I drink quite heavily these days. I drink until I feel then I keep drinking until I stop feeling. My days are such horribly depressing messes that seem to drag endlessly. I don’t know how I’ll get out of this mess. Let me tell you how it got to his point, I guess.
Quite recently my father died. I hadn’t spoken to him in several years prior to his death, we weren’t on good terms. He had apparently shot himself in the head with his hunting rifle, which as much as I disliked him, I couldn’t help but feel sad about.
I’d also struggled with depression and alcoholism for long time, part of the reason why I grew so distant from my father. To my surprise he did leave something for me in his will, it was a bar that he owned. That’s when I knew that he really did still hate me.
As a kid I was completely terrified of that bar. It was an old place, must have been at least a hundred years old, built out of wood. It used to scare me so much because the place was so quiet, so dimly lit and barely any customers showed up. Cleaning up after closing was such a nightmare. It barely helped that my older brothers used to tell me scary stories about that place.
“So there was this serial killer that owned this place a long time ago,” I remember my older brother Jack telling me, “during the day he worked the counter then at night he’d bring back women to it and kill them with an axe then he’d bury them underneath the floorboards. They say that if you’re there by yourself you can hear his victims crying.”
So many nights filled with horrible dreams about that place. I chuckled, my father must’ve had a dark sense of humor. I decided that I’d move back to my hometown, my life wasn’t going anywhere at the moment anyway and this might have been the break that I’d needed.
A few weeks later I’d moved, the building had a room with a bed behind the counter so I could just sleep there. Business went fine for a while, it wasn’t a very big town so there wasn’t many bars in the area, a lot of people came to mine. For a few months it was a comfortable existence, not perfect, but I could live like this. Of course it didn’t last.
One late night after closing I was up cleaning the bar. The place had so much dust everywhere it that some of these things must not have been cleaned in at least a decade. As I was cleaning I pulled the rug that was behind the counter to wash the floor and that’s when I first saw it.
It was an old wooden hatch, nothing remarkable about it. The handles on it were incredibly rusted, it had been there for a really long time. Despite all the time I’d spent in that bar as a kid I never knew about this.
I figured that it must’ve been a cellar or maybe a crawl space underneath there. The memory of Jack’s story flooded my mind again as my hands touched grabbed the handles. I shook my head and I pried it open, the handles also incredibly rusted.
Underneath the hatch there was a long dark hole with a circle of bricks surrounding it. It was a well. It must’ve been older than the bar and they’d just built over it without covering it, but that didn’t explain why there was a hatch over it.
I looked down into the darkness of the well, cold air rising up. That’s when I knew something wasn’t right. Cold air shouldn’t rise up like that yet I could feel the entire room get chillier. I probably should’ve just closed it then and there but I turned on my phone’s flashlight to see if I could make out the water.
At the very bottom of the well there was a dead body floating in the water. It was a naked woman with long black hair, her skin the color of paper. It didn’t look like the body had been there for long.
“Holy fuck!” I muttered to myself as I backed away from the hole. How the fuck did that get in there? My father had died months ago, that body didn’t look like it couldn’t have been older than a few days. I had to call the cops.
As I was about to dial the number I heard it. It was an ever so soft whispering sound. At first I thought I imagined hearing it, but it kept going. The story from my childhood flooded my mind again. I leaned over the well and, indeed, that’s where the sound was coming from.
“I’m so cold…” a soft, broken voice echoed from the well. “So… so cold.”
I recoiled backwards in horror. That voice was not human. It almost sounded human, but not quite. I didn’t know how to react, it wasn’t right. I shone my phone’s flashlight down there again and it was indeed the woman that was talking.
“So cold… so much pain… can you come down here, please?” she said. I shut the hatch open after that.
I sat down in one of the wooden chairs of the bar. I didn’t really know what to do. I was in shock and denial over the entire ordeal. I turned to the only thing I knew, which was alcohol, so I picked up a bottle of whiskey and took a few shots. The whimpering sounds continued for the entire time.
I woke up the next day with a headache, I didn’t even remember falling asleep. I opened up the bar and went about business as usual. What had happened the previous knight was troubling me the entire time but I just didn’t show it.
After closing I braced myself and I opened up the hatch again. The whimpering noises started the moment I opened it. I sat down by the mouth of the well for a while just listening to that woman tell me how cold it was down there and how she wanted me to come there with her.
I must’ve sat there for a few hours at least, mesmerized by the situation. The tone of her voice went from several kinds of pain, to sadness to apathy and so on, trying every tactic possible to get me to come down there. There was something so incredibly hypnotizing about the entire thing, in spite of how terrifying it was the voice was attracting me.
Despite the fact that this couldn’t have been happening in the first place I was still thinking logically at least. I had to do something about this, things like these should not exist in our world. Who knows what the fuck would have happened if I did went down there, but I wasn’t going to find out. I closed the hatch again that night and drank myself to sleep, again.
The next day after closing I opened the hatch yet again. As expected, the soft whimpering started once more. I was starting to get sick of this entire situation. I wasn’t going to let this take over my life, bring me down into that place of depression and misery again.
“What the fuck are you?” I asked, looking down into the well, my speech ever so slightly slurred from drinking.
“So cold… why don’t you… climb down here… with me?” she painfully managed to say.
That voice, ever so slightly not human. It wasn’t something that was of this world. Whatever it was, I was going to send it back to wherever it came from, I was going to pour gasoline down the well and set it on fire. There was an ever so slight change in her tone as I got up from the floor.
“Scott…” the voice started. That startled me.
“What…” I muttered, turning around in my tracks.
“Scott, do you remember when… your mother died… in a car accident… when you were 12?” she said. I wanted to throw up when I heard that.
“How do you know?” I asked, leaning over the well. How did it know? That was such a devastating event in my life, how could it mention it so casually?
“So cold… so cold…” it started again. I repeated my question but it kept pretending like it couldn’t hear me.
I drank some more. That night I fell asleep to my ear to the floor, listening to that thing talk to me. Even in my dreams I could still hear that voice.
The next few days came and went just like that. I would go through my miserable day then after closing I would open the hatch and listen. The woman would mostly just repeat how cold it was but then other times it would randomly mention traumatic events from my life. My high school girlfriend getting hit by a bus, my older brother Jack overdosing, that time I tried killing myself, it would say it all with an ever so slight hint that it was enjoying tormenting me.
That thing isn’t just not human, it was never human. It’s not a murder victim like I originally thought, it knows things that it couldn’t know. After a while it seemed to have grown bored of our usual game and it started telling me about the dark urges in my mind, telling me I should act out on them.
“Why don’t you… kill a woman with an axe… Scott?” it said once. “Scott, why don’t you… shoot up your former school… don’t you want revenge?” it said another time.
Over time it kept getting more deranged in what it was asking me to do. Things that should never be said, that go beyond just violent fantasies and into the realm of knowledge that disturbs your very being.
And that is how my life has been since then. I think it’s getting worse, in what it’s telling me at least. There’s no point in ignoring it. Even when I try to go to sleep in my room in the back I can hear it crying in pain all night, and during my dreams I can still hear the voice.
I haven’t even opened the bar in about two weeks, all I do is drink all day and lay down on the floor. I haven’t even eaten in a few days. It’s just me and that thing in here, talking to me every waking moment.
I should just leave but… there’s something to it that keeps drawing me in, keeps making me want to listen, no matter how much it’s hurting me. I’ve been in some pretty severe depressions in my life before, but all of that is nothing compared to this.
I really don’t know what to do anymore.