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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Theeaglestrikes on 2024-11-26 04:28:01+00:00.

Last week, she came home.

On Tuesday evening, when Tia Greenwood and Matt Walker went missing, the final strands of our threadbare town unravelled. Of course, we’d been coming undone for two decades — ever since Helen Cavendish ran away at the age of ten. But it wasn’t her fault. Wasn’t even simply her classmates’ fault, truth be told. All the townsfolk were culpable, in one way or another.

And all of us will pay.

I tried to get out once. In 2014, I earned my Journalism degree from Cambridge. However, by 2020, London had chewed me up. It tried to work me through its steel-lined stomach, but had to spew me out. An oddball from the north country, no matter how dazzling his credentials, doesn’t really belong there. I hardly belonged in Spitheap. That was what my friends and I used to call this place. I have Mr Fischer, my old German teacher, to thank for that.

“Why did you even move here, Rehn?” Mrs Caldwell asked her colleague in the school corridor.

He grumbled and shrugged his shoulders. “Heaven knows, Ash. This place is a shitheap.”

“Don’t you mean a scheiße heap?” I loudly chirped behind the chattering teachers, sparking a round of laughter from my friends.

The flustered Mr Fischer, realising that we had been eavesdropping, then told a blatant lie. “That’s not appropriate, Jesse Black. And, for your information, I said… ‘Spitheap’.”

The teacher then rewarded me with a demerit and a detention.

Things changed last Tuesday. And when they changed, they changed all at once; not dominoes falling one by one, but a house of cards buckling and collapsing. When three more townsfolk went missing on Wednesday, people started accusing one another of foul play — accusing neighbours and co-workers they’d never liked much. Spitheap’s Facebook group became a dumpster fire of baseless claims as nobody knew what was happening.

Even the mayor fled to his apartment in the city, sealing Spitheap’s dysfunctional state of operations. Hysteria and lies spread; the authorities did nothing to stop that. We’re far from civilisation out here. Far from rules and accountability. Besides, gossip and police officers are synonymous in a small town; they both meander and deal in half-truths.

By Friday evening, I’d started to put together an article; not just for the Spitheap paper, but for my blog. I knew I had a limited amount of time before the story became national news, so I wasn’t wasting a second of it. I typed as I walked along country lanes from the newspaper’s one-room office to my parents’ house — also my house, once again — on the outskirts of town.

Dusk was passing; its orange heart swallowed by the sky’s black overbite. The snow-capped tops of the alder trees, in Spitheap’s woodland, bled under the glow of the setting sun. For once, I saw not beauty, but a hellscape. There was no comfort from the blistering weather.

Instead, I cast my eyes back to my phone and typed with fast-moving digits; skin red and numb from that sub-zero evening. There were pockets of missing information in my draft, of course, so it was far too shallow to go to print. But I’d done my best to fill the gaps. Constable Jordan Merton had a loose tongue, and he let something slip to Alin, a friend of mine, on Friday afternoon. Something that probably should’ve been kept under wraps.

“Merton will kill me when you publish this,” Alin pointed out.

“Even if he were trying, he wouldn’t be able to hurt a fly,” I said, and my friend chuckled. “Come on. Tell me what he told you.”

Alin nodded. “He told me that they found something strange in Matt Walker’s house. Rope painted white; filthy, thin, cobweb-coated rope.”

I frowned. “What?”

“I don’t know, Jesse,” he whispered. “But I think we should get out of town for a bit, you know? Until all of this blows over. Five people have vanished in two days. This killer doesn’t seem to be—”

“Killer?” I loudly interrupted. “We don’t know that, Alin.”

“Do you want to hear what else Constable Merton told me?” my friend weakly asked.

My skin felt a little clammy as I started to dread what my friend might tell me next. I nodded, nonetheless.

“You know Matt lives with his sister, Blair, right?” he asked. “Well, in her interview, she said that she saw something on her drive home — minutes before she found her brother’s blood in the house. Something in the road. An animal, but not one she recognised. Not a dog. Not a wild fox. Nothing that would make sense in these parts. In any parts.

“Blair said the thing skittered in stiff, janky movements across the lane; moved so slowly that she had to swerve. In fact, she said…”

My friend wore a thousand-yard stare for several seconds, then I hoarsely whispered, “What?”

“She said the thing looked at her, and its face almost seemed… human,” Alin said.

I thought about Blair’s version of events as I walked up the darkening tarmac to my parents’ home. Jotted down notes of her story, that I planned to verify from her own mouth. But I was impatient. I had to write then and there; the prose flowed from my giddy fingers, crushing anything else I’d ever written because this story was my magnum opus.

The road beneath my feet wasn’t the only thing I ignored. Eventually, however, the smell of burning wood drew my eyes up my phone, and I jolted in panic. Over the trees, about a quarter-mile up the road, rose a billowing, fattening plume of smoke. It was coming from Farmer Ryan Gleason’s property, which sat only another quarter-mile from my parents’ house. I was surprised not to hear sirens, until I remembered that I didn’t live in the city anymore.

Thinking of my elderly parents just up the road, I pelted forwards; dashing at a pace that hurt my legs and lungs; the smoke didn’t help, of course. But I kept pushing until the blaze came into view. Gasped when I saw that the house, barn, and all other structures on the property were ablaze.

It wasn’t the crumbling infrastructure that frightened me. Not even the smoke, full of particles that scorched my lungs’ lining. It was the driveway painted with streaks of blood that encircled Farmer Gleason’s pickup truck. A truck which, given its open doors, had clearly been abandoned.

At this point, there finally sounded distant sirens, so I stopped dialling 999. I imagined, even in such an isolated location, that dozens of people must’ve seen the smoke cloud.

Anyhow, I followed the trail of blood to the trees surrounding Gleason Farm. I wasn’t sure why the slender trunks stung my teary pupils, but I knew smoke had nothing to do with it. Knew that before the cluster of alders, unhealthily narrow, suddenly shifted sideways.

Illuminated by the raging flames, there lurked a nude, muddy, fleshy thing with bent appendages; four long and four short. Though its face was hard to discern through the shade and smoke, the thing undoubtedly watched me. Was undoubtedly, in some sense, human.

Blair Walker hadn’t been entirely insane.

When the creature started to scuttle speedily to the right, disappearing into the forest, I ran up the road in pursuit of it. And a mere half-minute of running later, there came smashes, thuds, and screams from a few hundred yards up the road. But by the time I had reached the driveway of my parents’ house, the storm had already passed; had punctured the living room window, leaving jagged shards of glass in the vacant window frame, like uneven teeth. The lounge’s overhead light shone brightly, revealing blood stains across the sofa and the carpet. My parents were gone.

I wailed inconsolably as I spun to survey my surroundings, and I immediately noted the disturbed shrubbery beside the driveway. Immediately reminded myself that I’d seen this particular bush in a trampled and forlorn state before. I’d just blamed a wild animal.

I wasn’t entirely wrong.

Lighting the way with my phone’s torch beam, I stepped over the flattened threshold into the woodland. And a hundred-yard trail of mushed, circular footprints led me to a hovel in the mud. When I shakily shone my light inside, it revealed a curved tunnel that had been burrowed by something far too large to be a badger. Far too large to be anything that came to mind.

An animal, but not one she recognised. Not a dog. Not a wild fox. Nothing that would make sense in these parts. In any parts.

Alin’s words ran through my head as I dropped into the near-vertical entrance. And once I’d slipped down the curve, I found myself crouching in a level passageway, slightly wider than the entrance. It needed to be wider to make way for something that made me heave.

Propped against the side of the tunnel in a sitting position was a skeleton. It wore faded, denim jeans and a rucked, stripy top sinking into the gaps between rib bones. The skull’s jaw hung loosely, as if the woman had died screaming. I only really knew for sure that it was a woman because a wooden plank shot from the dirt beside her corpse; words had been etched into the grooves of the makeshift gravestone.

Dr Beatrice Long

1975-2020

Thank you for making me, but nobody will unmake me.

Shuddering uncontrollably, I pressed onwards, and my tightly shut lips finally opened to release a scream. At the end of the tunnel, only twenty yards ahead, was that deformed, eight-limbed thing from the trees.

Up close, I saw that its short legs, each a foot in length, weren’t legs at all. They were stringy pieces of immovable flesh that seemed only to serve an aesthetic purpose. As for the four lo…

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