My name is John, and I have recently been struggling with financial issues. A week ago, I noticed a too-good-to-be-true deal for a house on the Facebook marketplace while I was mindlessly scrolling. I was renting a place in which, 8 months of rent would cost exactly as much as the house that was for sale. I messaged the owner about it and they responded very quickly. I had been renting a small apartment because I lived alone and I had little belongings; a closet of clothes, 4 books, a laptop, a little coin collection, and food in the fridge. After some discussion, we agreed for me to check the house out tomorrow.
I arrived at the location he sent, exactly 4 minutes before the meeting time. I got out of my car and started excitedly walking towards the house. ‘I can’t believe this guy is selling this house for so little!’ I thought to myself. The house looked huge compared to the pictures, and I had my suspicions about something being wrong. I walked up to the door and rang the bell. After two rings, the seller opened the door and told me to come in.
That was when I noticed something strange, and not about the house, no. About the way the guy looked. He looked so stressed as if all of his hair could fall out right then and there. His fingernails were visibly bitten and there were black bags under his eyes, like he hadn’t slept in days. He talked in a similarly stressed manner. As I walked around the house, I couldn’t quite believe it. The place was spotless! It progressively made me both elated and scared. ‘So why was this guy selling it so cheap?’ The thought floated in my mind the whole time I was there. With a battle going on in my mind, I decided to buy the house. When I told the owner, he seemed way too happy. Way, way too happy. He was practically jumping with joy. We agreed for me to move in the next day. When I got in my bed, it was very hard to fall asleep. The looming thought in my mind made the experience I usually look forward to a task.
I only got a few hours of sleep, and as soon as I got up, I immediately started packing all of my things into the pickup truck my dad had gifted me for my 25th birthday. It only took two times of driving back and forth between the houses, one for my smaller things and the other for my fridge. If you have the question of how I got the fridge up onto the trunk alone, I didn’t. I called my neighbor, who was also my best friend, to help me. After I moved in, I called the previous owner to confirm that I had moved in.
Fast forward to the first night of sleeping in my new house, I was very tired and wanted to fall asleep as fast as I could. It was then that the scratching started. At first, it sounded like the sound a rat would make, but it was louder. This new house had very good blinds that blocked out all of the light from the outside. I never had a fear of the dark, so it only made it easier to sleep. After convincing myself that it was just a critter, I fell asleep in a few minutes. That night I had a very unnerving dream, probably the creepiest I’ve had in years. I was standing in a very dark room, I couldn’t move, and after some time a black, humanoid, but in no way human figure, appeared on the opposite end of the room. Its white eyes opened, and suddenly, it was right in front of me. I woke up in a cold sweat, and remained, staring at the ceiling, the whole night.
I woke up refreshed, even though the dream was still on my mind. I decided to start exploring my newly bought property. It was two stories high and had a backyard. As I walked around the outside of the house, I noticed a shed. I opened it, and inside was a lawnmower. It looked new and I decided to ask the owner if he had forgotten it. I texted him, and he replied with a short but generous ‘Keep it’. I looked back at the grass on my lawn, and seeing that it was quite high, I decided there was nothing to lose, and started mowing. I had mowed most of the grass to a desirable height when the mower produced a loud, metal-against-metal sound. At first, I thought I had hit a big rock, but the nature of the sound wasn’t right. I stopped mowing and looked at the maker of the noise. A metal, rusted handle poked out from the ground. It was attached to a hatch, similarly made out of rusted-to-hell metal. I mowed the rest of the lawn and put the lawnmower back in the shed. Out of sheer curiosity, I decided to open the hatch. ‘Must be an access to the water pipes or something,’ I thought. I wrapped my fingers around the handle and tried pulling. It didn’t budge. I tried pulling with all of my strength. The hatch gave away, and I struggled to stay on my feet. I looked inside.
Instead of some dirty rusted pipes, which I had expected, I was looking into a large tunnel. A very unstable-looking ladder reached the bottom. It was pitch black inside, with the only light being from outside the hatch. I can’t call myself an urban explorer, but I was always interested in abandoned and forgotten places. I didn’t know that the tunnel was abandoned, but it was unexplored for some time, given that the sheet of dust collecting on the bottom was undeniably thick. I decided to explore the tunnel tomorrow, with preparation and spare time. I closed the hatch and continued walking around the house.
I had never experienced sleep paralysis before, but I imagined how it felt. Now I lay, strapped to the bed with invisible ropes, with that humanoid creature now in my room. I felt horrified when the thing started walking towards my bed bent over, and I could smell its breath. It was a mixture of decomposing flesh that was soaked in vinegar and had been left under direct sunlight for 10 years. When it reached towards me with its sharp-clawed hand, and scraped the claws against my forearm. The pain felt… real. We all have those kinds of dreams, like we fall off a cliff or a building, and this wasn’t that kind of dream. It wasn’t a dream at all. The creature then started scraping them against my bed frame, which horrified me even more. It sounded exactly like the scraping I heard when falling asleep the night before. I woke up screaming, and without hesitation, I jerked my arm closer to my face to examine it. There was a long, bleeding cut on my arm. Something was very wrong with this house.
Yesterday, in the morning, I quickly geared up for my trip to the tunnel. I took a flashlight and some water. I brought my pocket knife with me, just in case. As I walked up to the hatch, I saw a detail that I hadn’t noticed before. In the newly shortened grass, lay a rusted, extremely corroded padlock. It looked 150 years old at least! It seemingly had snapped in half when I pulled the handle. ‘So, how old exactly was this metal hatch?’ I opened it up, and climbed down the ladder, leaving the hatch open.
I switched on my flashlight, shining around. I only had two choices. Go right or go left. I chose to go left. I walked for around 8 minutes when I heard a breaking sound beneath my feet, kind of like a stick snapping in half. I looked down and jerked my foot away in horror. It had been half eaten by maggots, a freaking, human skull! Maggots crawled away, disturbed by the intrusion of my boot into their meal. This place was insanely freaking me out. ‘First those dreams, now a skull?!’ After some hardcore contemplation, through serious resistance from my caveman instincts, I proceeded, down the tunnel.
The farther on I went, the worse the stench had gotten since entering the tunnel. At some point, I had grown so nervous, I would jump at the slightest drip of water. And jump I did when a rat loudly quickly scurried away from under my feet. I took the next step and cursed loudly as something made me trip forward, landing into the disgusting water, that who knows how long has been there. Cursing again and picking myself up, I thought ‘Well shit. Now I’m covered in this filthy water. Shit.’ I looked back to see what had caused me to fall and realized that it was a dead body. It was wearing a damn, army uniform.
Why didn’t I turn away the minute I saw the skull? It felt like an invisible force had been dragging me along. At this point, I seriously wanted (and should have!) to call the police. I carried on, unwillingly walking through the tunnel. I had soon reached a small room, in which that smell was the absolute worst so far. Multiple bodies were piled up around me, and my brain absolutely battling with the invisible force. ‘I’m getting the hell out of this place!’, I thought, but that wasn’t the thought that convinced me to run. The absolute deciding factor was when one of the, apparently, not-so-dead people stood up.
I don’t think I’ve run faster in my life. With the undead corpse now chasing me, I didn’t want to look back, but I did. I really shouldn’t have. I thought I had made some distance with the corpse, and stopped to pick up a Glock-18 I hadn’t noticed before, next to the dead soldier. Checking if it had any ammo inside, I heard the now apparent screams of either pain or some other, not-so-subtle feeling, emerging from the man, keeping up close behind me.
I aim the gun at him, revising the knowledge of how to shoot in my mind. As the man neared, I planted a bullet right between his eyes. He staggered for a moment, but to my utter shock, shook his head and charged at me once again. I aimed, and another shot, a bit off but still fatal, landed on the side of his head, finally killing him. I got loose from the immediate shock and continued sprinting back to the ladder, which I proceeded to ascend at record speed, bashing my arm against the hatch. I pulled myself out of that hellhole, laid on the grass, and stared at the sky, trying to calm down.
As soon as I came back to my senses, I took my car and hurried to the nearest supermarket, hoping to find a thick padlock to replace the one that I snapped in half. I deemed my mission successful, after returning ‘home’ (still being used to calling the house that way) and installing my new lock on the latch. Still paranoid, I spent a fortune to buy a set of security cameras and spent the rest of the day setting all of them up.
Today I was awakened by a scraping sound. I was thankful at first when I realized that I was not in a dream, but then it dawned on me. The same exact scraping and screeching sound that I had heard in my nightmares. Except now I was wide awake.
Silently but swiftly I stood up, every cracking joint sent shivers down my spine, worried that something might hear it. Was I going insane? I trotted down my bedroom floor, minding each step so as not to make any sound. Slowly cracking the door open, I realized that I was so tired after installing the cameras outside, and had fallen asleep fully clothed (except my jacket of course). Feeling my pocket, I silently exclaimed, ‘Bingo!’ I felt my car keys in my pocket; if I had to, I could escape in the car.
‘I’m probably going insane’ I thought. But no other thoughts came to mind as I crept down the stairs. Until I unfortunately stepped on something sharp, so sharp, that I winced in pain, and fell down the stairs, my head hitting the floor with a dull bang. When I woke up, I immediately felt a piercing pain in the side of my head, fearing the worst. I pulled myself on my knees with the help of my couch, my vision going in and out of focus. The side of my head hurt with every step. I heard a series of quick footsteps behind me and rushed out the front door.
As soon as I slammed the door shut, something crashed into the side of my car, breaking the glass and sending shards of glass flying into the side of my face thankfully not hitting my eye. That’s when I floored it out of there. I managed to catch a glimpse of what it was in the rearview mirror, it was that black silhouette from my nightmares. I decided to drive to the nearest hotel and finally relax for some time. The woman at the front desk was hesitant to give me a room at first, probably due to my battered face. But, thankfully, I convinced her to do it.
I am currently writing all of this as a warning. It had all started to make sense now. That time I shot the undead corpse, it leaked a black goo out of the wounds where my bullets had collided. The black liquid then flowed away back into the tunnel. The creature that broke my truck’s window was made of the same goo. I called the man who sold me the house, but as I suspected, no one answered.
A banging emanated from my hotel room door, and I hesitantly opened it. As soon as I did, with a scream, pale fingers poked through the crack in the opened door. I slammed it back shut with such force, causing the fingers to snap like pickles, and the same black goo shot onto the carpet, gathering and returning under the door. I looked through the peephole, seeing the front desk clerk, extremely pale. I checked the security cameras, and found my new padlock, similarly snapped in half like the previous one. That doesn’t surprise me anymore though.
I think I figured everything out. That creature kills people, taking their bodies as puppets to kill the next person. The person who sold me the house wanted to get rid of that thing, and I had taken the bait. I’m afraid I don’t have much time left, and I’m sorry if my writing has gotten confusing closer to the end.
Some things are just better left alone.