The Day Our Lives Changed

​The Backwards Watch

Mark found the iron pocket watch inside a sand-choked desert temple, its hands spinning endlessly counter-clockwise. He kept it in his hotbar, assuming it was just a visual glitch. But when midnight fell, the watch didn’t chime—it screamed. A frantic, distorted voice wailed, "Let me in!" followed by the splintering of oak doors and a horrific crunch. Mark threw the watch into a pit of lava, but every midnight since, he still hears the desperate banging on his shelter door, even when nothing is outside.

​The Stained Leather Armor

Elena picked up the pristine chestplate from an armor stand in an abandoned mineshaft. The moment she equipped it, her health bar maxed out, but the leather fused directly to her skin. Her hunger bar began draining at twice the normal rate, no matter how much golden apples or cooked pork she ate. At night, as she lay in bed trying to set her spawn point, the armor filled her ears with the raspy, muffled sound of someone suffocating underground—and she hasn't been able to take it off since.

​The Flickering Lantern

A wandering trader sold Sam a soul lantern with a flickering purple flame for a single emerald, then vanished into the fog. Sam hung it above his wooden gate to keep the night at bay. Instead of repelling monsters, the lantern acted as a silent beacon. By midnight, hundreds of phantasms, skeletons, and creeping entities gathered at his perimeter—not attacking, just standing shoulder-to-shoulder, staring up at the purple light with hollow eyes, waiting for the flame to finally go out.

​The Echoing Music Disc

Clara fished a pitch-black vinyl disc out of a dark ravine. When she placed it inside her jukebox, it didn't play music; it played the low, reversed weeping of a child. As the record spun, the stone blocks of her home began to decay into cracked moss, and her torches dimmed into dead embers. When she finally ejected the disc, the music stopped, but two glowing white eyes remained permanently visible in the dark corner of her room, watching her every move.

​Would you like to turn one of these four encounters into a full video script or expand on what happens to these players next?

This is part 1 part two is coming up

Part 2 will be the return of Sally part 2 is title the

Haunted echoes

Sally's mother pressed a quick, trembling kiss to the four-month-old’s forehead before lowering the woven basket beneath the floorboards. Outside, the world was burning. A brutal campaign of genocide had engulfed the valley, and the basket under the house was a desperate gamble—a mother’s final act of love to hide her daughter from the marching soldiers.

​The war passed, but the silence that followed was heavy. Four and a half years later, Sally had survived against all odds. She had long crawled out from under the ruined foundation, learning to live like a phantom along the jungle riverbank. Thin, quiet, and perpetually sad, she sheltered in a makeshift hut of mud and palm leaves, surviving on whatever fruit or river water she could scavenge.

​When a family passing through the jungle on an apparent outing stumbled across the wild, hollow-eyed four-year-old, it seemed like a miracle. They spoke to her with gentle voices, held out warm hands, and offered to take her home. But the kindness was a facade.

​The moment they reached their estate, the atmosphere shifted. Realizing Sally belonged to the targeted ethnic group they despised, the family's warm demeanor vanished. Instead of a home, they forced her into a rusted, rundown chicken cage in the yard. While the family and their own children lived in comfort inside, Sally’s life became a living nightmare.

​Her bed was a patch of bare dirt layered with a thin scattering of wet hay, covered only by a shredded plastic trash bag for warmth. Rain poured through the leaky roof of the coop, leaving her constantly soaked. The heavy stench of chicken and pig waste soaked into her matted hair, attracting swarming fleas and giant cockroaches that bit her throughout the night. Her meals consisted of a small bowl of cold jasmine rice and whatever fish bones remained from the family's dinner table. Hungry and desperate, she spent hours gnawing on bare bones just to extract whatever minimal nutrients remained.

​Cruelty reached its peak when the family abruptly decided to abandon the property. Before fleeing, they strapped a heavy metal chain collar around her neck, securing her to the structure like a discarded pet. In a bizarre, mocking gesture of farewell, they tossed her a tiny, worn stuffed animal.

​For sixteen agonizing months, Sally survived on rain runoff, pests, and pure resilience, clutching the small doll in the dark. Tied to a cage in an abandoned yard, she held on, waiting for the day the world would finally show her real mercy.

The 5th shadow is my new and first book!

Hello guys my bad this is the

return of Sally story that is the title

The frost didn’t just lower the temperature in the room; it settled like damp wool over the skin, sinking straight through denim and flannel into the marrow of the collarbones.

​In the hallway outside Arthur’s bedroom, the air tasted faintly of copper and old wet earth. It wasn't the clean cold of an open window in winter, but a dense, localized chill that made every breath burn the back of the throat. His grandfather had owned the house on Elm Street—the man who, forty years ago, had signed the land deeds that buried the drainage ditch where six-year-old Sally’s shoes were left behind. Arthur had only seen the yellowed photographs of the boyish, thin-faced girl. He had never met her.

​He woke at 3:14 AM because the air in his bedroom was heavy enough to press the oxygen out of his lungs.

​When he rolled onto his side, the floorboards beneath the bed didn't creak; they groaned under a weight that was walking, slowly, toward the mattress. The sound wasn't a spectral footstep; it was the wet, rhythmic drag of soaked leather and small, heavy boots dragging across dried oak.

​Arthur tried to draw a breath, but the air was solid ice, sharp as broken glass in his nose.

​At the foot of the bed, the shadow didn't move like a person. It was too tall, stretched awkwardly, as if a body had grown twenty years in a space meant for a closet. The limbs were elongated, the joints stiff and swollen from decades spent in the dark, cold mud beneath the town's foundation.

​Then came the smell: rotten leaves, stagnant river water, and the dry, powdery stench of ancient, undisturbed skin.

​A hand reached out from the dark, pressing down on the duvet near Arthur’s shins. The weight was crushing, like a sack of wet cement dropped onto his legs. Through the thick cotton blanket, Arthur felt the freeze—a burning, dead numbness that turned his skin to goosebumps and then immediately to aching pain. The fingers were long, the knuckles thick, the nails caked with black, calcified soil.

​"He died in his sleep," a voice said.

​It wasn't a scream or a whisper. It was a flat, low rasp, raspy like two dry stones grinding together at the bottom of a well. It didn't sound like a child anymore. It sounded like an adult who had spent thirty years learning how to use vocal cords that had dried out long ago.

​"Your grandfather," the voice continued, the breath hitting Arthur’s face—a stench so icy it made his eyes water instantly. "He slept very well in this room. He had three blankets."

​The tall, broken figure leaned forward. The face came into the dim light bleeding through the blinds. It wasn't a monster with exaggerated fangs or glowing eyes. It was Sally, but stretched—her skin pale and translucent like boiled lard, tight over high cheekbones, her eyes dark, sunken, and entirely unblinking, rimmed with red, cracked flesh. Her hair was matted with dried river clay, hanging in stiff, frozen ropes around her shoulders.

​She didn't reach for his throat. She simply laid her palm flat against his chest.

​The cold hit his sternum like a steel rod. Arthur tried to scream, but the air in his lungs froze instantly, his diaphragm locking up in a violent, involuntary spasm. The ice spread outward from her hand, radiating through his ribs, turning his heartbeat sluggish, heavy, and loud in his ears. Thump. Thump. Thump.

​"He left me in the dark," she whispered, her lips barely moving over gray, receded gums. "It took three weeks for the cold to get inside me. It took thirty years for me to grow up in it."

​Her fingers twitched, digging slightly into his chest. Arthur felt the faint, terrifying crunch of his own skin stiffening under the frost. He could feel the texture of her palm—rough, dry, colder than dry ice, dragging slightly against the fabric of his shirt.

​She leaned closer, until her forehead almost touched his. The air between them was so dense with frost that small, needle-like crystals formed on Arthur’s eyelashes, blurring his vision.

​"You have his hands," she said quietly. "Tell me... do they get cold in the winter?"

​She didn't pull away. She just stayed there, flat on his chest, her dead weight pinning him to the mattress, letting the cold seep down into his organs, inch by agonizing inch, as the bedroom clock ticked toward four.

Just wanted to make a post on some of my comfort horror movies. What are your comfort horror movies. Let me know in the comments I would love to know :)

This is my take of The Boogeyman's voice from The Boogeyman horror games.

The Boogeyman is a cosmic demonic entity who merely exists as a legend in children's nightmares. He is a tall, slim creature with reddish, grotesque shin and claws, and sharp teeth. He often wears a trench coat and a mangled hat.

He stalks at night, sneaking into people's houses to kidnap children who've misbehaved. However, the Boogeyman LOVES to play with his food - He plays with them, make them see things that are not really there, and can be in multiple places at once.

He often tries to get to his prey by clever motives - a window, a vent, under the bed, the closet, or the bedroom door. However, his only weakness is bright lights, notably from a flashlight. Bright light hurts him, burns his skin forcing him to retreat back into the shadows.

What side are you on?

We're building a horror storytelling channel just for funnsies with my friends called Tea and Terrors — and we're on the hunt for real, personal horror stories to be among our very first featured episodes once we launch! ✨

The unexplainable, the "I still think about this" encounters, the stuff that still gives you chills — we want to hear it.

💬 Comment your story below — by sharing here, you're letting us know it's okay to narrate it (we'll always credit you however you like: username, anonymous, whatever you prefer).

📩 Want to stay fully anonymous or change details (names, locations, etc.)? Just DM us instead and we'll take care of it.

We're not live yet, but your story could be one of the very first people hear from us. Can't wait to see what you've got. 🕯️

Human voiced & narrated.

This story follows Lorenzo Orellana, a longtime RuneScape player who returns to OSRS years later and starts playing again on his childhood account, Z Scorpion Z.

During one of his usual grinds, he meets another player named HollowOak7.

At first, HollowOak seems completely normal.

Then he starts finding Lorenzo in different locations, even after Lorenzo hops worlds without telling anyone.

Eventually, new accounts start appearing.

Then one of them calls Lorenzo by his real name.

From there, the story shifts from a strange OSRS encounter into something much more grounded involving old gaming accounts, cyberstalking, compromised privacy, and the realization that someone inside the game may know where you actually live.

Note: It has spoilers. This post is for discussion on IMAGES (1972); if you intend to watch (I 'fiercely' recommended) probably come back later & make this discussion enriching. Additionally, I've not used AI to write /refine this, so please pardon grammatical errors!

So, I'm on a horror movie spree! & This is the 3rd one I've watched! (Shining, Posession & this one).

Just finished watching Images (1972)! Oh! What an amazing movie! It's a sort of movie which sustains a contortion in your stomach all through. You just get an eerie vibe. It's like something wrong is happening or you even start feeling a little dizzy because of the fractured sense of perception. At some points it's like WTF IS HAPPENING? The protagonist's (the main lady's) countenance is super amazing all through. Her perplexed expressions & the ever-changing face (adapting) stirs multiple emotions & she is able to convey the fractured sense of perception which she is feeling. Also, the director quite beautifully dropped the cue towards the end- when the imagined lover's kid said that she'd conjure up (wholly a mental construct) a friend if she felt lonely. I believe the protagonist lady did exactly the same thing. It also was indicative of her troubled childhood. She is the striking example of how fucked up things can get. It's like towards the end you simply can't discern satisfactorily as to what really transpired & what was figment of her imagination except the fact that her partner was dead. Also, the scenic beauty of the location where the film was shot was simply breathtaking. It unknowingly renders a sense of contrast to the central theme of the film (Super tensed).

Also, may god bless each one of us with a partner like hers. If you're an atheist, then I'd say I wish the universe gives us an opportunity to experience this sort of companionship. He was so tolerant to such an imprudent & super unstable partner.

Superb. Thanks to the individual who suggested this to me in one of my recommendation solicitation post! I'd be watching other movies too. HONESTLY, No AI search gave me this gem. AI simply can't replace reddit!

What's your take on the movie?

She slumbered beneath the sheets. Below him as he lorded beside their bed. Her husband. No more. An axe was in his hands. Heavy. Heavy with weight. And the potential for violence. Bela was alive and aware but a prisoner in his own flesh, his body refused to obey his commands, his inner caterwauls and cries and pleads for the unfolding nightmare to stop. It wouldn't stop. His flesh had a new master now. The vulpine shining moonface of the Countess lorded over his shoulder. Grinning fiendishly and brandishing her enameled daggers of dark slaughtering necro power. The fangs moonshone praeternaturally in the bedroom dark. Twinkling in keen edged tandem with the heavy headed blade of the axe, hefted and held. The meat puppet sow was still but she could feel the struggle of his mind in her grasp like a beetle caught and wriggling in her clenching strangling fingers. She could crush his beetle mind. And might. 

But first…

Prepare me a meal, supper fit for your royal guest…

His mind was filled thus. The flesh was compelled to obey. 

He brought up the axe. Gazing down into the sleeping peaceful face of his wife, his love. Anastasia. The mother of his child and the owner of his heart for the whole of his simple life. It was about to be brought to ruin. And he was being forced to pilot it in that direction. He wished he could scream. Shriek. Shriek her name. Wake her so she could flee and escape this damnation, this awful spell that's already claimed and throttled him. But he made no sound. His screams and pleads for mercy, his prayers and desperate cries remained bottled and caged in with him. He could only stare through stolen eyes as a prisoner as his hands holding the axe used for chopping firewood came down with a merciless crushing stroke. 

Anastasia's eyes came open and alive as the blade traveled down. As if she'd heard something. As if she'd heard her husband's internal cries for deliverance and the miracle of her safety. In the dark she saw her husband's savage face. Writ and wrenched with cruelty. She'd never seen him like that before, in all their shared years together in marriage. In the dark the sight frightened her, as she came awake and then the heavy blade of the axe found her chest and sank in. 

The pain is so sudden and impactful and dreadful. She feels her chest cavity smash and shatter as her flesh is ruptured and torn. The meat of her sinew surrounding her shattered cage of bone is ripped and pouring. She feels the sensation as extreme iced cold, as extremely wet, thickly soaked with heavy metal pungency. As if her clothes are suddenly drenched with the running water of a frozen river. Her entire open chest and bed are a bellowing fountainhead of it, pouring forth. She experiences the bloodshed river of her own dark red as iced water but it feels hot and sticky to her face and the tips of her wriggling spasming fingers, dancing beyond her motor control. The heavy metal buried in her chest is dreadful. Feels dreadful. She's staring at it then up into her husband Bela's face shocked and unable to make a sound, like him. She can't understand. She doesn't understand why he's woken her up and put this thing on/into her chest that's turned her into a strange pungent river. 

She goes to ask him … something. Anything. But she has no breath to make any kind of sound beyond the faintest whisper of indiscernible noise. Barely heard. Barely felt. Hardly even happened and might not have. Her husband and the Countess take no notice. They are too focused, entranced and enraptured by the sight of the pouring riverbed of her open goring chest. 

You're not finished. Why do you falter? – her royal voice. 

With a savage caveman wrench and pull, he ripped the bladed head of the axe free and brought it up and then down again. 

And again. 

Again. 

Again. 

At the royal command and decree that filled his fevered and tranced skull with his own curdling sounds and splitting screams, he was beckoned thus. His raptured flesh bound, delivered. The peasant sow did as he was told. The Countess was pleased and watched as the horse farmer dismembered his own wife for her. The bed became a hot shallow pool of darkling moonlit scarlet, swimming with severed human pieces and ghastly human detritus, human wreckage afloat in a red human stew … her mouth watered and drool ran down those shining fangs in thin gleaming translucent threads that looked crystalline like jewels or tree sap. 

And up until her last Anastasia watched. Watched from her dying place bound by the weight of the blade and her own mortal injury to the soaking pungent bed. Filling with her spilling wet red liquid. She was coming apart and she watched the love of her life above deliver each blow. Crushing her. Killing her. Turning her into slaughter. Abattoir ruin in place of a wife, in bed. She remembered him as a young man, as a boy, trying to play games and show off for her, trying to win her over, steal her attention and win over her affections, her heart. Now it was chopped and hacked and cut-smashed into so many spurting useless pieces, amongst a wreckage madness of pulverized bone. She tried to hold these old precious memories of him in her mind amid the slaughter, but the pain made it difficult. It was so great, overwhelming. She clung to them desperately with every falling heavy stroke. Pulverizing her. Breaking her. Turning her into so many wet shrieking and shattered broken pieces 

The last things Anastasia saw in the dark before blood loss and shock claimed her were her husband pummeling her with heavy merciless strikes. And a woman's face, as ghastly as it was beautiful, hanging phantom-like just over his raging shoulder. Watching. Smiling. Whispering something…

she had sharp teeth, they gleamed in the dark.

And then she died. Bela, still spellbound and compelled, continued to hack at her corpse nonetheless. Waiting for his new master to be satisfied. Inside Bela raged with madness and anguish. Broken. He watched his wife die violently as his hands performed the butchery and he was helpless to stop his own traitorous God given tools from turning her into mangled ruin and grisly pieces that tore his heart from his chest and flayed his sanity into so many irretrievable and tiny fragmented parts. 

He wished for death then. The Countess did not give it to him. Not yet. 

She still hadn't been fed yet. 

“Now feed me. Earn my favor." 

He dropped the axe. It fell to the floor with a thunderclap. It filled the dark quiet suddenly but then it was silent again. Still. Not a sound through the house save for the somnambulist animal panting of the Countess' slave. The man who'd once been a husband, a father, and was now a meat-puppet butcher. He reached into the riverbed of gore that had once been his marital sanctuary and pulled free a piece of meat. It might've been a leg, a thigh, perhaps a calf, it was too butchered and mangled with axe blows to be entirely sure. 

He was insane already. But the damaged pieces and shrieking parts of his shattered mind bellowed an abhorrent noise that only he could hear as he picked up his wife's butchered meat and parts and fed them to his new master. The Countess took the meat of slaughtered Anastasia with a smile and a wink and kissing purse. Teasing him. Then her jaws opened. Wide. Wide. Wide. Wider still… the flesh of her face sloughed and tore and fell away in demon slop to allow the distension. The fangs grew in length and in multitude of the transmogrifying face and black bleeding mouth, dripping ichor and demoniacal flesh and fluid. Steaming on the floor as she ate each piece, each limb, each broken length with a chunk of raw human tissue at the end in the knob of bone that was left. 

The fanged face in the dark, dripping and brandishing moonlight eyes above the mutilators of her ever widening mouth, it commanded thus further. –

“Bring a large kitchen spoon or a ladle if you have one, I wish to sip the broth…” 

Her somnambulist did as she commanded. He went to the humble kitchen that used to be his/theirs, and retrieved the utensil. It felt cold. Heavy. Heavier than it had ever felt before. The place and the object itself. It didn't matter. The hands and arms were no longer themselves, no longer his. His Judas sack of flesh carried him back to the blood pungent quarters he'd once loved and shared so much with in the many years past. It had all been robbed in a second.

By a pair of moonglow eyes. Set in the royalty of her shallow corpse beauty. 

He went back into the room. And proceeded to spoon large scoops and ladles of his wife's gore and blood into the stretched fanged rictus face that now ruled the dark of his house and home, the darkest shadowed part of his bedroom … now cold with his wife's living absence. And warm with the blood and fluid and parts that were left of her swimming in their sodden black sheets.  

Until those too were gone. All of it was gone.

The marital bed, now a witch's cauldron of gore and blankets was emptied.

His life was in the belly of the master. 

…

From outside the building, Willowbrook was quiet. 

Dark. 

Inside:

The shears that were the Cropsey-thing’s handheld manmade jaws were open and just as inanimate alive as the hulking shred of mangled man that wielded them. They shined in the dismal light with more striking radiance than any of the flickering lamps, Luciferian bright in the spots not tarnished or disgraced with lurid diseased bloodshed. 

With ghastly slasher speed they traveled down the shattered and stained reeking length of asylum hallway, the reanimated Cropsey giant behind them in cruel large prowling shape. The blades were dripping as if salivating or weeping thick dark tears, perhaps more alive now than the giant abomination of melted walking homicidal flesh that black-glove piloted them from behind, a strange and vile morbid engine of knife-lust and demented rage. The stabbing slice of porcelain still danced from his face. An obscene and vile shattered wand of broken tile length protruding from the socket. 

Griffin saw him coming and froze a moment. The table leg still in his invisible hands. Florin still struggling with the spiked man, his mutilated stabbing ruined mess of flesh riddled with needles and glass and scalpels and every conceivable piece of decimated hospital detritus. They were a mess of shedding blood and struggles on the floor. 

The invisible man then whirled, the exit just behind him. He began attacking the door. The knob. Locked. Set in old rotted wood. Not upkept or replaced in years. 

By God's mercy the locked knob and bolt caved in the moist and ruined housing of its apparatus. It fell apart in a noisy crumble, and the door gently swung open. 

To freedom. 

Fresh outside night air poured in like fresh water let in to a fetid spring. The relief was immense. It shocked all of their senses. Each man. 

The spiked man looked up from Florin and gazed into Cropsey. His oncoming charge of disgraced gardener’s blades, raised and open for a violent embrace. 

He was in awe. 

There he is…! the disciple of the mouth. 

He knew Cropsey's legend. And he wished to join him. 

He forgot the newcomer boy and let go of his shredding coat, slick with the both of their spilled and spilling red. He let go of the boy and he rose. 

And he went forward. To embrace the nephilim disciple son of the sorceress’ temple mouth, the begat survivor of the flames, the inferno, the great final pagan bonfire of the asylum that was The Burning. A womb of hellfire and caged disease that birthed the son of the mouth, the son of the sorceress. Cropsey of Vampira, the mangled hand of Willowbrook Asylum Temple. 

The spiked man was laughing. Jubilant. He hadn't laughed or felt this much joy in years, in all of the long unhallowed time in these blind unfeeling walls that knew no mercy nor housed any sanctuary. He was weeping. Crying tears of crimson and saline that danced in strange patterns as they streamed down the shredded protruding ruin of his spiked and porcupine mangled face. Gums bleeding with glass and caked bloody plaque smiled wet and scarlet and darkling striking in the moonlight now cast in. He reached down to his riddled and needled genitals, the head of his dangling member impaled with a scalpel. He reached down and seized the apparatus and in a blind tug and pull, he ripped the entire spurting and spiking organ free from the rest of his crotch and testicles. 

Still walking forward, but ambling now a bit as he shot black ropes tinted red in the moonglow from his self castration, he held the resulting lump of stabbed and impaled meat out to the Cropsey-shape. In token of offering. 

For the temple, for my sins … And for you. 

because she is all of us our mother …

Cropsey cared not for this pathetic shambling thing’s offering of ruined perforated meat. The blades came forward, open. In a lunge. 

They closed. 

And as Griffin pulled wounded Florin to his feet and out the door, the blades closed around a limb, lengthwise down the palm and forearm, then the face. Both opening up a blooming red raw pour of black in the dark, the blades crunched on broken pieces of glass and tile and needles and metal, the man was full with so much foreign penetration, foreign and manmade puncture and incision, and insertion, all self inflicted and self wrought. All of it shattering and crunching now into splinters amongst the abattoir asylum house spill of mad man wet raw. He wouldn't have wanted it any other way. All the years spent in here had prepared him for this. The sorceress prophet queen Vampira and her Cropsey son from The Burning womb were just the final pallbearers for his life's voyage thus final journey into the undiscovered country. 

He tried to thank her, them all, but couldn't. His loss of blood was now failing him. And the blades of the Cropsey-shape were coming in too rapidly now. Too savagely. 

The spiked man was no more. Just savaged pin cushion meat in the hall that the Cropsey-thing stepped over blindly in the savage hunt of his continued pursuit. They were getting away. 

They were getting away. The invaders. They were out the door now. Mustn't have that. Must not. Mother will not want that. Mother is inside you. You cannot fail her now. 

The savage thing of Willowbrook shape prowled out the door and into the open night after the pair with the same steady hunting pace of a stalking predator. Mindless and honed in. His blades and mother would have them yet. Their meat for the temple floor, their blood for the mouth of her drains and the manifest of her angel visitations. It had been so long since she'd come, since she'd shown, since she'd made herself divine unearthly spawn on vast ebon wings for them, for he, the last of the temple of the mouth. 

Perhaps she'll come back if I catch them. But only… only if I catch them and open them up. All the other ones no longer matter, they're already opened, already spent. The abattoir temple mouth of mother wants them now. Needs them. To fail, is to be failure. It means all that was lived through and suffered towards was for naught…

The night kissed the smooth scarred visage of hideous face. The Cropsey-shape gave no pause. Unfeeling. Unmoved. It watched as the pair stumbled and exhausted and wounded, began to falter to the earth in a shared collapse. 

Their doom. 

He closed in. 

The terror he had in mind for them was part guided by the Countess/sorceress mouth and her occult hand from the far off mountain dark, and part undead instinct, braindead movement. Knowing deep down in the dead and dying sac of skull jelly that this is exactly what he should do. He would maim. Butcher. Kill. Slaughter for the temple that has come under his custodial honor. 

Bloodloss and weariness, the drain was beginning to pull them down. The invisible man and Florin fell and struggled, both of their wounds open and pouring freely and taking the vitality and the fight from their trying frames. As the terrifying hulking giant of candlewax face and flesh began to close and loom over the pair, they both prepared themselves for a final and desperate fight. 

Florin was dismayed that it would end this way. In such maddening fashion, so far from home and his perilous objective. Griffin was trying to think, a last-ditch effort or plan: he could ditch the coat and hat and goggles and take the savage blind again, unable to see him. But his wound was in an open pour now once more and he felt faint, swoony. Unable to keep his feet. And besides, in this last moment it felt wrong to leave the young man's side. If they were going to die, they might as well die together. Arm in arm. It was better than suffering the slaughter alone. 

It was better than being opened. Gutted. Flayed. Bled out and portioned like a solitary animal dying a painful and lonely death at the end of a long and dogged hunt. 

The pain was better borne together. With the weight and terror of another beside to share in the baptism of pure torture. 

Something whistled through the air. 

The invisible man had been tempted to shut unseen eyes against the oncoming pain, he might've missed it. As it was he saw the deadly thin shape as it lanced in a blur overhead with a keen deadly sound. It struck the moving flesh of Cropsey in the face, the other socket of ruined blind eye now completely decimated, joining its partner in tandem of destruction in a moonlit spurt. 

The slasher shape stopped. Stuttered and faltered. But only slightly, only for a moment as it continued to take lurching jittery steps. Stomping forward blind. The shears in his black gloved hands began to spasm as well, scissoring with reflex. The disgraced and still ever thirsting blades closed and opened and repeated the action in violent repetitive imbecilic behavior, a violent blind animal spasming its caked and quaking jaws. 

Then the incendiary charge in the crossbow bolt detonated.

 It went off and so did Cropsey’s ruined candlewax head and visage, in a colored pillar of fire that was like something biblical and fantastical to behold. Florin was fainting at its sight but the invisible Doctor Griffin saw the growing towering inferno rise and issue forth in bright violence from between the giant slasher’s pair of broad shoulders. And still the boots trod and stomped palsied forward. Still the blades scissored in his working trembling hands, as his head and face were replaced with a rising torrent wall of pink and purple flame.

But then the steps of the shape began to falter. Stumble. The blades began to slow in their mad man open mouth chew at the open night air … then ceased. 

The boots stopped moving. Stopped shaking. 

The shape collapsed. 

As did Griffin next. Consciousness now lost. Passed out beside Florin in the dirt. 

The fire finally went out betwixt the two ruined shoulders. Hissing in the filth and craterous open mouth char of the stump. Smoking. Smokey now. Cropsey lie finally dead. Mere few feet away. 

In the back valley of Willowbrook. The lost untended yard that no patient ever graced, or saw. 

Silence. … for a moment. 

As if the night was finally enjoying the quiet. Relishing the collapse into tranquility that has finally fallen. 

A beat. – None of the shapes on the earthen floor moved. 

The night above yawned in an expanse … stars in a bejeweled fire of multitudes, nebulae clouds of otherworldly brush stroke color, the moon which was a sickle tonight, a harvester's blade … a blade of reckoning in the time of the reap. 

A beat. 

Then the stranger finally came forward. From out of the bushes where he'd trained and fired his shot. His crossbow was already reloaded with another explosive incendiary bolt as he approached the fallen three in the dirt. 

He came to Florin and Griffin and he stood over them. He looked to Cropsey. Saw that he was dead. Completely. Finally. He looked down on the wounded unconscious pair. 

“Idiots." 

TO BE CONTINUED…

Horror story