This is a recounting of events from my childhood. I know this is a bit of a cliche, but if you don’t believe me, I understand, I wouldn’t believe this story either.
I was in sixth grade the first time it happened. Nothing was weird about the day, nothing that could prepare me for what would happen.
That night, I was lying in my bed, trying to go to sleep, when I noticed a bright light shining from under the door of my closet. The light shone many different colors, from an emerald green to a dark gray and finally settling on a deep blood-red. I watched curiously, since the light in my closet was normally a bright white, and nobody had been in there all day. All of a sudden the lights shut off. Not just the closet light, that would be too simple. All of the lights in my room instantly shut off. The soft lamp I sleep with next to my bed, the lava lamp in the corner of my room, even my speaker playing it’s white noise shut off. It’s at this point I’ll say that it was about 3 am, and understandably scared shitless. What happened next was easily the worst thing that could’ve happened. In the pitch-black of my room, I heard the sound of my closet door creaking as it opened. The second that noise spoke out through the darkness, I couldn’t move, not only from the fear, but even if I wanted to, I was in a state of sleep paralysis. Nothing happened for several minutes, the only thing keeping the time being the red numbers on my alarm clock. The next thing that happened will be imprinted on my mind forever. I heard a scuttling like a thousand spiders crawling along the floor. The sound seemed to last for hours, giving me an extreme sense of anxiety along with the feeling of pure terror. The sound grew closer and closer to my bed, until it was right by my side. A voice sounded from the darkness after a time of silence. The voice sounded like the embodiment of all the possible sounds of grinding and all the voices of the damned in hell collectively shouting.
“I am the culmination of humanity’s darkest fears, put into being by the writers who long for the darkness, I am the inspiration for the most disturbing of stories. I am, the Storyteller,
You young child, are lucky enough to encounter me, only those who have a true connection to the darkness within themselves may be granted this chance. Now let the fun begin.”
This entity, the storyteller, then opened a book they must’ve carried from my closet. As it opened, a bloodred light shone from the pages like it had from my closet, illuminating this monstrous creature. I have never felt as afraid as I did in that moment. The creature had the head of a man, but with all the features of a corpse. Rotting skin, sunken eyes, but he had long, skinny teeth, like those of a whale, but more plentiful. His body I could not see, but he had eight limbs, all human arms, that looked as if he had taken them off other’s bodies and sewn them onto his. As he finished looking through the pages, he began to read, looking up to me as he did.
“You always knew to fear your closet door, and keep one eye open forevermore;
Something is waiting for you to douse the light, it dances across your room at night;
Hungry, it shambles towards your bed, you forget in that moment, the brave words your father said;
Terror washes over you, more than any child should feel, and those sleepless night continue, making you an evermore delicious meal.“
As he finished, he slowly closed the book, and I was thrust back into darkness. The scuttling resumed, and instead of heading back to the closet, it came closer to my bed. I felt a change in pressure on my bed sheets, and had the horrifying realization that it was climbing onto my bed. He moved his face closer to mine, until it was an inch away, and whispered to me in a soft tone, “Sleep well child, for these events shall soon come to pass.” With that, he backed up, climbing off of my bed. The scuttling noise continued back to my closet, and the door creaked shut.
I was baffled, assuming it was all a dream. So I walked to my closet, and opened it, not sure what I would see. But nothing was there, just a normal closet. I decided that I was just tired, and that it was all a hallucination, and tried to go back to sleep. But I could not get that face out of my mind, with its sunken eyes and horrifying smile. As the sun came out, I lay in bed, unable to get even a wink of sleep. For the next few days, that sight would haunt me, always accompanied by the scuttling, the never ending scuttling. But as all things, the memory started to fade from my mind, never comprehending the gravity of the situation.
About a month after the night, I saw something on the news, and it all came rushing back. In the next state over, there was a small child found dead by his parents. The local police were extremely confused, for the child had been bitten in half, but the teeth marks matched no bite marks that exist on earth. There was a blood trail that led from the bed to the closet, and the trail went up the wall, and ended in what was one of the most disturbing images imaginable. There was a pool of blood on the wall, as if gravity did not apply to it, and there were handprints, eight of them, in a circle around the pool. In writing above it all was a message that said, “Ready or not child, I draw closer.”
Understandably, reading this as a middle schooler shook me to my core. I realized that my experience was not a dream, as I had convinced myself, but a real event, where the creature could influence what happened in the world. The day was a blur, and it seemed that nobody else had seen the newspaper article. A week went by, and my fear diminished more and more as nothing happened. Then, that night, it happened again.
I saw the light from under my closet door. I willed myself to wake up, convinced that it was all a nightmare. When nothing happened, I got out of bed and ran to the door, but it seemed to be locked from the outside. I yelled for my parents, but it was as if the sound was swallowed up by the presence of the light. I ran for my bed, defeated and terrified, and threw the covers over my head. As I saw the lights go out, I froze, in that state of sleep paralysis again, hoping that the covers would be enough to save me. Beneath my blankets, I could barely hear the scuttling, but it was clearly still there. Then the worst thing that could’ve happened became real. The covers were being pulled off of me, exposing me to the freezing dark of my room.
I did not see the creature as it was pulling off the covers, but once it started opening its ever-present book, I saw the red light shining from it, illuminating the face of this disturbingly made creature. I was stuck, staring into the eyes of the storyteller, just waiting for him to begin reading, knowing what was coming next.
“You thought that I, was only a dream, a nightmare where despite your best attempts, you could not scream;
The days went by, you slept protected by a simple locked door, I awaited, hidden away beneath the very floor;”
The book was slammed shut, throwing me back into darkness. The scuttling grew towards my bed, and the creature climbed up, and with his face an inch away from mine said,
“Young child, if you should sleep tonight, the souls of the damned shall come up, and take flight.”
He then scuttled back to my closet, and shut the door, and I felt his presence leaving. As what happened last time, I sat in my bed, wanting to be relieved of this hell. This time, it was only 2 weeks after that night’s events when a newspaper article came out about a very disturbing death. It was another child, bitten in half by an unknown creature. This time however, there was no blood trail to the closet, there was a trail to a huge hole in the floor. The investigators were baffled, since the bedroom was on the second story, yet there was no hole on the first floor. It was as if the hole was a portal, sending whatever went in it into an endless dark abyss. There was, however, another pool of blood with the 8 handprints surrounding it, and in writing above it, “Closer and closer I come, hidden away from the wrath of the sun”.
The most disturbing thing, without a doubt, was the fact that this all occurred in the next town over. The two occurrences created a line that perfectly pointed to my town on a map.
As the days went by, I got a more severe sense of anxiety, knowing that one of these days, he would return. I tried getting people to let me sleep at their house, but somehow there was always an excuse to keep it from happening. People noticed that I was beginning to break down, and they kept asking what was wrong, but I felt that telling them what happened would violate some rule and make the situation worse, so I said I was just having sleeping problems, which was partly true.
After about a week, as I was going to bed, I felt that tonight would be the night that he came back. I tried to prepare myself, but the experience that night was by far the most traumatizing by far. I saw the lights from the closet, and I froze, trying to steel myself for what would happen next. The lights went out, and the darkness felt so much more full than in the past. The sound of the door opening was even louder than it had been. The scuttling, by far the worst part, sounded much angrier and determined than in the past. It came up to the bed again, and this time, the storyteller immediately climbed onto my bed. He then opened the book, and the color was so much brighter. The entire experience seemed more alive, more real, as if the storyteller’s connection to reality was somehow stronger.
“You tried to thwart my return, but it cannot delay the damned from being burned.”
He brought his face closer to mine, and since his presence felt so much stronger, I could finally smell him. I truly wish I hadn’t. He smelled of rotting corpses and burned plastic, all combined with the strongest smell of mold I have ever smelled. I could feel bile starting to come up through my throat, but it stopped, held back by some unseen force. After several moments of silence, the storyteller said “Young child, three times I have visited you, pray that I don’t visit you again.” And he crawled off my bed, scurrying back to the closet. And the moment it shut, I leaned off the bed and relieved myself of my dinner. I just sat there, contemplating his words. Sadly, I didn’t know how to keep him from coming, so I just told myself that I had to suck it up, and hopefully he would not return.
This retelling is making it seem as if I was calm during these encounters, but I am leaving out details about hours upon hours of screaming, waking up in cold sweats, and days of research, looking for documentation of this being, but finding nothing, I am leaving out the extent to which I was losing sleep, slowly going insane from these very abnormal meetings, and being unable to talk about them. At this point, I was starting to have mental breakdowns in the middle of class. The counselors at school kept calling me in, asking what was going on.I told them I was just having trouble sleeping, which was true, but I couldn’t say what was really happening.
Only two days after this meeting, I heard about the occurrence. I learned of it rather quickly, considering it happened right down the street. A sinkhole had opened beneath the house at the end of the street, swallowing it completely, but naturally it wasn’t a normal sinkhole. The rims were lined with obsidian, a deeper black than I had ever seen, and it seemed that there was fire inside the stones, because along cracks of stone, a bright red was flickering. In addition to this, the sinkhole seemed to go deeper than was physically possible. The hole had carved through bedrock as if it was sand, and seemed to solidify the mantle of the earth so it could come up from the center of the earth to swallow the house. The hole was also ringed with fire, which never seemed to go out, but never spread. Also, if someone listened closely, they could hear a faint screaming, as if the hole went all the way down to hell. As was the theme with these events, there was a child, bitten in half by the outside of the hole. Another pool of blood, with 8 hands surrounding it. But this time, there was no message, but a drawing of a face, the horrifying face of the storyteller.
Now obviously there was a pattern. It is only now that I realize that this occurrence continued the line on, closer to my house.
While the investigation was going on, I wanted so badly to tell the investigators what had been happening, but I didn’t because I would be considered a crazy person and maybe even institutionalized, which I know would only make it worse, because then I couldn’t escape the encounters. My parents were beginning to tell that something was wrong, and they were getting more calls from school. I was falling behind in all my classes. My breakdowns were getting worse and more frequent. I was having depressive episodes, and I was feeling more and more stressed. I felt as if this would happen one more time my mind would shatter.
It was one day, only one day between this occurrence and his next visit. I saw the light, and I started to panic. I was running around my room, trying to use the furniture to block the door, but it’s as if everything was bolted to the floor. I went for the window, thinking I could climb out, but as soon as I opened the curtains and looked out, I wished that I hadn’t. The outside world was nowhere near what it used to be. I used to be able to see a vast forest and tons of wildlife would come up to the house to look at the strange structure in the middle of their home. Even at night, I could see almost as well as during the day due to there being no light pollution. But there was nothing, a black, empty void containing nothing. It was as if my room had been taken completely from the normal world and thrust into nothingness. I resigned myself back to laying down on my bed, convinced that I couldn’t do anything.
As soon as I was comfortable, the light shut off. The whole time I was thinking to myself, it’s just a power-outage, it’s just a power-outage. Except deep down, I knew what was coming next. I waited, and listened for the sound of the door opening, but it seemed as if days went by before there was any activity. When the door finally opened, time seemed to freeze. Everything was happening slower and slower, making my anxiety levels increase drastically. When the scuttling ensued, it seemed to go up the wall to the ceiling. It was soon shown that what I heard was correct, for the storyteller was suddenly right above me. When he opened the book, the red light showed that he was capable of making a web-like substance, and he was using it to hang from the ceiling like a true spider. He sat there, with the book open, for what seemed like a lifetime, before he finally began to read.
“When you awake to the clock’s tics; you will hear from above you faint clicks.”
He closed the book, then dropped himself closer to me, and said, “soon child, soon.” And with that, he brought himself back to the ceiling, and scuttled back to the closet and closed the door. I immediately ran to my window to see if I was still in the void. But when I opened my curtains, I saw the familiar sight of the forest, with the stars and the moon shining down on it. It seemed that the storyteller had the power to isolate his victims in an endless void, severing them from the real world momentarily.
It was the very next day when I saw cop cars pulling up to my neighbor’s house. I immediately knew what happened and sat in a corner, trying not to cry. A dear friend of mine had been killed, bitten in half like the other children, with the pool of blood and 8 handprints surrounding the dark red liquid. And the face of the storyteller was drawn again, in perfect detail. This time however, there was a hole in the ceiling of the room, going to the attic of the house, but there was no sign of entry from the attic. His alarm clock was beeping when they found him, flashing the time it went off. 3:00 on the dot. I was so much in grief that I didn’t even go to school, all I did was sit around and feel sorry for myself.
I didn’t even get a full day to grieve. I was visited by him again that very night. I was lying in my bed, the same as I had done the entire day, when I saw the lights from under my closet door. I didn’t even move or try to fight it, I was utterly hopeless. The lights went out and although my adrenaline was rushing through my body, I couldn’t bring myself to even try to move. The closet door slammed open, causing me to jolt suddenly, and I was caught off guard by how forceful it felt. I waited for the scuttling, but it never came. There was the creaking of something jumping off of the floorboards and I felt the sensation of something slamming down onto my bed. Then I felt the storyteller scurrying up my bed towards me. He thrust his face towards mine, and the smell was so much worse as it rolled over me. It smelled as if the power was shut off in a morgue for a month, with all the bodies rotting, along with the bad breath of all the souls in hell thrust into my face. He was smiling, more than he usually would, as he opened the book. The light seemed darker, more vibrant, and for some reason I knew that the light meant something important. He stayed there for a few moments, watching me with that wide smile that showed all of his sharp, needle-like teeth. He finally began to read, but it only made the situation worse.
“ Satan gave responsibility to I, and I have made many more children cry;
The fears of children are hard do douse, when I am in the safety of their house“
He closed the book slowly, stayed there in the silence for many moments, then made sure his face was as close to mine as it could be before saying,
“Dear young child, the final day of reckoning is upon you, and everyone knows it to be true.“
Then he crawled off of the bed, and scuttled back to the closet before slamming the door shut. Unlike other times, I couldn’t figure out what this one meant. With all of the other visits, I was able to vaguely guess what would occur, just not when. The choice of words made this time so much more confusing, and I lay in bed, trying to figure out what it meant until morning.
As soon as I opened my bedroom door, I knew something was wrong. There was an air about the house that made my hair stick up on end. I walked towards my parents’ door, and I smelled the scent of heavy amounts of iron. This caused me to run to my parents’ room, and the smell only got stronger. When I opened their room door, I immediately began to vomit. Both of my parents were on the floor, bitten in half, as was the storyteller’s motif, and there was a trail of blood from their bodies to the closet, and just like the first time, there was a pool of blood on the wall, unmoving as if gravity didn’t apply to it. And surrounding the pool of blood were the 8 easily recognizable handprints. The writing above the pool of blood read, “Tell others about your experience, and you will wish you had an end as easy as your parents.” The investigators pulled me aside and asked me what the writing meant, but I had to deny that I knew anything. I was never accused of killing my parents, because there were cameras in the hallway next to both mine and my parents’ rooms, and neither of our doors opened that night. I was put into an orphanage, and adopted by a very loving family. I did further research on the storyteller, but there was no writing anywhere of anybody ever encountering it.
Well, that’s the story. I think 20 years is long enough for the storyteller to have forgotten about me, and it’s time that I get this story out there, to tell people about this being. Maybe somebody can find a way to kill this creature. Through all my research, I never discovered what I had done to trigger this motion of events, and there is nothing I can warn you from doing. But I gotta go, I’m starting to see a bright light from my closet door.