I was up late, mindlessly drifting across the internet’s backwaters like a digital insomniac. That’s when I came across…it. A crudely designed website with glowing green text pulsating against the black background like radioactive veins.
At first, I thought it was just another laughably amateur attempt at a creepypasta-style horror story trying too hard to scare people. But as I read on, the content made my blood freeze.
The site claimed to have insider information about something called “The Render” - a legendary and depraved creature that stalks ancient forests and woodlands, seeking out humans for its deranged rituals. If The Render finds you alone, the text warned, it will appear from the shadows and ask you a simple question in a grating, inhuman voice:
“Are you right-handed…or left?”
If you foolishly admit to being right-handed, the creature mercilessly snaps your right arm with brutal force, relishing your screams as the bones shatter. If you admit to being left-handed, it shatters your left arm without hesitation.
And if you refuse to answer or try to be deceptive? That’s when The Render truly unleashes its evil. It begins methodically shattering every limb while you lay helpless on the ground, wailing in sheer agony. The relatively “lucky” victims had just their arms and legs broken in this cruel game.
But there were accounts of The Render also taking fingers and even hands from those who angered or offended it the most. One particularly disturbing story claimed The Render seemed to derive sadistic pleasure from the sickening crunch and snapping sounds of bones breaking. As if it fed off the audible misery of its victims’ suffering.
The most chilling detail, however, was the final part of The Render’s cruel ritual. After shattering your body and will, it would cruelly wipe your memory of the entire traumatic event, using some sort of unnatural power. Victims awoke later, hopelessly broken yet with no recollection of their fateful encounter in the woods or how their limbs became mangled.
Just…emptiness. Foggy blanks where those nightmarish memories should have been burned into the psyche.
At this point, my hands were shaking, cold sweat prickling my skin. This had to just be an admittedly well-done work of fiction, right? Creative writing at its most depraved, but not real… That’s what I desperately wanted to believe.
But then I scrolled down to the photo gallery section of the website.
Twisted, mangled arms bent at grotesque angles that no person should ever have to endure. Compound fractures with thick bones protruding through ripped flesh. Deep, ragged gashes crisscrossing appendages, dried blood caked around the wounds. These weren’t AI-generated, and there’s no way they were Photoshop fakes…these injuries were undeniably, horrifyingly real.
And each one was captioned with some form of the same sickening line of text: “I don’t remember how this happened.”
I slammed my laptop shut, heart pounding as if I’d seen something obscene that could never be unseen. Suddenly, my apartment felt too open, too exposed…too vulnerable. I struggled to catch my breath, fighting waves of panic washing over me.
Was this just an immersive horror experience? Some morbid Internet rabbit hole designed to mess with people’s minds? Or did this unholy creature - The Render - actually exist out there? Stalking the forests and woodlands, seeking out new victims to torment and disfigure for its sick pleasure before cruelly erasing their memories of the traumatic event?
That night, fear gripped me like a vice. I barely slept, startling at every creak and groan of the apartment settling. I checked and double-checked that all windows and doors were locked. At one point, I even got on my hands and knees, compulsively peering under beds and into closets with a trembling flashlight beam like a terrified child convinced there were monsters hiding in the dark.
For a while after that, I tried to put the disturbing website out of my mind and regain my grip on reality. Surely it was just someone’s creative writing project meant to unsettle people, I told myself. An unsettlingly well-done bit of horror fiction, but fiction nonetheless.
And yet…
Months later, I find myself staring unblinkingly at my right arm. The sickly pale flesh disappearing beneath the stark white cast. How? How did this happen? I’ve racked my brain endlessly, but many of the memories surrounding this catastrophic injury are just…gone. Erased. Replaced by hazy, formless blanks where the crucial details should be burned into my psyche.
The fragmented flashes I can piece together play like a distorted reel of specters and half-glimpsed horrors. They started a few weeks ago, as the dense forest began swallowing the last rays of twilight. I remember clutching the straps of my backpack tighter as I made my way along the narrow, winding trail alone. The crunch of twigs and dried leaves under my boots. A damp, earthy scent hanging heavy in the evening air. The trees seeming to press in closer with every step forward.
That’s when it began - that incessant, unnatural scratching sound that made me freeze in my tracks, my breath catching in my suddenly bone-dry throat. It slithered through the shadows of the treeline ahead, a harsh, grating rasp like something being dragged across jagged stone. It raised the hairs on the back of my neck as more garbled noises joined that initial ungodly skittering, seeming to circle me from all sides now, haunting whispers riding on the wind.
I shone my flashlight towards where that first sound had originated, the bright beam slicing through the enveloping darkness. My heart pounded so violently I could feel it throbbing in my temples as I squinted to make out whatever foul presence was lurking ahead.
That’s when it emerged. A hunched, spindly figure slithering out from the treeline, eerily silhouetted just beyond the glow of my light. Despite the deep shadows, I could make out elongated, disproportionately long limbs that twisted bonily with each strained movement, like viscous tendrils that did not…could not…belong to any living creature found in nature. Not on this earth.
The gurgling wheeze that issued forth next chilled me to the core - a blasphemous mockery of speech that raised the bile in my throat as those inhuman jaws worked:
“Are you…riiiiight-handed? Orrrrr…leeeeeft?”
In that soul-freezing moment, fragmented memories from the cursed website I’d discovered months earlier came flooding back in fractured pieces. Tales of an ancient, depraved legend - a twisted, unnatural creature that stalks the darkest forest trails, seeking out human victims for its sick, deranged rituals.
I felt rooted to the forest floor, petrified as the vile creature lurched another step closer. Its shadow seemed to reach out in tendrils, caressing the ground around me as that gurgling rasp issued forth once more:
“Welllll? Anssswer truthfulllly…”
My mind raced, trying to determine if playing along or staying silent would be the wiser decision in the face of this unholy abomination. What new torments would it unleash if I angered it? What if…
The thunderous crash of undergrowth being violently disturbed somewhere behind me shattered my thoughts. I whirled around to see a second set of glowing eyes emerging from the trees. Then a third set…and a fourth. More twisted, unnatural shapes beginning to encircle me from all angles, slithering out from the treeline as garbled wheezes and scratching sounds joined in a nightmarish chorus.
My heart turned to ice as the full realization dawned - this was no mere encounter with a solitary monster…this was an ambush.
The Render had been first, the vanguard of what appeared to be an entire hunting pack of these depraved, forest-stalking horrors. And now they had me surrounded…alone, defenseless, and ripe for their foul torments to commence.
I opened my mouth to scream, but only a rattling wheeze escaped as the first set of grotesquely long arms reached out to seize me…
…And that’s the last thing I can recall. Just fragmented sensations of blinding agony, shrieks of torment echoing endlessly through the abyss of the forest, and those cruel wheezing sounds that could only be this entire pack’s laughter at my suffering.
I don’t know how much time passed. All I remember is a hazy darkness, broken up by fleeting nightmares even more terrifying than the actual events must have been. Visions of being slowly, methodically unmade at the hands - or tendrils - of those unholy woodlands beasts slithered through my subconscious in disconnected bursts.
When I finally regained consciousness, I was lying in a hospital bed, head pounding and body laced with fiery lances of pain. Doctors and nurses hovered over me, masks concealing their expressions as they asked me a barrage of questions I couldn’t begin to answer:
“Can you tell us your name? What’s the last thing you remember? Do you know what happened to you out there?”
My throat was too ragged and raw to speak, but even if I could have, what would I have said? That I was ambushed and savagely attacked in the forest by grotesque, unnatural monsters straight out of a nightmare? They’d think I was insane…or worse, lying.
For now, I could only stare down at the cast covering what remained of my right arm. The limb was twisted at an angle no human arm should bend, with wires and metal rods protruding through the plaster in multiple places to stabilize the shattered bones. I turned my head slowly, feeling the agony radiating from every inch of my body - a torrent of broken bones and trauma.
They say time will help my memories reform, that the human mind protects itself by blurring out traumas too devastating to comprehend all at once. Part of me welcomes that possibility. To forget, even temporarily, the excruciating visions plaguing me of…things…that should never exist outside our darkest nightmares.
But another part feels there’s something too dangerous about forgetting. As much as I want to let those scattered, corrupted shards of recollection fade, something keeps pulling me back. An inescapable feeling that the second I drop my guard, I’ll be vulnerable to the next encounter.
Because after seeing what walked among those tumbling shadows of the forest…I know it’s only a matter of time before They return.