Moving to a small Colorado mountain town was never something that I thought I would do. I was born and raised in the city, but now, I live in the farthest thing from it. There is one grocery store in town, fishing is allowed in the local river (Which is barely three blocks away from my apartment, and all of six policemen who more than likely work twelve hour shifts. It’s calm and silent here at night. A stark reminder that I don’t live “Downtown” any longer. Heck, there isn’t even a Wal-Mart within fifty miles from here. This is not the scene I was used to, but after the shit I went through at the hands of my ex, I wouldn’t have it any other way. The mood here is different, giving the town an odd vibe. There is no hustle and bustle, rushing and speeding to get to a meeting. Pensioners walking the main street, going from knitting circles to the druggist for their medications and what would be the modern equivalent of an egg-cream.
I can’t help but feel like I stand out around here. I’m a liberal city girl. Relaxed in things that most old-fashioned folks would consider strange and out of the ordinary. I dress mostly in black, my hair changes colors like the tides, and I wear more makeup than I care to admit when most of the local women barely even wear anything more than mascara. Still, I don’t mind being the odd one out. I am comfortable being me, and whenever I get a sideways glance, I simply smile and give them the sweetest “Good Afternoon” that I can muster.
At night the stars shine brighter than I have ever seen. They twinkle and dance across the sky clear as bells, giving way to the swirls and magic of the Milky Way which is easily visible when you block out one of the seven street lights on this side of town. This town is wonderful. The people are questionable. Each one already bored with the majesty they have at their very finger tips, but as an outsider, I see this magic everywhere. So why do I feel so strange here?
I feel as though something is always watching me over my shoulder. Like, no matter what I am doing, or where I am, I sense eyes on me. Even though I am alone. Do you know the feeling some people get after watching a scary movie? As though you aren’t alone, even if you are the only person in your home? I feel that way constantly. It’s like that feeling you get in a coffee shop when the side of your head starts to burn, and you catch someone quickly looking away from you once you lift your gaze. Yet no matter when I look up, where I look, or what I’m doing, there is no one, or nothing looking at me. It’s unnerving to say the very least, and I can only seem to ignore it when I’m on my computer or playing a game online with my boyfriend. I can only ignore it by concentrating fully on something else. Other than that, it’s a constant nagging sensation in the back of my mind.
Sometimes when I am alone, I can almost feel a hand reaching out for me. Poised to grab my shoulder or my arm. As though it wants my attention, nearly demanding it. I try to block it out. There is no such thing as the boogie man. I tell myself over and over, but the feeling doesn’t go away. It gets worse in my room. No matter how I lay on my mattress, no matter how comfortable I make myself, surrounding my body in spare blankets and pillows, I can’t shake the feeling that it’s there, whatever it is, standing in the corner of my bedroom staring at me. This thing makes me feel like a child again, and not in the good way like most people would think. I feel like the child afraid of their own shadow. Running then jumping onto their bed the second they flick the lights off. Unable to sleep with even one limb exposed to the dark night air, or hanging over the edge of the bed. My blanket is the only shield I have from this thing. The only thing it cannot penetrate. The ultimate defense against scary thoughts and things that go bump in the night.
My doctors have always asked me if I can hear or see things that others around me cannot. How can I tell them that I feel something that no one else can notice at all? I’m worried they would just toss me into the looney bin to be alone with whatever this is only being able to give in to whatever it wants.
To make myself feel better, I try meditation. Sitting quietly in a comfortable position with my eyes closed, breathing slowly, and repeating to myself that this feeling isn’t real. Whatever this is, isn’t real. This is only my imagination getting the better of me, or at worst, I’m finally completely insane.
One day, I decided to give in to my own morbid curiosity. During my meditation I was thinking over and over “what are you? What do you look like?” Minutes ticked by slowly, and the feeling of being watched turned into the feeling of being studied. My ears burned, I could nearly feel hot air being breathed onto the back of my neck. I began to tremble. Almost terrified to keep going as a massive image began to conjure itself in my subconscious. Suddenly there was a sharp pain in my right shoulder, claws digging into my flesh. I yelped in horror, almost jumping out of my seat before realizing it was nothing more than my cat trying to jump onto my shoulder from behind my chair.
I watched the little black fuzz ball crawl down my chest and onto my lap. Picky-pawing as she purred, her fluffy tail swishing softly before she looked up at me with what only could be described as a smile. I sighed, still shaken from my moment of terror. I reached to pet her, but with one look at my hand she jumped down and trotted off in the way that a spoiled six-teen year old would after having an argument with a school chum. Such arrogance in her walk.
“Animals can sense things, right?” I questioned myself while watching her sit down to groom her tummy. “She’s calm enough.” As if on queue, a glass toppled off the table, slamming onto the floor, sending ceramic pieces and coffee everywhere, and sending my fuzz ball scurrying for safety. I shouted and instinctively lifted my feet off the floor and rested them on the support bars of the chair. Shaken yet again, I took a moment to collect myself before moving to get paper towels and a broom.
“Nothing but a coincidence. Things fall all the time.” My new mantra for cleaning anything spilled. Especially things that spill on their own. As I picked up the shattered pieces of mug, the sensation of being watched returned at full force. I could almost feel the weight of staring eyes drilling itself deep into my back. I turned to face this thing once and for all, when I saw this time, it was just my roommate who had come running at the sound of shrieks and breaking dishes. I assured her that everything was okay. My cat scared me, and I was just clumsy when I reached for the mug and knocked it over myself. With an eye roll and a small name call she went about her business without contest. I sighed and finished cleaning up the spill, feeling a little better that, had anything actually happened, she would have come running to help me, or at least scream her head off before leaving to find help.
Sitting once again in my chair, I thought back to the image that started to form in my head… Nothing but a rough silhouette. Barely even a form. All I could say about it at the time was that I was tall, and barely even in the shape of a human. It had arms and legs, yes… But I couldn’t begin to make out the rest, and after the mug incident, I didn’t really want to.
Days went by and the feeling didn’t fade. No matter where I went or what I was doing, there was always something behind me. Watching me, studying everything I did. I felt as though I was just going crazy. Perhaps I should tell my doctor about this new hallucination after all. What’s another pill to swallow compared to days and nights feeling like a prisoner in my own home, under constant surveillance.
Finally, one night after taking my sleeping pills and crawling deep into the pillow nest that was my bed at the time, I resolved myself to watching YouTube until the pills took me away to dreamland for another night. I bundled up tight in my blankets and curled my body into a comfortable fetus position. A wall of pillows at my back, no limb exposed, nothing hanging over the edge of the bed that could be grabbed. Safe. At least by boogie man standards. I could hear nothing but crickets and the soft hum of my computer as I searched for something interesting to watch. The feeling intensified. I clicked on the next mildly interesting video that I scrolled to and yanked my arm back into the security of my blanket. Double checking my pillow wall, I then tucked one arm behind my back, as extra protection against all things spooky.
As my eyelids began to get artificially heavy, I began to feel the intense gaze yet again. I tightened my arm behind my back and repeated another mantra. “This isn’t real. This is something that the drugs can make go away. This isn’t real. This is all in my mind.”
“Oh, I am very real.” A voice growled behind me. “And I have been this whole time.”
My body froze. I didn’t know what to do. I closed my eyes tight and started saying out loud, “That was just in my head. My imagination is getting the better of me. I’m over thinking this way too much.” A laugh echoed from the same place the voice was coming from. A deep sinister baritone of a laugh. The kind of laugh they give evil villains in any super hero movie ever.
“You can try to make me go away all you want. I am here to stay little girl.” Its rumbling voice certainly made me feel like a little girl, wishing I could run into my mother’s arms. I’d give anything in that moment to have her rush through my bedroom door, throw the lights on and rescue me from this living nightmare. “I’ve been watching you a long time now.” I could hear that whatever was talking was getting closer. “I know that you know I am here. I watched you writing about me in your journal for days now” It began to feel as though weight was being added to the opposite side of my bed, as though someone else was crawling in with me. I didn’t dare look.
“Listen to me now. You’re the first to learn that I am no joke, or a flicker of the young imagination. I am here for all.” Another dark chuckle sounded from what I could only presume was its belly. “To feed off of you.” I felt a very large had rest on my arm over the blanket. Heavy and simultaneously too hot and too cold. “Those silly little pills aren’t going to make me go away.” I shuddered and started pulling the blanket further up towards my head. “This blanket won’t work either.”
I could feel my eyes begin to fill with tears, terror freezing me where I lay. Defenseless. After a long moment I finally was able to turn my head, to face what was probably going to end my life. I wasn’t wrong before, it was massive. Had it been standing rather than resting on my bed, it would have had to hunch down. It had a massive triangular head, with its nose being the widest angle. The two other corners twisted into long horns that spiraled outwards. Two glowing orbs that seemed unnaturally jammed into its skull served as eyes. Looking decayed but illuminated as though to see not only me, but everything and anything beyond me. Its long neck stretched down to broad boney looking shoulders. Each one adorned with a cluster of horns that trailed down its chest and back, along its spine which jutted out from its dark sinewy flesh. Its chest was barely a rib cage, hollow and wrapped in more dark sinew. Inside its ribs was a dark, dried out but somehow still beating heart. Barely connected, with no other organs to speak of. Its legs however where powerful looking. Bones wrapped in tight nearly visible muscles that could easily kick down a wall if it wanted to. Or crush someone to death. The tops of its thighs and what would have been a buttocks stretched out into a long boney tail. Each vertebra there in also sporting a boney spine that pierced through whatever skin was there, ending it a long multi-pronged spine that looked as though it had already been soaked in the blood of something, or dare I even hazard to think, someone. Its feet hidden away off the edge of my bed offered an odd glow that would most commonly be associated with hot magma. Its hot breath washed over my face. Smelling distinctly of hot sulfur and rotted meat. My tears finally broke the surface, and I began to say my prayers before being massacred in my own bed. It laughed again.
“Don’t over think this. I have something I need you to do. As fun as you are to torture, I’m getting restless. Your journaling suggests you’re a mildly decent author. I want you to write for me.”
“W-write what?” I could barely get the words choked out before the thing continued.
“Write about me, write about this, and describe me as best you can.” I nodded in understanding yet confusion. “The more people who know, the more people I can reach, and the more I will leave you alone. The more victims I have, the better for you, little girl.” I was shaking under the blanket, watching its face in abject horror. Wanting to scream, run, vomit, anything to break this terrible stare down between me and whatever it was and still is. After agreeing to its terms, it stood, giving me what I can only guess was a kind of twisted grin, showing off its long sharp teeth that set in a jaw similar to a deformed cow jaw. Stretched and mangled outward to a degree no other animal on earth can attain. “Sleep tight.” It scoffed and turned towards my closet, walking through the doors until the very end of its tail was no longer visible.
When morning came, I awoke from my drug induced sleep to immediately sit at my computer and write all of this out. I’m sorry to tell you, reader, that you are just another person this thing is going to haunt. Whether you read it on some online creepypasta forum, or even had it read to you. This is your problem now. I have to keep it away from me as much as I can. I do feel bad for doing this to you. All I can hope is that you will forgive me.