Part 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/15w9yp2/we_drove_into_a_strange_abyss_now_something_is/
At the time, I felt more terrified and afraid by the sights in front of me- the man hanging on a crucifix, skinned and in horrible agony, his eyes wide open and staring, his bloody jaw hanging loose in a silent scream.
In reality, I should have been far more curious about what came behind me, the reason the two creatures next to our car in the darkness ran away. But at the time, I didn’t think about that at all. The human mind can only take so much in a short period of time, and my concentration and intelligence were not running at full capacity due to my mortal terror and the uncertainty about whether any of this was even real.
This place smelled rather plain. With no trees or flowers or plants, no fields or farms or cattle, the typical smells of rural America did not blow on the breeze. I smelled no manure or pines or clean wind blowing over the rolling hills.
In this place, a slight smell of burning metal seemed to pervade everywhere. It made my nose wrinkle, but it didn’t come off as overpowering. It smelled like someone’s brakes had started failing far down the street, the rotors rubbing against pure metal rather than brake pads, and that far-off, oily, burnt smell seemed to be as an essential part of this strange world as the darkness that cloaked it.
The two people I had heard talking had come out of the house now. My sister and I hid around the side. I put my hand on the outside of the quaint cabin, which looked like it belonged in a small European tourist trap village rather than a strange abyss.
How did it get here, I wondered to myself. Did someone build it, or did it come in- like us? Just in the regular world one moment and then transplanted into Hell the next?
“Ohh, I think this one has been left out to hang long enough,” a man said in a gruff voice nearby. I could hear them walking around the front of the building, examining the dying man on the cross. “Tenderizes the meat, you know. The slower the death, the better it tastes- for whatever reason.”
“You know what I think?” the other man said. “I think it’s all that adrenaline and hormones that get released when you skin them. That’s what makes the meat taste savory. You can taste it on the first bite.” He sighed heavily, and I swear I could hear him drooling. “Most of the crap around here tastes like nothing. A quick death and a bit of meat on a fire with no seasonings isn’t exactly a meal. You always do it best, though. No one else in this damned place knows how to cook.” The other man took the compliment silently, though I heard him chuckling in a low, hoarse voice.
I heard something else then, a very small sound from a couple hundred feet away, from the direction we had come. My sister heard it too, and I saw her eyes widen. We looked at each other for what felt like a very long moment, shadows covering her face in the dim light in the house, both of us too terrified to say anything or possibly give away our position. The two men examining their “dinner” did not hear a thing, though. I peeked around the house and caught a flash of white, naked skin low to the ground, and the glint of dozens of eyes. That was what had made the sound, and apparently the two men still had not noticed it. This made me think that these two men must be different from the ones that had attacked our car. The ones that had smashed our windows had seen something, maybe this abomination here, and it had caused them to flee.
I wondered if they hadn’t fled far after all, but perhaps were watching us even in this very moment. But I shook this thought away quickly. We had enough problems right here. Like my father always used to tell me before his death, whenever he was trying to fix a car or something in the house, he would say, “Deal with one problem at a time. Don’t focus on everything wrong at once, or you’ll be overwhelmed. Break it down into simpler problems that can be fixed easily in turn.” And my main problem now seemed to be this horrifying creature that approached us and the two men, stalking silently like a centipede hunting an insect.
What I saw there may once have been human, but it certainly was not anymore. It looked as if countless bodies had their legs, arms and skin taken off and transplanted into some abomination.
It moved low to the ground, like a crab with legs all around its body. The legs, sewn on through garish black stitches, kicked in turn. As it moved forward, a rippling motion passed through the twitching legs, like a millipede moving each of its many legs in turn with each small step forward.
It looked as wide across the quaint cabin we hid behind, at least 40 feet across. And yet it moved as silently as a cat, without dragging or loud breathing or any other noise that might give it away. My mind flashed back to animal documentaries I had seen, the predators moving silently through the grasslands or forests, and I knew without a doubt that this thing was the apex predator here in this hellish world.
Dozens of arms with blackened nails and loose skin swished silently around the creature’s body. The hands clenched and unclenched constantly, as if the anticipation of the hunt had caused them to grasp at the air in anticipation of the prey they would soon hold.
But the heads caused me the most terror and discomfort. It appeared as if the heads had been taken from corpses left to decompose for a while. The skin hung down, and some had flies and black clouds of bugs that fed on them. Their eyes blinked slowly and dully, the gleam and intelligence usually contained within the human face forever dissipated and replaced by the slow rot of death. The eyes on the dozen heads towards the front of the creature’s body stared straight ahead, like shellshock victims, apparently seeing nothing. But I wouldn’t want to put that to the test, as I think they likely saw far more than I realized.
It crept forward, inch by inch, silently stalking, its heads all trained on the two men. One of the heads made a slight sound, a loud exhale, and one of the men turned. He opened his mouth to scream, but the creature, knowing its cover blown, sprinted forward, its white, naked flesh a blur in the pale light. Dozens of legs rippled forward, each moving so fast I could make out no single one during its run.
And as it drew close, it leapt silently in the air. Such a massive creature seemed like it should not be able to leap like this one did. But it flew as high as the house before landing with a crunching sound on the leg on the man closest. He began to shriek in pain as the sounds of tearing flesh reached us near the back corner of the cabin where we hid.
“We need to run,” I whispered to Sarah quickly. I grabbed her hand so we wouldn’t get separated in the darkness, and we did. We sprinted as quietly and quickly as we could away from that horrid place, the sounds of chewing and screaming and sighs of pleasure and moans of horror echoing over and over far away, until I thought I might go mad.
***
I don’t know how long we ran. We became hopelessly lost. I pulled out my phone a few times, trying to shine the light, but there was nothing to see. We ran on the dark stone ground, with no features to find. The clock on my phone had begun to give strange times, so I couldn’t even know how long we had been trapped here, or what the date was. I knew when I came in with my sister it was August 20th, 2018. Now my phone told me it was 77:07 PM on December 91st, in the year 10,021. I suppressed the urge to laugh, because I felt sure if I started laughing, it would turn into some maniacal fit of crying and hopelessness that would leave me curled up in a ball for hours to come. I needed to keep my head.
Eventually we started to walk, conserving our energy. We had no water or food, which might turn into a fatal problem, unless we wished to eat dead bodies or drink blood. I nearly retched at the thought.
“Ken, do you ever think about… you know… what happened to mom and dad?” my sister asked, breaking the silence like a window being smashed in the middle of a deep sleep. I turned, my eyes wide, my heart pounding in my eardrums.
“I don’t ever want to think about it again,” I said. “It was horrible.” She nodded her head.
“I still have nightmares every week about it. Sometimes every night, even. My roommates get mad because I wake up screaming,” Sarah said. “But they don’t know the half of it. These dreams are worse than anything. It’s like I’m trapped and dying, over and over, and I see mom and dad burning alive in their car…” Though I couldn’t see her due to the lack of light, I held her hand, and I felt a shudder run through her slim body. “Their eyes are always really wide, and their mouths are open, and their skin is melting off, and sometimes I’m in the car with them, suffocating and burning alive. Sometimes I’m not, and I just stand outside, trying to smash the windows with anything I can find, but it seems like they’re made of bullet-proof glass and impossible to break.”
“Mom and dad are not coming back,” I said. “We need to focus on our survival.”
“I think maybe it’s connected to this place somehow,” she said. “Maybe we can find out why it happened here.”
“That’s insane,” I said. “What could this place possibly have to do with mom and dad?” But she just shook her head, and wouldn’t say anymore about it after that. So we walked on in silence, sometimes holding hands, moving through the pitch darkness
Finally, after what felt like an eternity, we saw lights in the distance. It looked like a town. Hope soared in my chest. Perhaps we would find people, real, normal people who didn’t eat their neighbors or turn into abominations with dozens of legs that skittered through the dark.
My hopes were dashed when I got near, and saw bodies hanging from the lamp poles and decapitated heads crushed into the spikes of the fence posts. It was more madness from a mad world, but still, I knew I had to go forward. If there was a way out of here, it wouldn’t be found in the endless darkness surrounding me. Maybe it would come from the people. Or maybe there was some exit, some random blotch of black that would bring us out into roads and forests and salvation, just like some random moment in space and time in the middle of nowhere on Route 9 had brought us in.
We snuck into the village, and what I found there still haunts me sometimes.
The houses looked German, or maybe French, and very old. If I had to guess, I would say they were from the 1800s. The poles running through the town, I realized, used coal gas, just like when street lights first took root in cities. It added to the eeriness and other-worldliness of the town, as if I had wandered back in time, or perhaps, the town had wandered forwards.
We crept around it, keeping it in a wide arc to try to inspect as much of the buildings as we could. And then I heard someone yelling for help. A little boy, by the sound of it.
On the second-story of a nearby cream-colored clapboard house, a small boy stuck his head out the window and looked directly at me.
“Please, God, he’s going to kill me!” he yelled. Without thinking, I started running towards the house. I heard my sister close behind me, trying to say something like, “Wait, wait,” but by that point I had made up my mind. I wouldn’t stand by and let a child get harmed, no matter what might happen to me at that point. The nightmares of seeing some innocent die in a horrible way seemed far worse to me than the risk of pain.
I ran to the front door, which I flung open. The street seemed deserted, for now at least, though I saw silhouettes moving in the windows of other nearby houses. It seems faces looked down, faces covered in shadows that stood as still as statues.
The kitchen of the house was covered in blood, and I saw a woman dead near the oven. She looked like she had been stabbed to death, and a puddle of spreading blood underneath her slowly stained the floor.
And I ran past her, grabbing a knife from the block on the counter, going up the stairs with adrenaline rushing through my veins, hoping I would be ready for whatever came.