I’m posting this from a burner phone and hoping no one finds me, but I’m on the run and need advice. So, a couple of days ago, I was kidnapped from a parking lot at night - I’m (was, not sure anymore) a student and I was studying late for an upcoming exam in the library, and decided to go home to get some shuteye, when this shadowy figure came out of nowhere and knocked me out cold.
The next thing I know, I wake up in this dimly lit, mostly empty room. The only thing besides me that was in the room was a table with a clear, glass jar on top. There was a door, which I tried, but it was locked. As I was still processing my surroundings, suddenly, some of the other lights in the room that I hadn’t noticed before turned on, and I was blinded by the light. I happened to be holding the door handle, which was made of metal, and suddenly, I felt a jolt of electricity rush through my body, and I fell backwards, away from the door.
Then the door opened, and this young woman was pushed into the room and the door closed again. I was still recovering from the literal shock I’d just had, so before I could react, I could hear the lock on the door click. I looked at the woman, and she stared at me, and we just looked silently at each other for a few seconds, sizing each other up. I spoke up first.
“Who are you? What is this place? What’s going on?”, I asked.
“I don’t know, I was just walking to my car in a carpark and got blitz attacked, and the next thing I know, I wake up in this strange place and get forcefully dragged into this room with you. Do you have anything to do with this?”, she responded, a hint of fear and scepticism in her eyes.
“I got ambushed in a carpark as well, and don’t remember anything after that. I just woke up in this room, and before I could do anything, you got shoved in here with me. Perhaps we should work together to try and find a way out of here”, I said.
“I don’t know, what do we do?”, she replied, and started banging on the door and screaming for help. Suddenly, the door gave her an electric shock just like the one I’d experienced, sending her flying back. I placed my hand on her shoulder and asked, “Are you alright? That happened to me too, sorry, I should have warned you”, I said, gently lifting her up and helping her sit.
“How do we get out of here? Is this some kind of sick joke?”, she moaned, still in pain. She then glanced at the table with the glass jar and said, “What’s that? Let’s examine it, it might be useful.” So, we both got up from the floor and walked over to the table. I grabbed the jar to examine it, and there was nothing special about it, it was just an empty jar.
Suddenly a sliding panel opened on top of the table, revealing a screen. The screen turned on, and a masked figure, wearing what could be described as a mask that was a cross between Pyramid Head’s, well, pyramid, and a plague doctor mask (it’s hard to describe and was very uncanny and bizarre) appeared on the screen and spoke in a robotic, distorted voice.
“Listen carefully. You have 3 hours to to fill the jar with tears, otherwise you both die. If the jar is not full when the timer runs out, we’ll collect the tears of your loved ones from your funerals. The jar cannot be filled with any other liquid. Try to cheat and the only liquid that’ll be filling the jar is your blood. Every hour, you will be provided with a glass of water to hydrate yourselves to keep the tears flowing. Trying to escape is futile. Your only options are cry or die. Your time starts now.”
The masked figure disappeared and the display changed to a timer, that started counting down from 3 hours. 2:59:59, 2:59:58, 2:59:57… The girl and I looked at each other, our hearts racing in panic. I’m not much of a crier, and crying in front of another person was definitely going to be hard, but I knew I had to do something. I asked her, “Can you cry on cue?” “Haven’t tried before, but I’ve seen some of my friends keep their eyes open and not blink in order to make themselves cry as a party trick, perhaps we should try that.” “Good idea, let’s do that. Wait, we should probably cry one at a time to make sure our tears get in the jar. I can go first.”
I rubbed my eyes and opened them wide, staring blankly at the wall in front of me, hoping tears would come. I’d never shed tears in front of a girl before, at least not since I was 6 or 7, so it was embarrassing. In fact, the last ever person to have seen me cry was my best friend from high school after we got into a fight. The awkwardness of having this random woman look at me as I made myself cry was too uncomfortable. The clock was ticking, but my eyes stayed dry. The timer was at 2:56:13.
“What are you doing? Can you cry or not? Maybe I should give it a shot. You better get those tears flowing or we aren’t getting out of here”, she snapped at me. “I haven’t cried in front of a girl before and having you brooding over me like that isn’t helping. Why don’t you try first?”, I blurted out, trying my best to stay calm. “Sure, let’s not waste time”, she said, grabbing the jar from me.
She held the jar in her right hand, and with her left hand rubbed her eyes and opened them wide, tilting her head downward towards the jar. I looked at her nervously, hoping she could get the waterworks going. And much to my relief, her eyes started welling up with tears. The lighting in the room reflecting from her tear-filled eyes made her eyes shine like diamonds. And soon enough, the first teardrop fell from her left eye and into the jar, followed immediately by another teardrop from her right eye. We got off the mark with the timer at 2:52:45. More tears followed, and a few tears fell like raindrops into the jar.
A couple of tears rolled down her cheeks, and she tried to adjust by tilting her head a bit further forward, but a couple more tears streamed down the same paths as her previous tears. A tear was about to drip off her chin, and she quickly moved the jar a little to catch it. She blinked, sending the tears that were in her eyes down her cheeks again, again managing to catch a teardrop falling off her chin. She set the jar down and wiped her eyes and her face.
“What are you doing? Why are you stopping? We need to keep going”, I said, confused.
“I want to make sure that my tears fall directly out of my eyes into the jar. Can’t afford to waste any tears by letting them trickle down my face”, she replied, making me feel stupid.
“Fair enough, sorry. Are you good to keep going?”, I asked, glancing at the timer that was now at 2:50:09.
“Yeah, I can go for a while. Perhaps if we make it out of here, I should become an actress, who knew I could cry buckets of tears like this! But if we are to make it out, you’re going to have to cry too”, she replied, rubbing her eyes again for round 2. More tears rained out of her eyes, and this time, she managed to get many more tears into the jar before her tears started to overwhelm her eyes and run down her cheeks again. Instead of just wiping her cheeks with her fingers, she tried to use the jar’s neck to collect the tears inside the jar. With 2 hours and 45 minutes remaining, there was a thin layer of tears at the bottom of the jar - progress, but still a far cry away from our goal. We had to keep going, keep crying.
She readied herself for another round, and this time, her eyes were watering much slower, and while she managed to shed a few tears, her tears were obviously starting to slow down. She needed a break, and some water. She looked at me, her eyes red from all the crying, and said, “I need to recharge. You need to take over for a while.”
I was terrified - more than 15 minutes had already passed, and we’d barely managed to fill a tiny bit of the jar, and I hadn’t shed a single tear yet. I knew I had to overcome my embarrassment of crying in front of a stranger and just force myself to cry, after all, we were in a life or death situation. I rubbed my eyes, kept them open, tried to fan them with my hands to get them to water, but no, nothing was happening, it was as if my tear glands had stopped working.
“Come on, you need to cry. I don’t want to die in here. I won’t look, just cry”, she said.
“I’m trying. My eyes are just not as sensitive as yours.” I looked away from her, and she turned away from me, and I tried again to get my eyes to water, and after struggling for a few more precious minutes, I could feel a sting in my right eye - it was starting to tear up! I held the jar in one hand, fanning my eyes with the other, hoping to expedite the tears, and finally, I could feel my eyes brimming with tears, ready to overflow. I made sure the jar was lined up right below my eyes so that the tears would fall right out of my eyes into the jar.
The first tear came out, and much to my horror, it went sort of down my cheek towards my nose, and fell down into oblivion instead of into the jar. All that effort to get a single tear, for nothing. I could feel the tear in my other eye on the verge of falling, and this time, I tilted my head as down as I could, holding the jar right under my eye, and after what felt like an eternity, finally, a teardrop managed to make it into the jar, quickly followed by another one.
I tried to keep the tears flowing, but I also felt an overwhelming urge to blink, and as I blinked, the tears that were forming just dissipated. I felt dejected, and felt like I might be on the verge of actually crying - and realised - that might help me shed more tears! So, fighting my instinct to hold back my tears, I let myself cry, and felt my eyes welling up, and had the jar at the ready. And soon enough, a couple of tears fell out of my eyes and into the jar, and then a few others. I was literally crying in fear, but it was working. I tried to stifle sobs, but I couldn’t any longer, and just turned into a sobbing mess, feeling greatly embarrassed, but helping us move towards our objective. Our lives depended on it.
As I was sobbing into the jar, I felt a gentle touch on my shoulder, and I looked up, startled, only to see the girl sitting next to me with this tender look on her face. “Keep crying, don’t be embarrassed, it’s okay to cry. I promise, I won’t tell anyone when we get out, this will be our little secret.” Her kindness and optimism helped greatly, and I pumped out a few more tears. But I could feel the emotions starting to wane, and the tears starting to dry up.
“I might need a break, you need to take over”, I told her through my snivels. “Cool, I got you covered. Hopefully, resting my eyes for the last little while helps and they’re able to produce more tears”, she replied as I handed her the jar. She repeated the same process as before, and collected more precious teardrops in the jar. Given how slow I’d been, we’d used up almost 40 minutes, and still had a long way to go in terms of filling up the jar. She cried for about 5 more minutes, with the jar now visibly starting to get filled up, but still at a dishearteningly slow rate.
It was my turn, and I had to find a way to conjure up the tears. I started to think about my friends and family, and how I might never get to see them again or say goodbye, and that did the trick - the tears came like clockwork, and I managed to get a few drops into the jar before calming down, which I didn’t want to do, but I’ve never been someone to express my emotions through tears a lot, so it was quite miraculous how I was even able to cry as much as I was crying.
“The masked man said that we’ll be given water to hydrate ourselves at the hour mark, and we’re almost there. Should we wait?”, I asked. “I don’t trust him, but I think we both need to rest our eyes at least a little if we want to fill up the jar. We’re in a marathon, not a sprint.” So, we decided to wait and see if we’d be given water as promised. I tried talking to her and asking questions about her life before being kidnapped and thrust into this nightmare. “Let’s actually not talk about it now as it might make me cry, but I don’t think I’m hydrated enough and I don’t want to waste precious tears.”
“Fair point”, I thought to myself as I nodded. This woman was definitely smart, and she had tear glands that were almost tailor made to a death game such as the one we were in. I glanced at the timer, and as it counted down to 2 hours, on the dot, a buzzer went off, and through a small, secret opening in the wall, a single, 500ml bottle of water was thrown into the room.
We glanced at each other, then at the bottle, then at each other again. My protective and survival instincts kicked in, and I said to her, “You’ve lost way more fluid than I have, so you should drink most of this. However, just to make sure it’s not a trick and it’s not poisoned or anything, I’ll take the first sip.” She nodded hesitantly, and I removed the bottle cap and took a sip - to my relief, it was just water, and I couldn’t discern any drugs or toxins in it. “It’s clean”, I said as I handed her the bottle, and she drank about half of it at once. “Let’s save some for later”, she said, so we just put the now half-empty bottle on the table alongside the timer which was ticking away, with less than 2 hours to go.
Fast forwarding a little, we took turns to cry like in the first hour - with her doing the bulk of the crying as before (if you could call her method of irritating her eyes to get tears “crying”), and me trying my best and going to some dark places emotionally to get the waterworks going. It was hard, and I had to open up a bit about myself and share some little secrets with her to get myself emotional enough to cry - oh, how I wish I had a more sensitive heart, or better yet, more sensitive eyes, so we didn’t have to go to some of those dark places mentally.
The jar was about 70% full when the buzzer went off at the 2 hour mark - we now had 60 minutes to go, and the jar was nowhere close to being full. Thankfully, we were given another bottle of water, and we rehydrated ourselves, ready to give it our best shot. It was cry or die, after all. She went first again after drinking some water, and managed to get quite a bit of tears flowing - I was actually quite surprised (and thankful) for how even after two hours of shedding buckets of tears, she was still able to pump out salt water from her eyes as if her eyes were faucets. When we needed to swap, I knew I had to open up more about myself, and my life and my past to her to have any hopes of crying enough tears to get us out of danger.
“There are things about me that I’ve never shared with anyone, that if the wrong person knew, my life would be completely destroyed. But I feel like we have no other option than for me to talk about those things in order to cry, because if I don’t, we’re both going to die. So, here goes”, I said to her, as I opened up to her about one of my deepest secrets. I’m obviously not going to include what it is - I don’t want the whole internet to know my secret, but I had to share it with her. Even thinking about it now has me tearing up.
But surely enough, as I started talking to her about it, the floodgates opened and tears started gushing out of my eyes, and I made sure to get as many of them into the jar as I could. I was an uncontrollable, sobbing mess, feeling completely embarrassed, completely helpless having had to make myself so vulnerable in front of a complete stranger, all to try and potentially save both our lives. I was starting to wonder whether the psycho who kidnapped us and was putting us through this ordeal would actually let us go even if we succeeded in filling up the jar with our tears.
“Why am I sharing these things with you? We don’t even know whether he’ll let us go even if we filled up this stupid jar. Why don’t we just give up?”, I sobbed. “Hey, this is our best shot. And don’t worry, I’m not judging you for the things you’ve shared. I know this is hard, but you have to do it, okay? I really don’t want to die here”, she said, in a surprisingly calm and soothing voice. I continued to cry my eyes out for a few more minutes and managed to get most of my tears into the jar. I looked at the timer, and we had 29 minutes to go.
“I need a break, it’s your turn”, I said, handing the jar over to her. Her tears came on cue - falling into the jar like raindrops in quite rapid succession. “If we survive this, it’d be thanks to those miraculous tear glands that she has and the uncanny ability to get her tears flowing like that”, I thought to myself as I observed her. I was surprised at how for all the tears she’d shed, she didn’t seem to get emotional - literally all her tears were through irritating her eyes by rubbing them and not blinking, not through emotional crying. “Wonder how she’s managed to keep her cool in a situation like this”, I wondered, though I wasn’t complaining - one way or another, we were filling up that jar with tears, and the masked man hadn’t said anything about what should cause the tears.
She paused for a bit, and sipped some of our last remaining water - leaving perhaps a sip or two, and continued to shed more tears, bringing the jar close to full. I looked at the timer - 10:03, 10:02, 10:01, 10:00, 9:59… We had less than 10 minutes remaining, and to my dismay, I looked at her and her tears were waning. “You have to do this last little stretch, we’re almost there, the jar is almost full”, she exclaimed. I took the jar from her, my hands trembling with fear knowing that if I failed, it could be the end of both of us. I tried to imagine the worst possible scenario, thought of my family and friends, even the secret I’d shared with her earlier, but unfortunately, my eyes weren’t cooperating.
“Come on, do something, is there something else you can think of that can make you cry? It’s a literal life or death situation - it’s not the time to have any reservations”, she said. Unfortunately, she was right. I had one ace up my sleeve, one really dark, personal secret that I’d sworn to myself that I’d never share with anyone, that if I had no conscience, I’d kill to keep buried. But I knew I had to open up about it and talk to her, as verbalising my thoughts seemed to be the only thing that was really effective in bringing out my tears.
So, I started stammering, trying to find the words to articulate a secret so dark and deep, that I’d never imagined ever speaking it out verbally to anyone. “Come on, the clock is ticking, out with whatever you want to say, as long as it makes you cry enough tears to get us over the line!”, she almost screamed at me. I’d wasted so much time thinking about it that we were now down to less than 5 minutes on the clock, and seeing no other way, I blurted out the unutterable secret that I’d been harbouring for years. As the words came out of my mouth, so the tears came out of my eyes, and with my trembling hands I managed to hold the jar in the right position to collect my tears.
60 seconds left - and the jar was almost full. A few more teardrops fell. The clock was ticking. 30 seconds, a couple more teardrops, and then more. Almost, a few more drops should do it. 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. An alarm went off almost in perfect sync with my last two tears that seemed to completely fill the jar to the brim. We looked at each other, unsure what was going to happen next. The alarm stopped, and I could feel my head hurt as a result of all the crying.
Suddenly, the door opened, and in walked the masked man, and he grabbed the jar and just drank the tears! To say I felt a bit grossed out is an understatement, but I was too exhausted to think too much about it. Suddenly, he laughed, almost the kind of evil laugh you hear in movies, but it was real. And he turned to the girl and said, “I always love how your tears taste, but I think mixed with this loser’s tears, they taste even better!” The girl said in almost a possessed voice, “You should have saved some for me, I’d have liked to have tasted what this guy’s tears tasted like”, but then burst out in hysterical laughter.
“It wasn’t that hard to get you to let the cat out of the bag. All those secrets you’ve been hiding for years, we have them on tape now, with your sorry face sobbing as you confessed them to a random stranger”, she said, still laughing like a maniac. My heart sank, and I felt like I’d just fallen victim, not just to kidnapping, but a very cruel prank designed to elicit my secrets from me. I also felt greatly betrayed by the girl - I thought I was saving her life, but instead, she’d been in on it all along and had just been toying with me, with a mix of fake kindness and pressure to get me to spill my secrets. I was no longer safe - when I said earlier that these secrets in the wrong hands could destroy me, I meant it. And now these two psychos had my secrets, and I felt completely helpless.
“What do you want from me?”, I said, stifling a sob. “Oh, we want a lot of things from you. We own you now, and if you ever want to keep your secrets from getting out, you do whatever we ask you to do from here on out.” “Yeah, let’s start with your money, that money you’ve saved up for paying your tuition fees for next semester, that’s ours now.” “And don’t even think about calling the police - if you do, the video goes online, and your life would be ruined, and that of your loved ones.” “And we also know where you live, and where your sister lives, if you don’t do as we say, it’ll be her tears I’m drinking next.” “We are, I won’t let you drink it all next time.”
I felt completely helpless, but I knew I had to do something. Running almost purely on survival instinct and adrenaline, I just got up and ran out of the door, and shut it and bolted it on my way out, taking them by surprise. I was in a hallway in what seemed like an abandoned house. I had to find the exit quick, and found it, and ran out into the woods as quickly as I could. I still had my wallet in my pocket, surprisingly, they hadn’t taken it though my phone was nowhere to be found, I kept running till I got to a petrol station, which thankfully also sold cheap mobile phones. I bought a couple, and used my drivers’ license which was in my wallet as ID to buy a couple of SIM cards, and I also withdrew as much cash as I could.
I’ve been on the run for two days now, and just got a room in a motel where I could pay by cash. I managed to call my sister to warn her to get out of the house and run and go somewhere safe. I don’t want to call the police as by now, I’m sure my secret is out and those psychos would have posted those videos of me all over the internet, and I’m just as much on the run from the police as I am from them (and from some other people). Part of me wonders whether I should just turn myself in - it could be better than being murdered by two psychopaths, or any of the others who’d be super angry at the secrets I spilled. What should I do? I’m currently geographically a bit far away from where I was held after being kidnapped, but I know I can’t stay in this motel forever, and would have to constantly be on the move (unless I turn myself in to the cops). Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks.