You awake slowly, your mind and memories bound in a deep and lightless bed of cotton, wresting themselves together blindly, haltingly and by feel, towards the sensation of consciousness. Blurred images swim in your eyes, wet and only but half open. It's impossible to interpret them, spilled watercolor and shadow.
The effort proves too much. Your mind slips back into the depths of nothingness, and you cease to exist, once again. For a while.
After some infinity of time, you begin the ascent anew. Another infinity, and your eyes glimmer open again, light piercing the void. Another, and you remember the existence of your body, your limbs. You can't feel them yet, but the memory of them gives you some sense of your body again, and with it, comes your mind. Your eyes, finally, flicker open fully, and you can feel yourself breathe, the rank air filling your lungs, expelling through wracked throat and dry mouth.
The room slowly comes into focus as your eyes regain their function.
It appears to be the interior of some decrepit rotunda, piss-yellow sunlight piercing in from an array of oval and ill washed windows. Your neck doesn’t respond to your commands to turn, so instead you circle around with your bleary eyes, feeling tired, oh, so tired, or something below tired, like rising from the grave. Incurious pigeons and thick reams of layered pigeon shit sit on the ledges just below the blearing windows.
The light illuminates stacks of books, some large, leather wrapped, and decaying; but a great number newer, glossy paperbacks blossoming with mold and mildew, their airport-fresh patina forever stained. Some of the bindings have completely come apart, spilling leaves across the floor, yellowed from years of sun.
Your eyes adjust, now seeing into the shadows, and you spy now a bulky figure, hunched on a small stool, its hair greasy and flowing from its lump-ridden head. It appears to be breathing heavily, raggedly, the dampness of its back sodding its thin shirt, sweat glistening off its hairy neck.
You attempt to cry out to it, but you emit nothing more than a low and unfamiliar wheeze, vibrating through your throat muscles, nerves in your back molars inexplicably crying out. Still, it’s enough. The figure turns. Its face is ghastly. Its eyes meet yours. Small, dull, piggish eyes, embedded in a pocked and unshorn face. Its mouth splits from beneath the black and patchy beard, revealing jagged, yellowing teeth.
“Ah, you’re awake,” it croaks, in an ugly, high-pitched tone. It lifts a pair of glasses from the floor with fat, dumb fingers, raising them to conceal the eyes. You wish to god you hadn’t gotten its attention. Something seems terribly wrong.
“No need to be afraid,” it says, rising, revealing its hideous, toad-like body, clad in greasy t-shirt, stained and threadbare denim jeans. It approaches. The stench, rotten milk and liquor, hits you before it has crossed half the room. You attempt to cry out, your throat disobeying you, nothing but another hiss.
“You should not try to speak. It will... prove difficult. I am a friend. I don’t suppose you remember me.”
You do not. This... thing... is not a creature which you have ever seen before, in waking, or even in nightmare. Its tiny eyes squint as it smiles, wetness glistening below thick and matted brow. “My name is Jon Phillips. We were friends, once. Or, acquaintances at least.”
You try to make your body move, but it does not respond to you. In fact, you cannot even feel it, anything but a dull ache, a very distant pain. What was the last thing you remember? Who is this thing? Where is this place? Jon Phillips? Why does it so freely offer its name, if it means you harm?
“Shh, shh, there, there. Calm yourself. There is no sense in struggling. I mean you no harm. I am simply a... well, I am a vessel. For the Muses.”
The creature, Jon Phillips, lifts one flabby, pale, hairy arm, and gestures around it. The pigeons? Is it referring to the pigeons as Muses? This thing is insane. You must get away. You must get away now.
“I always struggled, you know. With capturing my visions, those beautiful, horrible visions given to me, by the Muses. I lacked... what do you call it. You know. Motivation. I was given the images, and yet, without a drive to draw them from me, without any vessel but the blank page to spill them to, the beauty of my visions languished inside me, turning to sickness, disease, and eventually, something close to madness. Words on a page are nothing more than that. An emptiness worse than emptiness. And no one to read them... no one... so alone... crying madly to the void.”
It laughs, staring at the floor beneath its flat and knotted feet, its laugh a disgusting, huck huck huck, like dry heaves. It looks back up from the floor. At you. Directly into your eyes. You try to close them and find the horror too intense, you cannot, you cannot look away from this horrifying image in front of you, or the terrible things it is saying.
“But now, I have you. And I thank you. I truly must thank you. For you have solved my problem. No longer will my Muses give from me, to the page, to nothing. Now, they have an audience. Now, they have an audience, if only of one.”
It reaches out, now, touches the side of your face. You try to flinch away but cannot. Its touch is so gentle, so disturbing, its fingers soft and wet.
“You... you do not need to do any work, now, to read my words. I have taken the difficult efforts myself, for you, to make things easier, for you. You are now page, and reader. You are audience, and form. And I will write only for you. From the Muses, to me, directly to you, without any liason, any creative broker. You are... you are, my beautiful, perfect, audience of one...”
It is then that it rotates the mirror it has been standing by, and shows you... you don’t recognize it as yourself, at first, and when you do, what’s left of your mouth attempts, and fails, to open into a scream.
Your eyes lock into your own, wide, swiveling, bloodshot. Tears leak down your cheeks, past your top lip, over ruined flesh, to... your jaw has been completely removed. Everything below your mouth has been either amputated, or destroyed in more hideous and insidious ways. Your head is no longer part of your body, instead simply a dome of skull and flesh, isolated, corrupted, and part of some ghastly machine...
The hard palate of your mouth is bolted to a copper plate, from which the keyboard of a typewriter springs. A purple slug, your fat and writhing tongue, works uselessly above it. Wires spring from the keys, tracing up through hanging vertebrae, directly plugged into your cervical spinal cord, and from there, buried deeply into your skull. Your trachea winds down a wooden dowel, held in place with oily fencing staples, to a thick plastic bag, which heaves as you attempt to scream. Your trachea works madly.
“Now now, none of that,” murmurs Jon Phillips, this hideous tormentor, this insane surgeon, this cruel, hairy frog of a thing. “Time for our first story together. What shall it be? Muses, speak to me.”
It listens, as you scream silently, you attempt to tear yourself from this horrifying situation, even to die. But Jon Phillips doesn’t hear you. It hears its Muses. They coo, calmly, above, amongst the windows.
“Ah, yes,” the hideous thing says, and sits down on a stool, in front of you, poising its dirty fingers above the typewriter keys that have replaced your lower jaw. “That’s just the thing.”
When its finger presses down on the first key, it is as if a great crackling firework had burst just behind your eyes, blossoming through your brain tissue until you see, lit in fire, bounding in front of your jittering eyes: W
E
L C O M E
T O
S P O O K T O B E R
S T O R I E S
Y E A R
8
Top review for "Halloween Haunted House Sound Effects Cassette/CD Vol. 8"
★☆☆☆☆ (1/5)
audio design ok. starts off pretty spooky, lots of screams and ghoulish sounds that effectively set the tone for a holiday party. that's the only reason this review is not ZERO out of five stars.
about 10 minutes in it gets VERY specific. i do not know who "brian jeffrey hopper at 2042 west ernest lane columbus ohio" is and i do NOT care for all the blah-blah-blah of his father begging me to contact him to help free him from where "they're" keeping him. i hoped he'd at least describe where he was, maybe give some spooky details... but instead he says they've "taken his eyes" so he can't see anything, and he just keeps pleading for us to "find brian, find brian, he can save me"!
no!
ten minutes of ok sound effects. fifty minutes of begging and crying and (admittedly gross, but not very frightening) throwing up from the pain. this is NOT what i paid for. disappointed. ruined my party. will not be buying from this company ever again.
I have a spare hour before work so I do a fifteen minute sublet of my cerebral cortex to the cloud computing company with the nicest looking ads. I try not to do this too often; my roommate Rebecca sublet her brain for three, four hours a day for a couple weeks and ended up absolutely fucking nuking her higher brain function, her grey matter now perpetually rented out, she’s making absolute bank but she’s a baked potato. I tried to pull her back a couple times, but ultimately it’s really nice having a steady source of income in the household.
During the sublet, I dream, a little, mostly primary shapes and colors, the name INGSOLL IV, a lot of numbers, and when the lease is up I have the taste of watermelon and iron dancing around the back of my throat. I cry, because I always cry, but things are pretty good, actually, I’ll be able to afford those boots with the lights on them.
I shake myself off, put on my shoes (no lights… yet!), step around Rebecca’s body, trembling lightly on the rug, and go to work.
a lazy short film called like 'the visitant' where it's just somebody going around their boring apartment while their phone glitches out with bad after effects plugins and the big scare at the end is somebody wearing white makeup jumps at the camera and makes a face like >8o
actually, the bride of frankenstein is the doctor. the monster is called frankenstein
Oh, so it's GHOULISH what I'm doing with the corpses, is it? Sure YOU'RE not the ghoulish one? Attacking a man for simply following his heart? Let me tell you, you need to do a lot of self reflection before you're in a place to judge anybody!
i've become one of those guys who says 'know what i'm sayin?' at the end of every phrase. everyone says, 'yea,' or, 'i know what you're sayin ha ha!' but when i ask them about it they'll never tell me. i don't know what i'm sayin. i don't. i don't. help me i don't know what i'm sayin i don't know what i'm sayin please help me know what i'm sayin?
Life of a gravedigger ain't easy. I keep buryin' em, they keep diggin' their way out. Company only pays me once, no matter how many times I gotta put em down. Ain't that just the way.
The man strains against his chains, naked, his eyes bloodshot and bulging, blind with it: "...The hunger... the HUNGER... the INSATIABLE HUNGER... I mustn't, no, I, dare not indulge, for if I give in to these URGES I shall truly be LOST... forever... lost in MIND and lost in SOUL... and yet the hunger GNAWS at me... it EATS at me from the inside, a greedy demanding BEAST named HUNGER... I must FEED... I must FEED, I've never felt a HUNGER such as this... please, Father, you must KILL ME to SPARE ME from this INTENSE HUNGER... I BEG OF YOU...!"
"Haha," responds Father Whitcombe. "Me in line at the Taco Bell, lmao."
"lmao," admits the chained, naked man.
She spends all day listening to comedy true-crime podcasts about her daughter's abduction, torture, and murder. Whenever there's a particularly witty joke she pushes another sewing needle into her stomach.
"Welcome," says the mat, but it's not very welcoming at all. The mat makes you feel very unwelcome, in fact, because it's woven of what is clearly your mother's beautiful blonde hair.
I'm not getting anywhere with the lady on the phone and she's so fakey-fake nice that I know that they've gotten to her already and she's just stringing me along until they can trace the phone booth I'm calling from which is 14 blocks away south from my apartment and another 8 blocks east, which i chose because their product is 112 and the number 112 is important and maybe it's how far they can search but i don't know yet
so I hang up and wipe off my fingerprints and burn a match to erase my pheromonal dna signature, take the bus back to my apartment and sweep it again for bugs and then it's only noon so I take another two buses and a taxi that I can't afford so the taxi driver pulls a gun on me and I get away only just but I don't think he was going to use it, to get to the big gray stone building that I've seen in the newspaper where I know they have to be.
i touch the door four times before i go in, just to be doubly sure that i am grounded and won't be riding any telluric currents, and i walk in and i ask the front desk guy if this is where they are broadcasting the messages into my brain from
"yes," he says. "lots of them."
"oh," i respond, slightly taken aback. "uh. why?"
"oh, you know how the cabal-" he gestures upstairs, rolling his eyes; solidarity between the working class. "-can be. they think you might be the reincarnation of so-and-so the redeemer or ba-ba-ba the avenging messiah or whatever, and are beaming these messages into your skull just to mix you up a little, so you won't redeem or avenging messiah anybody."
he excuses himself to take a quick phone call, returns, smiles politely.
i say: "is there any way to make them stop? if i promise not to redeem anybody, i mean?"
"i don't think so. you could fill out a form, but i don't think it would do any good, they're rather busy with their eschatological scheming and don't really bother with much paperwork. how about i let you go up and talk to their front desk man?"
i squint, and ask, suspicious: "will they kidnap and murder me or anything?"
"probably not, they're very busy, as i said. the fellow working the cabal's front desk today is jeschia, that's j-e-s-c-h-i-a, and he likes it when you pronounce it right: je-shy-uh. he's very susceptible to flattery, so i recommend you compliment his tie before asking any big questions like 'please stop beaming messages into my brain,' ok?"
"ok," i say, nodding, trying to remember: je-shy-uh. je-shy-uh.
"elevators to your left. floor 112."
"this building isn't that tall!"
he winks. "that's what they want you to think. good luck, and if i don't see you again, have a beautiful day."
"you too," i tell him, and mean it.
bug with a face
well they said they wanted a magical wedding
they should have specified what type of magic
i thought they'd want grandma here
peeled off all my flesh to seek the truth beneath
but just found a real freaky lookin weirdo in there
my uncle warned me about all this he said
"jon, if you're walking down the road mind your feet, even if you're real real excited to get to the convention hall where they're holding the pickle convention," he told me,
"and i know you've got your pickle juice and your hot hot pickles so hot they burn your mouth clean off and make you sick when you take a bite and that's a lot of fun, but if you don't mind your feet you're liable to step on a big fat toad just sittin there licking slime and toad snot all over itself all day," he told me,
"and then if you step on a big fat wet slimy toad you'll fall down a big old hole and drop your juice and your hot hot pickles so hot they make you puke whenever you eat them so hot they make you absolutely sick out of every hole you've got," he said,
and i nodded but i wasn't really listening because i was thinking about kicking away and walking down the road eating my hot hot pickles so hot they made me shit and puke and piss and also snot all over, like the toad that i stepped on which had snotted all over itself so snotty it made itself real wet and slimy and so i stepped on it my foot slipped right off its snot,
and now i fall down a big old dirty hole and i spilled my pickle juice and my hot hot pickles so hot they make me get really really sick and now i'm trapped at the bottom of the hole, and i'll never get to that pickle convention and i'm liable to about die down here because i've already licked up as much pickle juice as i can that spilled down the bottom of the hole but it's not very much and the sun has set and can't anybody hear me down here,
and that just about does it for me, anyway, i guess.
SPOOKTOBER STORY: Guest Submission by Jon Elliott
“GADZOOKS! My stupendously dumb son guessed my password and now it’s Spocktober!”
