Part 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/15omvee/my_uncles_darkest_secret/
Part 2: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/15r70lb/my_uncles_darkest_secret_series_part_2/
When my dad pulled me out back to the surface, we were not where I was expecting us to be.
We had crossed the other door in the basement room, my dad’s breathing feeling scared and desperate, and the entire way was dark right until we reached another ladder. I almost refused to go up, but my dad pushed me towards the ladder and started pleading with me to just go.
When I grabbed the first step in the ladder, my head was spinning with confusion. I didn’t know where the girl was, or my uncle, and for all I knew, both of them were murderers about to make me their next victim.
That was my first thought when I peaked out of the trapdoor. Around me, all I saw was woods. In my head, I understood how my uncle got out and got to me and the girl without us noticing. When I stood up outside, finally able to completely stretch my legs, I couldn’t hold them still. I started running through the woods, hearing my dad scream my name and rushing up the ladder. I tried to run faster to get away from him, but not even adrenaline could save me at this point.
As my dad caught up and dragged me to the ground, though, he seemed to have changed. Before he was aggressive and strange, but now he just felt afraid. He smashed me to the ground, then climbed over my body and covered my mouth while looking around the woods intensely.
As he stood me up but kept his dirty hands on my mouth, he kept asking me to please be quiet and all I wanted to do was scream at him to let me go.
He shook me hard, then turned me towards him and shushed me before taking his t-shirt off, gagging me and dragging me along while binding both of my wrists together. We were going back to the house, and to my uncle!
As soon as we stepped out of the woods, I could see him pacing back and forth next to the station wagon, then noticing us and raising his arms in the air with a “Finally”. The house door was closed with a bunch of different things piled up in front of it, but I didn’t have time to see why, because I was thrown in the back of the car, ungagged and locked there, my breath starting to fail me and the heat eating away at me.
My uncle came into the car first, screaming at my dad to hurry up while he ran around the car, dove into it butt first and twisted the key until the car came back to life, black smoke taking over the landscape behind me.
I can’t describe the fear I felt for being locked in the car with two murderers who were now taking me away as their latest victim, but at the same time, I couldn’t shake the confusion away. Why would they ungag me? Why would they put up with all my resistance, when all they needed to do was kill me like they did the other three and leave me somewhere while they escaped.
There was only one road on the way to my uncle’s house, and the same road on the way back, but while the last time my dad drove in carefully, now his driving felt like a maniac’s swerving left and right on turns, almost losing control of the car while he kept muttering something to himself that I couldn’t understand with all the screeching from the tyres.
When we finally stopped, we were in the middle of a square with a small church at one end. My uncle pushed the door open, a strange smile on his face, while telling my dad that this was it, this was finally it.
When I took my eyes away from them, my heart sank.
At the bottom of the church’s stairs, a body was sprawled, one ankle broken at the tip of one of the steps and bone splinters coming out. The body was dressed in black, darker stains covering it, and a white satchel with golden ornaments and red stains was lining the body’s neck. Around it, scattered around, there were other bodies, most of them headless.
I crawled backwards until I hit the opposite side of the trunk, making the car bounce and calling my dad and my uncle’s attention back to me.
As he ran up the steps, my dad ordered my uncle to bring me.
Inside, the church was a tomb full of praying mummies on every bench, terror frozen into their faces eternally, praying into the empty church.
“Why couldn’t we just leave her outside?” - my uncle asked, nodding at me while they rushed me stumbling across what must have been more than twenty bodies, the light coming from outside through the dirty windows. I didn’t know what to feel. I didn’t know how they could have done something like this, but I knew my eyes stopped working, going blurry with tears at the thought of what was about to happen to me.
“No, we need her. It’s not going to be like before.” - my dad replied.
My uncle grunted at this, but didn’t reply. After crossing the entire church, me, my dad and my uncle stumbled through one of the doors leading to the back that opened into a room with one hole in the middle, a spiral of stairs going all the way down into another room. My uncle took out his phone and shone a light down the steps, which swirled around like a washing machine all the way until the bottom of a dirty floor in a dark room with splashes of something I couldn’t make out at the bottom of the walls.
It wasn’t until we reached half the stairs that I realised there were even more bodies here and the splashes were stabs of blood coming from the body’s exploded head. Every part of the room I thought I was going to die in, is now burned into my memory and will never go away. The walls were cold and humid as my dad and my uncle cuffed me with a pair of iron shackles hanging from the wall and stepped back. For a while, they both looked at me, my uncle looking excited, and my dad with a look of either nervousness or concern. All I could do was beg for my life, and I did, hoping to convince my dad to change his mind and not end my life there.
Then, suddenly and without warning, my dad pushed the entire knife’s blade into the outside of my leg. I screamed like I never remember screaming before, or since. I imagine it would have felt like my vocal chords were about to rupture, but at that moment, all I felt was the cold metal against my hot blood and the tip of the blade crossing the outside of my leg inside all the way until it cut out through the other side.
Almost as torture, my dad left the blade in there for what felt like an hour, and then started pulling it back and pushing it forward while my uncle asked him if he thought that was enough. I could hear everything, but all I could do was scream uncontrollably and try to pull my hands together to push my dad away. I could feel my voice starting to fade away when the blade finally slid all the way out of the cut and my dad whispered in my ear how sorry he was, and that he hoped I would understand.
By now, I was starting to want to bite his ear off.
To my surprise, he stepped away from me, my uncle pulling him back, while I could hear something above us in the distance, my eyes starting to lose a bit of focus.
Silently, they both seemed to float away from me, all the way to the back of the room where they uncovered an almost invisible door and disappeared.
As the minutes passed, I started hearing someone or something approaching. I tried to pull myself loose, but the shackles wouldn’t budge.
When I finally managed to get my eyes to work and focus and looked up to the start of the spiral stairs, I sighed in relief.
From the hole the stairs rolled into, a small head popped down, almost bald, but now with some thin hair growing, falling behind her ears and floating around at her movement like ghosts. All that showed up was the head of the girl from the basement, scanning around the room, turning it’s back to me while slowly rotating until it finally found me and I saw the expression change from focus to a smile.
At first, I smiled back, happy to see her alive and moving around, but that happiness started to slip away when her smile started going creepier and she dropped the rest of her body into the stairs. I could see the clothes she had before, the small flowery backpack hanging from one side, but whatever was underneath her clothes seemed too limp to keep them straight and that smile looked nothing like a person’s would.
The smile was blank, trying to show happiness for seeing me, I thought, but there was something human missing that made my skin crawl and made me feel all alone in that cold room. I wanted to scream for my dad, but what was a murderer going to do to help me? So I just screamed.
With my scream, the girl’s expression changed, her clothes dropped a little more slowly and to my horror started floating around away from the stairs as a massive, brown, hard, hairy body followed. Somehow, it looked like a massive spider had consumed the girl and decided to use her face and her body, but only at the edge, and its legs were now invading the room, blocking any hope at an escape I had, and all I could think was how I had just been sacrificed.
My body wanted to force me to scream, but I was too scared to do it. All I could do was stand there, frozen, hoping for some miracle. Hoping for my mother, who was back home, waiting for me to just come back.
My breath got stuck inside me, as this thing with the face of the small girl came closer, eyeing me, focused. When the entire body was finally on the floor and the face was getting closer to me, I could see it was frozen in an empty expression, her eyes had turned red and the skin was now rotten grey. It looked like it was curious, looking for something, coming closer, her shiny, hairy legs following the movement behind this unsettling stolen face.
Somehow, I managed to murmur a plea, telling this thing how I helped her and how we could be friends. At the word “friends”, standing one inch away from my face, it tilted its head to one side, the thin hair floating and the now red eyes becoming slightly expressive and a tiny smile showing up. Then, like a quick slash, it repeated the word over and over and over again, quick and sudden, tilting its head to each side with each time it repeated the word “friend”, looking at me from every angle.
When it stopped, the legs gaining balance between the room’s floor and walls, its eye came so close it almost touched mine. All I could do was keep as still as my stuttering breath would allow me.
“No” - it whispered in my face, the putrid breath choking me - “not friend”. It giggled, its entire body shaking. “ Not friend” - it repeated, still giggling. - “Last soul.”
As it said this, two tiny hands popped out of the corners of this thing’s mouth and started spreading it open, a beam of some shiny shadow coming from the inside, a black hole sitting inside its mouth ready to devour me. I could feel my energy being sucked away like wind had come into the room and was pushing a part of me into this thing’s mouth.
I was about to fade away, when I heard a scream echoing somewhere in the room. I couldn’t see where it was from, all I felt was limpness. I couldn’t hold myself up anymore, my breathing was almost gone and all I could see was a small shadow coming closer to the thing, which seemed to be turning around, and thrusting something into its body between its back legs. I could hear a desperate scream coming from this thing while it seemed to shrink and swipe around, throwing itself against a corner and crying, the head back to a poor hairless girl.
As they got closer, my dad and my uncle unshackled me and carried me off the wall, bringing me outside, pushing me into the back seats this time. My dad stayed with me while my uncle ran somewhere and sped back, throwing himself onto the driver’s seat and driving off. The last thing I could hear was the mobile phone ringing someone on speaker while my dad smeared my forehead with cold water, and then everything went black.
I’m lucky to be sitting here now, in my living room with my mom watching TV behind me. She has no idea I’m writing this and wouldn’t allow me to do it if she knew about it, but as Sirius Black said, “What’s life without a little risk?”.
I’ve searched the internet for explanations on what happened and tried to know what this thing was, but could never find anything. According to my dad, though, this is what happened.
My uncle found one more of his girlfriends. This time he met her online and found out later that she had a kid. He decided to give things a chance, and since they both liked the same kinds of things, everything seemed to go well until they decided to play with things they didn’t understand and accidentally summoned a demon that seemed to look for people with souls to consume. If it considered they didn’t have an edible soul, it would kill and eat the body out of rage. If it liked the soul, then it would consume the person’s essence until they withered away.
Once summoned, the demon takes the form of the most innocent thing it can find until it has collected all the souls and only reveals its form if it needs to defend itself.
To this day, I have refused to speak to my uncle, who, after this happened, decided to call my dad for help. My dad thought it was just my uncle Paul going crazy, so he decided to go help him and only accepted me there because he had no idea what was coming. He found out through another of my uncle’s calls as we were on our way there, so he left me with my uncle on the promise that he wouldn’t let me anywhere near that thing while he was out looking for ways to take care of this thing in town with the local priest. My uncle’s poker game nights were his excuse to leave the house without it looking suspicious to allow him to stand guard on the back exit of the basement, which was the only one that wasn’t secured and this thing could escape through. When my dad found out what to do and came back to take the girl away, he locked me away without explaining anything to try to spare me from everything, but he never expected the demon to consume the entire town.
What they needed to do wasn’t complicated, but it was hard. Bless a blade with the blood of an unconsumed edible soul and find a way to get close to the demon and stab it. I was the last soul the demon was looking for. I was their way to getting close to the demon.
The only problem was, this was not the way to kill the demon. This was the way to imprison it, and I am now its last required soul.
As long as I live and no one finds a way to kill it, it will keep trying to come after me. For now, it’s still contained at the church and my dad is looking everywhere for a way to protect me, but all we can hope for is that no one decides to check that church and accidentally releases it.
Please, you guys, promise me you will leave it alone.