Hello.

I am Mr. Welldone.

No, just kidding, it’s Kris, the author of Ichor Falls and Candle Cove, the reason why you found me. I know the site’s been dead quiet for a long while now, and I’ve been wanting to write more horror, but I have a problem. I can’t. I’m so meta about everything nothing scares me lately. No ghost, no unseen stalking spirit, no lumbering, stitched nightmare. I feel like I understand every trope.

As you may know, traditional horror/suspense/thrillers don’t do a lot for me — for example, the Scream movies or any of their ilk. I can’t get worked up about a guy with a bladed weapon, and the reason is, I know their motive. They want to hurt me, they want me to know fear as I die. I get that, I get all of it. So when he puts the sword through the door and it startles me, now I have to fight him, and it’s just brains vs. brawn, or brawn vs. brawn, and I’m gonna lose, and he’s gonna get me. The end. It just doesn’t inspire the same feeling of dread that an alien entity does, a completely foreign state of existence like something unknown from the depths of the sea, or a haunting. That’s why they scare me so much — because to deal with something, you have to be able to form a pattern. You have to be able to begin to understand them.

I understand a serial killer. He has to conform to the laws of physics; he probably can’t break in without making a lot of noise. And if he gets me, I guess he gets me. I die. Or I get tortured and then die. Misery is terrible, but it doesn’t frighten me; the unknown frightens me. The appropriation of innocence frightens me, like you see in Candle Cove. (If you want to read what I have to say about why I did Candle Cove and its meta legacy, here’s a blog post about it.)

And attempts to frighten me, other stories — there’s a lot of good creepypasta out there that does get me, but it’s also very formulaic. The ritual ones I never understood! How can anyone be expected to remember all that stuff? Who would even bother? And usually the reward is to be cursed and miserable forever. What? Really?

Anyone here watch Suicide Mouse? That meme? I haven’t heard the audio. I just watched the first five seconds and shut it off. Why, because it was frightening? No, because it was supposedly made in the 1930s, but the animation looks like it was done in Mario Paint. Have some pride for God’s sake. Do your job, scare people. Force them to imagine a little more, don’t lay it all out on a plate. People don’t stagger out of a screening of something and raise a gun to their temples. If they do, there’s a much longer buildup. Make me think about it! Haunt me with it, haunt the reader with it after the story’s over.

Anyway. My point is, I don’t know what to get scared by. Who’s seen something in the vein of horror I’m describing? Anyone? If I can’t… get creeped out, I don’t know how I can write more. I know it’s out there. Marble Hornets is excellent… I was a big fan of the Josef K Stories… I just need that consistency. That slow burn. Can you help me find it?

Just wanted to share a link from Shannon. If you are a fan of moody horror and haven’t seen the film version of Pontypool, the BBC has done a radio drama version of the same story with the same actors. I’m listening to it and it’s arguably as good so far. It’s definitely worth the hour-long listen.

Saturday morning my friend Brendan Adkins introduced me and a group of players to Geiger Counter, a “cooperative survival horror” RPG that seemed more like group storyboarding than an actual game. I think it would be great to brainstorm a story out using Geiger Counter as a tool.

It was rooted in the mythos of Ichor Falls, and as far as Ichor Falls stories go, it actually adhered pretty well to the town. A library burned to the ground, the Amish children’s holiday Totenkinder figured heavily, and a driverless carriage that demanded a driver. It was pretty fascinating and genuinely upsetting at some points. I can see how it would be super effective late at night in the right setting. Thanks, Brendan, and the poor townspeople of Lucy, Chip, Jennifer, Katerina, Amos, Herbert and Omar.

Hello all, long time no post (no, this isn’t a meta-horror story in a blog post format). Ross over at Role Playing Public Radio informs me that:

Hi Kris,

I run a tabletop RPG podcast called Role Playing Public Radio. We do normal shows, comedy skits and recordings of our tabletop games. Back in March, I ran a two part game based on your story ‘Candle Cove’ from Ichor Falls. Even though the game ran for 6 hours, we got a great response from our listeners, judging from the comments we got. You can see it here.

Anyway, I’m a huge fan of Ichor Falls which I promoted it on RPPR episode 42.

I meant to email you to give you a heads up earlier, but I forgot to until now.

Look forward for any future creepy pasta you make!

Thanks Ross. I’m sharing the link because it’s way too late at night to begin listening to a six-hour-long descent into the (fan-generated) world of Candle Cove, but I can’t wait to hear it and see what people think.

Even as I type this on my laptop, I’m thinking about how in this dark room my eyes have adjusted to where they can only see the bright screen, and nothing beyond it. It would be so easy for a bone-white face to rush at me from the pitch-black just to the left of my monitor and then vanish.

I moved to my desk and turned on the lamp just now; I couldn’t take that chance.

The first Ichor Falls book is available for purchase at my personal shop. It includes black and white reproductions of drawings, a little photography from the Falls, and a new town legend written especially for the book.

The rumours, speculation and conspiracy theories surrounding the so-called Cedar Cove Incident of August 2009 are so varied, so wildly divergent and contradictory that one despairs of ever uncovering the truth of what happened. I have undertaken here to lay down and weave into a coherent whole only the established, verifiable facts, and let the reader draw his or her own conclusions. I will be the first to point out the many seemingly irrational choices made by the people involved, and the narrative gaps left where we cannot say with certainty how events unfolded. To these I say, we must wait for further information, but until that happens: Caveat lector. I’m sure even the most skeptical reader will agree that the following is the most parsimonious telling that accounts for all the known facts.
(continue reading…)

The favorite urban legend of the Mortuary School was the drunken student in the morgue. Either a student or a local boy– depending on the version. He and some friends go rabble rousing in the town. They get back to the campus completely sloshed. There is a dare to streak through campus and go into the morgue. His friends bar the door, and he passes out on the slab unable to get back out.

A class comes in early the next morning to perform an autopsy or an embalming on a cadaver. They find the boy naked on the slab. Sure it’s odd he has no tags, but what the hell it’s not like we have an over abundance of cadavers. There are many variations on the ending. In some he wakes up right before the first incision. Or during. In the funny ones he’s ousted by the gasps and pointing of female students at his erect penis. In the dark ones no one ever notices…

Victoria felt the ridges of the staples in the in the cadavers through the fingers of her latex gloves. A big cross on the man’s chest. One of the problems with the myth is that a school has no problem with reusing a cadaver on the newbies. Were these staples from the original autopsy or a subsequent? Hard to tell. The students observe one, but they never actually perform. The man’s toe tag reads Robin Smith. Must have died from embarrassment of his name.

She jabbed him in the chest with her index finger. The flesh was cold and spongy. It lacked the smooth elasticity of her own. Or the rigid stone of Rigor Mortis. She could have poked straight through him if she had a mind to. Victoria was always fascinated with death. She always watched it with an academic eye. It was something that only happened to grandparents and pets. It changed from hobby to career when a Pinkerton ran a Charger through a coal picket line.

Electricity jumped from her fingertips. All the air rushed from her lips. The hands on the clock lurched forward.

Another hand wrapped in latex wretched her hand away from the body. There was an audible pop like a circuit at been broken. Victoria felt her blood rush from her head. Her fingertips exploded. She clenched her hand and crumbled into the other man in scrubs.

She recovered in seconds and remembered propriety.

“What the hell was that?”

“N-Nothing,” Victoria replied. “It was just…the smell. Yeah, how long has this stiff been lying out?”

The pathologist cocked a perfectly manicured eyebrow at her. He shook his head and took the hedge clippers from the tray. She never did like how mundane the tools were. The everyday implements that could dismantle a human in minute. She thought that maybe the tools were more specialized in a County Coroner with a budget. Then again a Coroner with a budget wouldn’t be looking for a pair of hands out of Mortuary school.

He nodded towards the other side of the room. Maybe it was a charitable act. Get her away from the cadaver when he first plunged the tip of the snipers right above the groin. They would bite along the line of stitches swiftly chomping through sinew and the rib cage. She pondered if there was even anything recognizable left inside. If the cadaver’s internals were pulped from the frequent demonstrations. She hit play on the docked Ipod. Mozart streamed from the speakers.

While her back was turned he took the first plunge. She heard the blade slurp when he swung open the maw. Victoria whirled on the balls of her feet when she heard the Pathologist’s bagged shoes slosh back from the table. A vermillion line dripped down from his goggles, spotted his face mask, and splattered his apron.  His eyes were just whites, and the bare spots on his forehead between splotches of blood were ashen.

The blood on the floor soaked through the baggies right down to her socks when she approached the body. The scent of formaldehyde danced in her nostrils - that new corpse smell. The cadaver was rapidly draining its fluids that should have been long gone by now. Victoria approached as if in a dream. She laid her hands on the great wooden handle of the shears. The Pathologist stood frozen in place.

She could have sworn she saw the slight heave the cadaver’s chest. A rookie mistake. Every teacher had to remind the Morgue virgins that it was just their imagination. She plunged the blade further. The blood kept coming. The cadaver’s eyes flashed open. He lurched forward and took her wrists in his hand. Victoria furrowed her blood spattered brow and closed the scissors. The cadaver was split down the middle.

He wouldn’t stop screaming.

It’s alive! It’s alive!

She thrust the blade deeper into the even softer tissue. The hedge clippers continued gnashing its teeth until he stopped.  The Pathologist laid a dripping red hand on her shoulder. She knocked him flat on the ground when she withdrew the scissors. She was suffocating. She tore her face mask loose and shredded her apron. She widened the neck line on her scrubs. She still couldn’t breath. She clawed at her bare white neck before collapsing on the slab.

Submitted by Chase Henderson

She snapped back from the cognitive abyss she found herself staring into, something that happened far too often. It got in the way. It always did. The thick, dark air hung over her supine form, enveloped by a deafening stillness, her body cold and numb with old sweat from a receding sliver of dream.

She steadied her thoughts and concentrated. Not again, not again. There was the anticipated excruciating tensing of muscle fiber at the corners, pulling one against the other until whole striated networks of intertwined flesh stiffened like toothpicks, forcing hot blood from capillaries, sending plump cells and smoke-thin platelets cascading into arterial walls. The abyss again. How long it lasted she could never tell. She cut herself free, willed it. A sensation of electricity hit her hard, as it always did, and here came the cruel entanglement of thick black hairs, hundreds sliding against hundreds, clawing and scraping as the familiar arc of light appeared, searing her. She often thought it would be better to get struck with the harsh glare all at once, but as it was, that brilliant scalpel slid across, exposing a deep, raw swath of nerve endings that had been absolutely poised for hours waiting for this tiny, ragged white line of pain.

Lost in it for a moment. She could never feel exactly when it takes over. Back now. Helpless, she now felt a growing rush, a tremendous pressure that welled up from below, a single heartbeat reverberating within that flooded channel — even this she sensed — and mercifully the pinched, hard edges of the ducts slid open, offering a minor respite from the sensation of dry, corrugated flesh grinding against taut, throbbing sclera.

Her eyes were now open.

Less than a second had passed. Sixty thousand to go.

—

I wanted this to be really vague as far as what was happening, but I think the reader can figure it out way early. You tell me!

NetNostalgia Forum - Television (local)

mike_painter65
Subject: Candle Cove local kid’s show?

i found it and its louder than i remmber

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Someone from the creepypasta.com thread actually put that video together! How flattering! It is legitimately scary and pretty much what I imagined that awful last episode to look like (except for the Christmas tree, anyway). Great job and I’m so thrilled.