at it.

Pretty much, that was how the rest of the night went; it was literally screaming constantly for the next two hours, and we could hear s*** moving out into the treeline. But it never came back up to the cabin until everyone had finally fallen asleep.

Tan had been sitting in the chair watching the door with his rifle; nobody else heard or saw this, and he told me two days later, after the whole thing was over.

He said he had been nodding off after the screaming and noises finally stopped, and he had been almost asleep when he saw someone come out of the bathroom and then lay down in the middle of the floor and go to sleep. He just assumed it was one of us and he had nodded off.

Then he said he kind of realized something was wrong, and while pretending to be sleeping, he counted us. There were 9 people in the cabin. He basically didn’t want to try to shoot at the fucking thing in the cabin and have it kill us all then and there, or have Reese wake up and start shooting and then we kill ourselves. So he just stayed awake all night, pretending to be asleep.

He said sometimes, it would stand up and kind of do this weird jittery thing, or heave like it was laughing. But then it would lay back down.

The story closes pretty weak, because from my perspective nothing happened. We woke up. And I noticed that Tan was a little jittery, and that he was avoiding looking at all of us. But we ate some breakfast, packed up and started walking to his house. He stayed last in the cabin and said he’d lock up and bring me my uncle’s keys; to just start walking and he’d catch up. Which I didn’t really want to fucking do.

We got a little bit up the path, and when he came running up, basically we just jogged back to his house. His cousin took us home.

There was a window in the bathroom. Tan had gone back to lock up and looked in there. We were too stupid to lock a screenless window. The window was fucking up when he went in there.

I’m guessing it had been doing that all along, waiting for us to fall asleep or slip up and then getting in among us. It walked with us all the Goddamn way back to his house, and then he said it lagged to the back of the group and looked him dead in the eyes before walking into the woods.

NORMAL PORN FOR NORMAL PEOPLE (NSFL)

Everybody knows that if you surf the web long enough, you’ll see some pretty sick s***. This is especially true if you intentionally dwell into the dark underbelly of the internet. I’ve seen quite a few things I don’t care to admit to, but one thing that I’ll always remember is a site called “normalpornfornormalpeople.com”.

The first strange thing about the site was that I didn’t find it by actually looking for it. It was e-mailed to me by someone I didn’t know. The e-mail was as follows:

Hi there
found this site is very nice thought u might like
normalpornfornormalpeople.com
pass it on, for the good of mankind

Pretty standard issue chain letter, although the url and the last remark really piqued my curiosity. I was having a very boring day when I got this, so I made sure my anti-virus was working and then I clicked on it.

It was a very average, very generic looking site. It gave the impression that the creators just BARELY gave a s*** about making it look professional. The author seemed to have a very tenuous grasp on English, and on the front page was a long, boring, and incoherent rant that I don’t remember or have saved.

The site had a strange tagline (which even today people haven’t figured out the meaning of), which was:

“Normal Porn for Normal People, A Website Dedicated To The Eradication of Abnormal Sexuality”

And from the sound of that, I wasn’t sure whether I was here to watch porn or if I had stumbled onto some kind of eugenics program. But I was here now, and I was very, very curious to see what “Normal People” get their rocks off to. So I scrolled down through the rant and…nothing. The page didn’t seem to link to anywhere else, and I was about to leave when I noticed every word of the rant was its own hyperlink.

So I clicked one of them, and was sent to a white page with very long list of links in the form of:

“normalpornfornormalpeople.com/(random letters)”

So I stopped for a minute and asked myself if I really wanted to waste God knows how much time clicking random links that will likely give me a virus that will r*** my computer. I figured I’d just try it for maybe five minutes, just to see if anything came up. I clicked one of the links, and was sent to another page. This page apparently had totally different urls than the last one.

I was just about to say “F*** this” when I clicked on the third link, and a video download came up. It was called “peanut.avi”. It was a thirty-minute video of a man, a woman and a dog in a kitchen. The woman would make a peanut butter sandwich, and the man would set it down for the dog to eat. This was all that happened, for thirty minutes. It was obvious that the cameraman had to stop filming and wait until the dog was ready to eat again, and the dog seemed rather sick by the end of it.

I know what you’re thinking: “What the hell does that have to do with porn?” I have no clue. I’ve seen a little over two dozen videos from this site, and the majority had no sexual activity at all.

After watching peanut.avi, I went on a certain image board I frequent to play online show and tell, like I always do with weird s*** like this. But someone had already made a thread about it, some guy who had received the same chain letter I did. The image board thread got lots of people with nothing better to do to dig through the site, and that’s how I saw other videos.

Most of those two dozen videos were very uneventful, and consisted of people talking to the cameraman in a room with nothing in it but a desk and a few chairs. I mean literally nothing on the walls, or in terms of furniture. The whole room had a very cold, sterile feel to it.

The conversations were just idle banter about previous jobs or embarrassing childhood moments. I kept expecting some kind of discussion about what the people were filming or what the site was about, but of course, nothing. You would never know these videos had anything to do with porn if you saw it out of context. I will say one thing though, the people who appeared in these videos were quite attractive.

However, the other videos that actually did feature content which I suppose could be called “sexual” is where things got weird.

I’ll give brief descriptions of the stranger videos; if you’re really eaten up with curiosity you can try to hunt them down on a torrent site.

lickedclean.avi

A ten-minute video filmed by a hidden camera in which we see a repairman working on a washing machine for the first two minutes. When it’s fixed, the repairman talks to the owner briefly, and then leaves. The owner checks to make sure the repairman is gone, and he begins to lick all over the top of the washing machine. This goes on for seven minutes.

jimbo.avi

A five-minute video of an obese mime performing his act. It was actually pretty funny, particularly one part where he pretends to pull up a chair, then pretends that it breaks because of his weight. In the last thirty seconds of the video, the camera cuts to static briefly and cuts back to the man sobbing quietly, still wearing mime outfit and makeup. Some kind of obscure fetish?

dianna.avi

Four-minute video in which the camerman talks to a woman in a room different from the “interview room”. This room looks like one you’d find in a normal person’s house. Exactly where they are is never specified, as Dianna only talks about her violin playing. She obviously plays her violin, but she keeps getting distracted by something.

I didn’t notice this until someone on the image board thread pointed it out, but if you look at the mirror in the background, you can see a fat man in a chicken mask masturbating.

jessica.avi

Another four-minute cameraman video. This time he’s outside a house, talking to another young woman. They talk about canoe rides. The camera zooms out to reveal the city streets behind them occasionally.

The strange thing is: No one so far has been able to identify where this street is. Guesses have ranged everywhere from Europe to Australia to the Philippines, but there’s yet to be a match for the street shown in the video.

tonguetied.avi

Ten-minute video. The first five minutes consist of an elderly woman making out with a mannequin. The video cuts out like it did in jimbo.avi halfway through, and the scene is now a group of mannequins huddled together in a circle around the camera. The lights have been dimmed, and the elderly woman is nowhere to be seen. From this point on, there is no sound.

stumps.avi

Five-minute-long video where a man with no legs is attempting to breakdance on a DDR mat in what looks like the kitchen from peanut.avi, but much dirtier. There’s a radio playing music unseen in the background, but it stops at the four minute mark when the man collapses on the mat in exhaustion.

He breathes heavily and pleads with someone off-screen to let him rest. This off-screen person becomes terrifyingly enraged and yells at him to keep dancing, which he does. You can hear this off-screen person begin to scream as the video ends abruptly.

privacy.avi

The woman from dianna.avi is masturbating on a mattress in the “interview room”, while the man from stumps.avi walks around on his hands while wearing some kind of goblin mask.

The door in this room was always closed in other videos, but it’s now open. In this video the only light is in the room, and the hallway is dark. Near the end of the video, you can see an animal quickly run through the hallway.

And finally, the last video we uncovered:

useless.avi

In this eighteen-minute video, a blonde woman from one of the previous interview videos is tied down to a mattress in the interview room. She attempts to scream but her mouth is taped over. After seven minutes, a man in a black suit and mask opens the door, but he does not enter.

He holds the door open for the animal that was running in the hall in the previous video. It’s revealed to be an adult chimpanzee, its hair shaved and its entire body painted red. It seemed to be starved and abused, with several wounds along its shoulders and back.

When the chimp enters the room, the masked man closes the door behind it. The chimpanzee sniffs the air for a moment (it may have been blind), and notices the woman tied to the mattress. It goes into a frenzy, and begins to maul her.

The assault goes on for a grueling seven minutes, until the woman finally dies. The chimp eats flesh from her corpse for four minutes as the video ends.

The thread exploded with activity after this video was uncovered, and people discussed it long into the night. When I came back to the image board the next day I found that the thread was deleted. I tried to start another one, and they banned me. I tried e-mailing the guy who sent me the chain letter with the site’s url, sent him five messages and never got a response.

I have tried to discuss this website on various places, and I got banned frequently. The site itself was also deleted about three days after useless.avi was uncovered, likely because someone contacted the authorities about it.

The only proof that normalpornfornormalpeople.com ever existed was a few screencaps people took, and videos from the site that people saved and uploaded on torrents. The most popular of which being useless.avi, which found its way onto a few gore sites.

Wherever you upload them to, all of the videos from normalpornfornormalpeople.com get deleted after a while.

GATEWAY OF THE MIND

In 1983, a team of deeply pious scientists conducted a radical experiment in an undisclosed facility. The scientists had theorized that a human without access to any senses or ways to perceive stimuli would be able to perceive the presence of God.

They believed that the five senses clouded our awareness of eternity, and without them, a human could actually establish contact with God by thought. An elderly man who claimed to have “nothing left to live for” was the only test subject to volunteer. To purge him of all his senses, the scientists performed a complex operation in which every sensory nerve connection to the brain was surgically severed.* Although the test subject retained full muscular function, he could not see, hear, taste, smell, or feel. With no possible way to communicate with or even sense the outside world, he was alone with his thoughts.

Scientists monitored him as he spoke aloud about his state of mind in jumbled, slurred sentences that he couldn’t even hear. After four days, the man claimed to be hearing hushed, unintelligible voices in his head. Assuming it was an onset of psychosis, the scientists paid little attention to the man’s concerns.

Two days later, the man cried that he could hear his dead wife speaking with him, and even more, he could communicate back. The scientists were intrigued, but were not convinced until the subject started naming dead relatives of the scientists. He repeated personal information to the scientists that only their dead spouses and parents would have known. At this point, a sizable portion of scientists left the study.

After a week of conversing with the deceased through his thoughts, the subject became distressed, saying the voices were overwhelming. In every waking moment, his consciousness was bombarded by hundreds of voices that refused to leave him alone. He frequently threw himself against the wall, trying to elicit a pain response. He begged the scientists for sedatives, so he could escape the voices by sleeping. This tactic worked for three days, until he started having severe night terrors. The subject repeatedly said that he could see and hear the deceased in his dreams.

Only a day later, the subject began to scream and claw at his non-functional eyes, hoping to sense something in the physical world. The hysterical subject now said the voices of the dead were deafening and hostile, speaking of hell and the end of the world. At one point, he yelled “No heaven, no forgiveness” for five hours straight. He continually begged to be killed, but the scientists were convinced that he was close to establishing contact with God.

After another day, the subject could no longer form coherent sentences. Seemingly mad, he started to bite off chunks of flesh from his arm. The scientists rushed into the test chamber and restrained him to a table so he could not kill himself. After a few hours of being tied down, the subject halted his struggling and screaming. He stared blankly at the ceiling as teardrops silently streaked across his face. For two weeks, the subject had to be manually rehydrated due to the constant crying. Eventually, he turned his head and, despite his blindness, made focused eye contact with a scientist for the first time in the study.

He whispered “I have spoken with God, and He has abandoned us” and his vital signs stopped.

There was no apparent cause of death.

* follow-up study, 2000: Dr G.F., Department of Neurology, [hospital name witheld], San Francisco, CA. Recent study of a degenerative disease which targets the motor function and cognitive decline often leads to ‘hallucinations’ of the deceased. The death of targeted cells and chemicals in the brain by this disease leads to a loss of smell, among other senses. The cause of the disease is unknown. Hallucinations present in 39.8% of the patients, falling into three categories: a sensation of a presence (person), a sideways passage (commonly of an animal) or illusions. Present in 25.5% of patients (an isolated occurrence in 14.3%), formed visual hallucinations present in 22.2% (isolated in 9.3%) and auditory hallucinations present in 9.7% (isolated in 2.3%). Continuing study in San Francisco, CA. 2003-present.

WHITE WITH RED

A man went to a hotel and walked up to the front desk to check in. The woman at the desk gave him his key and told him that on the way to his room, there was a door with no number that was locked and no one was allowed in there. She explained that it was a storeroom, and that it was out of bounds. She reminded him of this several times before allowing him upstairs. So he followed the instructions of the woman at the front desk, going straight to his room, and going to bed.

However, the insistence of the woman had piqued his curiosity, so the next night he walked down the hall to the door and tried the handle. Sure enough it was locked. He bent down and looked through the wide keyhole. Cold air passed through it, chilling his eye. What he saw was a hotel bedroom, like his, and in the corner was a woman whose skin was incredibly pale. She was leaning her head against the wall, facing away from the door. He stared in confusion for a while. Was this a celebrity? The owner’s daughter? He almost knocked on the door, out of curiosity but decided not to.

As he was still looking, the woman turned sharply and he jumped back from the door, hoping she would not suspect he had been spying on her. He crept away from the door and walked back to his room. The next day, he returned to the door and looked through the wide keyhole. This time, all he saw was redness. He couldn’t make anything out besides a distinct red color, unmoving. Perhaps the inhabitants of the room knew he was spying the night before, and had blocked the keyhole with something red. He felt embarrassed that he had made the woman so uncomfortable, and hoped she had not made a complaint with the woman on the front desk.

At this point he decided to consult her for more information. She sighed and said, “Did you look through the keyhole?”

The man told her that he had and she said, “Well, I might as well tell you the story of what happened in that room. A long time ago, a man murdered his wife in there, and we find that even now, whoever stays there gets very uncomfortable. But these people were not ordinary. They were white all over, except for their eyes, which were red.”

PSYCHOSIS

Sunday

I’m not sure why I’m writing this down on paper and not on my computer. I guess I’ve just noticed some odd things. It’s not that I don’t trust the computer… I just… need to organize my thoughts. I need to get down all the details somewhere objective, somewhere I know that what I write can’t be deleted or… changed… not that that’s happened. It’s just… everything blurs together here, and the fog of memory lends a strange cast to things…

I’m starting to feel cramped in this small apartment. Maybe that’s the problem. I just had to go and choose the cheapest apartment, the only one in the basement. The lack of windows down here makes day and night seem to slip by seamlessly. I haven’t been out in a few days because I’ve been working on this programming project so intensively. I suppose I just wanted to get it done. Hours of sitting and staring at a monitor can make anyone feel strange, I know, but I don’t think that’s it.

I’m not sure when I first started to feel like something was odd. I can’t even define what it is. Maybe I just haven’t talked to anyone in a while. That’s the first thing that crept up on me. Everyone I normally talk to online while I program has been idle, or they’ve simply not logged on at all. My instant messages go unanswered. The last e-mail I got from anybody was a friend saying he’d talk to me when he got back from the store, and that was yesterday. I’d call with my cell phone, but reception’s terrible down here. Yeah, that’s it. I just need to call someone. I’m going to go outside.

Well, that didn’t work so well. As the tingle of fear fades, I’m feeling a little ridiculous for being scared at all. I looked in the mirror before I went out, but I didn’t shave the two-day stubble I’ve grown. I figured I was just going out for a quick cell phone call. I did change my shirt, though, because it was lunchtime, and I guessed that I’d run into at least one person I knew. That didn’t end up happening. I wish it did.

When I went out, I opened the door to my small apartment slowly. A small feeling of apprehension had somehow already lodged itself in me, for some indefinable reason. I chalked it up to having not spoken to anyone but myself for a day or two. I peered down the dingy grey hallway, made dingier by the fact that it was a basement hallway. On one end, a large metal door led to the building’s furnace room. It was locked, of course. Two dreary soda machines stood by it; I bought a soda from one the first day I moved in, but it had a two-year-old expiration date. I’m fairly sure nobody knows those machines are even down here, or my cheap landlady just doesn’t care to get them restocked.

I closed my door softly, and walked the other direction, taking care not to make a sound. I have no idea why I chose to do that, but it was fun giving in to the strange impulse not to break the droning hum of the soda machines, at least for the moment. I got to the stairwell, and took the stairs up to the building’s front door. I looked through the heavy door’s small square window, and received quite the shock: it was definitely not lunchtime. City-gloom hung over the dark street outside, and the traffic lights at the intersection in the distance blinked yellow. Dim clouds, purple and black from the glow of the city, hung overhead. Nothing moved, save the few sidewalk trees that shifted in the wind. I remember shivering, though I wasn’t cold. Maybe it was the wind outside. I could vaguely hear it through the heavy metal door, and I knew it was that unique kind of late-night wind, the kind that was constant, cold, and quiet, save for the rhythmic music it made as it passed through countless unseen tree leaves.

I decided not to go outside.

Instead, I lifted my cell phone to the door’s little window, and checked the signal meter. The bars filled up the meter, and I smiled. Time to hear someone else’s voice, I remember thinking, relieved. It was such a strange thing, to be afraid of nothing. I shook my head, laughing at myself silently. I hit speed-dial for my best friend Amy’s number, and held the phone up to my ear. It rang once… but then it stopped. Nothing happened. I listened to silence for a good twenty seconds, then hung up. I frowned, and looked at the signal meter again – still full. I went to dial her number again, but then my phone rang in my hand, startling me. I put it up to my ear.

“Hello?” I asked, immediately fighting down a small shock at hearing the first spoken voice in days, even if it was my own. I had gotten used to the droning hum of the building’s inner workings, my computer, and the soda machines in the hallway. There was no response to my greeting at first, but then, finally, a voice came.

“Hey,” said a clear male voice, obviously of college age, like me. “Who’s this?”

“John,” I replied, confused.

“Oh, sorry, wrong number,” he replied, then hung up.

I lowered the phone slowly and leaned against the thick brick wall of the stairwell. That was strange. I looked at my received calls list, but the number was unfamiliar. Before I could think on it further, the phone rang loudly, shocking me yet again. This time, I looked at the caller before I answered. It was another unfamiliar number. This time, I held the phone up to my ear, but said nothing. I heard nothing but the general background noise of a phone. Then, a familiar voice broke my tension.

“John?” was the single word, in Amy’s voice.

I breathed a sigh of relief.

“Hey, it’s you,” I replied.

“Who else would it be?” she responded. “Oh, the number. I’m at a party on Seventh Street, and my phone died just as you called me. This is someone else’s phone, obviously.”

“Oh, ok,” I said.

“Where are you?” she asked.

My eyes glanced over the drab white-washed cylinder block walls and the heavy metal door with its small window.

“At my building,” I sighed. “Just feeling cooped up. I didn’t realize it was so late.”

“You should come here,” she said, laughing.

“Nah, I don’t feel like looking for some strange place by myself in the middle of the night,” I said, looking out the window at the silent windy street that secretly scared me just a tiny bit. “I think I’m just going to keep working or go to bed.”

“Nonsense!” she replied. “I can come get you! Your building is close to Seventh Street, right?”

“How drunk are you?” I asked lightheartedly. “You know where I live.”

“Oh, of course,” she said abruptly. “I guess I can’t get there by walking, huh?”

“You could if you wanted to waste half an hour,” I told her.

“Right,” she said. “Ok, have to go, good luck with your work!”

I lowered the phone once more, looking at the numbers flash as the call ended. Then, the droning silence suddenly reasserted itself in my ears. The two strange calls and the eerie street outside just drove home my aloneness in this empty stairwell. Perhaps from having seen too many scary movies, I had the sudden inexplicable idea that something could look in the door’s window and see me, some sort of horrible entity that hovered at the edge of aloneness, just waiting to creep up on unsuspecting people that strayed too far from other human beings. I knew the fear was irrational, but nobody else was around, so… I jumped down the stairs, ran down the hallway into my room, and closed the door as swiftly as I could while still staying silent. Like I said, I feel a little ridiculous for being scared of nothing, and the fear has already faded. Writing this down helps a lot – it makes me realize that nothing is wrong. It filters out half-formed thoughts and fears and leaves only cold, hard facts. It’s late, I got a call from a wrong number, and Amy’s phone died, so she called me back from another number. Nothing strange is happening.

Still, there was something a little off about that conversation. I know it could have just been the alcohol she’d had… or was it even her that seemed off to me? Or was it… yes, that was it! I didn’t realize it until this moment, writing these things down. I knew writing things down would help. She said she was at a party, but I only heard silence in the background! Of course, that doesn’t mean anything in particular, as she could have just gone outside to make the call. No… that couldn’t be it either. I didn’t hear the wind! I need to see if the wind is still blowing!

Monday

I forgot to finish writing last night. I’m not sure what I expected to see when I ran up the stairwell and looked out the heavy metal door’s window. I’m feeling ridiculous. Last night’s fear seems hazy and unreasonable to me now. I can’t wait to go out into the sunlight. I’m going to check my email, shave, shower, and finally get out of here! Wait… I think I heard something.

—

It was thunder. That whole sunlight and fresh air thing didn’t happen. I went out into the stairwell and up the stairs, only to find disappointment. The heavy metal door’s little window showed only flowing water, as torrential rain slammed against it. Only a very dim, gloomy light filtered in through the rain, but at least I knew it was daytime, even if it was a grey, sickly, wet day. I tried looking out the window and waiting for lightning to illuminate the gloom, but the rain was too heavy and I couldn’t make out anything more than vague weird shapes moving at odd angles in the waves washing down the window. Disappointed, I turned around, but I didn’t want to go back to my room. Instead, I wandered further up the stairs, past the first floor, and the second. The stairs ended at the third floor, the highest floor in the building. I looked through the glass that ran up the outer wall of the stairwell, but it was that warped, thick kind that scatters the light, not that there was much to see through the rain to begin with.

I opened the stairwell door and wandered down the hallway. The ten or so thick wooden doors, painted blue a long time ago, were all closed. I listened as I walked, but it was the middle of the day, so I wasn’t surprised that I heard nothing but the rain outside. As I stood there in the dim hallway, listening to the rain, I had the strange fleeting impression that the doors were standing like silent granite monoliths erected by some ancient forgotten civilization for some unfathomable guardian purpose. Lightning flashed, and I could have sworn that, for just a moment, the old grainy blue wood looked just like rough stone. I laughed at myself for letting my imagination get the best of me, but then it occurred to me that the dim gloom and lightning must mean there was a window somewhere in the hallway. A vague memory surfaced, and I suddenly recalled that the third floor had an alcove and an inset window halfway down the floor’s hallway.

Excited to look out into the rain and possibly see another human being, I quickly walked over to the alcove, finding the large thin glass window. Rain washed down it, as with the front door’s window, but I could open this one. I reached a hand out to slide it open, but hesitated. I had the strangest feeling that if I opened that window, I would see something absolutely horrifying on the other side. Everything’s been so odd lately… so I came up with a plan, and I came back here to get what I needed. I don’t seriously think anything will come of it, but I’m bored, it’s raining, and I’m going stir crazy. I came back to get my webcam. The cord isn’t long enough to reach the third floor by any means, so instead I’m going to hide it between the two soda machines in the dark end of my basement hallway, run the wire along the wall and under my door, and put black duct tape over the wire to blend it in with the black plastic strip that runs along the base of the hallway’s walls. I know this is silly, but I don’t have anything better to do…

Well, nothing happened. I propped open the hallway-to-stairwell door, steeled myself, then flung the heavy front door wide open and ran like hell down the stairs to my room and slammed the door. I watched the webcam on my computer intently, seeing the hallway outside my door and most of the stairwell. I’m watching it right now, and I don’t see anything interesting. I just wish the camera’s position was different, so that I could see out the front door. Hey! Somebody’s online!

—

I got out an older, less functional webcam that I had in my closet to video chat with my friend online. I couldn’t really explain to him why I wanted to video chat, but it felt good to see another person’s face. He couldn’t talk very long, and we didn’t talk about anything meaningful, but I feel much better. My strange fear has almost passed. I would feel completely better, but there was something… odd… about our conversation. I know that I’ve said that everything has seemed odd, but… still, he was very vague in his responses. I can’t recall one specific thing that he said… no particular name, or place, or event… but he did ask for my email address to keep in touch. Wait, I just got an email.

I’m about to go out. I just got an email from Amy that asked me to meet her for dinner at ‘the place we usually go to.’ I do love pizza, and I’ve just been eating random food from my poorly stocked fridge for days, so I can’t wait. Again, I feel ridiculous about the odd couple of days I’ve been having. I should destroy this journal when I get back. Oh, another email.

—

Oh my god. I almost left the email and opened the door. I almost opened the door. I almost opened the door, but I read the email first! It was from a friend I hadn’t heard from in a long time, and it was sent to a huge number of emails that must have been every person he had saved in his address list. It had no subject, and it said, simply:

“seen with your own eyes don’t trust them they”

What the hell is that supposed to mean? The words shock me, and I keep going over and over them. Is it a desperate email sent just as… something happened? The words are obviously cut off without finishing! On any other day I would have dismissed this as spam from a computer virus or something, but the words… seen with your own eyes! I can’t help but read over this journal and think back on the last few days and realize that I have not seen another person with my own eyes or talked to another person face to face. The webcam conversation with my friend was so strange, so vague, so… eerie, now that I think about it. Was it eerie? Or is the fear clouding my memory? My mind toys with the progression of events I’ve written here, pointing out that I have not been presented with one single fact that I did not specifically give out unsuspectingly. The random ‘wrong number’ that got my name and the subsequent strange return call from Amy, the friend that asked for my email address… I messaged him first when I saw him online! And then I got my first email a few minutes after that conversation! Oh my god! That phone call with Amy! I said over the phone – I said that I was within half an hour’s walk of Seventh Street! They know I’m near there! What if they’re trying to find me?! Where is everyone else? Why haven’t I seen or heard anyone else in days?

No, no, this is crazy. This is absolutely crazy. I need to calm down. This madness needs to end.

—

I don’t know what to think. I ran about my apartment furiously, holding my cell phone up to every corner to see if it got a signal through the heavy walls. Finally, in the tiny bathroom, near one ceiling corner, I got a single bar. Holding my phone there, I sent a text message to every number in my list. Not wanting to betray anything about my unfounded fears, I simply sent:

You seen anyone face to face lately?

At that point, I just wanted any reply back. I didn’t care what the reply was, or if I embarrassed myself. I tried to call someone a few times, but I couldn’t get my head up high enough, and if I brought my cell phone down even an inch, it lost signal. Then I remembered the computer, and rushed over to it, instant messaging everyone online. Most were idle or away from their computer. Nobody responded. My messages grew more frantic, and I started telling people where I was and to stop by in person for a host of barely passable reasons. I didn’t care about anything by that point. I just needed to see another person!

I also tore apart my apartment looking for something that I might have missed; some way to contact another human being without opening the door. I know it’s crazy, I know it’s unfounded, but what if? WHAT IF? I just need to be sure! I taped the phone to the ceiling in case

Tuesday

THE PHONE RANG! Exhausted from last night’s rampage, I must have fallen asleep. I woke up to the phone ringing, and ran into the bathroom, stood on the toilet, and flipped open the phone taped to the ceiling. It was Amy, and I feel so much better. She was really worried about me, and apparently had been trying to contact me since the last time I talked to her. She’s coming over now, and, yes, she knows where I am without me telling her. I feel so embarrassed. I am definitely throwing this journal away before anyone sees it. I don’t even know why I’m writing in it now. Maybe it’s just because it’s the only communication I’ve had at all since… god knows when. I look like hell, too. I looked in the mirror before I came back in here. My eyes are sunken, my stubble is thicker, and I just look generally unhealthy.

My apartment is trashed, but I’m not going to clean it up. I think I need someone else to see what I’ve been through. These past few days have NOT been normal. I am not one to imagine things. I know I have been the victim of extreme probability. I probably missed seeing another person a dozen times. I just happened to go out when it was late at night, or the middle of the day when everyone was gone. Everything’s perfectly fine, I know this now. Plus, I found something in the closet last night that has helped me tremendously: a television! I set it up just before I wrote this, and it’s on in the background. Television has always been an escape for me, and it reminds me that there’s a world beyond these dingy brick walls.

I’m glad Amy’s the only one that responded to me after last night’s frantic pestering of everyone I could contact. She’s been my best friend for years. She doesn’t know it, but I count the day that I met her among one of the few moments of true happiness in my life. I remember that warm summer day fondly. It seems a different reality from this dark, rainy, lonely place. I feel like I spent days sitting in that playground, much too old to play, just talking with her and hanging around doing nothing at all. I still feel like I can go back to that moment sometimes, and it reminds me that this damn place is not all that there is… finally, a knock on the door!

—

I thought it was odd that I couldn’t see her through the camera I hid between the two soda machines. I figured that it was bad positioning, like when I couldn’t see out the front door. I should have known. I should have known! After the knock, I yelled through the door jokingly that I had a camera between the soda machines, because I was embarrassed myself that I had taken this paranoia so far. After I did that, I saw her image walk over to the camera and look down at it. She smiled and waved.

“Hey!” she said to the camera brightly, giving it a wry look.

“It’s weird, I know,” I said into the mic attached to my computer. “I’ve had a weird few days.”

“Must have,” she replied. “Open the door, John.”

I hesitated. How could I be sure?

“Hey, humor me a second here,” I told her through the mic. “Tell me one thing about us. Just prove to me you’re you.”

She gave the camera a weird look.

“Um, alright,” she said slowly, thinking. “We met randomly at a playground when we were both way too old to be there?”

I sighed deeply as reality returned and fear faded. God, I’d been so ridiculous. Of course it was Amy! That day wasn’t anywhere in the world except in my memory. I’d never even mentioned it to anyone, not out of embarrassment, but out of a strange secret nostalgia and a longing for those days to return. If there was some unknown force at work trying to trick me, as I feared, there was no way they could know about that day.

“Haha, alright, I’ll explain everything,” I told her. “Be right there.”

I ran to my small bathroom and fixed my hair as best I could. I looked like hell, but she would understand. Snickering at my own unbelievable behavior and the mess I’d made of the place, I walked to the door. I put my hand on the doorknob and gave the mess one last look. So ridiculous, I thought. My eyes traced over the half-eaten food lying on the ground, the overflowing trash bin, and the bed I’d tipped to the side looking for… God knows what. I almost turned to the door and opened it, but my eyes fell on one last thing: the old webcam, the one I used for that eerily vacant chat with my friend.

Its silent black sphere lay haphazardly tossed to the side, its lens pointed at the table where this journal lay. An overwhelming terror took me as I realized that if something could see through that camera, it would have seen what I just wrote about that day. I asked her for any one thing about us, and she chose the only thing in the world that I thought they or it did not know… but IT DID! IT DID KNOW! IT COULD HAVE BEEN WATCHING ME THE WHOLE TIME!

I didn’t open the door. I screamed. I screamed in uncontrollable terror. I stomped on the old webcam on the floor. The door shook, and the doorknob tried to turn, but I didn’t hear Amy’s voice through the door. Was the basement door, made to keep out drafts, too thick? Or was Amy not outside? What could have been trying to get in, if not her? What the hell is out there?! I saw her on my computer through the camera outside, I heard her on the speakers through the camera outside, but was it real?! How can I know?! She’s gone now – I screamed, and shouted for help! I piled up everything in my apartment against the front door –

Friday

At least I think that it’s Friday. I broke everything electronic. I smashed my computer to pieces. Every single thing on there could have been accessed by network access, or worse, altered. I’m a programmer, I know. Every little piece of information I gave out since this started – my name, my email, my location – none of it came back from outside until I gave it out. I’ve been going over and over what I wrote. I’ve been pacing back and forth, alternating between stark terror and overpowering disbelief. Sometimes I’m absolutely certain some phantom entity is dead set on the simple goal of getting me to go outside. Back to the beginning, with the phone call from Amy, she was effectively asking me to open the door and go outside.

I keep running through it in my head. One point of view says I’ve acted like a madman, and all of this is the extreme convergence of probability – never going outside at the right times by pure luck, never seeing another person by pure chance, getting a random nonsense email from some computer virus at just the right time. The other point of view says that extreme convergence of probability is the reason that whatever’s out there hasn’t gotten me already. I keep thinking: I never opened the window on the third floor. I never opened the front door, until that incredibly stupid stunt with the hidden camera after which I ran straight to my room and slammed the door. I haven’t opened my own solid door since I flung open the front door of the building. Whatever’s out there – if anything’s out there – never made an ‘appearance’ in the building before I opened the front door. Maybe the reason it wasn’t in the building already was that it was elsewhere getting everyone else… and then it waited, until I betrayed my existence by trying to call Amy… a call which didn’t work, until it called me and asked me my name…

Terror literally overwhelms me every time I try to fit the pieces of this nightmare together. That email – short, cut off – was it from someone trying to get word out? Some friendly voice desperately trying to warn me before it came? Seen with my own eyes, don’t trust them – exactly what I’ve been so suspicious of. It could have masterful control of all things electronic, practicing its insidious deception to trick me into coming outside. Why can’t it get in? It knocked on the door – it must have some solid presence… the door… the image of those doors in the upper hallway as guardian monoliths flashes back in my mind every time I trace this path of thoughts. If there is some phantom entity trying to get me to go outside, maybe it can’t get through doors. I keep thinking back over all the books I’ve read or movies I’ve seen, trying to generate some explanation for this. Doors have always been such intense foci of human imagination, always seen as wards or portals of special importance. Or perhaps the door is just too thick? I know that I couldn’t bash through any of the doors in this building, let alone the heavy basement ones. Aside from that, the real question is, why does it even want me? If it just wanted to kill me, it could do it any number of ways, including just waiting until I starve to death. What if it doesn’t want to kill me? What if it has some far more horrific fate in store for me? God, what can I do to escape this nightmare?!

A knock on the door…

—

I told the people on the other side of the door I need a minute to think and I’ll come out. I’m really just writing this down so I can figure out what to do. At least this time I heard their voices. My paranoia – and yes, I recognize I’m being paranoid – has me thinking of all sorts of ways that their voices could be faked electronically. There could be nothing but speakers outside, simulating human voices. Did it really take them three days to come talk to me? Amy is supposedly out there, along with two policemen and a psychiatrist. Maybe it took them three days to think of what to say to me – the psychiatrist’s claim could be pretty convincing, if I decided to think this has all been a crazy misunderstanding, and not some entity trying to trick me into opening the door.

The psychiatrist had an older voice, authoritarian but still caring. I liked it. I’m desperate just to see someone with my own eyes! He said I have something called cyber-psychosis, and I’m just one of a nationwide epidemic of thousands of people having breakdowns triggered by a suggestive email that ‘got through somehow.’ I swear he said ‘got through somehow.’ I think he means spread throughout the country inexplicably, but I’m incredibly suspicious that the entity slipped up and revealed something. He said I am part of a wave of ‘emergent behavior’, that a lot of other people are having the same problem with the same fears, even though we’ve never communicated.

That neatly explains the strange email about eyes that I got. I didn’t get the original triggering email. I got a descendant of it – my friend could have broken down too, and tried to warn everyone he knew against his paranoid fears. That’s how the problem spreads, the psychiatrist claims. I could have spread it, too, with my texts and instant messages online to everybody I know. One of those people might be melting down right now, after being triggered by something I sent them, something they might interpret any way that they want, something like a text saying seen anyone face to face lately? The psychiatrist told me that he didn’t want to ‘lose another one’, that people like me are intelligent, and that’s our downfall. We draw connections so well that we draw them even when they shouldn’t be there. He said it’s easy to get caught up in paranoia in our fast paced world, a constantly changing place where more and more of our interaction is simulated…

I have to give him one thing. It’s a great explanation. It neatly explains everything. It perfectly explains everything, in fact. I have every reason to shake off this nightmarish fear that some thing or consciousness or being out there wants me to open the door so it can capture me for some horrible fate worse than death. It would be foolish, after hearing that explanation, to stay in here until I starve to death just to spite the entity that might have got everyone else. It would be foolish to think that, after hearing that explanation, I might be one of the last people left alive on an empty world, hiding in my secure basement room, spiting some unthinkable deceptive entity just by refusing to be captured. It’s a perfect explanation for every single strange thing I’ve seen or heard, and I have every reason in the world to let all of my fears go, and open the door.

That’s exactly why I’m not going to.

How can I be sure?! How can I know what’s real and what’s deception? All of these damn things with their wires and their signals that originate from some unseen origin! They’re not real, I can’t be sure! Signals through a camera, faked video, deceptive phone calls, emails! Even the television, lying broken on the floor – how can I possibly know it’s real? It’s just signals, waves, light… the door! It’s bashing on the door! It’s trying to get in! What insane mechanical contrivance could it be using to simulate the sound of men attacking the heavy wood so well?! At least I’ll finally see it with my own eyes… there’s nothing left in here for it to deceive me with, I’ve ripped apart everything else! It can’t deceive my eyes, can it? Seen with your own eyes don’t trust them they… wait… was that desperate message telling me to trust my eyes, or warning me about my eyes too?! Oh my god, what’s the difference between a camera and my eyes? They both turn light into electrical signals – they’re the same! I can’t be deceived! I have to be sure! I have to be sure!

Date Unknown

I calmly asked for paper and a pen, day in and day out, until it finally gave them to me. Not that it matters. What am I going to do? Poke my eyes out? The bandages feel like part of me now. The pain is gone. I figure this will be one of my last chances to write legibly, as, without my sight to correct mistakes, my hands will slowly forget the motions involved. This is a sort of self-indulgence, this writing… it’s a relic of another time, because I’m certain everyone left in the world is dead… or something far worse.

I sit against the padded wall day in and day out. The entity brings me food and water. It masks itself as a kind nurse, as an unsympathetic doctor. I think it knows that my hearing has sharpened considerably now that I live in darkness. It fakes conversations in the hallways, on the off chance that I might overhear. One of the nurses talks about having a baby soon. One of the doctors lost his wife in a car accident. None of it matters, none of it is real. None of it gets to me, not like she does.

That’s the worst part, the part I almost can’t handle. The thing comes to me, masquerading as Amy. Its recreation is perfect. It sounds exactly like Amy, feels exactly like her. It even produces a reasonable facsimile of tears that it makes me feel on its lifelike cheeks. When it first dragged me here, it told me all the things I wanted to hear. It told me that she loved me, that she had always loved me, that it didn’t understand why I did this, that we could still have a life together, if only I would stop insisting that I was being deceived. It wanted me to believe… no, it needed me to believe that she was real.

I almost fell for it. I really did. I doubted myself for the longest time. In the end, though, it was all too perfect, too flawless, and too real. The false Amy used to come every day, and then every week, and finally stopped coming altogether… but I don’t think the entity will give up. I think the waiting game is just another one of its gambits. I will resist it for the rest of my life, if I have to. I don’t know what happened to the rest of the world, but I do know that this thing needs me to fall for its deceptions. If it needs that, then maybe, just maybe, I am a thorn in its agenda. Maybe Amy is still alive out there somewhere, kept alive only by my will to resist the deceiver. I hold on to that hope, rocking back and forth in my cell to pass the time. I will never give in. I will never break. I am… a hero!

====

The doctor read the paper the patient had scribbled on. It was barely readable, written in the shaky script of one who could not see. He wanted to smile at the man’s steadfast resolve, a reminder of the human will to survive, but he knew that the patient was completely delusional.

After all, a sane man would have fallen for the deception long ago.

The doctor wanted to smile. He wanted to whisper words of encouragement to the delusional man. He wanted to scream, but the nerve filaments wrapped around his head and into his eyes made him do otherwise. His body walked into the cell like a puppet, and told the patient, once more, that he was wrong, and that there was nobody trying to deceive him.

PALE LUNA

In the last decade and a half it’s become infinitely easier to obtain exactly what you’re looking for, by way of a couple of keystrokes. The Internet has made it all too simple to use a computer to change reality. An abundance of information is merely a search engine away, to the point where it’s hard to imagine life as any different.

Yet, a generation ago, when the words ‘streaming’ and ‘torrent’ were meaningless save for conversations about water, people met face-to-face to conduct software swap parties, trading games and applications on Sharpie-labeled five-and-a-quarter inch floppies.

Of course, most of the time the meets were a way for frugal, community-minded individuals to trade popular games like King’s Quest and Maniac Mansion amongst themselves. However, a few early programming talents designed their own computer games to share amongst their circle of acquaintances, who in turn would pass it on, until, if fun and well-designed enough, an independently-developed game had its place in the collection of aficionados across the country. Think of it as the 80’s equivalent of a viral video.

Pale Luna, on the other hand, was never circulated outside of the San Francisco Bay Area. All known copies have been long disposed of, all computers that have ever run the game now detritus buried under layers of filth and polystyrene. This fact is attributed to a number of rather abstruse design choices made by its programmer.

Pale Luna was a text adventure in the vein of Zork and The Lurking Horror, at a time when said genre was swiftly going out of fashion. Upon booting the program, the player was presented with a screen almost completely blank, except for the text:

-You are in a dark room. Moonlight shines through the window.

-There is GOLD in the corner, along with a SHOVEL and a ROPE.

-There is a DOOR to the EAST.

-Command?

So began the game that one writer for a long-out-of-print fanzine decried as “enigmatic, nonsensical, and completely unplayable”. As the only commands that the game would accept were PICK UP GOLD, PICK UP SHOVEL, PICK UP ROPE, OPEN DOOR, and GO EAST, the player was soon presented with the following:

-Reap your reward.

-PALE LUNA SMILES AT YOU.

-You are in a forest. There are paths to the NORTH, WEST, and EAST.

-Command?

What quickly infuriated the few who’ve played the game was the confusing and buggy nature of the second screen onward — only one of the directional decisions would be the correct one. For example, on this occasion, a command to go in a direction other than NORTH would lead to the system freezing, requiring the operator to hard reboot the entire computer.

Further, any subsequent screens seemed to merely repeat the above text, with the difference being only the directions available. Worse still, the standard text adventure commands appeared to be useless: The only accepted non-movement-related prompts were USE GOLD, which caused the game to display the message:

-Not here.

USE SHOVEL, which brought up:

-Not now.

And USE ROPE, which prompted the text:

-You’ve already used this.

Most who played the game progressed a couple of screens into it before becoming fed-up by having to constantly reboot and tossing the disk in disgust, writing off the experience as a shoddily programmed farce. However, there is one thing about the world of computers that remains true, no matter the era: some people who use them have way too much time on their hands.

A young man by the name of Michael Nevins decided to see if there was more to Pale Luna than what met the eye. Five hours and thirty-three screens worth of trial-and-error and unplugged computer cords later, he finally managed to make the game display different text. The text in this new area read:

-PALE LUNA SMILES WIDE.

-There are no paths.

-PALE LUNA SMILES WIDE.

-The ground is soft.

-PALE LUNA SMILES WIDE.

-Here.

-Command?

It was another hour still before Nevins stumbled upon the proper combination of phrases to make the game progress any further; DIG HOLE, DROP GOLD, then FILL HOLE. This caused the screen to display:

-Congratulations

—— 40.24248 ——

—— -121.4434 ——

Upon which the game ceased to accept commands, requiring the user to reboot one last time.

After some deliberation, Nevins came to the conclusion that the numbers referred to lines of latitude and longitude — the coordinates lead to a point in the sprawling forest that dominated the nearby Lassen Volcanic Park. As he possessed much more free time than sense, Nevins vowed to see Pale Luna through to its ending.

The next day, armed with a map, a compass, and a shovel, he navigated the park’s trails, noting with amusement how each turn he made corresponded roughly to those that he took in-game.

Though he initially regretted bringing the cumbersome digging tool on a mere hunch, the path’s similarity all but confirmed his suspicions that the journey would end with him face-to-face with an eccentric’s buried treasure.

Out of breath after a tricky struggle to the coordinates, he was pleasantly surprised by a literal stumble upon a patch of uneven dirt. Shoveling as excitedly as he was, it would be an understatement to say that he was taken aback when his heavy strokes unearthed the badly-decomposing head of a blonde-haired little girl.

Nevins promptly reported the situation to the authorities. The girl was identified as Karen Paulsen, 11, reported as missing to the San Diego Police Department a year and a half prior.

Efforts were made to track down the programmer of Pale Luna, but the nearly-anonymous legal gray area in which the software swapping community operated inescapably led to many dead ends.

Collectors have been known to offer upwards of six figures for an authentic copy of the game.

The rest of Karen’s body was never found.

NOEND HOUSE

Let me start by saying that Peter Terry was addicted to heroin.

We were friends in college and continued to be after I graduated. Notice that I said “I”. He dropped out after two years of barely cutting it. After I moved out of the dorms and into a small apartment, I didn’t see Peter as much. We would talk online every now and then (AIM was king in pre-Facebook years). There was a period where he wasn’t online for about five weeks straight. I wasn’t worried. He was a pretty notorious flake and drug addict, so I assumed he just stopped caring. Then one night I saw him log on. Before I could initiate a conversation, he sent me a message.

“David, man, we need to talk.”

That was when he told me about the NoEnd House. It got that name because no one had ever reached the final exit. The rules were pretty simple and cliche: reach the final room of the building and you win $500. There were nine rooms in all. The house was located outside the city, roughly four miles from my house. Apparently Peter had tried and failed. He was a heroin and who-knows-what-the-f*** addict, so I figured the drugs got the best of him and he wigged out at a paper ghost or something. He told me it would be too much for anyone. That it was unnatural.

I didn’t believe him. I told him I would check it out the next night and no matter how hard he tried to convince me otherwise, $500 sounded too good to be true. I had to go. I set out the following night.

When I arrived, I immediately noticed something strange about the building. Have you ever seen or read something that shouldn’t be scary, but for some reason a chill crawls up your spine? I walked toward the building and the feeling of uneasiness only intensified as I opened the front door.

My heart slowed and I let a relieved sigh leave me as I entered. The room looked like a normal hotel lobby decorated for Halloween. A sign was posted in place of a worker. It read, “Room 1 this way. Eight more follow. Reach the end and you win!” I chuckled and made my way to the first door.

The first area was almost laughable. The decor resembled the Halloween aisle of a K-Mart, complete with sheet ghosts and animatronic zombies that gave a static growl when you passed by. At the far end was an exit; it was the only door besides the one I entered through. I brushed through the fake spider webs and headed for the second room.

I was greeted by fog as I opened the door to room two. The room definitely upped the ante in terms of technology. Not only was there a fog machine, but a bat hung from the ceiling and flew in a circle. Scary. They seemed to have a Halloween soundtrack that one would find in a 99 cent store on loop somewhere in the room. I didn’t see a stereo, but I guessed they must have used a PA system. I stepped over a few toy rats that wheeled around and walked with a puffed chest across to the next area.

I reached for the doorknob and my heart sank to my knees. I did not want to open that door. A feeling of dread hit me so hard I could barely even think. Logic overtook me after a few terrified moments, and I shook it off and entered the next room.

Room three is when things began to change.

On the surface, it looked like a normal room. There was a chair in the middle of the wood paneled floor. A single lamp in the corner did a poor job of lighting the area, casting a few shadows across the floor and walls. That was the problem. Shadows. Plural.

With the exception of the chair’s, there were others. I had barely walked in the door and I was already terrified. It was at that moment that I knew something wasn’t right. I didn’t even think as I automatically tried to open the door I came through. It was locked from the other side.

That set me off. Was someone locking the doors as I progressed? There was no way. I would have heard them. Was it a mechanical lock that set automatically? Maybe. But I was too scared to really think. I turned back to the room and the shadows were gone. The chair’s shadow remained, but the others were gone. I slowly began to walk. I used to hallucinate when I was a kid, so I wrote off the shadows as a figment of my imagination. I began to feel better as I made it to the halfway point of the room. I looked down as I took my steps and that’s when I saw it.

Or didn’t see it. My shadow wasn’t there. I didn’t have time to scream. I ran as fast as I could to the other door and flung myself without thinking into the room beyond.

The fourth room was possibly the most disturbing. As I closed the door, all light seemed to be sucked out and put back into the previous room. I stood there, surrounded by darkness, not able to move. I’m not afraid of the dark and never have been, but I was absolutely terrified. All sight had left me. I held my hand in front of my face and if I didn’t know what I was doing, I would never have been able to tell. Darkness doesn’t describe it. I couldn’t hear anything. It was dead silence. When you’re in a sound-proof room, you can still hear yourself breathing. You can hear yourself being alive.

I couldn’t.

I began to stumble forward after a few moments, my rapidly beating heart the only thing I could feel. There was no door in sight. Wasn’t even sure there was one this time. The silence was then broken by a low hum.

I felt something behind me. I spun around wildly but could barely even see my nose. I knew it was there, though. Regardless of how dark it was, I knew something was there. The hum grew louder, closer. It seemed to surround me, but I knew whatever was causing the noise was in front of me, inching closer. I took a step back; I had never felt that kind of fear. I can’t really describe true fear. I wasn’t even scared I was going to die; I was scared of what the alternative was. I was afraid of what this thing had in store for me. Then the lights flashed for a second and I saw it.

Nothing. I saw nothing and I know I saw nothing there. The room was again plunged into darkness and the hum became a wild screech. I screamed in protest; I couldn’t hear this goddamn sound for another minute. I ran backwards, away from the noise, and fumbled for the door handle. I turned and fell into room five.

Before I describe room five, you have to understand something. I am not a drug addict. I have had no history of drug abuse or any sort of psychosis short of the childhood hallucinations I mentioned earlier, and those were only when I was really tired or just waking up. I entered the NoEnd House with a clear head.

After falling in from the previous room, my view of room five was from my back, looking up at the ceiling. What I saw didn’t scare me; it simply surprised me. Trees had grown into the room and towered above my head. The ceilings in this room were taller than the others, which made me think I was in the center of the house. I got up off the floor, dusted myself off, and took a look around. It was definitely the biggest room of them all. I couldn’t even see the door from where I was; various brush and trees must have blocked my line of sight with the exit.

Up to this point, I figured the rooms were going to get scarier, but this was a paradise compared to the last room. I also assumed whatever was in room four stayed back there. I was incredibly wrong.

As I made my way deeper into the room, I began to hear what one would hear if they were in a forest; chirping bugs and the occasional flap of birds seemed to be my only company in this room. That was the thing that bothered me the most. I heard the bugs and other animals, but I didn’t see any of them. I began to wonder how big this house was. From the outside when I first walked up to it, it looked like a regular house. It was definitely on the bigger side, but this was almost a full forest in here. The canopy covered my view of the ceiling, but I assumed it was still there, however high it was. I couldn’t see any walls, either. The only way I knew I was still inside was that the floor matched the other rooms: the standard dark wood paneling.

I kept walking, hoping that the next tree I passed would reveal the door. After a few moments of walking, I felt a mosquito fly onto my arm. I shook it off and kept going. A second later, I felt about ten more land on my skin at different places. I felt them crawl up and down my arms and legs and a few made their way across my face. I flailed wildly to get them all off but they just kept crawling. I looked down and let out a muffled scream – more of a whimper, to be honest. I didn’t see a single bug. Not one bug was on me, but I could feel them crawl. I heard them fly by my face and sting my skin but I couldn’t see a single one. I dropped to the ground and began to roll wildly. I was desperate. I hated bugs, especially ones I couldn’t see or touch. But these bugs could touch me and they were everywhere.

I began to crawl. I had no idea where I was going; the entrance was nowhere in sight and I still hadn’t even seen the exit. So I just crawled, my skin wriggling with the presence of those phantom bugs. After what seemed like hours, I found the door. I grabbed the nearest tree and propped myself up, mindlessly slapping my arms and legs to no avail. I tried to run, but I couldn’t; my body was exhausted from crawling and dealing with whatever it was that was on me. I took a few shaky steps to the door, grabbing each tree on the way for support.

It was only a few feet away when I heard it. The low hum from before. It was coming from the next room and it was deeper. I could almost feel it inside my body, like when you stand next to an amp at a concert. The feeling of the bugs on me lessened as the hum grew louder. As I placed my hand on the doorknob, the bugs were completely gone but I couldn’t bring myself to turn the knob. I knew that if I let go, the bugs would return and there was no way I would make it back to room four. I just stood there, my head pressed against the door marked six and my hand shakily grasping the knob. The hum was so loud I couldn’t even hear myself pretend to think. There was nothing I could do but move on. Room six was next, and room six was Hell.

I closed the door behind me, my eyes held shut and my ears ringing. The hum was surrounding me. As the door clicked into place, the hum was gone. I opened my eyes in surprise and the door I had shut was gone. It was just a wall now. I looked around in shock. The room was identical to room three – the same chair and lamp – but with the correct amount of shadows this time. The only real difference was that there was no exit door and the one I came in through was gone. As I said before, I had no previous issues in terms of mental instability, but at that moment I fell into what I now know was insanity. I didn’t scream. I didn’t make a sound.

At first I scratched softly. The wall was tough, but I knew the door was there somewhere. I just knew it was. I scratched at where the doorknob was. I clawed at the wall frantically with both hands, my nails being filed down to the skin against the wood. I fell silently to my knees, the only sound in the room the incessant scratching against the wall. I knew it was there. The door was there, I knew it was just there. I knew if I could just get past this wall –

“Are you alright?”

I jumped off the ground and spun in one motion. I leaned against the wall behind me and I saw what it was that spoke to me; to this day I regret ever turning around.

There was a little girl. She was wearing a soft, white dress that went down to her ankles. She had long blonde hair to the middle of her back and white skin and blue eyes. She was the most frightening thing I had ever seen, and I know that nothing in my life will ever be as unnerving as what I saw in her. While looking at her, I saw something else. Where she stood I saw what looked like a man’s body, only larger than normal and covered in hair. He was naked from head to toe, but his head was not human and his toes were hooves. It wasn’t the Devil, but at that moment it might as well have been. The form had the head of a ram and the snout of a wolf.

It was horrifying and it was synonymous with the little girl in front of me. They were the same form. I can’t really describe it, but I saw them at the same time. They shared the same spot in that room, but it was like looking at two separate dimensions. When I saw the girl I saw the form, and when I saw the form I saw the girl. I couldn’t speak. I could barely even see. My mind was revolting against what it was attempting to process. I had been scared before in my life and I had never been more scared than when I was trapped in the fourth room, but that was before room six. I just stood there, staring at whatever it was that spoke to me. There was no exit. I was trapped here with it. And then it spoke again.

“David, you should have listened.”

When it spoke, I heard the words of the little girl, but the other form spoke through my mind in a voice I won’t attempt to describe. There was no other sound. The voice just kept repeating that sentence over and over in my mind and I agreed. I didn’t know what to do. I was slipping into madness, yet couldn’t take my eyes off what was in front of me. I dropped to the floor. I thought I had passed out, but the room wouldn’t let me. I just wanted it to end. I was on my side, my eyes wide open and the form staring down at me. Scurrying across the floor in front of me was one of the battery-powered rats from the second room.

The house was toying with me. But for some reason, seeing that rat pulled my mind back from whatever depths it was headed and I looked around the room. I was getting out of there. I was determined to get out of that house and live and never think about this place again. I knew this room was Hell and I wasn’t ready to take up a residency. At first, it was just my eyes that moved. I searched the walls for any kind of opening. The room wasn’t that big, so it didn’t take long to soak up the entire layout. The demon still taunted me, the voice growing louder as the form stayed rooted where it stood. I placed my hand on the floor, lifted myself up to all four and turned to scan the wall behind me.

Then I saw something I couldn’t believe. The form was now right at my back, whispering into my mind how I shouldn’t have come. I felt its breath on the back of my neck, but I refused to turn around. A large rectangle was scratched into the wood, with a small dent chipped away in the center of it. Right in front of my eyes I saw the large seven I had mindlessly etched into the wall. I knew what it was: room seven was just beyond that wall where room five was moments ago.

I don’t know how I had done it – maybe it was just my state of mind at the time – but I had created the door. I knew I had. In my madness, I had scratched into the wall what I needed the most: an exit to the next room. Room seven was close. I knew the demon was right behind me, but for some reason it couldn’t touch me. I closed my eyes and placed both hands on the large seven in front of me. I pushed. I pushed as hard as I could. The demon was now screaming in my ear. It told me I was never leaving. It told me that this was the end but I wasn’t going to die; I was going to live there in room six with it. I wasn’t. I pushed and screamed at the top of my lungs. I knew I was going to push through the wall eventually.

I clenched my eyes shut and screamed, and the demon was gone. I was left in silence. I turned around slowly and was greeted by the room as it was when I entered: just a chair and a lamp. I couldn’t believe it, but I didn’t have time to well. I turned back to the seven and jumped back slightly. What I saw was a door. It wasn’t the one I had scratched in, but a regular door with a large seven on it. My whole body was shaking. It took me a while to turn the knob. I just stood there for a while, staring at the door. I couldn’t stay in room six. I couldn’t. But if this was only room six, I couldn’t imagine was seven had in store. I must have stood there for an hour, just staring at the seven. Finally, with a deep breath, I twisted the knob and opened the door to room seven.

I stumbled through the door mentally exhausted and physically weak. The door behind me closed and I realized where I was. I was outside. Not outside like room five, but actually outside. My eyes stung. I wanted to cry. I fell to my knees and tried but I couldn’t. I was finally out of that hell. I didn’t even care about the prize that was promised. I turned and saw that the door I just went through was the entrance. I walked to my car and drove home, thinking of how nice a shower sounded.

As I pulled up to my house, I felt uneasy. The joy of leaving NoEnd House had faded and dread was slowly building in my stomach. I shook it off as residual from the house and made my way to the front door. I entered and immediately went up to my room. There on my bed was my cat, Baskerville. He was the first living thing I had seen all night and I reached to pet him. He hissed and swiped at my hand. I recoiled in shock, as he had never acted like that. I thought, “Whatever, he’s an old cat.” I jumped in the shower and got ready for what I was expecting to be a sleepless night.

After my shower, I went to the kitchen to make something to eat. I descended the stairs and turned into the family room; what I saw would be forever burned into my mind, however. My parents were lying on the ground, naked and covered in blood. They were mutilated to near-unidentifiable states. Their limbs were removed and placed next to their bodies, and their heads were placed on their chests facing me. The most unsettling part was their expressions. They were smiling, as though they were happy to see me. I vomited and sobbed there in the family room. I didn’t know what had happened; they didn’t even live with me at the time. I was a mess. Then I saw it: a door that was never there before. A door with a large eight scrawled on it in blood.

I was still in the house. I was standing in my family room but I was in room seven. The faces of my parents smiled wider as I realized this. They weren’t my parents; they couldn’t be, but they looked exactly like them. The door marked eight was across the room, behind the mutilated bodies in front of me. I knew I had to move on, but at that moment I gave up. The smiling faces tore into my mind; they grounded me where I stood. I vomited again and nearly collapsed. Then the hum returned. It was louder than ever and it filled the house and shook the walls. The hum compelled me to walk.

I began to walk slowly, making my way closer to the door and the bodies. I could barely stand, let alone walk, and the closer I got to my parents the closer I came to suicide. The walls were now shaking so hard it seemed as though they were going to crumble, but still the faces smiled at me. As I inched closer, their eyes followed me. I was now between the two bodies, a few feet away from the door. The dismembered hands clawed their way across the carpet towards me, all while the faces continued to stare. New terror washed over me and I walked faster. I didn’t want to hear them speak. I didn’t want the voices to match those of my parents. They began to open their mouths and the hands were inches from my feet. In a dash of desperation, I lunged toward the door, threw it open, and slammed it behind me. Room eight.

I was done. After what I had just experienced, I knew there wasn’t anything else this fucking house could throw at me that I couldn’t live through. There was nothing short of the fires of Hell that I wasn’t ready for. Unfortunately, I underestimated the abilities of NoEnd House. Unfortunately, things got more disturbing, more terrifying, and more unspeakable in room eight.

I still have trouble believing what I saw in room eight. Again, the room was a carbon copy of rooms three and six, but sitting in the usually empty chair was a man. After a few seconds of disbelief, my mind finally accepted the fact that the man sitting in the chair was me. Not someone who looked like me; it was David Williams. I walked closer. I had to get a better look even though I was sure of it. He looked up at me and I noticed tears in his eyes.

“Please… please, don’t do it. Please, don’t hurt me.”

“What?” I asked. “Who are you? I’m not going to hurt you.”

“Yes you are…” He was sobbing now. “You’re going to hurt me and I don’t want you to.” He sat in the chair with his legs up and began rocking back and forth. It was actually pretty pathetic looking, especially since he was me, identical in every way.

“Listen, who are you?” I was now only a few feet from my doppelgänger. It was the weirdest experience yet, standing there talking to myself. I wasn’t scared, but I would be soon. “Why are you-”

“You’re going to hurt me you’re going to hurt me if you want to leave you’re going to hurt me.”

“Why are you saying this? Just calm down, alright? Let’s try and figure this-” And then I saw it. The David sitting down was wearing the same clothes as me, except for a small red patch on his shirt embroidered with the number nine.

“You’re going to hurt me you’re going to hurt me don’t please you’re going to hurt me…”

My eyes didn’t leave that small number on his chest. I knew exactly what it was. The first few doors were plain and simple, but after a while they got a little more ambiguous. Seven was scratched into the wall, but by my own hands. Eight was marked in blood above the bodies of my parents. But nine – this number was on a person, a living person. Worse still, it was on a person that looked exactly like me.

“David?” I had to ask.

“Yes… you’re going to hurt me you’re going to hurt me…” He continued to sob and rock.

He answered to David. He was me, right down to the voice. But that nine. I paced around for a few minutes while he sobbed in his chair. The room had no door and, similarly to room six, the door I came through was gone. For some reason, I assumed that scratching would get me nowhere this time. I studied the walls and floor around the chair, sticking my head underneath and seeing if anything was below. Unfortunately, there was. Below the chair was a knife. Attached was a tag that read, “To David – From Management.”

The feeling in my stomach as I read that tag was something sinister. I wanted to throw up and the last thing I wanted to do was remove that knife from under that chair. The other David was still sobbing uncontrollably. My mind was spinning into an attic of unanswerable questions. Who put this here and how did they get my name? Not to mention the fact that as I knelt on the cold wood floor I also sat in that chair, sobbing in protest of being hurt by myself. It was all too much to process. The house and the management had been playing with me this whole time. My thoughts for some reason turned to Peter and whether or not he got this far. If he did, if he met a Peter Terry sobbing in this very chair, rocking back and forth… I shook those thoughts out of my head; they didn’t matter. I took the knife from under the chair and immidately the other David went quiet.

“David,” He said in my voice, “What do you think you’re going to do?”

I lifted myself from the ground and clenched the knife in my hand.

“I’m going to get out of here.”

David was still sitting in the chair, though he was very calm now. He looked up at me with a slight grin. I couldn’t tell if he was going to laugh or strangle me. Slowly, he got up from the chair and stood, facing me. It was uncanny. His height and even the way he stood matched mine. I felt the rubber hilt of the knife in my hand and gripped it tighter. I don’t know what I was planning on doing with it, but I had a feeling I was going to need it.

“Now,” his voice was slightly deeper than my own. “I’m going to hurt you. I’m going to hurt you and I’m going to keep you here.” I didn’t respond. I just lunged and tackled him to the ground. I had mounted him and looked down, knife poised and ready. He looked up at me, terrified. It was like I was looking in a mirror. Then the hum returned, low and distant, though I still felt it deep in my body. David looked up at me as I looked down at myself. The hum was getting louder and I felt something inside me snap. With one motion, I slammed the knife into the patch on his chest and ripped down. Blackness fell on the room and I was falling.

The darkness around me was like nothing I had experienced up to that point. Room four was dark, but it didn’t come close to what was completely engulfing me. I wasn’t even sure if I was falling after a while. I felt weightless, covered in dark. Then a deep sadness came over me. I felt lost, depressed, and suicidal. The sight of my parents entered my mind. I knew it wasn’t real, but I had seen it and the mind has trouble differentiating between what is real and what isn’t. The sadness only deepened. I was in room nine for what seemed like days. The final room. And that’s exactly what it was: the end. NoEnd House had an end and I had reached it. At that moment, I gave up. I knew I would be in that in-between state forever, accompanied by nothing but darkness. Not even the hum was there to keep me sane.

I had lost all senses. I couldn’t feel myself. I couldn’t hear anything. Sight was completely useless here. I searched for a taste in my mouth and found nothing. I felt disembodied and completely lost. I knew where I was. This was Hell. Room nine was Hell. Then it happened. A light. One of those stereotypical lights at the end of the tunnel. I felt ground come up from below me and I was standing. After a moment or two of gathering my thoughts and senses, I slowly walked toward that light.

As I approached the light, it took form. It was a vertical slit down the side of an unmarked door. I slowly walked through the door and found myself back where I started: the lobby of NoEnd House. It was exactly how I left it: still empty, still decorated with childish Halloween decorations. After everything that had happened that night, I was still wary of where I was. After a few moments of normalcy, I looked around the place trying to find anything different. On the desk was a plain white envelope with my name handwritten on it. Immensely curious, yet still cautious, I mustered up the courage to open the envelope. Inside was a letter, again handwritten.

David Williams,

Congratulations! You have made it to the end of NoEnd House! Please accept this prize as a token of great achievement.

Yours forever,
Management.

With the letter were five $100 bills.

I couldn’t stop laughing. I laughed for what seemed like hours. I laughed as I walked out to my car and laughed as I drove home. I laughed as I pulled into my driveway. I laughed as I opened my front door to my house and laughed as I saw the small ten etched into the wood.

These creepypastas redefine our definition of the macabre and disturbing contents within people’s minds on the internet. Some of these tales are straight up depressing to a terrifying degree. It is a wonder how many people would go through them without ultimately reaching a point of giving up.