You know what, maybe this isn’t for you. I will never be an action hero. More an inactive villain. No. Compared to a lot of people who post their lives on here I am living a very sheltered existence. Sure, I’m a recovering alcoholic and an abuse survivor but we’re ten a penny in this world sadly. I’m not a craftsman with my words either I’m just a man (debatable) who is pretty scared, at the end of his tether, and need to pour it out somewhere. So I’ll use you all as my support group and hope that these words are allowed to remain and some unseen hand doesn’t see fit to remove them. These stories have had me turned away from AA meetings. Paranoid, yes, but I have reason to be and so do you.
My back yard is frequently a dumping ground for all sorts of things. Maybe the fact there’s no fence, so its open to everyone, and the fact that my depressive state often leads to me frequently letting the weeds grow freely through the tarmac (maybe dreaming of the day nature takes over once again), makes people think that the house lies abandoned. Maybe my landlord does and thats why he hasn’t fixed the hole in my floor resulting from his shoddy workmanship that turns my every trip to my bathroom or kitchen into a mid 90s Playstation platform game as well. This is a side note.
Some unusual things have shown up in my back yard. Someone chalked a large bind-rune on the ground once, a mixture of Algiz and Dagaz, and helpfully chalked an arrow nearby pointing to it as if I could’ve missed it. One of the more welcome things to show up in my back yard was a kick drum and snare. One of the more unwelcome things to show up in my back yard was two dead birds tied together.
I live across the road from the call centre I work in, where I pretend to sympathise with people who pretend to think that anything has ever been fixed by phoning and whining at minimum wage workers. I moved here so my commute would turn from an hour to five minutes. I did this in February 2020. We all know what happened next. Regardless, I am now back to making my five minute commute. I mention this as I feel that, as unimportant as I am, context is quite important.
A couple of days ago I stepped blearily out of my back door in the kind of hungover fug I had hoped would subside when I got sober but that it turns out is just life. It was a crisp autumnal morning, and my breath reassuringly condensed in front of me. Summer is on its way out. Summer coincides quite nastily with my manic episodes: I believe May is notorious in psychiatric circles for this, for me it always happens in the lead up to my birthday in July and a couple of weeks afterwards. Sorry, I’m rambling - life is a hangover and I’m walking through a shitty back yard I pay too much for, and am confronted with a fridge that has been dumped there.
I do what any sane person would do, and open the fridge to see if there is anything interesting in there. Maybe a ghost? Maybe a skull? Maybe some beer so I can blame the relapse on divine intervention? Nothing of the sort, just an envelope containing a cassette tape. I know this is going to be interesting so I pocket it. You’d be surprised the strange things you can find in other things. Once I found a perfectly good Casio SK1 sticking out of the top of a skip. Once I found some tiny Doc Martens abandoned on an end table in a snowy street in Glasgow, took them home for my then girlfriend. The universe throws these things at us, and if we don’t catch them first time its going to try to throw it again harder. It may even break your window or your skull. So I pocketed the tape. As any sane person would.
When I got home from work I put it in my tape player. This was the tracklist for side 1:
Ceramic Hobs - Flower
Syd Barrett - Late Night
Psychic TV - The Orchids
Vukovar - Voices/Seers/Voices
A snatch of unintelligible conversation
An answerphone message which I have transcribed:
“Hiya, it’s Frankie. I need your brother’s address so I can invite him to my birthday party. I also need your address. So I can invite you to my birthday party. I also need your phone number so I can ring you and invite you to my birthday party. Okay. Bye.”
Television Personalities - Look Back In Anger
Primal Scream - Velocity Girl
Strawberry Switchblade - Another Day
Velvet Underground - Pale Blue Eyes
A snatch of unintelligible conversation
The sound of someone falling down the stairs, when they reach the bottom I hear a smash. It is possible they were porcelain.
“Hiya, it’s Alice. Don’t give your Frankie your address. Don’t give him your brother’s address. Don’t give him your phone number. Don’t give me your phone number. Don’t give me his address because I don’t want to know it. This whole wretched thing has gone on too long. Too much talk of hallucinations and arc words and questions taken from Scientology audits. Too much time delving in the filthy laundry of history. I’m tired and poisoned by your questions. You look on, unthinking unblinking. The voice of reason is a vicious bark”
A long passage of ambient drone I cannot identify, but as it played my living room seemed to fill with mist. I didn’t get sober I am lying.
The tape snapped at a close and my phone rang. It was a number I recognised as being neither debt collectors or phony debt helplines so I answered. It was Gretchen. As we spoke I battled to hide the rising fear in my voice as the cassette compartment was filling with blood. The tape was bleeding itself to death, silently which struck me as unusual as I thought the blood of a tape would in fact be sound.
The spam emails I have been receiving are getting increasingly hostile and driving me closer and closer to the head space I get in where I start covering the mirrors and wrapping knives. I feel like Farrow’s company are watching me through my phone screen. G told me I was being stupid but I don’t believe her just because she’s a nurse. I sleep til it feels like sex magick and wake til it feels like a dream stretched over a useless skin.
The spam emails are always from a guy called Thomas Communication, which’d be a pretty cool name for a new wave revival project but they are always very hostile and of a sexual nature. Once at the bottom of the email there was one of those slideshows you see on Geocities websites, an endlessly recurring circle of images: someone falling down the stairs captured mid air; a broken china doll; the question “Did you ever destroy a doll body?”; a dignified old man with hands folded, smiling benignly with the mark of Farrow somewhere in the background; feathers being plucked from two dead birds tied together; and again, the face of a broken china doll bearing Farrow’s insignia.
There’s another song I think of frequently but don’t remember the name of. I heard it on BBC 6 Music once or twice when I was a teenager. I thought it was by Stars but it isn’t. One day I will find both songs and be a happy pixie albeit briefly.
I don’t know what came over me then. Perhaps it was honesty. Anyway, I was slumped on my couch and then I was watching myself turn the cassette over. I turned it over and the conversation I had just had with Gretchen came out of the speakers, interspersed with fragments of sixties girl group hits we all knew and loved. Jump into the fire singing old songs we loved. I’ve been through a lot in my life and maybe whatever is coming, I deserve it. Hold on wasn’t the tape snapped and bleeding? No wait I don’t know if that happened yet.
There’s a bang came from outside but I’ve A) watched enough horror movies to know what good comes of looking and B) dealt with enough bailiffs to know what good comes of looking. Frankly I’d rather it was Cthulu or something. At least he can be reasoned with, listens and has some kind of sense of morality. Maybe whatever I just heard isn’t trying to get in. Maybe they successfully got out, and will be delivered back to me by the kind of helpful police who returned one of Dahmer’s naked bleeding victims back to him.
Stay tuned folks, I get the feeling this is about to get about as interesting as it is allowed to be. I can’t promise you ghosts or murders or things that go ookie spookie after dark but I can promise you honesty. I can promise you the feeling of disgust you feel when every loud, rote word from your upstairs neighbours painfully pedestrian banging around feels like a violation of sorts; and your skin itches but you can’t peel it off because some nightmares have to remain safely contained. The kind of jump scare that unmoors you for decades. That’s going to happen. I just know it.
If this isn’t for you this definitely isn’t for me.
Yes, it seems to have found its way in. Now all I have to do is wait. Now the decision-making process is over the harvest ceremony can unfold in a symphony of clang. Sometimes I remember things in the wrong order. It’s now that the tape is bleeding, silently, to new life. Walking naked through every nightmare I will stand at every door.
When he talks like this you don’t know what he’s after.
++&( Dear friend, I miss you and if you do post this on Reddit please don’t tell them about Louise. If I ever get to see you again I may tell you what led to me attempting to strangle Poseidon. I’ll tell you about the pig child moving sideways through my wall. The naked reeling before the flesh waterfall. The creeping sickness.
Remember that night in the graveyard? That kind of stuff happened to me too. I wish I’d laid you down on the stone and bit your throat open.
I love you still. Be good.
Dan
——————————–+—-+—++++++++++
My friend sent me the above email from an email address he hasn’t used since high school with a follow-up telling me to post it to the nosleep Reddit. I still consider Dan to be one of my closest friends even though I haven’t seen or heard from him in 7 years. No one has. He’s a sweet, talented guy but something happened to him and he began to push us all away. The last time I heard from him he was speaking in conspiracy theories, saying some incredibly bigoted shit I thought he was too smart for and I told him so. He gave me an incredibly chilling look and said “So it’s been decided then.”. I asked what was and he smiled and said “You’ll find out later”.
Weeks later he attempted to die. We heard that as he walked out into the River Mersey he was chanting, low, something about the “bruise faced kids” and “the mark of Sandalphon”. I understand that Sandalphon is a psychopomp. What I don’t understand is the references to Gretchen.
I’m not saying it’s impossible that he’s met a nurse with that name, possibly during one of his spells in hospital, but I remember him being obsessed with a CD-R he’d burned of a strange voiced adolescent from Illinois ranting to an imaginary child about sending them to Gretchen’s house. So whether Gretchen is real or not is questionable. But why would you ask that question?
He asked me not to tell you about Louise, so I won’t.