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

–

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.

Leighton had given up on his garden faster than he’d given up on other hobbies, pastimes, occupations, acquaintances, friends. He’d started one out of the sheer boredom of living out here, in farmland considered secluded even for the Falls. His closest neighbors seemed to glean some kind of satisfaction from tending small gardens; they were at least three miles down the narrow dirt road in either direction, which he liked. Contrasted with the depth of Leighton’s other emotions, “like” was an ocean.

This garden, if it could be called that now or ever, had yielded nothing — a few stark white shoots that dried yellow and wrinkled; countless weeds; and, in the far corner nearest the back of the house by the rusting water meter, one sad green tomato immediately beset upon by caterpillars. He ran his fingers through what was left of his gray hair, and considered pulling all the plants up, but it was a thought that had come to him many times in the past, never acted upon. Let the earth do what it will, he thought.

Leighton’s existence was both bleak and self-applied. He had had a life once, known people once. A child of a stern upbringing, he had worked as a materials scientist, a metallurgist, for an iron ore refinery up in Point Pleasant for forty-odd years, and took early retirement. He attempted to teach physics to high school students for a year or so, but he had no interest in imparting knowledge to those too stubborn to receive it.

There was something pathetic, infuriating about youth today and their parents. The people of Point Pleasant — or anywhere really. People got on Leighton’s nerves; sometimes he couldn’t understand how anyone could stand to be a part of the world.

Ichor Falls was a dim town, a gray town, which appealed to him — the locals kept to themselves, and in all the time he’d lived out here he never considered himself one of them. The mist gave him a good, cold feeling. From this distance he could barely even make out the lights of the highway.

The feeling was broken, often, by the local newspaper delivery. The man parked his truck further south where the dirt wasn’t so soft, and walked the 300 yards up to Leighton’s mailbox. He kept thinking one of these days he’d have to move it further away from the house; as it is around this time of day he tried to be inside so as to avoid small talk. But here Leighton was, standing outside staring at his garden. He set his jaw.

The delivery man waved a long wave as he came closer with a stack of ads Leighton had no interest in reading. “Morning, Leighton.”

“Morning.”

“Last stop of the day. Always good to see you — means my shift is over.” He had made this joke too many times to count.

“Just in the box, please.”

“No time for chit-chat, huh? Something you’ve gotta get back to?”

“I enjoy my solitude, and I wish you’d respect that,” Leighton said, already moving towards his front door. He stopped and turned back to the man. “And if all you have for me is advertising, then make your last stop somewhere else.”

“You want us to suspend delivery, then? I can put in the form for you, but you’ll have to sign it.”

Leighton responded by angrily slamming his front door.

This was his never-ending experience with others — no matter what steps you took to be left alone, it intruded. It persisted. Wasn’t it obvious from the way he acted, Leighton thought, what his desires were? From the company he didn’t keep? From the places he refused to live? From the state of his garden? He had a house full of journals and books to read.

What could be more simple, more easily carried out, than to leave another man completely alone?

(continue reading…)

My grandfather was a big card gambler, and told us a lot of wild stories from his traveling youth. He mostly kept to five-card stud and was a master at bluffing — given the nature of most of his stories and how we believed them, I guess he was at least telling the truth about that.

The story that stuck with me had happened in the summer of 1940, he said. He was on furlough and visiting his parents a few miles east of Ichor Falls. Landlocked and bored, he overheard at some dive that there was all-night gambling at a nearby Indian reservation, maybe Moneton or Mattaponi, I forget which. The story was that a local group of investors calling themselves “the Opossum Society” gathered there one night a month and talked big policy and local events; the things that had made them wealthy. Intrigued, my grandfather caught a ride near there, and walked a couple miles on foot the rest of the way.

Two things to remember about my grandfather: he was as slick and charming as anything, and he hated to play sober. He said they poured strong drinks there, and by the time he had the courage to wander over to the lone table where anyone was still playing, he was worried they’d kick him out for being too drunk. But he must have turned on the charm, because after twenty minutes or so, he’d been invited to sit down.

The game was five-card stud. My grandfather didn’t have much money, but he hung on in the early hands, and after an hour or so, he had a tidy pile of chips in front of him, to the surprise of the others.

The night wore on, the talk was lively and the drinks kept coming. An old woman came around with a tray of shots of whiskey, which she placed in front of each player. Each raised their glasses, and one man made a toast: “To the Opossum Society, and to new friends.” They all drank and the dealer continued with a new hand.

My grandfather said the tone of the game changed. All the din of small talk and high conversation was replaced with the quiet shuffling of cards, and the clinking of chips. Sensing this, my grandfather bet conservatively — but it became increasingly difficult as the pot grew.

Finally deciding the most he’d be out was the money he walked in with, he went all in on the next hand. The entire table called, and the cards came down. Although there was a clear winner, and it wasn’t my grandfather, all eyes on the table turned to one of the other players, who had trash cards and no chips left. Sweating, he plead with the dealer, the others in the society, even the old Indian woman.

“You know the rules,” said the winner. At this, the losing player burst into tears and, knocking over his stool, ran out of the place whimpering and moaning.

The other players congratulated my grandfather, saying he’d played a good game, and that he had an open invitation to play next time they gathered. The old woman came around with another tray of shots and set them down, when my grandfather said, “no more for me, thanks, I’ve got to get home.” But she insisted he drink. He asked why.

The winning player leaned in and told him.

“It’s the antidote.”

—Based on a story my dad told me of a dream he had.

If you see the Blue Man walk
Mind to him you do not talk.
For if you see the Blue Man smile
Your sweet soul he will defile
- From “The Blue Man”, traditional folk ballad

Samuel Douglas drove home from town, taking the main highway instead of the usual back roads that he was particular to. He hadn’t had much business in town, so his visit was short and sweet. Spending time talking to the other men who farmed the area, the last few holdouts who hadn’t been bought out by any of the big conglomerates yet. It wouldn’t be too long before Ned Harrison sold though. Crops weren’t doing well. Sick child in bed. Sell the land and get a pretty check in the mail. Maybe they’d even let you stay on and work the land.

Sam shook his head. There wouldn’t ever be a time that he’d work another man’s land, not for any amount of money. His was his and had been in his family since folks started coming out here to the Midwest and he’d be damned if he was going to be the one that let it go.

(continue reading…)

“How — what — what kind of foods do they have?”

Four independent subroutines went to work analyzing the phrase uttered by the four-year-old: expression context, voice recognition, tone analysis, body language. Tone analysis needed to be the fastest, and luckily it was also the simplest. No quavering or whining detected. Had it been, the other subroutines would have been directed to stop, and control would be given over to an array of prewritten comfort dialogues.

Expression context came next. Eye contact from the child was only occasional. The image analysis package, in concert with the body language and expression routines, determined that the child, a fair-haired boy, was occupied by something below frame. The RFID scan identified it as a toy train, one of twelve toys in the room. The dialogue routine was updated with the name of the object, potentially to be used later if the child remained silent for a specified amount of time (”Hey, is that a toy train you’ve got there?”).

Voice recognition had been dissecting the phrase all this time. Tone analysis supported the conclusion that the child had asked a question.

??t k?’??d? fudz’ du ðe? hæv ?

“Food” triggered a subarray of typical questions, and once the substrings “kind of” and “they” had been identified and routed through the context and grammar parsers, it was a simple matter to locate the most likely question being asked.

The response set, indexed by question, was accessed and syllabically divided for the vocal synthesis package. Then, poring over a hash table of pre-identified lingual structures of the child’s father, the synthesizer generated an audio file by conflating the two data streams. The file is equalized to include a bassy subaudio component at 180 Hz, creating a comforting, warm “in-room” effect that mimics the tone heard by the child with their head upon the father’s chest.

Meanwhile, a 1280×700 image of the father, taken years ago when he was first deployed, is overlayed onto a digital model (from the neck up only — originally the Department of Defense had planned to include hands so the model could gesture, but this was abandoned early due to overcomplexity). The resulting hybrid passes through a series of basic lingual configurations (augmented with syllable-stress-driven head movements) and converted into a number of keyframes.

These individual frames can be presented directly on the viewing screen, synchronized to the audio file. A series of static-simulating filters create “webcam believability” and reduce Morian “uncanny valley” effects, which children have been shown to be particularly sensitive to. Once it was understood that they want to believe, the goal became to give them less visual fidelity, not more.

“They give us all kinds of foods here to keep us healthy. Lots of things like vegetables, steak, chicken. Even some of your favorites like pizza. You like pizza, huh, buddy?”

The microphone registers no audio response, but expression context identifies upturned corners of the mouth and squinting eyes.

“I miss you, daddy.”

A timer preset with a value of five minutes plus or minus anywhere from zero to thirty seconds reaches zero. A half-dozen randomly-selected dialogue trees are deallocated from memory.

“I miss you too, Josh. I’m coming home real soon, okay? Daddy has to go now. Be a good boy, okay? I love you. I love you.”

Somewhere in the room, a hard drive whirs.

Inspired by http://www.boingboing.net/2009/01/07/dod-wants-parent-bot.html

Once upon a time, you brat, there was a spoiled little prince who wouldn’t eat his dinner if he didn’t want to, and nobody could make him because he was a prince.

And one day, there was fish for dinner and the fish on the prince’s plate was green and purple, and the prince wouldn’t eat it because he said it looked nasty. But that night the prince woke up screaming, saying he dreamed that a huge green and purple fish stood over his bed and said “You’ll have me, brat, one way or another!”

And every year, on the anniversary of not eating his fish, he dreamed the same terrible dream. One day when he was king, he came home from holiday with his sweetheart, and said he was going to marry her. She was very beautiful but her skin and hair were always damp and she had big eyes that didn’t blink, and she wore green and purple all the time. And the king married her.

And the night after they married there was a terrible scream from the royal bedroom, and they found the king lying in the big royal bed completely mad, and the damp lady was nowhere to be seen but on the pillow beside the king was a little green and purple fish! And the king was mad for the rest of his life, and if you don’t eat your greens now, you little creep! The Damp Lady will come and turn you mad too! No, it would not be more fun than spinach!

(Reprinted with permission from “Ethylor Voices: Effects of phenolic toxicity on the folkloric imagination in Ichor Falls, Mason County.” Hiram Whipporwill, Miskatonic University Press 2007.)

The sound of jet engines blared in the tiny rooms. Victor plugged his ears and waited for the howling to stop. He really hated to be the one to do this. But there was really no one else.

Those Servers needed rebooting, and that’s all there was to it.

He pulled his fingers from his ears. The worst was over. Soon the Servers would drone into the back as just white noise. Now the tune of John Denver’s Country Roads – that was a sound he could never ignore.

He pulled his phone from the belt clip. It was illuminated by Mary’s photo. She wore an exasperated smile and black strands of hair hung in her face. It was the first photo he snapped on the phone; she had just woken up from a nap.

Victor sucked his lower lip, his thumb hovering over the big red Decline button. He walked over to the window behind his desk. The phone reported no bars, and the call disconnected. He clipped the phone back to his belt and his hand went instinctively to the white band around his finger. He twisted the skin between his thumb and forefinger — his personal worry stone.

He rested his forehead on the windowpane. It was damp with cool condensation from the mist hanging in the air. He almost wished he could stay here forever. Opening his eyes, he could almost make out the distant lines of Sweetbrook Hospital, a wraith in the distance. The blinking blue light of the heliport told him where he was.

This was his lighthouse. If he ventured too close, he’d wreck himself on the rocks. Mary would be getting off work right now. If she pulled the night shift. No. He would stay over here. His office was on the upper floor of what used to be a Haelig Meyer department store, its floor cluttered with deceased computers. He’d stay over here in MIS. That’s where they preferred him anyway.

“My friend,” said a voice from behind accompanied by a hairy brown hand landing on his shoulder. “I got you tickets for speed dating at Sharkie’s. They have karaoke!”

“I’ll have to pass… my heart will always belong to Mary.”

“That is the most melodramatic thing I have ever heard,” Ramir scolded. It always amazed Victor — the only place he’s ever actually seen the cliché Indian systems admin was here in the Falls, of all places. “And yet they make fun of arranged marriages. Look, they work. The secret is that the husband and wife lead separate lives…”

Victor chuckled. “Hey, want to take a ride today?”

“And if the hospital needs us?”

He patted the pager on his hip. “They know where to find us.”

2

It always surprised people to find out that there even was an IT industry in Ichor Falls. Half of the town was still on AOL, assuming they had any Internet at all. Even facilities the size of Sweetbrook Hospital were wired. There were no actual paper trails with medical records, thanks to Bill Clinton and HIPAA. Some nurse left a senator’s STD screeen out in the break room one too many times.

The real issue here is that prior to 1998, Sweetbrook had no records.

Victor pulled his truck into the dirt lot in front of Amaranth Mental Hospital. Ramir whistled when he dropped out of the passenger side. Victor couldn’t blame him — even at high noon it was creepy as hell. He decided the mist might actually help the old folks in the New Haven Rest Home right across the hospital. Wouldn’t have to look at the thing.

(continue reading…)

Upon the polished tiles of alabaster marble glided a figure gaunt and garbed quaintly. The bleak hallway of opaque white lingered into a coiling miasma of black –- infinitely cold and eddying in its pitchy depths. The odd décor of arabesque patterns upon the papered walls gleamed whitewashed beneath the moonlight, which spilled forth from casements draped in blood red. Through these windows, dusty parapets rose ominously against the pink sky, their blackened faces looming over vacant battlements in silent vigil. Hills blanketed in dense wood rolled beyond a stone bulwark, and at their edge sat a small town glowing dimly in the growing light.

Augustine’s passage through the ghastly corridor produced upon the cold marble floor an unnerving serpentine slithering. The starkness of his black robe hypnotically coalesced into the shadows. He passed tall portals of dark wood lacquered unsparingly with mephitic oils, and stone daises whose glassy surfaces reflected the sputtering sconces, dim flames tossing luridly in the musty darkness. Upon each dais sat an odd figurine or statuette; artifacts carved intricately of ivory or pristine obsidian, resembling those things which the mind can conceive only in the darkest of nightmares. Oily portraits of noblemen grinned at his passing; their fragile vampiric countenances suggesting a time long ago. In the lofty heights of the rustic ceiling were folding stone faces and wooden girders veiled in cobwebs and the dust of time.

Augustine approached a dark portal lacquered heavily with pungent oil and ornamented by a charm of silver, encrusted with a profound ruby of sharpest red. He placed his hand upon its curved handle, pausing briefly to breathe deeply the peculiar odor. The bitterness of a half century fooled his senses as a knave of time’s breadth. He heard faintly a discordant ringing of gothic bells from another chamber and then a queer chant accompanied by an evil plucking of lute strings. His thin lips melted into a tight line and he entered the room.

(continue reading…)