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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/two-hip on 2024-10-30 13:43:29+00:00.

I am desperately looking for someone to pull the plug on me.  Not sometime in the distant future, but ideally as soon as possible, without taking time to get things in proper legal order or anything else.  I know that many people may find this offensive or distasteful, but please hear me out.  If you understand the pain I am in and how I have suffered, I think most anyone would be sympathetic. 

I am a professional estate executor, or I guess more precisely I should say was.  Basically, I get paid to settle the estates of people that have passed away and either have families too wealthy to deal with their own crap, or simply don’t have any loved ones around to do it.  In reality, 90% of the time I’m hired by estate attorneys.

Recently I was hired to settle the estate of a decedent with assets dispersed globally, having significant holdings both in the U.S. and across Europe.  One of the assets I needed to attend to was an old parcel of land in the foothills of the Moldavian Subcarpathians.  Travelling out of the country for work is not unprecedented for me, and it typically pays extremely well, but generally I loathe doing it.  It won’t surprise you to learn that I don’t speak a lick of Moldovan, and as a former Soviet region, English is not all that widely spoken, and this was a job I wouldn’t have dreamed of taking on had I realized what it involved before I’d signed up.

So, reluctantly, I headed off to the middle of nowhere in NW Moldova, feeling more than a little bit like the solicitor at the start of Dracula, and wondering whether I should’ve gotten my own affairs in order before departing.  And don’t worry, this has nothing to do with vampires (or creepy dolls coming to life – more on that later). 

I arrived at the large parcel of land to find an ancient decrepit house that looked more castle than farmstead.  I went into the house to happily find that this may not require as much work or time as I’d anticipated, with the home half empty, being mostly some old furniture to assess and dispose of. 

Strolling through the house, however, my heart dropped when I opened the door of a room to find a vast collection of marionette dolls, displayed wall-to-wall.  Collectibles are the bane of my existence.  With some commonly collected items, like coins, it’s easy enough to find reasonable values or a numismatist to assess everything and usually even liquidate the collection for me (we don’t have a lot of incentive to get the best price.  This did not look to be the case here.

The spacious room had rows and rows of antique marionettes from wainscoting to ceiling.  The only break in the dolls was a several foot wide floor to ceiling mirror, and the doorway to the room itself.  The room was much longer than it was wide, eerily long for where it was nested into the manor’s floorplan, almost as if it shouldn’t have fit.  The floorboards ran parallel to the room’s length, and the mirror was directly across from the door so that looking into it gave the impression that you were surrounded by an endless sea of marionettes, bearing down on you from above. 

These were the type of old-timey, hand crafted and painted dolls that you picture going back to the Renaissance.  Like string puppets in a travelling show, or Punch and Judy dolls.  Assessing, cataloguing and liquidating these in a country where I wasn’t even sure if I could google things was going to take forever.  The immense time spent on these types of things also tends to get questioned on expense reports, which sets me up for uncomfortable conversations with the families of clients and occasionally the IRS.

It was also at that moment that I remembered I was forced to stay in this house, with no inns or other alternatives nearby.  At least there was no bed in the marionette room, so that one was off the table.

The first few days and nights there passed largely unremarkably.  On several occasions, however, I had woken at night to hear a distant ratcheting sound that seemed to come from deep inside the house.  The noise would slowly click, and was accompanied by a ping like the sound of heavy cables being drawn taught, and it would build erratically over the course of several minutes to a crescendo pop.  It was almost like a giant jack in the box being cranked to eruption, without the campy music. 

Over the first several days, I progressed along with my inventory of the property, going room by room, planning to defer the marionette collection until I had completed everything else.  It would take the longest, so I should’ve gotten on it first, but hey, why not enjoy my time there, right?

One night, however, I was awakened by the ratcheting sound rattling from deep within the house.  I lay awake for some time, listening as the click-click would slowly build to a snap, then start all over again.  After some time tossing and turning like this, the noise began to feel like it was burrowing deeper into my head with each click, before bursting deep inside my brain, before beginning anew.  With the realization that sleep would not come, I decided it was time to investigate.

The noise seemed to be almost ambient, coming from all directions, but after roaming the house to try and zero in on a source, I was utterly unsurprised to find that as best I could tell, it was coming from the marionette room.  I wasn’t exactly the type to be afraid of some creepy dolls, but you know…alone in middle of nowhere Eastern Europe and all that.  I also forgot to mention that we were not operating with a fully powered and lit house here…oh no, it was nighttime navigation by cell flashlight, and conserving charge on the handful of power banks I’d brought along.

I paused outside of the room to reassess things (or maybe muster some courage) and the ratcheting noise began to sound almost inviting.  Throwing caution to the wind, I stepped into the room to investigate.  The rational part of my mind kept telling me there must be a marionette in there with some kind of wind-up aspect, or ratcheting gears like an old clock, but as I entered the room I had the cold realization that that was not the case. 

Nothing inside looked any different or disturbed, other than a whole mess of tantalizing and intimidating shadows cast by the dim, dusty light.  I held still so I could focus on the sound, and quickly realized that it didn’t seem to actually be coming from inside the room at all, and instead still seemed to come from all directions through the house. Too tired and cold at this point, I just shrugged and called it a night.

A night or two after that, I was again awoken by the ratcheting sound, and after trying in vain to ignore it, decided it was really, really time to get to the bottom of it, if nothing else than for my own curiosity and sanity.  After some strolling and triangulation, I again found myself in that damn room.  This time, however, I slowly made my way around the room, trying to determine if the sound was louder in any spot.  As I made my way down the long room, the noise grew and seemed to pulse, like I was approaching the heart of the house.

As I came around towards the mirror, I caught something out of the corner of my eye and froze.  In my peripheral I could see a dark mass laying on the floor, and half gave a sigh of relief, thinking a marionette had merely fallen off the shelf.  That sigh was quickly choked off, however, as I turned to see the figure of a man lying there in a heap as if he’d fallen out of the mirror. 

I froze in terror as the man moaned, and started to stumble to his feet like he was drunk.  I backed away towards the door, watching while the man awkwardly gained his footing and began to shuffle and totter towards me, reaching out his arm with a raspy moan.  What I first took as a predatory pursuit, in hindsight seemed more like a desperate plea.

The man lurched forward, and I heard the sound of his ankle snap, buckling him lower towards the ground, but he kept upright.  With each blundering step forward, he seemed to further deteriorate, with the cracking of bones fading to the grinding of gravel.  In the distance of several feet, the man eroded away nearly to mush, with his moaning becoming labored and a gurgle as his structure collapsed. 

The pile in front of me looked like a human octopus; a sack of amorphous skin and innards with a head plopped on top.  There weren’t any homes nearby to run for help, and even if I had cell service, I had no idea what the equivalent of 9-1-1 was, so I reluctantly decided to try and help the man and bent down towards him.  With a squishy grunt, a tentacle arm swung up at me, and I felt the cold, gooey appendage slide across my cheek.  I think I even felt the scratch of a nail.  I came to my senses and ran. 

I spent that night huddled in the shed, wondering if I did the right thing, and worried that I’d left a man suffering and helpless.

With the benefit of daylight the following morning, my resolve steeled, and guilt began to creep in, so I went back to check on the man – or whatever it was – but found nothing there. 

I reminded myself that I had a job to do, and managed to push the incident back to the “I’ll deal with that shit later” place in my mind.  It is amazing what you can ignore if you set your mind to it – I think it’s a sign of a strong will to have the ability to utterly ignore reality. 

At the risk of running long, I’ll try and cut to the chase here.

A few more nights passed of the no…

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