This is not a story that “started innocently enough.” It started pretty fucking annoyingly, actually. You see, it wasn’t a zombie, bug, or werewolf that haunted me. It was the beeping.
As I made my coffee one Saturday morning, I opened a window. This action caused the beeping to come into my home. It was high-pitched, distant, and just intermittent enough to allow me to forget for a time. Then it would creep back in.
I awoke to “BEEP!”
I drank coffee. “BEEP!”
I ate breakfast. “BEEP!”
I took a shower. “BEEP!”
It was incessant! I soon realized it must have been an alarm for a busted pipe, no doubt due to the recent freezing spells in the neighborhood. I was livid.
Despite all this anger, I’m not a “go-getter,” as my father would say. I resigned to letting the beeping rule my world. After all, I could escape it as long as I left the house.
That was until it started to follow me. I was taking my twelfth bathroom break at work when I heard it. Surely I was mistaken. Surely I was going crazy. It couldn’t be.
But then, so clearly: “BEEP!”
Not a regular beep! A haunting beep. Soul-hounding beep. A beep you couldn’t forget, even in your sleep!
I had to take matters into my own hands.
It was one of the years of COVID lockdown, and I hadn’t been anywhere since I moved to the city months ago. I wandered around my neighborhood aimlessly. The beeping was always out of reach, not guiding but constantly teasing. I walked until my feet were sore and my arms were numb from the cold.
One night, I went further than usual and lost my way in a thick fog. Every direction I turned seemed to be wrong until I finally collapsed. The only familiarity was the beeping, taunting me from the darkness.
I rose from the cold ground and saw a golden glow. As I approached it, the beeping returned. It grew louder with every step.
I stepped forward, and my big head slammed into a wooden door. A glistening golden cross shone on the front. It was a nunnery.
A nunnery? Who stumbles upon a nunnery? Trust me. I thought the same. It did not stop me from rapping my knuckles on its beautifully dark, solid oaken frame. After a moment, it creaked open. A face shadowed by a nun’s veil answered the door.
“What is it?” the face said.
“Please help,” I begged.
The face, teeth glistening in the darkness, smiled and said: “Well, nuns surely don’t turn away those in need, do they?” She swung the door open with a loud creak. I hesitantly walked in from the cold and into the dingy abbey.
Flickering candles lit the stone walls of the dank-smelling hallway.
“Sorry,” she said. “The power’s out. I hope you don’t mind.”
I followed her further in, and things got stranger. There was no light coming from anywhere besides the long, winding hallway. All doors and adjoining hallways were dark.
My head crooked up to see yet another darkened, cobwebbed stairwell.
I said, “It seems other nuns don’t stay up too late, huh?” I shouted ahead. I looked down, and she had disappeared just beyond the bend in the hallway. I crept around the corner to find a heavy wooden door that stretched to the twelve-foot ceiling. I trepidatiously pushed it open with an ominous creak.
Candlelight flickered through the smokey room. At the end of the long cathedral crouched the nun over an altar. I could see dark liquid dripping over it, staining the wooden floor.
“What are you doing?” I asked to no response.
I stepped closer. I had to see what intensely mesmerized her.
She slowly turned to me with a wriggling cauldron of putrid death in her arms. Maggots, worms, mites, severed appendages – all mixed in a miasma of thick, crimson blood.
I screamed until my soul threatened to set loose from my body, my soul torn from my bones, my face ripped from my –
“Wait!!!” the specter yelled.
I ceased my screaming.
“I’m sorry,” She said. “Shucks, I always do this!”
To my surprise, the specter started crying. She turned from me, faced the stone wall and wept.
“Why can’t I be normal!” she cried. “All the other ghosts have friends, but I always fuck it up!”
I know it sounds crazy, but I needed to comfort her.
“There, there…” I said. “It’ll be okay.”
“No! No, it won’t! Sure, my brother Casper is the friendly ghost. And my sister, the Bell witch, is a family favorite. But who am I? NOBODY!”
I know, I should have run. It’s a ghost, for chrissakes. One with family connections, no less!
Instead, I said: “I get it.”
She turned, her pallid face streaming with ethereal tears.
“My father says I won’t amount to anything too. He says I’m a failure compared to my siblings,” I said. “Somehow, he finds a way to make me feel bad when I’m around them.”
I offered a handkerchief, and she dabbed the tears from her face.
“I’m sorry about the food I offered you,” she said, gesturing to the cauldron of blood and guts. I thought this was the kind of food your kind ate! I just… don’t know what human beings want, I guess.”
Her nebish, spectral hands wrung nervously in the darkness, and I thought it was charming.
I said, “Neither do I. Maybe we can be friends after all?”
It was from then on that I visited the spirit in the nunnery every day. At first, I brought her food and gifts – a can of sardines and bread or maybe a freshly killed dove. Things were happy for a while. I felt like I finally had a true friend.
Soon she confided to me that if she didn’t make a kill soon, her father would disown her.
It almost killed me to hear her overwrought tale. I decided to oblige her. She lent me her gift of the beeping to lure fools into our web. They’d follow it, the pestering, incessant, ever-present beeping to our doorstep, then:
Wham!
I’d hit them, drag them through the hallway and present them to her for feeding.
They’d never see it coming. Honestly, the poor boys probably wanted relief from it.
The maddening, the sickening, the hopeless:
The beeping.