Yesterday I posted a story I called “Fences.”
https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/1aqb3vy/fences/
It was about an incident from my childhood. But let me assure you that this was only the tip of the iceberg. I said that due to recent events, I had decided to post it now. But there’s so much more to this story, and I really need help, but before I ask the question that could decide if I live or die, I need to catch you up. So here’s part two of this story.
The months following Kyle’s death were a blur. Right after I saw his body, my dad and Isaac’s dad quickly rushed over to us, wrapped their arms around their respective kids and held us tight, making sure we could not see the gruesome sight before us. But we already had.
Kyle’s body was quickly removed from the scene, but every time I passed the fence for the next year I could still see his body, mangled and twisted, forever there upon the fence.
Fast forward to the fifth grade, February.Isaac, Izzy and I were walking to school and discussing the usual. We had never really talked about Kyle after his death, but it was always in the back of our heads. Of course, Izzy had been lucky enough not to see his body, but she knew. It had been written all over the news.
This was not what we thought of on this day, though. We were discussing something insignificant, like Pewdiepie or Markiplier, when Izzy stepped on a crack. Isaac laughed.
“HA! Your mom’s gonna die!” He said, in the way kids do, not caring about anything whatsoever.
“What are you talking about?” Izzy gasped and stopped in her tracks, standing directly over the crack. “What do you mean?”
“It’s the ‘Step on a crack, break your mom’s back’ thing,” I rolled my eyes. “He’s just being annoying. That’s not even scary anymore, Isaac.”
“You’re such a baby,” Izzy rolled her eyes. “Grow up- ow!”
Izzy hopped up, clutching her heelie.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
Izzy put her foot back on the ground.
“Nothing, something just stabbed my foot, probably a twig or something.”
I looked at the crack she had just been on. It was only as wide as the side of a caseless phone and it was pitch black. Like all cracks in the sidewalk, you couldn’t really tell how deep it was. Something silver gleamed in the darkness. I bent down. It was a sewing needle.
“Huh, here,” I said. I reached down to pick it up but I couldn’t remove it. “I think it’s stuck.”
“What is it?” Izzy asked.
“It’s an old needle,” I told her.
I was about to let go of it and stand up when, during my last pull upwards, I felt the needle slip right out of my fingers and dissapear into the crack. But it hadn’t fallen. It deliberately sank. Something had pulled it from the other side.
“What the-“ I stood up. “Something just took the needle.”
Isaac laughed.
“And you said I was a baby. What’s wrong? Did the Crackman scare you?”
“You’re not funny, Isaac,” Izzy glared at him. “Are you ok, James?”
“Yeah,” I stood up. “Must’ve fallen.”
We continued the walk to school. The day past without another event. The next day we took the same path. When we got to the crack, I noticed something. It was longer. It was now the length of the entire panel of the sidewalk.
“Huh?” I asked. I looked at the next panel. The crack kept going. As we continued the walk, it wormed all the way down the street before turning a corner. It was the only crack in the sidewalk for the entire block.
“It definetly wasn’t like this yesterday,” Izzy pointed out.
“Yeah it was, idiot,” Isaac insulted her.
“Isaac!” I replied. “Don’t call her an idiot! She’s a girl! You can’t mean to a girl!”
“That’s sexist!” Izzy hit my arm.
“So you want to be called an idiot?” I asked.
She thought for a moment.
“No,” She admitted. “Thanks,”
“Oh! Uh! You’re welcome.” I blushed.
“Izzy and Ja-ames, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-“ Isaac’s taunt was cut short when Izzy punched him in the arm. He winced. I chuckled and then I noticed something. In the corner of my eye, I saw two white dots in the crack. Almost as if they were a pair of eyes. I blinked, and they were gone. I didn’t mention this to my friends. I thought I had just imagined them.
When we got to school, we all went to our respective classes. None of us were in the same class, so we wouldn’t see eachother until lunch. Before we parted ways, I spoke to them.
“Hey guys, tomorrow you wanna follow the crack? Maybe map it out? See where it leads?”
It’s funny. Nowadays I wouldn’t even think to do this, but as a kid, it seemed like a grand adventure from some storybook. I’m so glad I did though.
“What crack?” Isaac asked.
“You’re so dumb, Isaac,” Izzy rolled her eyes. “Sure!”
“Is tomorrow Saturday?” asked Isaac.
“Yeah,” I responded.
“I can’t. I have therapy.”
Oh. Yeah. I forgot to mention, but Isaac had taken Kyle’s death a lot harder than I had. Maybe it was because he was on Isaac’s property. Although the police had never found a killer, Isaac had become convinced that there was a murderer hiding in his house. It would make sense. As I said before, his house was huge. So Isaac’s mom had been taking him to therapy for a year.
“Oh well,” I said. “Me and Izzy’ll go.”
Sure enough, the next day, we went down the same street and found the same crack. But this time, it was even larger. It had branched out into other directions. It was cut off by the street but it somehow picked up right where it left off on the other side of the crosswalk.
We walked for about an hour, chatting about youtube and shows we liked while I drew the crack in it’s entirety, connecting the spots that had been seperated by the streets.
Every once in a while, the paths would end at some sort of landmark. Generally an old sewer grate or a manhole cover, or one of those traffic cones on the road. Interestingly, all of the line caps seemed abandoned, the traffic cones bent over and the grates covered with leaves and mud.
We finally got to the end of the last root of the canal. I looked down at the map I had drawn. It looked familiar. The branching lines and twisting paths reminded me of something, but I couldn’t place it. Izzy and I walked home and parted ways. She gave me a little hug when she left, which made me blush again.
That night, as I lay in bed, I couldn’t stop thinking about the drawing I made. That crack was shaped like something, but what? Then I realized. I immediately threw the covers off and dashed over to my desk. I grabbed the paper and ran to my mom’s laptop to compare the image.
I typed “NYC Subway Map” into the search bar and immediately the results came up. I held the map I had drawn up to the Brooklyn section of the NYC Map. And my drawing was indistinguishable from the way the map was drawn. The strange crack in the sidewalk was a map of a subway system.
But it was not the subway system of New York City. The maps didn’t match. The lines were in completely different places. Even though my drawing looked like the style of the NYC map, it was not depicting the same train tunnels. It was something else. I scratched my head, wondering what this could mean, and if it even meant anything.
And then I saw it. It was a shape I recognized. A shape I knew all too well . The subway system that I had made, the crack that had stretched across sidewalks, the iron flowers in the fence, and the body of my dead friend. It was Kyle. It was the same twisted shape that Kyle’s body had been found in a year ago. The shape that was carved into the iron fences that I was ever so terrified of now. This crack that I had subconsciously drawn to look like a subway system was the pattern that I was all too familiar with.
Two days later, I walked to school like usual, Izzy and Isaac with me. I didn’t tell them about the shape or that the crack looked like a strange subway. They would think I was reading into things that weren’t there. When we got to the street we had passed every day on our walk to school I froze.
I stared down at the block. Nothing had changed. There were no signs of construction. No newly cemented sidewalk. No initials recently carved into the stone. Nothing. It was the same sidewalk as always, the same rough old tiles. But the crack was gone.