Voting has now started and will last for 3 days until the 5th. You have the option to give 2 votes.
Contest Two: Scarey Stories.
Create a short scarey story, or recreate your favourite one. For this contest you can either write your own scarey short story, read a part of your favourite one, or one you've created, in a video or voice recording, or create a small comic strip of a spooky story.
Written stories no more then 2000 words long. Recorded stories, voice or video, no longer then 5 minutes in length. Comic strip a maximum of 9 panels. NSFW entries to be submitted with the appropriate tags. Please include a disclaimer at the start of your story if it includes any disturbing imagery.
Entry period will be until the 1st of November.
This thread is for SCAREY STORY contest entries only. All discussion to be in the coressponding discussion thread.
Halloween Spooktacular: Scarey Story Contest. Vote now!
Moderators: Don Alexander, midgetshrimp
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Bear
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Recca
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Re: Halloween Spooktacular: Scarey Story Contest.
The Hairy Heart (As told by Recca)
There was once a handsome, rich, and talented young man who observed that all his friends grew foolish when they fell in love. The young man resolved never to fall prey to such weakness and employed dark arts to ensure his immunity.
Unaware of his secret, the man's family laughed at his coldness and thought "All will change once a maiden catches his fancy." But try as they might no one did. The man was pleased none succeeded in touching his heart and glorified in the dignity it left him.
Time passed and he man's peers began to wed, and then have children. The man scoffed at them, thinking how tired and annoyed they must be by these children and again was pleased with his decision.
In due course, the man's parents aged and died. Thier son did not mourn them.
On the contrary, he considered himself blessed to now rule over the house by himself. His life was full of wealth, ease, and nothing but comfort.
The man was pleased with this life until he overheard 2 of his servants talking about him. One servant expressed pity for the man, since he had so much wealth and power, but was loved by no one. But the second laughed and wondered why a man with so much wealth and a great house had been unable to attract a wife.
This hit the man's pride very hard and determined to get himself a wife. A woman of great beauty, lineage, and wealth. One worthy of him. The man found such a woman and coveted her.
All who noticed the change in the man told the woman that she had succeeded in catching his eye where hundreds have failed. The woman, herself, was facinated and repelled by the man's attentions. Under the warmth of his flattery she sensed a cold and strangely remote person. But her parents deemed him a worthy suitor and agreed to the invitation of a huge feeast in her honor.
So the maiden sat on a throne next to the man at this feast. He dowsed her with words of tenderness he had stolen from poets, which he knew not the true meaning. The woman listend to this and replied "You speak well and I would be delighted by your attention if I thought you had a heart."
The man grinned and told the maiden to follow him to the basement, where he kept his treasure. Here in an enchanted casket was the man's beating heart. Long since removed, the heart had shrunk and was covered in long black hairs. The frightened maiden screamed "oh what have you done? Put it back where it belongs, I beseech you!"
Seeing that was necessary to please her, the man sliced his chest open and took his heart and placed it back into his chest. "Now you are healed and will feel true love!" The maiden exclaimed and embraced him.
The touch of her soft arms, the sound of her breath in his ear, and scent of her hair all pierced his newly awoken heart like spears. But in it's long exile his heart had grown strange and perverse.
The guest having noticed their absence went looking for the two and upon entering the basement found a horrid sight.
The maiden lay dead on the floor, her breast cut open and crouched beside her was the man, holind her heart in one bloody hand, which he licked and stroked vowing to exchange it with his own.
Trying to coax out the shriveled heart from his chest unsuccessfully, the man knew the heart had grown stronger than he was, and it refused to leave. Before the horror-struck eyes of the guests, the man grabbed a knife and swearing never to be mastered by his own heart, he hacked it from his chest.
For one moment the man was triumphant. With a heart clutched in each hand, the man fell across the maiden's body and died.
There was once a handsome, rich, and talented young man who observed that all his friends grew foolish when they fell in love. The young man resolved never to fall prey to such weakness and employed dark arts to ensure his immunity.
Unaware of his secret, the man's family laughed at his coldness and thought "All will change once a maiden catches his fancy." But try as they might no one did. The man was pleased none succeeded in touching his heart and glorified in the dignity it left him.
Time passed and he man's peers began to wed, and then have children. The man scoffed at them, thinking how tired and annoyed they must be by these children and again was pleased with his decision.
In due course, the man's parents aged and died. Thier son did not mourn them.
On the contrary, he considered himself blessed to now rule over the house by himself. His life was full of wealth, ease, and nothing but comfort.
The man was pleased with this life until he overheard 2 of his servants talking about him. One servant expressed pity for the man, since he had so much wealth and power, but was loved by no one. But the second laughed and wondered why a man with so much wealth and a great house had been unable to attract a wife.
This hit the man's pride very hard and determined to get himself a wife. A woman of great beauty, lineage, and wealth. One worthy of him. The man found such a woman and coveted her.
All who noticed the change in the man told the woman that she had succeeded in catching his eye where hundreds have failed. The woman, herself, was facinated and repelled by the man's attentions. Under the warmth of his flattery she sensed a cold and strangely remote person. But her parents deemed him a worthy suitor and agreed to the invitation of a huge feeast in her honor.
So the maiden sat on a throne next to the man at this feast. He dowsed her with words of tenderness he had stolen from poets, which he knew not the true meaning. The woman listend to this and replied "You speak well and I would be delighted by your attention if I thought you had a heart."
The man grinned and told the maiden to follow him to the basement, where he kept his treasure. Here in an enchanted casket was the man's beating heart. Long since removed, the heart had shrunk and was covered in long black hairs. The frightened maiden screamed "oh what have you done? Put it back where it belongs, I beseech you!"
Seeing that was necessary to please her, the man sliced his chest open and took his heart and placed it back into his chest. "Now you are healed and will feel true love!" The maiden exclaimed and embraced him.
The touch of her soft arms, the sound of her breath in his ear, and scent of her hair all pierced his newly awoken heart like spears. But in it's long exile his heart had grown strange and perverse.
The guest having noticed their absence went looking for the two and upon entering the basement found a horrid sight.
The maiden lay dead on the floor, her breast cut open and crouched beside her was the man, holind her heart in one bloody hand, which he licked and stroked vowing to exchange it with his own.
Trying to coax out the shriveled heart from his chest unsuccessfully, the man knew the heart had grown stronger than he was, and it refused to leave. Before the horror-struck eyes of the guests, the man grabbed a knife and swearing never to be mastered by his own heart, he hacked it from his chest.
For one moment the man was triumphant. With a heart clutched in each hand, the man fell across the maiden's body and died.
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Engy
- Posts: 2847
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Re: Halloween Spooktacular: Scarey Story Contest.
Tags: Rated H for 'Holy shit, that's a lot of blood!' and some gore too.
From your contact over at TF Industries, an Engy production, engineered to perfection.
Hotel of Hell
'Come for the night, stay for the rest of your life'
"I'm Mick. And I am stuck in this hotel... Heh... Not a normal one... Noooo, of all hotels I could pick, I took one with a serial killer in it... When I first arrived, it seemed like any other hotel. Lovely lobby. Good help at the desk. A bagagecarrier begging for a tip. Yep, like any other hotel. In the middle of the night, I was awakened by a scream. Not just any scream, a death scream. I immediately wanted to leave, but all windows and doors had been locked down. Dammit, they felt like they were welded shut! And now something is after us all! It's trying to kill us all!"
“Oh god, oh god, DAMMIT!” Mick yelled as he pulled on the bar of a door, but the door wouldn't budge “Why won't you open?!” he yelled when he suddenly heard another scream. He jumped around and started running again, trying to find an exit “Why me?” He groaned as he suddenly tripped over something. He fell face first into the ground and a crack was heard. “Ow, sunuvabitch” he grumbled as he felt his nose. He had broken it and blood was flowing out of it “As if this day wasn't bad enough” He muttered when he felt his pants getting wet. He looked down and his eyes went wide. He had tripped over a leg. Or at least what was still over of the leg. Horror and shock crept into Mick as he stared at the two legs and head that was laying there. Nothing else. Mick jumped up and looked around, suddenly seeing someone next to him. A hooded man completely dressed in black. From beneath the hood, only two red lights were visible. The man rose a hand, but Mick let out a scream before spinning around and running like shit.
When he looked back, he no longer saw the man and crashed into someone. Falling back, he looked up and saw the same man again, the red lights glowing even brighter now. Mick jumped up again and ran as fast as his legs could carry him. His heart was pounding like mad on his ribs, as his breathing went faster and faster. Sweat ran down his head, causing Mick to feel the salt of his sweat and the blood that was still running out of his nose. After a while, Mick slipped into a room, closing the door and pressing himself against the wall. He had his eyes closed as he tried to catch his breath, fear still master of his body “Fear is the mindkiller... Fear is-” Mick immediately stopped muttering when he felt something large crawl over his head. His hand searched for the light switch as he stayed completely still with the rest of his body. Once the lights turned on, he opened his eyes, seeing a big, hairy spider sitting on his forehead. In complete fear, he looked around, seeing that the room was covered in webs and equally sized spiders.
Mick screamed again as he hit the spider of his face, before fleeing out of the room, seeing those damn red lights again down the hallway. As he saw them moving towards him, he turned around and fled back to the lobby, where now more body parts had been collected.
“Oh god... What... Who...” He mumbled as he kept turning around in the middle of the lobby, surrounded by those bloody body parts. Mick felt himself going insane as he suddenly noticed that the heads that were laying on the ground started to roll. They soon were all looking at them and their mouths fell open.
“Hahahahaha!” They all went, the many heads laughing. Soon, other body parts and even objects in the lobby started to move as more and more laughs were heard. Mick grabbed his head as his eyes started to roll around in their sockets. Soon he joined in with the laughing, which then slowly turned into screams, at which point Mick fled once again.
He ran through hallways, up stairs, down stairs, past hundreds of rooms as he tried to find an exit. He then stopped when he heard something.
“Please... Please help me” Someone coughed, that was laying in a door opening, the door against his side “He... It got me... Earlier... It cut up my legs” the man coughed.
Mick got closer but then jumped back again as the man started to scream “Oh god, it grabbed my legs! Oh god, please help me! Don't let him kill me!” the man screamed as he slowly disappeared into the room, followed by death screams as the sound of flesh being ripped apart came from the room.
Mick in the mean time had started running again and once again hid himself in a random room. He put on the lights so as to make sure that this time it wasn't filled with spiders. He locked the door before leaning against the wall with his back. He sank to the floor, muttering “I'm... I'm so sorry” He obviously felt guilty that he hadn't tried to save the man from earlier, despite his own experiences by then. He covered his head in his hands, trying to calm himself again. His nose had stopped bleeding and the screaming had stopped.
After a few minutes, once he had calmed down again, he felt his leg becoming wet. Taking his head out of his hands, he saw that the room was covered in blood. And the amount of blood was rising. He stood up and soon he was standing up to his knees in blood. He looked around to see where the blood was coming from and horror once again filled his body. The blood was coming out of the television, mirror, clocks, pipes, hell, even out of the glasses on the nightstand. Mick turned around and tried to open the door, but also this one seemed to be welded shut.
“Oh come on!” Mick yelled as he slowly started to panic, standing up to his waist in blood now “Open, goddammit, open!” his yells turned into screams as he started to hit the door with his fists. The blood kept rising, up to his armpits, then up to his neck and then up to his mouth. Mick took a big breath before going down into the blood, still hitting the door. The room was full of blood now and Mick was running out of oxygen. As he felt that he wouldn't last long now, the door flew open and all the blood started flowing out of the room, forcing Mick to flow along. As he was floating down the hallway in the blood, screaming, the blood slowly started to turn into water. Other doors also flew open, releasing a giant amount of water, forcing Mick to go faster. Soon, he crashed against the wall with a large force and the water immediately disappeared.
Mick was still very wet, laying on the floor, coughing the mix of water and blood out.
“Please, let it end now” He begged to no one as he got onto his knees. He stood up and slowly walked further down the hallway. Turning into another hallway, it seemed to twist in front of him as at the end of the hallway he saw a door with light coming from underneath it. He saw shadows moving and he knew that either the killer was there, or other survivors. He slowly made his way down the hallway, the hotel being way to silent.
Standing in front of the door, he debated with himself whether he should enter. He then finally opened the door and looked around in the room, which was completely empty of people. It seemed the directors office. On top of the painting of presumably the owner was drawn a sign... A pentagram.
“Demons?” Mick muttered to himself before suddenly freezing into place as he felt a cold hand pressing onto his shoulder.
“Heh”
Snap.
From your contact over at TF Industries, an Engy production, engineered to perfection.
Hotel of Hell
'Come for the night, stay for the rest of your life'
"I'm Mick. And I am stuck in this hotel... Heh... Not a normal one... Noooo, of all hotels I could pick, I took one with a serial killer in it... When I first arrived, it seemed like any other hotel. Lovely lobby. Good help at the desk. A bagagecarrier begging for a tip. Yep, like any other hotel. In the middle of the night, I was awakened by a scream. Not just any scream, a death scream. I immediately wanted to leave, but all windows and doors had been locked down. Dammit, they felt like they were welded shut! And now something is after us all! It's trying to kill us all!"
“Oh god, oh god, DAMMIT!” Mick yelled as he pulled on the bar of a door, but the door wouldn't budge “Why won't you open?!” he yelled when he suddenly heard another scream. He jumped around and started running again, trying to find an exit “Why me?” He groaned as he suddenly tripped over something. He fell face first into the ground and a crack was heard. “Ow, sunuvabitch” he grumbled as he felt his nose. He had broken it and blood was flowing out of it “As if this day wasn't bad enough” He muttered when he felt his pants getting wet. He looked down and his eyes went wide. He had tripped over a leg. Or at least what was still over of the leg. Horror and shock crept into Mick as he stared at the two legs and head that was laying there. Nothing else. Mick jumped up and looked around, suddenly seeing someone next to him. A hooded man completely dressed in black. From beneath the hood, only two red lights were visible. The man rose a hand, but Mick let out a scream before spinning around and running like shit.
When he looked back, he no longer saw the man and crashed into someone. Falling back, he looked up and saw the same man again, the red lights glowing even brighter now. Mick jumped up again and ran as fast as his legs could carry him. His heart was pounding like mad on his ribs, as his breathing went faster and faster. Sweat ran down his head, causing Mick to feel the salt of his sweat and the blood that was still running out of his nose. After a while, Mick slipped into a room, closing the door and pressing himself against the wall. He had his eyes closed as he tried to catch his breath, fear still master of his body “Fear is the mindkiller... Fear is-” Mick immediately stopped muttering when he felt something large crawl over his head. His hand searched for the light switch as he stayed completely still with the rest of his body. Once the lights turned on, he opened his eyes, seeing a big, hairy spider sitting on his forehead. In complete fear, he looked around, seeing that the room was covered in webs and equally sized spiders.
Mick screamed again as he hit the spider of his face, before fleeing out of the room, seeing those damn red lights again down the hallway. As he saw them moving towards him, he turned around and fled back to the lobby, where now more body parts had been collected.
“Oh god... What... Who...” He mumbled as he kept turning around in the middle of the lobby, surrounded by those bloody body parts. Mick felt himself going insane as he suddenly noticed that the heads that were laying on the ground started to roll. They soon were all looking at them and their mouths fell open.
“Hahahahaha!” They all went, the many heads laughing. Soon, other body parts and even objects in the lobby started to move as more and more laughs were heard. Mick grabbed his head as his eyes started to roll around in their sockets. Soon he joined in with the laughing, which then slowly turned into screams, at which point Mick fled once again.
He ran through hallways, up stairs, down stairs, past hundreds of rooms as he tried to find an exit. He then stopped when he heard something.
“Please... Please help me” Someone coughed, that was laying in a door opening, the door against his side “He... It got me... Earlier... It cut up my legs” the man coughed.
Mick got closer but then jumped back again as the man started to scream “Oh god, it grabbed my legs! Oh god, please help me! Don't let him kill me!” the man screamed as he slowly disappeared into the room, followed by death screams as the sound of flesh being ripped apart came from the room.
Mick in the mean time had started running again and once again hid himself in a random room. He put on the lights so as to make sure that this time it wasn't filled with spiders. He locked the door before leaning against the wall with his back. He sank to the floor, muttering “I'm... I'm so sorry” He obviously felt guilty that he hadn't tried to save the man from earlier, despite his own experiences by then. He covered his head in his hands, trying to calm himself again. His nose had stopped bleeding and the screaming had stopped.
After a few minutes, once he had calmed down again, he felt his leg becoming wet. Taking his head out of his hands, he saw that the room was covered in blood. And the amount of blood was rising. He stood up and soon he was standing up to his knees in blood. He looked around to see where the blood was coming from and horror once again filled his body. The blood was coming out of the television, mirror, clocks, pipes, hell, even out of the glasses on the nightstand. Mick turned around and tried to open the door, but also this one seemed to be welded shut.
“Oh come on!” Mick yelled as he slowly started to panic, standing up to his waist in blood now “Open, goddammit, open!” his yells turned into screams as he started to hit the door with his fists. The blood kept rising, up to his armpits, then up to his neck and then up to his mouth. Mick took a big breath before going down into the blood, still hitting the door. The room was full of blood now and Mick was running out of oxygen. As he felt that he wouldn't last long now, the door flew open and all the blood started flowing out of the room, forcing Mick to flow along. As he was floating down the hallway in the blood, screaming, the blood slowly started to turn into water. Other doors also flew open, releasing a giant amount of water, forcing Mick to go faster. Soon, he crashed against the wall with a large force and the water immediately disappeared.
Mick was still very wet, laying on the floor, coughing the mix of water and blood out.
“Please, let it end now” He begged to no one as he got onto his knees. He stood up and slowly walked further down the hallway. Turning into another hallway, it seemed to twist in front of him as at the end of the hallway he saw a door with light coming from underneath it. He saw shadows moving and he knew that either the killer was there, or other survivors. He slowly made his way down the hallway, the hotel being way to silent.
Standing in front of the door, he debated with himself whether he should enter. He then finally opened the door and looked around in the room, which was completely empty of people. It seemed the directors office. On top of the painting of presumably the owner was drawn a sign... A pentagram.
“Demons?” Mick muttered to himself before suddenly freezing into place as he felt a cold hand pressing onto his shoulder.
“Heh”
Snap.
Achievement Hunter, Software Engineer, retired competitive Team Fortress 2 Engineer, professional snarker.
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zgwortz
- D.O.M.
- Posts: 648
- Joined: Thu Oct 23, 2008 7:58 pm
- Location: North of Phila, PA
Re: Halloween Spooktacular: Scarey Story Contest.
Content Warnings: Adult content, Kink (hey, it's me, after all 
), Gruesomeness.
A young man named Dirk was spending some time wandering the world. Always looking for someplace new, he travelled any way he could, using bus and train where available, hitchhiking or just walking from place to place when not. A handsome, charismatic fellow, everywhere he went, he found pretty girls to have fun with.
One day Dirk found himself far off the beaten trail in a tiny village in the foothills of the mountains in an obscure country he'd never heard of before. It had taken him days to get there - the only road to the village ran through the mountains in a twisty, winding route. But the scenery was gorgeous, and there was a pretty girl who made the trip worth it.
It was rather odd, however -- according to the maps, a large city lay only about 20 miles away on this side of the mountains. But no road went to the village from there, although a local map showed a couple of trails through the nearby forest to get there. Dirk thought it might be a good way to go when he had to leave. One day, as he was starting to realize he was coming close to outstaying his welcome, he asked the innkeeper at the small inn he was staying at why there was no road to the city.
"Ah, you see, young lad, any road to that thar city would be havin' ta run through the Old Forest. And tain't nobody goin' to try that 'round these parts." The innkeeper looked at Dirk as if he was daft to even think of the idea.
"The Old Forest?" asked Dirk. "Why would that be any trouble?"
The innkeeper looked around to make sure nobody was listening to them talk, then leaned down closer to Dirk and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "Well, ye see, there's Trolls livin' in them woods. Anyone who runs afoul of them gets eaten, or worse. Ye can hike through on the trails if you're careful and don't get them angry, but anyone tryin' ta cut a road through the forest would be a dead fool."
Dirk chuckled. "Trolls. Riiiight."
The innkeeper, missing the sarcasm in Dirk's voice, continued, "Aye, Trolls. Big ones. They hides under bridges and demand horrible tolls if-fen ye cross. Terrible big green hairy things, they are, strong, and like as not to gobble ye down in a couple of bites. And that's just the men Trolls. The women Trolls are much, much worse..."
About this time, a young man Dirk had befriended came running into the pub to tell Dirk that the father of the pretty girl he'd been spending time with had found out about it, and was gathering a bunch of the local men, and was talking about a wedding needing to happen. Dirk knew it was serious when they started talking about marrying. Fortunately, he moved quickly when he had to. In only a minute or so he had gotten his backpack from his room, had paid his tab to the innkeeper, and was out the door. With a quick glance, he could see several men at the outskirts of the village where the road through the mountains began, but ducked around a corner before they could see him. Good thing he wasn't going that way.
Instead, directing himself in the direction of the forest, he consulted the trail map he'd copied and spotted the start of the trail he was planning to take to the nearby city. It would be a pleasant hike, although he'd probably need to find some place to camp for the night half way.
Indeed, for several hours, it was a very pleasant hike. The forest was quite lovely, passing stream and brooke, tall trees all over, the trail well marked, the local wildlife fairly tame and not too skittish. But eventually, shadows lengthened and dusk quickly caught up to Dirk as he was following the trail winding up a hill by a ravine with a wide stream at the bottom.
He started keeping an eye out for a place to camp when he came upon the bridge over the ravine. On the other side, Dirk could see a small meadow, which would make an ideal camping spot. As he crossed the bridge, he thought briefly back to the superstitious innkeeper and laughed.
"Trolls, heh. I bet there are fairies too," he commented as he stepped off the bridge on the other side and started walking into the meadow.
"Nope. 'Taint no fairies in these woods. We ate them all," said a gruff voice from behind him.
Dirk froze. Surely not... It couldn't be. He slowly turned. Standing in front of him in the light of the setting sun, he could make out a huge creature, maybe 9 feet high, hair all over the place, with green skin, pointed teeth, yellow glowing eyes, and fingernails which looked putrid. Dirk rubbed his eyes as if he couldn't believe what he was seeing...
The troll grinned, which unnerved Dirk even more. "Yah, we're real, so don't get any funny ideas. Now, about the matter of your toll..."
"T-toll?" asked Dirk.
"Yah, the toll. Now, back in the old days, we used to charge an arm and a leg, take every coin they had, that sort of thing, but that was bad for business. Not many repeat customers, you see?"
"W-well... That's a r-relief." Dirk's knees were shaking as he tried to get his mind past the concept that he was actually talking to a Troll. "N-now what do you c-charge?"
The troll grinned again and pulled out a large, bloody, butchers knife. "Now, we only charge the arm."
At this point, Dirk's mind may have still been trying to deal with the concept that he was talking to a Troll, but Dirk's feet were way ahead of him. Running. On the trail in the fading sunlight, as fast as he possibly could, which was pretty darn fast.
Behind him, he could hear the Troll give a roar and a loud shout which echoed through the woods, "Herbert! We got ourselves a runner! " The sound of pounding footsteps followed behind him, not gaining, but not falling far behind either. A minute or two of running, and Dirk rounded a curve in the trail, when he heard a roar from ahead of him and yet another Troll started charging in his direction.
Looking around quickly, Dirk noticed a side trail which he immediately turned and headed down. Not quite as wide as the main trail, it was more than wide enough for the Trolls to follow behind him. Slowly, he started to gain ground on them when he heard another shout from behind him. "Jayne! We're chasin' a runner and he's headed for the lake!"
Dirk kept on running, though, looking for another side trail as the lake came into view in the distance. Standing near it, looking around in the dim twilight, was the biggest troll he'd seen yet, easily 12 feet tall if not bigger. Fortunately for Dirk, it was facing the other way from him and hadn't seen him yet, and just then, he spotted a narrow but still well trodden side trail, and ducked into it, running for all his life. With luck, they wouldn't figure out which trail he had taken until he was so far ahead they wouldn't catch up.
After a couple minutes of running, he could dimly hear the three Trolls shouting at each other asking where he got to, but he kept on running until he couldn't hear them anymore. It was almost completely dark now, and it would have been difficult to continue running anyway - he'd likely run into a tree, so he slowed to a walk and tried to catch his breath.
As he kept walking and it kept getting darker, he realized he had no idea where this trail led, or how to get back to the main trail without risking being found by the Trolls. About then, he noticed a pale light up ahead along the trail, and after following it for a few more minutes, found himself in a clearing in the woods with a large stone building in it. The building was maybe 15 feet tall, with big double doors, and a small lamp burning just outside.
He approached cautiously. As he did, he saw a woman come around the corner of the building carrying a bucket of water. The woman was small, with light blonde hair that glistened by the starlight, and was wearing a heavy cloak. She walked up to the door and put the bucket down as she fumbled for the latch on the door.
"Excuse me," said Dirk, stepping into the light.
The woman turned around, startled. "Who's there?" Shading her eyes from the light, she looked at him.
"I'm Dirk, miss, and you wouldn't believe the day I just had."
The woman looked appraisingly at him. "I just heard some Trolls in the distance arguing. Was that your fault?"
"Um... I think so. One of them threatened to cut off my arm, so I ran, and they chased me, and I lost them but now I'm here. You'll have to pardon me if I seem a bit hysterical, but I didn't think there were such things as Trolls until today."
The woman stared at him, looking him up and down. Suddenly, she smiled, the most beautiful smile Dirk had ever seen. "Well, you'd best come in and stay the night then. My brothers are out there making sure nothing bothers us, so this is as safe a place you could find in these woods." She picked up her bucket and led the way inside.
The inside of the building was one big room, with a large fireplace to the left, a roaring fire going and a big pot of some kind of stew bubbling over it, smelling a bit of pork, a set of bookcases, cupboards, and closets along the back wall, and a large, ornately carved, four poster wooden bed to the right. A wooden table with an open book face down on it, and a single chair sat close to the fireplace. The inside of the building was very warm.
As Dirk came in, the woman closed the door, and placed a heavy wooden bar through slots in front of it. From this side, it looked like it could withstand a siege. Dirk relaxed for the first time since he'd first seen the Troll.
The woman carried the bucket over next to the fireplace. "It's safe now. Relax. My name is Ilyse, and there's warmth and food here to comfort you. Take off your jacket and make yourself comfortable." She gestured at the chair.
Dirk took off his jacket and hung it on a peg by the door, then walked towards the chair. He was about to sit down when he froze.
Following her own advice, Ilyse had removed the heavy cloak she was wearing and hung it next to Dirk's, revealing the knee length silky white dress she was wearing underneath. The dress left very little to the imagination, flowing and clinging as she walked, and so thin as to be nearly translucent. Her full breasts and hard nipples were clearly outlined, as was her nearly perfect bottom, as it was clear she was wearing nothing underneath the dress. As she stepped between him and the fireplace, the light from the fire shown clear through her clothing, outlining her clearly. She was as near to naked as she could be yet still be dressed.
She turned back to him, a bowl of stew in her hands, and gestured. "Sit! You should eat something." Dirk quickly sat, his eyes glued to her body. "I'm sorry I only have the one chair and bowl, so we'll need to share." With that, she sat on his lap, and holding the bowl and a spoon, started feeding him.
Dirk was no fool - he knew when a woman was interested in him, and Ilyse was showing all the signs. Over the next hour, feeding led to caresses, then kisses, then some fondling and before long they were both undressed and making out, and it wasn't very long before that the two were on the bed, and she was starting to tease him in ways which were making his blood boil.
But when he went to take things further, she held a finger to his lips and said, "Uh uh... Not so quickly. I like to take my time. It's more fun for me that way and I think you'll find it a lot more fun as well." As she spoke, she reached into a drawer in the dresser to the side of the bed and pulled out a long scarf. "Let me tie your hands up and I'll give you the best night of your life."
Dirk was no stranger to kinky fun, and quickly agreed. His hands were tied to the headboard, and seconds later, his legs were tied as well. And then she began to please him like no other girl ever had. She used every technique of pleasing a man he'd ever heard of, and a lot he hadn't. When he thought he couldn't go any more, she touched him in interesting places and brought him around to her way of thinking, again. And again. All night long. And her own pleasure equally intense until finally, hours later, she gave out one great scream and collapsed, unconscious, on top of him. Exhausted, he reflected that it was indeed the best night of his life, as he too fell asleep.
Hours later, Dirk awoke to the sight of bright sunlight shining through the narrow windows above the fireplace. His hands and feet were still tied, and Ilyse was still laying naked on top of him. Smiling and kissing him, she whispered, "One last time, lover...", but suddenly there was a knock at the door.
"Oops, that's my brothers. Sorry." Ilyse crawled off of him, climbed out of bed, and started walking to the door.
Dirk, laying there naked, tied and a bit turned on, struggled briefly against the ties, but they were fairly effective. "Hey! Shouldn't you untie me first so we can get dressed?"
Ilyse grinned at him as she lifted the bar, her naked body gleaming in the sunlight, replying, "No, I think it's better this way." With that she pulled opened the door and walked back towards the bed.
And three Trolls came walking through the door, looking just as rank as they had yesterday. The big one had to duck a bit to get inside.
Dirk's eyes nearly popped out as he saw the trolls come in. "T-t-those? Are your b-brothers?"
The tall one said, "Yeah, what's it to yer?"
One of the others looked at Ilyse and said, "Cor, sis. Did you really have to keep him all night? We was gettin' hungry out there!"
Ilyse replied, "Yeah, but he was *so* much fun in here." She reached over to lick Dirk in a sensitive spot. "And *so* tasty too."
The tall one commented, "Sheesh, You're *such* a Trollop, sis..."
And then they carved up Dirk and ate him.
), Gruesomeness. A young man named Dirk was spending some time wandering the world. Always looking for someplace new, he travelled any way he could, using bus and train where available, hitchhiking or just walking from place to place when not. A handsome, charismatic fellow, everywhere he went, he found pretty girls to have fun with.
One day Dirk found himself far off the beaten trail in a tiny village in the foothills of the mountains in an obscure country he'd never heard of before. It had taken him days to get there - the only road to the village ran through the mountains in a twisty, winding route. But the scenery was gorgeous, and there was a pretty girl who made the trip worth it.
It was rather odd, however -- according to the maps, a large city lay only about 20 miles away on this side of the mountains. But no road went to the village from there, although a local map showed a couple of trails through the nearby forest to get there. Dirk thought it might be a good way to go when he had to leave. One day, as he was starting to realize he was coming close to outstaying his welcome, he asked the innkeeper at the small inn he was staying at why there was no road to the city.
"Ah, you see, young lad, any road to that thar city would be havin' ta run through the Old Forest. And tain't nobody goin' to try that 'round these parts." The innkeeper looked at Dirk as if he was daft to even think of the idea.
"The Old Forest?" asked Dirk. "Why would that be any trouble?"
The innkeeper looked around to make sure nobody was listening to them talk, then leaned down closer to Dirk and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "Well, ye see, there's Trolls livin' in them woods. Anyone who runs afoul of them gets eaten, or worse. Ye can hike through on the trails if you're careful and don't get them angry, but anyone tryin' ta cut a road through the forest would be a dead fool."
Dirk chuckled. "Trolls. Riiiight."
The innkeeper, missing the sarcasm in Dirk's voice, continued, "Aye, Trolls. Big ones. They hides under bridges and demand horrible tolls if-fen ye cross. Terrible big green hairy things, they are, strong, and like as not to gobble ye down in a couple of bites. And that's just the men Trolls. The women Trolls are much, much worse..."
About this time, a young man Dirk had befriended came running into the pub to tell Dirk that the father of the pretty girl he'd been spending time with had found out about it, and was gathering a bunch of the local men, and was talking about a wedding needing to happen. Dirk knew it was serious when they started talking about marrying. Fortunately, he moved quickly when he had to. In only a minute or so he had gotten his backpack from his room, had paid his tab to the innkeeper, and was out the door. With a quick glance, he could see several men at the outskirts of the village where the road through the mountains began, but ducked around a corner before they could see him. Good thing he wasn't going that way.
Instead, directing himself in the direction of the forest, he consulted the trail map he'd copied and spotted the start of the trail he was planning to take to the nearby city. It would be a pleasant hike, although he'd probably need to find some place to camp for the night half way.
Indeed, for several hours, it was a very pleasant hike. The forest was quite lovely, passing stream and brooke, tall trees all over, the trail well marked, the local wildlife fairly tame and not too skittish. But eventually, shadows lengthened and dusk quickly caught up to Dirk as he was following the trail winding up a hill by a ravine with a wide stream at the bottom.
He started keeping an eye out for a place to camp when he came upon the bridge over the ravine. On the other side, Dirk could see a small meadow, which would make an ideal camping spot. As he crossed the bridge, he thought briefly back to the superstitious innkeeper and laughed.
"Trolls, heh. I bet there are fairies too," he commented as he stepped off the bridge on the other side and started walking into the meadow.
"Nope. 'Taint no fairies in these woods. We ate them all," said a gruff voice from behind him.
Dirk froze. Surely not... It couldn't be. He slowly turned. Standing in front of him in the light of the setting sun, he could make out a huge creature, maybe 9 feet high, hair all over the place, with green skin, pointed teeth, yellow glowing eyes, and fingernails which looked putrid. Dirk rubbed his eyes as if he couldn't believe what he was seeing...
The troll grinned, which unnerved Dirk even more. "Yah, we're real, so don't get any funny ideas. Now, about the matter of your toll..."
"T-toll?" asked Dirk.
"Yah, the toll. Now, back in the old days, we used to charge an arm and a leg, take every coin they had, that sort of thing, but that was bad for business. Not many repeat customers, you see?"
"W-well... That's a r-relief." Dirk's knees were shaking as he tried to get his mind past the concept that he was actually talking to a Troll. "N-now what do you c-charge?"
The troll grinned again and pulled out a large, bloody, butchers knife. "Now, we only charge the arm."
At this point, Dirk's mind may have still been trying to deal with the concept that he was talking to a Troll, but Dirk's feet were way ahead of him. Running. On the trail in the fading sunlight, as fast as he possibly could, which was pretty darn fast.
Behind him, he could hear the Troll give a roar and a loud shout which echoed through the woods, "Herbert! We got ourselves a runner! " The sound of pounding footsteps followed behind him, not gaining, but not falling far behind either. A minute or two of running, and Dirk rounded a curve in the trail, when he heard a roar from ahead of him and yet another Troll started charging in his direction.
Looking around quickly, Dirk noticed a side trail which he immediately turned and headed down. Not quite as wide as the main trail, it was more than wide enough for the Trolls to follow behind him. Slowly, he started to gain ground on them when he heard another shout from behind him. "Jayne! We're chasin' a runner and he's headed for the lake!"
Dirk kept on running, though, looking for another side trail as the lake came into view in the distance. Standing near it, looking around in the dim twilight, was the biggest troll he'd seen yet, easily 12 feet tall if not bigger. Fortunately for Dirk, it was facing the other way from him and hadn't seen him yet, and just then, he spotted a narrow but still well trodden side trail, and ducked into it, running for all his life. With luck, they wouldn't figure out which trail he had taken until he was so far ahead they wouldn't catch up.
After a couple minutes of running, he could dimly hear the three Trolls shouting at each other asking where he got to, but he kept on running until he couldn't hear them anymore. It was almost completely dark now, and it would have been difficult to continue running anyway - he'd likely run into a tree, so he slowed to a walk and tried to catch his breath.
As he kept walking and it kept getting darker, he realized he had no idea where this trail led, or how to get back to the main trail without risking being found by the Trolls. About then, he noticed a pale light up ahead along the trail, and after following it for a few more minutes, found himself in a clearing in the woods with a large stone building in it. The building was maybe 15 feet tall, with big double doors, and a small lamp burning just outside.
He approached cautiously. As he did, he saw a woman come around the corner of the building carrying a bucket of water. The woman was small, with light blonde hair that glistened by the starlight, and was wearing a heavy cloak. She walked up to the door and put the bucket down as she fumbled for the latch on the door.
"Excuse me," said Dirk, stepping into the light.
The woman turned around, startled. "Who's there?" Shading her eyes from the light, she looked at him.
"I'm Dirk, miss, and you wouldn't believe the day I just had."
The woman looked appraisingly at him. "I just heard some Trolls in the distance arguing. Was that your fault?"
"Um... I think so. One of them threatened to cut off my arm, so I ran, and they chased me, and I lost them but now I'm here. You'll have to pardon me if I seem a bit hysterical, but I didn't think there were such things as Trolls until today."
The woman stared at him, looking him up and down. Suddenly, she smiled, the most beautiful smile Dirk had ever seen. "Well, you'd best come in and stay the night then. My brothers are out there making sure nothing bothers us, so this is as safe a place you could find in these woods." She picked up her bucket and led the way inside.
The inside of the building was one big room, with a large fireplace to the left, a roaring fire going and a big pot of some kind of stew bubbling over it, smelling a bit of pork, a set of bookcases, cupboards, and closets along the back wall, and a large, ornately carved, four poster wooden bed to the right. A wooden table with an open book face down on it, and a single chair sat close to the fireplace. The inside of the building was very warm.
As Dirk came in, the woman closed the door, and placed a heavy wooden bar through slots in front of it. From this side, it looked like it could withstand a siege. Dirk relaxed for the first time since he'd first seen the Troll.
The woman carried the bucket over next to the fireplace. "It's safe now. Relax. My name is Ilyse, and there's warmth and food here to comfort you. Take off your jacket and make yourself comfortable." She gestured at the chair.
Dirk took off his jacket and hung it on a peg by the door, then walked towards the chair. He was about to sit down when he froze.
Following her own advice, Ilyse had removed the heavy cloak she was wearing and hung it next to Dirk's, revealing the knee length silky white dress she was wearing underneath. The dress left very little to the imagination, flowing and clinging as she walked, and so thin as to be nearly translucent. Her full breasts and hard nipples were clearly outlined, as was her nearly perfect bottom, as it was clear she was wearing nothing underneath the dress. As she stepped between him and the fireplace, the light from the fire shown clear through her clothing, outlining her clearly. She was as near to naked as she could be yet still be dressed.
She turned back to him, a bowl of stew in her hands, and gestured. "Sit! You should eat something." Dirk quickly sat, his eyes glued to her body. "I'm sorry I only have the one chair and bowl, so we'll need to share." With that, she sat on his lap, and holding the bowl and a spoon, started feeding him.
Dirk was no fool - he knew when a woman was interested in him, and Ilyse was showing all the signs. Over the next hour, feeding led to caresses, then kisses, then some fondling and before long they were both undressed and making out, and it wasn't very long before that the two were on the bed, and she was starting to tease him in ways which were making his blood boil.
But when he went to take things further, she held a finger to his lips and said, "Uh uh... Not so quickly. I like to take my time. It's more fun for me that way and I think you'll find it a lot more fun as well." As she spoke, she reached into a drawer in the dresser to the side of the bed and pulled out a long scarf. "Let me tie your hands up and I'll give you the best night of your life."
Dirk was no stranger to kinky fun, and quickly agreed. His hands were tied to the headboard, and seconds later, his legs were tied as well. And then she began to please him like no other girl ever had. She used every technique of pleasing a man he'd ever heard of, and a lot he hadn't. When he thought he couldn't go any more, she touched him in interesting places and brought him around to her way of thinking, again. And again. All night long. And her own pleasure equally intense until finally, hours later, she gave out one great scream and collapsed, unconscious, on top of him. Exhausted, he reflected that it was indeed the best night of his life, as he too fell asleep.
Hours later, Dirk awoke to the sight of bright sunlight shining through the narrow windows above the fireplace. His hands and feet were still tied, and Ilyse was still laying naked on top of him. Smiling and kissing him, she whispered, "One last time, lover...", but suddenly there was a knock at the door.
"Oops, that's my brothers. Sorry." Ilyse crawled off of him, climbed out of bed, and started walking to the door.
Dirk, laying there naked, tied and a bit turned on, struggled briefly against the ties, but they were fairly effective. "Hey! Shouldn't you untie me first so we can get dressed?"
Ilyse grinned at him as she lifted the bar, her naked body gleaming in the sunlight, replying, "No, I think it's better this way." With that she pulled opened the door and walked back towards the bed.
And three Trolls came walking through the door, looking just as rank as they had yesterday. The big one had to duck a bit to get inside.
Dirk's eyes nearly popped out as he saw the trolls come in. "T-t-those? Are your b-brothers?"
The tall one said, "Yeah, what's it to yer?"
One of the others looked at Ilyse and said, "Cor, sis. Did you really have to keep him all night? We was gettin' hungry out there!"
Ilyse replied, "Yeah, but he was *so* much fun in here." She reached over to lick Dirk in a sensitive spot. "And *so* tasty too."
The tall one commented, "Sheesh, You're *such* a Trollop, sis..."
And then they carved up Dirk and ate him.
-->Steve
D.O.M.
D.O.M.
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Don Alexander
- Dr. Ebil SithMod
- Posts: 28238
- Joined: Sat Aug 30, 2008 11:26 am
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Re: Halloween Spooktacular: Scarey Story Contest.
STRANGE EONS
Rated M for Madness! 
Whether it was just pure chance or a real quirk of fate, perhaps even the cause itself, that the first of the Undying was a suicide attempt will never be known. For who today has the capacity or the information to think about such things?
Miriam Carningale - that is, Dr. Miriam Carningale - had had enough of life. In her just about 30 years, she had worked hard, each and every day, to fulfill her lifelong dream of helping humanity by becoming a doctor. She had finally fulfilled that dream - and yet, below that dream lay another sphere, a plane of her subconcious, the driving force. Some may have called her a typical career woman, but in truth she was just the opposite. In her heart of hearts, she was a pure romantic. It was something she had never really noticed before, she had thought of herself as altruistic, wanting to become a doctor, when in truth, she was a pure egoist, and in search of recognition by the hateful world that surrounded her. She didn't know if she should blame her parents, or her genes, or whatever, but she had grown up without the bodily endowments other girls could luxuriate in - the same bodily endowments that drew men as carrion draws flies. And so the cheerleaders got the football players, and she was left with nothing. Sure, she had a sharp mind, a mind that had brought her this far, but whereas the other girls had been able to do the things she had secretly longed to do, she had spent her days studying, reading, no, devouring books, and fulfilling the image of the gray mouse. And then, finally, in her 25th year of bleary existence, Michael had come, like the archangel himself, and had abducted her to paradise. A man, not only good looking, but also a man who respected her just for what she was, who found joy in a romantic evening dinner by candlelight - combined with a discussion on polymerase chain reaction. Yes, that was what she had thought. A year after meeting, they had married, and the following years were the most fulfilled of here life. And then it had happened, suddenly, like a thunderbolt from heaven, no decline before, nothing - Michael had just wandered off, with a woman who had exchanged most of her brain tissue for her mammary glands - the worst thing was that she actually even was blonde, just the perfect horrible, rotten cliché!!! And it was all too much for her - standing outside of paradise without being let in was bad enough, but being cast out after having drunk its nectar - it simply shattered her. I was never meant to be - those were her last thoughts as she, staring straight ahead, stepped off the platform and right in front of the inrushing subway train. She didn't even have time to drop, the front of the train smacked into her head on, tossing her away like not much more than a rag doll. Bones snapped, pulverized, organs ripped, agony inflated within, and blackness, that allwonderful mother, smothered her against its breast.
And then she awoke again. Death is a lot of people bending over you, was her first thought. The next one was that she was darned hungry, and also darned cold. Somebody, she only noticed his unbelieving eyes, helped her up. "She's unharmed!" "Thank Mary and the Holy Ghost!!" "Impossible..." It was all Babylonian babble around her. She looked down at herself. Sure, her clothes were a complete loss; she probably looked like some kind of a punk, and she was smeared and dirty... and alive. She finally realized it. But it was impossible!! She acutely remembered the wash of agony, the enfolding blackness. And yet she was alive... Again? Still? She wasn't even sore. Actually, with the exception of this horrible, gnawing hunger, she felt better than in a long time. Echoing words of a man two millenia dead, she said, slightly croaking with emotion: "I am hungry." And she was fed.
Later, her thoughts returned to more or less normal - that is, if you could call her train of thoughts in the days before this - this event - normal. She had tried to step out of life, and yet death had refused her. She didn't care if the specialists who were examining her thought she was a complete miracle. Her depression had her in its shadowy grip again, and her goal remained the same as before stepping in front of the subway train. Desparate people do desparate things, and she used her chance as soon as the guys in white were out of her room for a short while. It was a seven-story drop from her hospital room, and she hit head first. Blackness came immediatly - and she woke up again. She was lying on the wet ground, rain drizzling down on her, mixing with her tears... And she was hungry again.
In the following days, she tried it thrice more, and then she gave up. Her case was probably the best documented, since it was the first, but it was not the last. Oh no, it was not the last...
"Once we were afraid of people dying in droves from some kind of plague, and now, nobody out there wants to die anymore." Daniel Jefferson's statement was carried away by the soft Pacific wind, but Arthur Clark caught it anyway.
"Yeah, it should be impossible. I think it's hilarious that nobody has found an explanation for this yet," Daniel added.
"Oh, it's not that the process hasn't been analyzed extensively. Say, you suffer normally fatal damage to your body - injury by weapons, collision, falling, etc. So your body simply heals itself, zips up the holes, reknits the bones. It's just like the normal healing process, only in hyperspeed. It uses up a lot of energy, and you come back wanting to eat an ox. Which leads to the next point. Try to starve yourself, or dehydrate yourself, and you just enter a kind of hibernation, all bodily functions wind down, until somebody waters you again. It hasn't been going on long enough, but it's probably possible to mummify yourself in time. Disease. No chance. Your immune system converts from National Guard to Navy SEALs or Delta Force, and simply purges you. AIDS, Ebola, even cancer. Nothing doing. Poison. Another loser. Your body just breaks the stuff down, be it too much salt, cyanide or VX. And elemental poisons like mercury or plutonium are simply expelled without doing damage. Let's take a bigger step. Bombs! Rip somebody apart! Remember that old flick, Terminator 2? The pieces just melt together again, and within the minute, you're back among the living. And hungry as hell, of course. Nobody has tried atomics yet, but I'll give you a prognosis: set someone upon a surface nuclear explosion, and within half an hour, he'll walk out of ground zero, naked and smiling. Same goes with fire. Send someone up the smokestack, he'll reform a mile high, drop, get squashed, reform again and run to the next hot dog stand."
"All this is fine and dandy, but what's the cause, Arthur?? I mean, this has never happened before!"
"Of course it hasn't, Dan. I mean, I'm no biologist or physicist, I can't give you an answer that has anything to do with thermodynamics or quantum tunneling. As far as I understood it, this thing, this Undeath, as they call it, is actually possible within Heisenberg's whatchamacallit. The pure chance of a human being being blasted to bits and reforming within the energy continuum is like ten raised to the minus umpteenth power, but it's theoretically possible. Guy once computed how high the chance was of a mouse surviving for a whole week on the surface of the sun. If you put one of the Undying on the surface of the sun, he'd turn to plasma, get blown into space, reform, freeze in the vacuum, enter Earth's atmosphere by chance a billion years later, burn up again, reform, drop, etc. Finally he'd wake up, not knowing how much time had passed. It's... No, I absolutely don't understand it. It's completely freaky. Especially since it seems to be spreading more and more rapidly."
"Are you one of the Undying, Art?"
"Are you?? If you try and fail, you'd never know it!" He chuckled. "No, I'm afraid to try. There still are people dying out there. And I'm not the guy to throw my life away."
"What do ya say? Will the day come when nobody is able to die?"
"It sure seems to be the way we're heading. I mean, look how the world governments are reacting. In China, it has become illegal to conceive, and there are mass sterilization campaigns getting under way. Look, in the last six months, the world population has jumped by over 300 million people, just because a lot of people haven't had the good graces of dying away peacefully. I mean, it's not like anybody will be starving..."
"You know, I've been thinking..."
"Really?"
Dan punched him in his side.
"Hey, watch out, you big drillhole, you could get me killed!!"
The two men laughed at the sinking Pacific sun, leaning over the rail of the aging yet still trustworthy Glomar Challenger II, comissioned in '05 for exploratory deep sea drilling.
"So, high lord of the rotating bit, what are your thoughts??"
"Well, I've tried to view all this with a little bit of, well, esotericism. Of course, there are millions who are doing the same, drivel about the Second Coming and the Dawn of the New Age. But... Well, this is a little hard. It's like Death... Well, Death is off on vacation, and has neglected his job. Maybe, when he comes back, he'll see what has happened and try to refill his quota as quickly as possible?"
"Death on vacation? Have you read too much Terry Pratchett?"
"Terry what?"
"Pratchett. Weird fantasy author, end of the last millenium. Haven't read any myself, just heard some stories. In his books, Death is a personality, and he always talks IN CAPITAL LETTERS - perhaps because he thinks he's important or something. Well, in one book, he quits his job out of boredom or something like that. Perhaps Pratchett was right?"
He massaged his scruffy beard while the sun ignited the waves.
"Naa... It's another author I've been thinking of. Guy named H. P. Lovecraft, that being Howard Phillips. Been dead probably a century or so. He had this weird pantheon of unspeakable deities from beyond the voids between the stars, and they had been once and will be again, because, according to Lovecraft, 'That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange eons even death may die.'"
"So we're living in strange eons, eh?? Reminds me of that Chinese proverb - and curse: 'May you live in interesting times!'"
"Well, who are we to deny that these are strange times?? I mean, here we are, in the southern Pacific doldrums, out to investigate a gigantic seamount that is rising, without any visible volcanic or earthquake activity, toward the surface with incredible speed."
"Shouldn't we be in the target area soon?"
"Yeah, let's go down."
And as the two men left the deck, the Pacific night fell, and, toward the north, near the horizon, the bull's eye, Aldebaran, flickered and balefully cast it's red light upon the still peaceful ocean.
The sonar mapping room of the Glomar Challenger II had just recently been updated. The images of the 3-D doppler pulse sonar were continously being projected into a large holoprojector, almost eight cubic meters in volume. He'd worked with this ship for three years, but Arthur always thought it an impressive display of modern technology.
"Sweep beam forward, 04-75°.", he commanded, and the 3-D view in the holo-p changed rapidly. And there it was.
"My gosh, it's... it's risen more than five hundred meters since the last satellite Georadar report!! And that was only twelve hours ago!" Dan just couldn't imagine what force drove up the pillar - for it was a pillar by now, about one square kilometer on top, jutting up from the nearly five kilometer deep abyssal plain, with sheer cliff walls. It was only 300 meters below the ocean surface, and it would break out in a few hours - if it didn't start growing any faster!! It was about five kilometers away, and they were heading directly toward it.
"Looks like I'm out of my job. Who needs a deep sea drilling engineer when you can just walk up on the beach at midnight??"
"We have the next Georadar scan coming on line now," one of the sonar engineers remarked.
"Combine it with our own real-time scan to get a multilevel 3-D picture. Highest resolution, please."
"Coming up."
And for the first time, they really saw the top of the seamount. It wasn't flat, as they had expected (since there had been nothing but flat abyssal plain there two months before) - it had structure. Structure that should not be there.
Dan's mouth was hanging open: "Is that a city I'm looking at??"
"Dimensions!!"
Within seconds, the advanced sonar was feeding the structure dimensions into the holo-p, where they popped up next to the more obvious features. A pyramid nearly 200 meters high, its tip less than 100 meters under the surface of the Pacific Ocean - and rising. Majestic streets stretching out in a star form, all the way to the lip of the abyss, where they dropped away to nothing. Assorted other buildings, arches, obelisks, temples.
"I'm not seeing this."
"What is it???"
"Well, guys, I'm also not an archeologist, but that doesn't look so much like a normal city but more like a temple district. The central pyramid, all the symmetries... Like Angkor Wat, or Karnak, or the things in the Middle American jungles."
"But, Arthur, we're not in Egypt or in Nicaragua, but in the middle of nowhere, 500 kilometers west of the Marquesas, 1000 kilometers north of Tahiti. Nothing here but fish and water, water everywhere!! It's... it's utterly impossible!!!"
"Remember, Dan - Strange Eons! Crew, give me a view of the base of that pillar."
The sonar beam looked down.
"Yeah, yeah, that's it. See there, sediment fans, ripples. Whatever this city is, it was buried beneath thousands of years of sediments, and this seamount pushed it out, pushed it through, and all the sediment washed out. Must have incredible tensile strength to survive that battering."
"What do you mean, thousands of years?!"
"Do you think mankind built this city?? On a five and a half kilometer deep abyssal plain?? You've got to be kidding. I'd say, this is the first sign of extraterrestial life we've found on earth."
"But how is it coming up?? And why? Why now?? I mean, we've got enough weirdness going on around here on our little blue marble in space!! I need a drink!"
Dan was really getting agitated, and who would blame him? So he had just gotten out the Scotch bottle (which should have been saved for the party at the end of a sucessful mission), when suddenly, a gigantic wave rocked the ship, and another one. Arthur scrambled to his feet, for a while ignoring the smashed Scotch bottle Dan was wistfully looking at.
"Align sonar!! Get this bucket stable! Something must be happening on the top! And get a deckhand to clean up this mess!"
Trembling, the sonar picture climbed the seamount's incredible flank - and climbed on, for in the short while they had been looking at the bottom, the mount had risen another 200 meters, and the pyramid and the first high arches were breaking the surface - no wonder they had been swamped by a tidal wave!
"Send message to Hawaii, Tahiti, Anchorage, Chile, and wherever else! They've got a tsunami coming their way!"
A deckhand, a young Samoan, had entered with a bucket and a rag, and froze, looking at the image of the sonar, the city which was still rising out of the sea. It wasn't that he had never seen the sonar image before, or that he wasn't accustomed to the technology. He was a child of the 21st century, and not a primitive islander. And yet he shook, as ancient racial memory surfaced within him, the terrors of 50.000 years past, when the Star Lords had set the Pacific boiling, and THEY had come!! "R'Lyeh!" he stammered. "R'LYEH!!!!" He fell to his knees, ignoring the sharp pain of Scotch-soaked glass shards biting into his kneecaps. "Ija!!!! N'Gayh!!!! Cthulhu!!!!! Yog-Sothoth!!!!!"
The pyramid exploded.
Seconds later, the incredible thundering sound washed over them, rocking the ship. It hit Arthur and Daniel as they were just climbing up to deck, and they finally made it outside, each a few bruises richer. It wasn't dark outside, for to the north, a new star cast its unforgiving eye upon the Last Days - the moonbright supernova that had been Aldebaran before the pyramid exploded - or was it the other way around?? The Stars were Right. And the sea was boiling, foaming, playing with the Glomar Challenger. Fighting for a hold on the railing, the two crewmen gazed over at the ancient city that had finally returned to the surface. They gazed over at the place where IT had lain for millenia, dreaming, not dead. To where ITs timeless sleep had been upset, and where IT was rising, thunderous cascades of ocean water pouring from ITs massive shoulders, dripping from ITs immeasurable tentacles, ITs abominable claws. And as IT cast ITs multi-faceted gaze of Evil upon Daniel Jefferson and Arthur Clark and the wallowing Glomar Challenger, their sanity escaped into the black void between the stars, and yet they knew that this was hell, for they would never, ever die until the Elder Gods awakened and sent the Great Old Ones back to their timeless sleep, and the New Age would dawn.
And then Great Cthulhu started moving...
"That is not dead which can eternal lie...
...and with strange eons even death may die."
- Howard Phillips Lovecraft, "The Nameless City"
Rated M for Madness! Whether it was just pure chance or a real quirk of fate, perhaps even the cause itself, that the first of the Undying was a suicide attempt will never be known. For who today has the capacity or the information to think about such things?
Miriam Carningale - that is, Dr. Miriam Carningale - had had enough of life. In her just about 30 years, she had worked hard, each and every day, to fulfill her lifelong dream of helping humanity by becoming a doctor. She had finally fulfilled that dream - and yet, below that dream lay another sphere, a plane of her subconcious, the driving force. Some may have called her a typical career woman, but in truth she was just the opposite. In her heart of hearts, she was a pure romantic. It was something she had never really noticed before, she had thought of herself as altruistic, wanting to become a doctor, when in truth, she was a pure egoist, and in search of recognition by the hateful world that surrounded her. She didn't know if she should blame her parents, or her genes, or whatever, but she had grown up without the bodily endowments other girls could luxuriate in - the same bodily endowments that drew men as carrion draws flies. And so the cheerleaders got the football players, and she was left with nothing. Sure, she had a sharp mind, a mind that had brought her this far, but whereas the other girls had been able to do the things she had secretly longed to do, she had spent her days studying, reading, no, devouring books, and fulfilling the image of the gray mouse. And then, finally, in her 25th year of bleary existence, Michael had come, like the archangel himself, and had abducted her to paradise. A man, not only good looking, but also a man who respected her just for what she was, who found joy in a romantic evening dinner by candlelight - combined with a discussion on polymerase chain reaction. Yes, that was what she had thought. A year after meeting, they had married, and the following years were the most fulfilled of here life. And then it had happened, suddenly, like a thunderbolt from heaven, no decline before, nothing - Michael had just wandered off, with a woman who had exchanged most of her brain tissue for her mammary glands - the worst thing was that she actually even was blonde, just the perfect horrible, rotten cliché!!! And it was all too much for her - standing outside of paradise without being let in was bad enough, but being cast out after having drunk its nectar - it simply shattered her. I was never meant to be - those were her last thoughts as she, staring straight ahead, stepped off the platform and right in front of the inrushing subway train. She didn't even have time to drop, the front of the train smacked into her head on, tossing her away like not much more than a rag doll. Bones snapped, pulverized, organs ripped, agony inflated within, and blackness, that allwonderful mother, smothered her against its breast.
And then she awoke again. Death is a lot of people bending over you, was her first thought. The next one was that she was darned hungry, and also darned cold. Somebody, she only noticed his unbelieving eyes, helped her up. "She's unharmed!" "Thank Mary and the Holy Ghost!!" "Impossible..." It was all Babylonian babble around her. She looked down at herself. Sure, her clothes were a complete loss; she probably looked like some kind of a punk, and she was smeared and dirty... and alive. She finally realized it. But it was impossible!! She acutely remembered the wash of agony, the enfolding blackness. And yet she was alive... Again? Still? She wasn't even sore. Actually, with the exception of this horrible, gnawing hunger, she felt better than in a long time. Echoing words of a man two millenia dead, she said, slightly croaking with emotion: "I am hungry." And she was fed.
Later, her thoughts returned to more or less normal - that is, if you could call her train of thoughts in the days before this - this event - normal. She had tried to step out of life, and yet death had refused her. She didn't care if the specialists who were examining her thought she was a complete miracle. Her depression had her in its shadowy grip again, and her goal remained the same as before stepping in front of the subway train. Desparate people do desparate things, and she used her chance as soon as the guys in white were out of her room for a short while. It was a seven-story drop from her hospital room, and she hit head first. Blackness came immediatly - and she woke up again. She was lying on the wet ground, rain drizzling down on her, mixing with her tears... And she was hungry again.
In the following days, she tried it thrice more, and then she gave up. Her case was probably the best documented, since it was the first, but it was not the last. Oh no, it was not the last...
"Once we were afraid of people dying in droves from some kind of plague, and now, nobody out there wants to die anymore." Daniel Jefferson's statement was carried away by the soft Pacific wind, but Arthur Clark caught it anyway.
"Yeah, it should be impossible. I think it's hilarious that nobody has found an explanation for this yet," Daniel added.
"Oh, it's not that the process hasn't been analyzed extensively. Say, you suffer normally fatal damage to your body - injury by weapons, collision, falling, etc. So your body simply heals itself, zips up the holes, reknits the bones. It's just like the normal healing process, only in hyperspeed. It uses up a lot of energy, and you come back wanting to eat an ox. Which leads to the next point. Try to starve yourself, or dehydrate yourself, and you just enter a kind of hibernation, all bodily functions wind down, until somebody waters you again. It hasn't been going on long enough, but it's probably possible to mummify yourself in time. Disease. No chance. Your immune system converts from National Guard to Navy SEALs or Delta Force, and simply purges you. AIDS, Ebola, even cancer. Nothing doing. Poison. Another loser. Your body just breaks the stuff down, be it too much salt, cyanide or VX. And elemental poisons like mercury or plutonium are simply expelled without doing damage. Let's take a bigger step. Bombs! Rip somebody apart! Remember that old flick, Terminator 2? The pieces just melt together again, and within the minute, you're back among the living. And hungry as hell, of course. Nobody has tried atomics yet, but I'll give you a prognosis: set someone upon a surface nuclear explosion, and within half an hour, he'll walk out of ground zero, naked and smiling. Same goes with fire. Send someone up the smokestack, he'll reform a mile high, drop, get squashed, reform again and run to the next hot dog stand."
"All this is fine and dandy, but what's the cause, Arthur?? I mean, this has never happened before!"
"Of course it hasn't, Dan. I mean, I'm no biologist or physicist, I can't give you an answer that has anything to do with thermodynamics or quantum tunneling. As far as I understood it, this thing, this Undeath, as they call it, is actually possible within Heisenberg's whatchamacallit. The pure chance of a human being being blasted to bits and reforming within the energy continuum is like ten raised to the minus umpteenth power, but it's theoretically possible. Guy once computed how high the chance was of a mouse surviving for a whole week on the surface of the sun. If you put one of the Undying on the surface of the sun, he'd turn to plasma, get blown into space, reform, freeze in the vacuum, enter Earth's atmosphere by chance a billion years later, burn up again, reform, drop, etc. Finally he'd wake up, not knowing how much time had passed. It's... No, I absolutely don't understand it. It's completely freaky. Especially since it seems to be spreading more and more rapidly."
"Are you one of the Undying, Art?"
"Are you?? If you try and fail, you'd never know it!" He chuckled. "No, I'm afraid to try. There still are people dying out there. And I'm not the guy to throw my life away."
"What do ya say? Will the day come when nobody is able to die?"
"It sure seems to be the way we're heading. I mean, look how the world governments are reacting. In China, it has become illegal to conceive, and there are mass sterilization campaigns getting under way. Look, in the last six months, the world population has jumped by over 300 million people, just because a lot of people haven't had the good graces of dying away peacefully. I mean, it's not like anybody will be starving..."
"You know, I've been thinking..."
"Really?"
Dan punched him in his side.
"Hey, watch out, you big drillhole, you could get me killed!!"
The two men laughed at the sinking Pacific sun, leaning over the rail of the aging yet still trustworthy Glomar Challenger II, comissioned in '05 for exploratory deep sea drilling.
"So, high lord of the rotating bit, what are your thoughts??"
"Well, I've tried to view all this with a little bit of, well, esotericism. Of course, there are millions who are doing the same, drivel about the Second Coming and the Dawn of the New Age. But... Well, this is a little hard. It's like Death... Well, Death is off on vacation, and has neglected his job. Maybe, when he comes back, he'll see what has happened and try to refill his quota as quickly as possible?"
"Death on vacation? Have you read too much Terry Pratchett?"
"Terry what?"
"Pratchett. Weird fantasy author, end of the last millenium. Haven't read any myself, just heard some stories. In his books, Death is a personality, and he always talks IN CAPITAL LETTERS - perhaps because he thinks he's important or something. Well, in one book, he quits his job out of boredom or something like that. Perhaps Pratchett was right?"
He massaged his scruffy beard while the sun ignited the waves.
"Naa... It's another author I've been thinking of. Guy named H. P. Lovecraft, that being Howard Phillips. Been dead probably a century or so. He had this weird pantheon of unspeakable deities from beyond the voids between the stars, and they had been once and will be again, because, according to Lovecraft, 'That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange eons even death may die.'"
"So we're living in strange eons, eh?? Reminds me of that Chinese proverb - and curse: 'May you live in interesting times!'"
"Well, who are we to deny that these are strange times?? I mean, here we are, in the southern Pacific doldrums, out to investigate a gigantic seamount that is rising, without any visible volcanic or earthquake activity, toward the surface with incredible speed."
"Shouldn't we be in the target area soon?"
"Yeah, let's go down."
And as the two men left the deck, the Pacific night fell, and, toward the north, near the horizon, the bull's eye, Aldebaran, flickered and balefully cast it's red light upon the still peaceful ocean.
The sonar mapping room of the Glomar Challenger II had just recently been updated. The images of the 3-D doppler pulse sonar were continously being projected into a large holoprojector, almost eight cubic meters in volume. He'd worked with this ship for three years, but Arthur always thought it an impressive display of modern technology.
"Sweep beam forward, 04-75°.", he commanded, and the 3-D view in the holo-p changed rapidly. And there it was.
"My gosh, it's... it's risen more than five hundred meters since the last satellite Georadar report!! And that was only twelve hours ago!" Dan just couldn't imagine what force drove up the pillar - for it was a pillar by now, about one square kilometer on top, jutting up from the nearly five kilometer deep abyssal plain, with sheer cliff walls. It was only 300 meters below the ocean surface, and it would break out in a few hours - if it didn't start growing any faster!! It was about five kilometers away, and they were heading directly toward it.
"Looks like I'm out of my job. Who needs a deep sea drilling engineer when you can just walk up on the beach at midnight??"
"We have the next Georadar scan coming on line now," one of the sonar engineers remarked.
"Combine it with our own real-time scan to get a multilevel 3-D picture. Highest resolution, please."
"Coming up."
And for the first time, they really saw the top of the seamount. It wasn't flat, as they had expected (since there had been nothing but flat abyssal plain there two months before) - it had structure. Structure that should not be there.
Dan's mouth was hanging open: "Is that a city I'm looking at??"
"Dimensions!!"
Within seconds, the advanced sonar was feeding the structure dimensions into the holo-p, where they popped up next to the more obvious features. A pyramid nearly 200 meters high, its tip less than 100 meters under the surface of the Pacific Ocean - and rising. Majestic streets stretching out in a star form, all the way to the lip of the abyss, where they dropped away to nothing. Assorted other buildings, arches, obelisks, temples.
"I'm not seeing this."
"What is it???"
"Well, guys, I'm also not an archeologist, but that doesn't look so much like a normal city but more like a temple district. The central pyramid, all the symmetries... Like Angkor Wat, or Karnak, or the things in the Middle American jungles."
"But, Arthur, we're not in Egypt or in Nicaragua, but in the middle of nowhere, 500 kilometers west of the Marquesas, 1000 kilometers north of Tahiti. Nothing here but fish and water, water everywhere!! It's... it's utterly impossible!!!"
"Remember, Dan - Strange Eons! Crew, give me a view of the base of that pillar."
The sonar beam looked down.
"Yeah, yeah, that's it. See there, sediment fans, ripples. Whatever this city is, it was buried beneath thousands of years of sediments, and this seamount pushed it out, pushed it through, and all the sediment washed out. Must have incredible tensile strength to survive that battering."
"What do you mean, thousands of years?!"
"Do you think mankind built this city?? On a five and a half kilometer deep abyssal plain?? You've got to be kidding. I'd say, this is the first sign of extraterrestial life we've found on earth."
"But how is it coming up?? And why? Why now?? I mean, we've got enough weirdness going on around here on our little blue marble in space!! I need a drink!"
Dan was really getting agitated, and who would blame him? So he had just gotten out the Scotch bottle (which should have been saved for the party at the end of a sucessful mission), when suddenly, a gigantic wave rocked the ship, and another one. Arthur scrambled to his feet, for a while ignoring the smashed Scotch bottle Dan was wistfully looking at.
"Align sonar!! Get this bucket stable! Something must be happening on the top! And get a deckhand to clean up this mess!"
Trembling, the sonar picture climbed the seamount's incredible flank - and climbed on, for in the short while they had been looking at the bottom, the mount had risen another 200 meters, and the pyramid and the first high arches were breaking the surface - no wonder they had been swamped by a tidal wave!
"Send message to Hawaii, Tahiti, Anchorage, Chile, and wherever else! They've got a tsunami coming their way!"
A deckhand, a young Samoan, had entered with a bucket and a rag, and froze, looking at the image of the sonar, the city which was still rising out of the sea. It wasn't that he had never seen the sonar image before, or that he wasn't accustomed to the technology. He was a child of the 21st century, and not a primitive islander. And yet he shook, as ancient racial memory surfaced within him, the terrors of 50.000 years past, when the Star Lords had set the Pacific boiling, and THEY had come!! "R'Lyeh!" he stammered. "R'LYEH!!!!" He fell to his knees, ignoring the sharp pain of Scotch-soaked glass shards biting into his kneecaps. "Ija!!!! N'Gayh!!!! Cthulhu!!!!! Yog-Sothoth!!!!!"
The pyramid exploded.
Seconds later, the incredible thundering sound washed over them, rocking the ship. It hit Arthur and Daniel as they were just climbing up to deck, and they finally made it outside, each a few bruises richer. It wasn't dark outside, for to the north, a new star cast its unforgiving eye upon the Last Days - the moonbright supernova that had been Aldebaran before the pyramid exploded - or was it the other way around?? The Stars were Right. And the sea was boiling, foaming, playing with the Glomar Challenger. Fighting for a hold on the railing, the two crewmen gazed over at the ancient city that had finally returned to the surface. They gazed over at the place where IT had lain for millenia, dreaming, not dead. To where ITs timeless sleep had been upset, and where IT was rising, thunderous cascades of ocean water pouring from ITs massive shoulders, dripping from ITs immeasurable tentacles, ITs abominable claws. And as IT cast ITs multi-faceted gaze of Evil upon Daniel Jefferson and Arthur Clark and the wallowing Glomar Challenger, their sanity escaped into the black void between the stars, and yet they knew that this was hell, for they would never, ever die until the Elder Gods awakened and sent the Great Old Ones back to their timeless sleep, and the New Age would dawn.
And then Great Cthulhu started moving...
"That is not dead which can eternal lie...
...and with strange eons even death may die."
- Howard Phillips Lovecraft, "The Nameless City"
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Re: Halloween Spooktacular: Scarey Story Contest. Vote now!
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