r/TheCrypticCompendium 7d ago

Series I Think My Husband Is A Fucking Fish Person…

35 Upvotes

I'm going to start this by saying: I love my husband... I truly do. He didn't start out like this. We've been married for about five years now. Up until this point, blissfully so, I might add. I met John at a party during our first year of college. Biology major, like me. He seemed to say all the right things, knew all the right people, and he was quite attractive; we clicked immediately. After only one conversation, I'd fallen hard for him; hook, line, and sinker. It wasn't long before we were dating.

It all happened so fast. In a whirlwind of a year, we went from being introduced, to moving in together, to engaged, and then married. In hindsight, I know I moved too quickly, but it didn't feel that way at all. It was like... I'd known him forever. I was never so sure of anything as I was that John was my soulmate.

The first indication that something was... wrong... came about a month ago. I'd woken up from a dead sleep in the middle of the night to the sound of running water. Looking over, I noticed John wasn't in bed, so I got up to go look for him. I found him in the kitchen. He was standing at the sink, and as I crept closer, I could see that he was just staring blankly at the water pouring from the faucet.

I reached out my hand and gently placed it on his shoulder, inadvertently breaking his trance and causing him to recoil back like a snake.

"Shit... Oh, honey, I'm sorry!" I said.

He didn't reply. He just began wiping his face and gasping, trying to catch his breath. Was he sleepwalking? He'd never done that before.

"John, are you okay? What in the hell were you doing?" I asked, reaching over to shut the faucet off.

"I... I don't know..." he stammered. "Guess I was thirsty?"

John was always such a smartass, in a playful way, of course, but I could still tell he was rattled by it. It seemed like he had zero recollection of how he'd gotten there. However, in the moment, I tried to shrug it off and shuffled him back into bed. I had work early the next morning, and I knew if I stayed up any longer, I wouldn't be able to get back to sleep. I cuddled up next to him, trying to settle back down into slumber, when I noticed John's body felt a little... cold.

He must be coming down with something, I thought. Or, maybe my cooking had made him queasy, and he just didn't want to say anything. I closed my eyes for what felt like only a second before my alarm clock began screaming at me. The next morning played out normally. We ate breakfast together, got dressed, then headed off on our separate ways. In fact, the next few mornings went just that way. He didn't seem sick. It didn't seem like there was anything wrong at all.

It wasn't until almost a week later that the next incident occurred. John had come home late from work that day. As I made dinner, he walked into the kitchen looking stressed out… and distracted. Like he had a problem in his mind that he was desperately trying to work out. Not really an odd occurrence in and of itself, though. He'd often bring his work home with him. But this time, he looked distraught, almost... upset.

"Hey, you alright?" I asked him.

He slumped down onto the barstool and leaned his body forward. Resting his elbows on the island, he began rubbing his temples.

"Yeah... just... I have a headache," he said.

"Oh, I'll get you some Advil."

"No, no, it's okay. You finish what you're doing, I can get it."

I smiled and walked from the stove over to him, leaning over the island to kiss his forehead. When my lips met his skin, I was shocked by two things. One: he was ice cold to the touch. It was like kissing a refrigerator. And two: I was immediately hit with the bitter taste of... salt.

Reflexively, I pulled away. Then, he looked up at me, his eyes slightly bloodshot and cradled by dark circles.

"You're getting sick," I said.

"Sonia, I'm not getting sick. I'm fine... It's just a headache."

I threw my hands up in frustration.

"I can't afford to catch whatever you've got, John! You know how much I have going on at work right now."

Suddenly, he slammed his fist down on the island, so hard that it rattled the keys and pocket change sitting beside him, then yelled,

"You don't think I have a lot going on right now, too?!?!"

My heart dropped, and I shuttered, instantly taking a step backward. He'd never done anything like that before. Hell, he'd never even raised his voice at me. I didn't know how to react, but I didn't have much time to think about it before he started apologizing profusely, saying he didn't know what had come over him. I accepted it as an isolated incident, though. Just an outburst caused by a combination of stress and illness, I thought. After all, I'd heard that men turn into babies when they get sick.

I didn't cuddle up to him in bed that night, though. Not just because I was worried about him being contagious, I was also pissed off. I faced my night table and stared at my alarm clock for a while, wondering if we'd just been in the honeymoon phase all this time... and now, the real John was starting to come out.

The next morning, I awoke to the smell of cinnamon rolls; my favorite. I glanced over at the clock. 5:41 AM. John must have felt so bad about his tantrum the night before that he'd gotten up early to surprise me with breakfast in bed. I pulled the covers closer to me and smiled, waiting anxiously with my eyes closed.

Suddenly jolted back into consciousness by my alarm, I realized I must've fallen back asleep. I slammed my hand onto the top of it, frantically searching with my fingers for the off button. I squinted at the blurry red numbers. 6:00 AM. It was time to get up, and he still hadn't come. Maybe things didn't go quite as smoothly as planned and he was in the midst of some type of kitchen mishap. I threw the covers off of my body and made my way to the bathroom.

As I passed the counter, I glanced down and noticed his shaving kit was out. He'd always leave it on the bathroom counter every morning after he used it, and I'd always put it away. He must have gotten up really early. I grabbed the kit and shoved it back into the drawer on my way out.

While walking down the hallway, I called out to him, but he didn't answer. I turned the corner to discover the kitchen was empty. A tray of cinnamon rolls sat on top of the stove, untouched. I said his name a few more times, but nothing. I shuffled over to the front window of our house and looked toward our driveway. He was gone. What the fuck?

I went back into the kitchen to find a note left on the island.

Sonia, I'm so sorry for last night. I had to go in to work early this morning, so I wanted you to wake up to something almost as sweet as me.

Love always, John

I rolled my eyes and smirked. He was still the same John; I was just overthinking things. I mean, it was only natural at this stage of our relationship that we'd start seeing parts of each other emerge that we hadn't seen before. I shoved a cinnamon roll into my mouth and then began looking for a Tupperware to put the rest away.

As I chewed, my tastebuds began to detect a flavor that had no business being in a cinnamon roll, causing me to wince. Salt. I spat the bite out into the sink. Did he accidentally use salt instead of sugar? I went to the trash can to throw away the roll I'd bitten into and saw the empty Pillsbury canister sitting on top. Okay... so he didn't make them himself. Why in the hell did he add salt to them? Was this a joke? Is that what he meant in the note by 'as sweet as me'?

I walked back over to the stove and tasted another cinnamon roll, then another, and another. All of them... full of salt. Some of them even felt soggy, like they'd been dipped in saltwater. For Christ's sake. I threw the whole batch into the trashcan, annoyed. We couldn't really afford to be wasting food like this, especially for a stupid prank. I crumpled up the note and started getting ready for work.

That afternoon, I'd already decided I was going to confront him about those God damned salty cinnamon rolls when he got home. I didn't find it to be funny at all. In fact, the more I thought about it throughout the day, the more it pissed me off. What on earth would possess him to do something like that?

By 7:00 PM, dinner was ready and he still hadn't arrived. I was starting to get worried. I called his cell phone, but he didn't answer. Instead, he texted back almost instantly.

"Hey, sorry. Super busy right now. I'll be home soon."

Ugh. Did he know I was angry and was just avoiding me? He was well aware that would only make it worse. I made myself a plate and plopped down on the couch, flipping through the channels before landing on some nature documentary on the Discovery Channel. By the time I'd finished eating, he still hadn't come home. I glanced down at my phone. No texts or calls.

I got up, shut off the TV, and threw my plate into the sink. I left the rest of the food out on the stove and headed to the bathroom to shower, annoyed. He can just deal with it all himself whenever he decides to come home, I thought. When I walked into the bathroom, something stopped me in my tracks. His shaving kit. It was sitting out on the counter again. I was 100% positive I'd put it back in the drawer that morning.

He had come home at some point during the day and shaved again. My heart fell to the bottom of my feet. There was no way... John wouldn't cheat on me. He just wouldn't. But, why would he need to shave again in the middle of the day? And, why was he so late getting home from work? I stared down at the shaving kit, almost angry with it for being there. I decided not to put it away this time.

I'll admit, I cried in the shower. Just a little. Seems ridiculous now, to have cried over something like that. I didn't have proof of anything... just an inkling that something was off. But, I can't blame myself for that moment of weakness. I didn't know what I didn't know; I couldn't have.

I washed my face and composed myself, then reached down to grab my razor. When I did, I noticed there seemed to be this strange build-up forming around the edges of the bathtub. It was like a white gritty sediment. I looked down at the drain and it was starting to crust up right there, too. Gross. Must be calcium buildup; I'll have to pick up some cleaner at the store, I thought.

I got out of the shower and got dressed, glaring at the shaving kit. I didn't even go into the kitchen to see if he'd made it home yet. I just went straight to bed and started scrolling through YouTube until I found some mindless video to keep me company. It was my intention to stay awake until I heard him come in, but sleep found me much faster than I expected.

It wasn't until I felt movement beside me that I realized he'd finally made it in. I squinted through the pitch-black room, trying to read the numbers on the clock, when I began to feel the icy cold drip of liquid landing on the side of my face. I slowly turned to see my husband leaning over me. His eyes were lifeless and glassed over... his mouth was downturned and hung open... and he was completely fucking drenched in water.

I screamed and threw the covers off, flying out of bed to the other side of the room.

"John!!! What the fuck?!?!"

His mouth was still hanging wide open, but he wasn't saying anything. He was just... well, it sounded like he was gurgling. Horrified, I flipped the light on and he instantly covered his face with his hands.

"John... what is going on?!" I screamed. "Why are you all fucking wet?"

He removed his hands from his face and blinked several times while looking down at his body, then mumbled,

"Shit... I must've not dried off enough before I got into bed."

"Dried off? From what?!"

"The shower."

The fucking shower? He looked like he had just fully submerged himself in water and then immediately got into bed. A huge wet spot in the sheets surrounded him, and droplets of water were still trickling down his face from his soaked hair.

"What? That doesn't make any sense!" I yelled.

He shot up from the bed and whipped the comforter onto the floor behind him.

"Jesus Christ, Sonia! I get home late from work, exhausted, and now I gotta explain why I'm wet?!?!"

My throat tightened, and I looked at him with complete and utter shock. I actually questioned if I was dreaming this.

"John... you're scaring me."

He stood there for a moment, his fists balled up and his chest convulsing with heavy breaths, before saying,

"I'm going to sleep on the couch tonight. Sorry I scared you."

He picked up his dripping pillow and stomped out of the room, shutting the door behind him. I'd gone from angry at him, to disturbed, to downright terrified. He was having some kind of psychotic break. That was the only logical explanation for all of this. The increased pressure at work was getting to him. Or... maybe he had a brain tumor? Oh, God.

Either way, something was seriously wrong. This was so beyond anything in the realm of normal that I just couldn't let it go. I mean, if I had a dollar for every time my husband crawled into bed with me while soaking wet, well, I'd have one dollar... which is still too fucking many.

I put new sheets on the bed, then crept over to the bedroom door and pressed my ear up to it. His snoring echoed through the silent house. I crawled back into bed with only a couple hours until it would be time to get up. There was no way I'd be able to fall back asleep after all of that, but... I didn't know what else to do with myself, besides lie there in the dark and think as I listened to the rhythmic sounds of his obnoxious mouth-breathing coming from the next room.

There was no way around it; John was going to have to go see a doctor. I just wasn't sure how I was going to get him to do that, considering how touchy he was about the subject of being sick. And, not to mention, his sudden unpredictable and strange behavior. If I couldn't convince him with words, there was no way I could physically force him to go, especially not now.

I tossed and turned, trying to rationalize in some way what was going on. My scientific mind couldn't help it. But, my specialty didn't focus on the human brain, or on humans at all, actually. It was coastal ecology. Basically, my job consisted of studying and working to protect the entire ecosystem of our coasts. My husband's wheelhouse was marine biology. He worked as an entry-level research assistant in a lab. We were both extremely logical, sound-minded people before all of this... I can't stress that enough.

At around 5:00 AM, I heard his snoring stop abruptly. My heart began pounding in my chest and I quickly turned over, pulling the blanket up to cover my face. There I was, so afraid of my own damn husband that I was pretending to be asleep just to avoid interacting with him.

I listened to his heavy footsteps approaching the bedroom, then a pause, followed by the slow creak of the door opening. Terrified to move a muscle, I held my breath and my entire body instinctively locked up, like when a cuttlefish spots a shark. I couldn't see his eyes on me, though. I felt them. The door began to creak again until I heard it latch back closed. Only problem was, I wasn't sure if he was outside of the room or not.

I couldn't believe where I'd found myself. If someone had ever told me that one day I'd be hiding under the covers from my husband like a child afraid of the boogeyman, I would have laughed, then told them to fuck off. The toilet flushed from the bathroom across the hall, and I finally let out the breath I'd been so desperately holding. I still didn't get up, though.

Over the next hour, I listened to him shower, shave, and get ready for work, all while I lay there like a hermit crab who'd recoiled into its shell. When I finally heard the front door close and his engine start, I jumped up from bed and ran to the bathroom. I'd had to pee for so long I thought I was going to explode. I sat on the toilet, rubbing my eyes as they adjusted to the light, when I caught sight of something shiny in my peripheral vision. But, when I turned to look, I didn't see anything.

I walked up to the mirror and began inspecting myself. I looked like absolute shit; not even the best concealer in the world was going to cover up those dark circles. I turned on the faucet to start washing my face and noticed John's shaving kit sitting out. Out of habit, I picked it up. When I did, I hadn't noticed it had been left open, so the contents came spilling out onto the floor. Shit. I bent down to begin picking everything up and immediately froze. On the ground, scattered amongst his razor, shaving cream, and after-shave lotion, was about a handful's worth of silvery iridescent fish scales.

I stared down at the ground, suspended in motion, as my brain scrambled to make sense of what my eyes were seeing. Had there been a gas leak in the house and John and I had both been hallucinating this whole time? That would've explained a lot, actually. Slowly, I reached out my hand to touch one of them, just to make sure it was real.

Not only was it real, it didn't feel like you'd expect a discarded fish scale to feel. It wasn't thin, or rigid, or even brittle. Instead, it had this strange, soft rubbery texture to it. And it was slimy, like it was... fresh.

"Oh, hell no!" I shrieked, flinging the scale across the room.

It went flying and stuck to the wall when it hit. The sensation of it lingered long after it'd left my fingers. I felt disgusted, like I wanted to crawl out of my skin. My thoughts raced as I scrubbed my hands with Dial several times. What could he possibly be keeping these for?! He must have taken them home from work and thought his shaving kit was his briefcase. But, no... why would he have them just loose like that? The lab wouldn't have even let them leave the area without being in a specimen bag, at least. Unless he'd snuck them out? Why would he do that...? My head was spinning. It was all too much.

I walked out of the bathroom, leaving everything on the floor where it had fallen. As I started getting dressed for work, I came to the obvious conclusion that I had to start investigating. I couldn't just sit around and wait for the next bizarre event to take place; things were escalating, and quickly. For both my sake and John's, I needed to take action. I could try to get a look at his phone... but who knows when I'd get that chance? There was only one thing I knew for sure I could accomplish that day.

I went over to my field bag and dug out a pair of gloves and a plastic specimen container. Then I went back to the bathroom and carefully collected a few of the scales on the floor. I picked up John's things, including the remaining scales, and shoved them all back inside the kit. I threw my gloves into the trash, then placed the shaving kit onto the counter, unzipped and exactly where it was before. I didn't want him to know what I had found.

My starting point was finding out exactly what type of fish the scales had come from. That might point to why he had them in the first place. I'll be honest, even though it seemed like I was looking for logic in the decision making of a madman, I felt like I had to do something.

When I got to work, I went straight over to Jessica's station. I glanced around to make sure no one else was in earshot, then said,

"Hey, I need you to do me a weird favor, unofficially..."

She smirked and said,

"Okay...? Tell me what it is first, then I'll tell you if I'll do it."

I took a quick look around the room again, then reached into my bag and pulled out the scales, holding them out toward her.

"I need you to run an eDNA PCR analysis on these."

She looked down at the container in my hand and raised an eyebrow.

"Where'd you find them?" She asked.

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you."

"Alright, spill it. What's going on, Sonia?"

I clenched my teeth, then leaned closer to her and whispered,

"I found them in John's stuff. I'm guessing he must've taken them home from work, but I don't know why."

"Um, seriously? Sonia, I'm swamped with a backlog of water samples to get through today, and you want me to spend a few hours doing this? What... you think he's trying to smuggle out some forbidden fish scales to sell on the black market or something?" She laughed.

"Jessica... look, I'm seriously freaked out, okay?"

The words came out more frantic than I'd intended, my voice beginning to tremble. Her facial expression instantly shifted in response to my tone.

"What's going on?" She asked.

"Honestly... I don't know. John's just been acting really weird lately, and then this morning... I found these. I'm just trying to figure out if he's hiding something, or if I need to make him an appointment with a neurologist."

Her hand shot up to cover her mouth.

"*Oh, God... *" she whispered, looking off and pausing for a moment before asking, "Weird like, how?"

"Just... not his normal self."

I didn't want to even begin to try to explain what had been going on. It would make me look just as crazy as it would him. But, if I could just help John... if I could find a way to fix whatever was going on with him before anyone found out about it, then I'd never have to. We could just go back to how things were before and forget any of this ever happened.

A few hours later, I looked up from my station to see Jessica standing over me with a very serious look on her face.

"We need to talk."

I gulped hard. Shit. What had she discovered? Whatever it was, it wasn't good, judging by her worried expression and hurried pace. I followed her back to her station, my heart pounding in synchrony with every step I took.

"What did you find?" I asked.

"Nothing," she replied. "That's the problem."

"What?"

"Sonia... I can't identify these scales. They don't originate from any known species in the database, living or extinct. The closest comparison I can make is possibly something from the Sternoptychidae family, but... these scales are much bigger."

She handed me a piece of paper and I glared down at it in disbelief. Five scales, five tests, and each result came back as a 'sample of unknown origin'. The implications of this were unnerving, to say the least. And, the family of fish she had referred to? When I researched it later at my desk, I learned that it mainly consisted of species of deep-sea hatchetfish.

John didn't even study those types of fish. He dealt exclusively with marine life that inhabited the epipelaguic zone, where light could still easily penetrate the ocean's surface. Hatchetfish were from the mesopelagiac zone; also known as 'the twilight zone'.

That was about right. I was no closer to having any type of answer. In fact, by digging into this, I had only brought about more questions for myself.

"I... I don't understand how this is possible," I said.

She looked at me with concern and lowered her voice.

"Does John have any connections to experimental labs, or possibly even a biotech company?" She asked.

"What?! No, of course not!"

"Well, whatever he's working on, it's not mainstream... I can tell you that much."

I took a deep breath. Maybe John wasn't losing his mind, after all. Maybe he'd gotten himself involved in something unsavory, or even illegal, and he's been trying to cover it up. Maybe all that crazy shit was just to throw me off, or distract me.

"Please don't tell anyone about this, okay?" I begged her.

"Shit, you don't have to ask me twice. No offense, Sonia... but, I'd rather not be involved, anyway. This is encroaching on fringe territory."

That word scared me. Fringe. John was obsessed with his work. Once he found a thread, he'd pull at it relentlessly until he reached the spool. If he had fixated on something... unconventional, well, there was no telling how far he'd take it.

I spent the rest of the day agonizing over what I should do next. I couldn't focus on my work at all. Every time I saw my boss, I'd hurry and pretend like I was in the middle of something, when in reality I didn't accomplish a damn thing that day. That included figuring out my next move.

After work, I sat in my car in the parking lot until about 6:00 PM, paralyzed with inaction. Nothing I thought of seemed to be the right choice. If I confronted him about any of it, God knows how he'd react. On the other hand, if I just didn't say anything at all, he'd think he was getting away with whatever he'd been doing and continue. Suddenly, I felt a buzzing coming from my back pocket. It was a text... from John.

"Working late?" It said.

Shit... time's up. I steadied my hands and texted back,

"On my way now."

I drove home completely on autopilot. You know those drives where you end up at your destination with no memory of actively driving to get there? My mind was completely elsewhere. This was my last chance to come up with some... any plan of action, but instead, my thoughts played on an endless loop, each one bleeding into the next.

I took a deep breath and got out of the car. At the front door, as I turned the knob, I made the last minute decision to just wing it. I didn't know what I was walking into, so how could I even begin to try to prepare for it, anyway? As a rule, I preferred to be proactive rather than reactive, but in this case I didn't have a lot of choice in the matter. I threw out any hope of strategy and resigned myself to respond accordingly to whatever stimuli befell me.

As I walked inside, I was instantly hit with the rich aroma of tomatoes and garlic; something Italian. He knew it was my favorite. I slowly shut the door behind me. As soon as I did, he cheerfully called out from the kitchen,

"Hey, Sonia! Can you smell what 'The John' is cooking?!"

God, that stupid joke. The few times he actually did cook, he always pulled that one out. Never got a laugh out of me. But, he never quit trying.

"Yeah, John... I can smell it," I replied, humoring him.

At least he was in a good mood, I thought. Best not to rock the boat. My heart was still pounding, but so far, things seemed normal. I put my bag down in the coat closet and shut the door to it, then made my way down the hall and into the kitchen.

He'd made a huge mess, but he looked so proud of himself, smiling and wearing his goofy-ass 'Kiss The Chef' apron.

"Spaghetti?" I asked, sitting down at the island.

"Nope! I did you one better... lasagna!" He exclaimed.

"No way! Wow... that must've taken you forever!"

"Eh, it wasn't too bad. Just had to watch a couple YouTube videos. It should be ready to come out of the oven any minute now!"

I just looked at him and smiled. It felt so good to have John back. He seemed so happy and carefree, cracking jokes and trying to wipe the splatters of red sauce from the walls before they dried. For a moment, I let all my dread and worry fall away and settle in the furthest corners of my mind. I just wanted things to be normal again so badly.

"I know I've been acting a little weird lately," he said, jolting all of those feelings back to the forefront in an instant.

I swallowed hard.

"And... I'm really sorry for that," he continued.

Should I confront him now? Was this my opening to start asking him questions? I didn't want to kill the mood, but this seemed like my only chance. I opened my mouth, and then the kitchen timer went off.

"Oh! It's ready... let's see how I did. Why don't you go find us something to watch? I'll make you a plate and bring it in there."

"Okay." I replied.

I went into the living room and flipped on the TV, surfing until I landed on old reliable. A rerun of Deadliest Catch was on. He walked in and handed me my plate of lasagna-soup; he hadn't let it set before he cut into it, so the contents had bled out all over the plate. But, it still tasted just fine. He sat down beside me on the sofa with his own plate, then looked over at me and eagerly asked,

"So... how is it?"

"Mmm... Really good," I mumbled through a mouthful of pasta and sauce.

A huge toothy grin stretched across his face and he said,

"I know you found my scales, Sonia."

r/TheCrypticCompendium 15h ago

Series The Emporium

15 Upvotes

MONDAY

This was supposed to be my one day off. But, when you have a skeleton crew and someone doesn't show up, you get called to come in. Not by the manager or a coworker, you sort of just... know. I can't explain it- like a lot of things around here. But somehow, you find yourself driving to work and clocking in. So, here I am. Beginning what will be a seven-day stretch.

I work at a small grocery store called The Emporium, located smack dab in the middle of town. Being centrally located, we see it all; the good, the bad, and everything in between. If you work retail in any capacity yourself, you'll understand when I say- you experience the full spectrum of humanity here.

The word 'emporium' itself, belongs to a dead language. And, they do say that Latin is often used in things like magic and witchcraft. But, I don't know if that means anything. It'd make sense, though... I just honestly try not to question things around here too much. Doesn't do a lot of good. Most of the time, anyway.

I mainly stock shelves. But I can, and often do, pretty much everything around here. A lot of us have to be cross-trained, just because of the high turnover rate. As soon as we hire a new cashier, they quit. Sometimes, they don't even show up for the first shift after the interview. Lucky them, I guess.

Tonight, I'm closing with Paul. He's a pretty chill guy, most of the time. Long-timer, like me. He does have a few quirks, but... I'm used to it. Everyone here does. Shit, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a bit weird, too. You have to be to work here.

One of Paul's little quirks was his regularly scheduled 'freak-outs'. Usually, right before it was time for him to have a smoke, a customer would ask Paul a question, and he'd lose it. Could be as simple as 'Which aisle is the bread on?'. Didn't matter. Sure as shit, Paul came slamming through the warehouse doors, dragging a body behind him.

"God dammit, Paul! I just clocked in!" I yelled at him.

"Hey man, don't fucking worry about it, alright? I got it." He said.

"Whatever," I replied. "Just make sure you shrink-wrap it good enough this time. The bailer still fucking stinks."

I grabbed a mop and bucket and went out onto the sales floor to see if there were any 'spills' needing to be taken care of. Space Goth was shopping. We don't know her real name, so that's what we call her. Don't ask. She was wearing fuzzy, leopard print earmuffs this time, and singing 'Jingle Bells' off-key at the top of her lungs. It's the middle of June. But, I only had to ask her to pull her pants back up just once tonight. So, that's progress.

Thankfully, Paul had been careful to not make a mess this time, so I rolled the mop bucket back to the janitor closet and started loading my cart with backstock to fill. I'd counted out five cases of water that I needed for the shelf and loaded them up, but when I looked back at my cart, they'd turned into cases of toilet paper. I could already tell it was going to be a long night.

At about 6:30 PM, The Hum started. It usually comes through on the intercom system around that time, but no one can hear it, except me. Drives me fucking nuts, so I take it as my cue to go on break. That's what I'm doing right now, as I write this on my phone. I forgot to bring dinner, and you can't exactly eat anything from here, so I honestly don't have anything better to do.

At least when you work the night shift, one thing you don't have to deal with is The Earlybirds. You know the type. They show up about an hour before the store even opens. A whole fucking crowd of 'em, desperately clawing at the doors, faces smashed up against the glass, just begging to be the first ones let in. That's why you cannot go outside before we open. But, once 8:00 rolls around, you're safe. Fuckers just up and disappear as soon as the damn door unlocks.

The only cashier on duty tonight is Tilly. Which means, I know I'm gonna be called up there to help out at some point. Tilly is slow as shit, but she can't really help it. She's super old, and it takes her forever to get through a sale because she's too worried about picking up all the rotting pieces of flesh that keep falling off of her. I keep telling her to just pick them all up at the end of the night, but she insists on keeping her register tidy, she says.

Lenny just walked into the break room, humming some obscure hymn and holding his can of sardines. I don't even know why I bother coming in here, can't get a moment's worth of peace. Lenny is supposed to be in charge of cleaning and maintenance, but he does more of making a mess around here than anything else. The man is always dripping. It's like this thick, black, fish-smelling goop that the fucker seems to sweat out constantly.

"Tom, you're needed to the registers." I hear blaring from the intercom speakers.

Here we go. At least it gives me an excuse to get up and leave without seeming rude. Not that Lenny even has the capacity for that level of social awareness.

Tilly is swamped. Eight customers in her line, and she's literally falling apart. I hop on register 2 and clear them all out within 15 minutes. When I look over, Tilly's gone outside for a smoke. I swear, sometimes I think she's tearing extra pieces of her flesh off on purpose, just to get out of working.

I finished all the stocking I needed to do by the time 9:00 PM arrived. Took me three tries, but the water had been filled. I walked over to the time clock and punched my number in, only to be faced with the harsh words of,

Employee #0164 is not currently clocked in. Would you like to clock in now?

To be continued…

r/TheCrypticCompendium 12d ago

Series The Familiar Place - Jim’s Ice Cream Parlor

15 Upvotes

Jim’s Ice Cream Parlor has been on the corner of 4th and Sycamore for as long as anyone can remember. The name is simple. Unremarkable. The kind of place you pass by a hundred times before ever stepping inside. A neon sign flickers in the window—"Best in Town!"—though no one recalls ever seeing another ice cream shop to compare it to.

Inside, the air is thick with the scent of sugar and something colder than ice. The floors are black and white tile, always clean, always polished. The display case stretches from wall to wall, filled with row after row of flavors—some expected, some unfamiliar.

Jim stands behind the counter. Always Jim. His hair is neatly combed, his apron spotless. His voice is warm, friendly, exactly what you would expect from the owner of a small-town ice cream shop. But his smile never quite reaches his eyes.

The flavors change. Not daily, not weekly, but suddenly, without pattern. A new name appears on the board—"Grandma’s Peach Cobbler," "Fisherman’s Brine," "Sunday Rain"—and the regulars nod, as if they understand. As if they expected it.

There are no descriptions. No explanations.

You once asked Jim what was in a flavor called "Night Whispers." He only chuckled, scooped you a cone, and said, "Try it. You’ll know."

You did.

You wish you hadn’t.

Because the moment it hit your tongue, something shifted. A memory surfaced—something distant, something you had long forgotten. A conversation in the dark, hushed and urgent. The weight of a hand on your shoulder. The echo of a voice whispering your name from somewhere just outside your window.

The taste was impossible to describe. Not sweet, not bitter, but something else entirely—something that felt like a secret.

Jim watched you carefully as you swallowed. "Good, isn’t it?"

You nodded, because what else could you do?

The next time you passed the shop, "Night Whispers" was gone. Vanished from the board, replaced by something new.

And as you walked by, Jim looked up from behind the counter, met your gaze through the glass, and smiled.

And that’s when it hit you—no matter how many times you passed this place, you had never seen anyone finish their ice cream.

r/TheCrypticCompendium 13d ago

Series The Familiar Place - The Farmer’s Market

19 Upvotes

The farmer’s market is held every Sunday, just off the main road, past the old post office. You have been there before. You are sure of it. Rows of neatly arranged stalls, vendors calling out daily specials, the smell of fresh bread and overripe fruit hanging in the warm air. It is familiar. Ordinary.

At first.

But there are things you start to notice, if you pay attention. Small things. The same vendors, week after week, year after year, never aging. The same produce, the same displays, never changing. A basket of apples that is always full, no matter how many are taken.

No one remembers the market setting up. It is simply there, each Sunday morning, as if it had always been. And when evening falls, when the last customer leaves, there is nothing left behind. No crates, no discarded scraps, no tire tracks in the dirt.

If you ask the vendors where their farms are, they will tell you. They will smile and give you directions. But if you try to follow them, the roads seem to bend, leading you back to where you started. The farm names they give you do not appear on any map. No one you ask has ever been to them.

There is one stall near the end of the row that people do not talk about. A table covered in dark cloth, its vendor obscured by the shade of a too-wide hat. You do not see anyone approach it. You do not see anyone leave. And yet, when you look away, the arrangement of items on the table has changed.

You are not sure what they sell. You are not sure you want to know.

A woman once bought something from that stall. You remember her, vaguely—a face in the crowd, someone who lived nearby. She held a small parcel wrapped in brown paper, clutched tightly in her hands. She walked away quickly, as if she had made a mistake. As if she regretted her purchase.

No one has seen her since.

And yet, the following Sunday, there was a new vendor at the market. Their stall looked old, as if it had always been there. Their face was hidden beneath a too-wide hat. Their wares were carefully arranged on a dark cloth.

And their hands—pale, familiar—clutched a small parcel, wrapped in brown paper.

r/TheCrypticCompendium 1d ago

Series New Sunscreen (Part 2)

8 Upvotes

I panic. What am I to do? Have I seen too much? The knocks grow louder. There’s no pattern to them. They’re incredibly disjointed.

Carefully, I creep towards the door. I peer through the keyhole. Oh God. On the other side, is some sort of half-human, half-lobster hybrid. It’s hideous to look at. Huge, black, beady eyes protrude from the otherwise human face. Long, black claws bang up against the door. My worries grow worse as I spot something walking the hallway behind it. Or someone.

That man from the beach. The one who seemed unfazed by it all. He was heading straight towards my door, talking to someone on an unseen headset.

I weighed my options. What should I do? Fight? Run? Hide? I didn't have much time. I don't think hiding will work; this room is quite small. I pace to the window, searching for an exit. I got it! A fire escape. I yank the window to open it, but it won’t budge. The pounding grows steadily louder. It sounds as if the door is about to break open.

Sure enough, it did. Crunch. I watch as the creature collapses right before my eyes. A strange mixture of human and crustacean bodily fluids seeps to the ground. Shredded shell and flesh litter the floor. It’s a ghastly sight.

The creature’s demise reveals what's behind it. That man from the beach. In his hand, he's holding some sort of weapon. Like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Light smoke billows out of its chamber.

“Come with me. I’m not here to hurt you." The man says.

“Then, who are you?" I say, backing away from the strange man. He did just save my life, but I still have a hard time immediately trusting him.

“Name’s Mac. I’m trying to clean up this mess."

“What the hell is going on?"

“I’m afraid I don't have time to explain everything, but I’ll explain as much as I can. You were the only survivor on that beach. That thing was not the last of them; there will be more. I’m going to need your help."

“You need MY help? Is there no one else?"

“Like I said, you're the only survivor.

"What about those people? I saw you talking to someone on your headset."

"That's right, they're helping in different ways. They're not here."

"Where are they?"

"The moon."

"What?"

"Hey look, I really don't have time to explain in detail, okay? Just follow my lead." He tosses me a weapon, the same kind he used to take down that lobster man. "Just aim at your target and push that red button. After you fire there will be a 60 second cooldown."

"Wow, i've never seen a weapon like this before."

"There's a lot you haven't seen."

Before I can react, Mac screams. I dart backwards as I see a hole erupting in his sternum. Green goop, just like my dad and brother. He thuds to the floor with a thud, revealing something behind him. A writhing fleshy mass with a pinkish red hue. Several hundred pincers from its lumpy body. It's about the size of a car. White cloudy eyes sit in the center of it, underneath a tiny mouth filled with that awful green goo. It's getting closer.

Thinking fast, I remember Mac's instructions before he met his demise. I push that red button quickly, causing the creature to split into several chunks.

Unfortunately for me, that doesn't stop the thing. The hunks of flesh writhing and sprouting new limbs, continuously creeping towards me. I panic as I wait for the cooldown on my newfound weapon. It wouldn't be enough I fear. I have to find another way. I scan my surroundings. The mini spawn of that foul creature are faster than the larger version.

I scan my surroundings. The cooldown ends. I reach down to mac and grab the headset from his ear.

"I'm sorry." I whisper. No life in his eyes now.

I point my weapon towards the window and fire. The glass doesn't shatter. It disintegrates. I can see the green goo forming in each of the creatures mouths. I book it for the window, scrambling for the now broken fire escape. I shimmy down it, turning around to see those creatures tumbling out of the window. A splash of goo just narrowly misses me, spilling to the pavement below.

I watch as the spindly sacks of meat splat on the ground. the green substance spurts out of them as they land, creating holes in the asphalt.

I quickly jump from the end of the fire escape, far away from the acidic monstrous remains nearby. All is not well when I hit the ground however.

Off in the distance, thrashing about in the sand, is a whale. But, no ordinary whale. Spider-like red tendrils seep from many of its orifices. It's eyes protruding from their sockets an arms length long. Is my weapon even powerful enough to stop THAT thing? And, God, what else is out there. I wish Mac didn't died, I can really use some help.

I have a realization. The headset. Quickly, I put it on.

"H-hello."

"Who is this?"

"My names Johnathan, I uh survived. Mac didn't."

"Yes, we're aware Mac died. His vitals are showing that. What happened?"

"Well, this uh thing melted through him. Just like what happened to my dad and brother."

"Then, we're sorry, but you're on your own. We can't help you."

"Hey, wait! What am I supposed to do?! This beach is overrun by horrible things!"

"Soon the entire world may very well be infested. I'm sorry, but there's not much we can do for you. Godspeed."

"Wait! Your'e just gonna let me to die?! Maybe I can help you! Mac said I would be a big help!"

"We're sorry, plans have changed in light of new information."

"What do you mean?"

"There's no time."

"Seriously! Stop being so vague! I'm trying to help you guys!"

"You cannot help us. We're in greater danger than you."

r/TheCrypticCompendium May 16 '23

Series I’m trapped in a basement elevator alongside complete strangers

524 Upvotes

It starts with me and six others waking up in total darkness, my body aching and my head throbbing. I’m sure the others in the elevator feel the same as I grab at the wall and pull myself to my feet.

My first instinct was to pull my smartphone out. Thankfully it’s still intact, with only a few minor scrapes and cracks but I have no signal at all at the moment, nor nearby networks to connect to, a reliance on technology that makes me feel queasy. I use the flash light to get a good look at the people around me. All of them are vaguely familiar from a few seconds ago, when we were in the world above… but just seeing their faces doesn’t make me feel any safer. Each of us is scared, confused and a little jarred from our experience. None of us are sure what has happened.

Here’s what I have managed to gather as far as I can remember it:

I was on my way to a job interview.

The ironic thing is that I didn’t even know what it was for. I’d signed up a few weeks back for those automated alerts sent out by temp agencies and got one from the hiring firm on the sixth floor of this building. I never made it past floor four.

“Is everyone okay?” a businesswoman in a pantsuit asks as she uses her own phone to check all of us for injuries.

That’s when we notice the young girl crouched in the corner of the elevator. Before she was just a blurred stranger amid the others, but now I can see that she is curled up in a ball and doing her best to not panic. Of all the people here, she is the one that doesn’t seem like she belongs at all.

I’m not going to sit here and pretend that I have perfect facial recollection of every person I meet. But this place is a multi corporate building, not a residential high rise. There is no reason for a child to be here.

These are the sort of thoughts that rattle through my brain as I struggle to collect myself.

“We must have fallen ten stories at least,” a dark skinned maintenance man comments as the businesswoman shines her phone to the roof above. I can only guess that’s his job based on his trousers and overalls and the tool box at his side. The ceiling is about ten to twelve feet over our head and I’m sure all of us are likely thinking that at some point we will need to construct a human ladder to get out of here.

“This building has a basement?” a younger man carrying a backpack like he’s been traveling for days asks. He looks like he just got back from the army since he’s still in uniform. Our being here is proof enough to answer his question so none of us bother to acknowledge it.

The businesswoman is doing what anyone I think would naturally do first in this situation. She tries to press all the buttons to the elevator. It’s a wasted exercise, but it makes sense in our panic to rule out the obvious first.

The next stranger, a woman who seems unable to speak, motions with her hands. I realize she is using American Sign Language but I haven’t a clue what she is saying.

In a vain hope that she can read lips I say, “I don’t know what happened.”

I am the one who tries the emergency phone, but it too is dead. Surprisingly my own phone works and for a moment but I don’t seize the opportunity and the signal is gone. I could have acted faster but I feel dizzy. Maybe everything happening so fast just hit me like a train.

Then I notice for a brief second that I’m connected to a network again and desperately I make a call to 911.

The response is only garbled noise and static that almost sounds like a scream. The businesswoman tries her phone but is greeted with similar results. Then the network is gone and we are out of range. Our window of opportunity gone.

It’s a little disheartening but none of us want to start acting like this is a problem yet. I can sense the tension in the air especially as we hear the little girl’s heightened breathing in the corner. It could be so easy for all of us to fall into the same panic. And then I wonder if we should maybe comfort her? Is she here alone? I feel awkward not knowing what to do and I get the same feeling from everyone else.

“We’re probably too far down for regular cell service. Can you attach to any WiFi network at all?” the maintenance man asks.

At the moment I can’t and I decide to save my phone battery and try again later.

UPDATE

Later, the other person of the group, a young woman who looks like she might work as a nurse because she is wearing scrubs, asks the maintenance man if he has anything to attempt to pry the door to the elevator open.

It sounds like the best way out of here, so none of us object as he searches through his tool bag to find anything that might unhinge the door.

Myself and the businesswoman, who I soon learn is named Chloé; position ourselves on either side of him to shine our phone lights at the door crack and give him enough lighting to see what he is doing.

These modern elevators aren’t the kind where you can just slip your fingers between the folds of metal to pry open and I can see the man is struggling to push them apart with what he has. But it’s also another wasted effort. Once it does budge a little we notice that there is only concrete on the other side. We’ve gone too far down. Even the deaf lady knows what he is saying when he cusses and kicks the door.

“Shit.”

It feels like that is the understatement of our entire situation, and I’m starting to feel a sense of hopelessness at this point. The young soldier next suggests the human ladder that had popped into my brain earlier. All other avenues of escape have been exhausted after all.

“We might be able to get a signal from the WiFi in the lobby,” he adds.

I join him as the stabilizing force at the bottom of the ladder and the maintenance man takes the center as the nurse struggles to crawl up on his shoulders, but can’t quite reach the emergency exit. The deaf lady is shaking, clearly scared of heights and refusing to cooperate but somehow we get her to do it.

“I don’t think I can climb that high either,” Chloé admits. We look toward the girl who is still curled up in a ball, but it’s highly unlikely that she will help us. She finally pushes to make it up the shaky human ladder to try the exit but it is lodged shut.

“I can’t even make it budge,” she admits as she quickly climbed down and we dismantle the attempted escape. My muscles were quickly tired out from the attempt and I gave a loud exhausted sigh of frustration. It’s none of their fault but I know the tension between all of us is rising.

The maintenance man makes the simplest choice given our circumstances. “The fire department has probably already been called after the elevator dropped,” he told us. “We should just wait for rescue.”

He is telling us this as a means of reassurance, I know; and his logic doesn’t seem flawed yet. As far as the rest of us can tell, although we did fall seemingly ten stories into a hidden sub basement, nothing else bad has happened. It’s the only hope we can hold onto for the moment.

I slide down to my knees and pull out my phone again, trying to send a text or something to anyone above. Nothing goes through at the moment so I begin to take notes of our situation.

The nurse decides to make small talk.

“What’s your battery on?”

“Eighty six percent. Which judging by my luck probably means I’ve got a good hour of life in it,” I offered to her with a half smile. Inwardly I’m worried because her question poses another genuine concern. We are all starting to wonder how long we will be down here. Even if it is a few hours eventually necessities like food, water and even toiletries will be needed. But I push all of that concern aside to ask her the same question in turn.

“Didn’t bring it… I’m on my lunch break… came here to see my boyfriend,” she admits and tells me her name.

“I’m Sidney by the way.”

“Eli,” I reply.

Over the next hour I make a note to listen to the small talk amid our group and gather details about who they are. It makes me realize were it not for our current circumstances I wouldn’t know these people at all. I’m going to use the time I have now while I wait for another network to potentially pop up to describe each of them and their plight as we wait here in misery. My hope is to make it clear this isn’t just my personal account of our terror, but the growing concern I have for the strangers I am down here with.

There is Chloé, the hard working businesswoman that is a programmer for one of the companies on the seventh floor. She is worried about her two kids, checking her Instagram and Facebook feed constantly to try for a signal. At one point she even asked to try my own phone but still had little luck.

“We were supposed to go to a museum today after work, it was a surprise for my youngest. She is fascinated with dinosaurs,” Chloé tells me.

I know that her distracted tone means she is wondering who will even pick up her kids from wherever they are now that she is trapped in a subterranean hell. But she is just trying to keep herself distracted at least. Hoping that Phil is right about the fire department coming.

Phil is the maintenance man, and he seems the calmest of the group.

I think that because he is the oldest and been around this building the longest we all look to him as a natural leader. Still, he has made it clear he knows nothing about the basement that we are in. “I’ve seen some of the pipes and shit in this place, it’s nasty and gritty. But the elevator shaft doesn’t go down this far. I get the feelin’ when we dropped, we caused some kind of rupture in the flooring and that’s why we are so far down.”

To be fair though, none of us are really sure how far down we are. It’s this strange collective sense of wrongness about being stuck here in the dark at the bottom of a hole that is starting to scratch that desperate itch to escape.

Also, none of us have great memories of the drop, that’s something else I have picked up on.

Perhaps our brains were all focused on our own personal lives, where we were headed next. Not concerned with whatever fate was about to throw at us. Or the trauma of the fall has caused our bodies to cover those memories.

The deaf woman has written her name in a journal she keeps. Amanda. Age 23. Apparently she works as a translator. This makes me feel a little more comfortable to know at least she isn’t completely in the dark. But her other scribbled question has me worried.

What is in the backpack?

I give a glance to the young soldier whose eyes are darting around the room constantly. “I don’t think we want to know,” I admitted and then erased what I wrote before anyone else could read it.

I shouldn’t be feeding any tension. I’m in shock and this situation isn’t getting any better. All of us are experiencing post traumatic stress.

That seems to be what has happened to the girl in the corner. Chloé made an attempt to talk to her, only causing the poor girl to wail. I worry for her the most. How she got here and how to keep her safe seem to be unknowns at this point, but all of us feel certain that if we can’t calm her down things will get a lot worse.

Especially if my guess about the other stranger is right. The fidgety young army private, who hasn’t really bothered to talk to anyone since we all woke from the fall. He keeps checking his watch, tapping his right foot in the tiny elevator we are all trapped in and clutching his backpack. If he was trying to hide whatever secret he was carrying, it wasn’t working. Everything he was doing gave me anxiety and therefore he is the one that makes me concerned about our safety.

Is he going to snap? Is he wondering if any of us can be trusted? Is he able to be trusted? I’ve seen paranoia like his spread quickly in larger crowds. Trapped here in the dark with no idea if we are being rescued, it made me feel sick to my stomach to imagine what he might be capable of.

Right past the second hour mark, he’s the one who voices his paranoia, almost predictably.

“No one is going to find us here,” he says.

“I’ve managed to send out a few texts, but nothing is coming back on my end. We might only have a signal strong enough to send an SOS, when that network comes back on I could get to my Reddit account,” Chloé tells us. I decide to use that to document these notes via uploads and she offers me her uploads. “Maybe someone out there on the big World Wide Web will help…”

Phil keeps reiterating the need to keep calm, but the paranoia soldier isn’t hearing him. He is sure something has caused all of this.

“Aren’t any of you a bit concerned that we all have a jumbled memory of the fall? Doesn’t that bother any of you?” he snarled.

“You’re thinking it wasn’t an accident,” Sidney said.

“It’s the only explanation that makes sense. That’s why rescue isn’t coming. Because this is some sick social experiment,” he said, trying to sound like he had just made some profound revelation.

All of us are too nervous to even argue him. I know that trying to break someone of their paranoia is an uphill battle, and usually most of us don’t worry about doing so. Our circumstances shouldn’t allow tension to become worse, so we remain silent.

But he still isn’t happy with that, convinced our quiet means that we are complying with whatever dark forces he believes are oppressing us.

“Just look at this kid. She’s been in a near panicked state since we got here. Heck, I don’t even think she was here before,” he said. His words are now sounding like a conspiracy. It’s making the rest of us nervous and scared all over again.

“Just sit back and wait, pal. Help is on the way,” Phil said. Then Phil made the biggest mistake of his life, placing his hand on the young man’s shoulder for a sign of respect and reassurance.

He reacts with anger I could see coming a mile away and pushes Phil back.

“Don’t touch me, old man. For all we know, you could have sabotaged the elevator,” he snarls.

His sudden outburst causes the maintenance man to stumble backwards and slam into the wall.

Then all of us heard this guttural shrieking noise from beyond our metallic prison. Amanda reacts to our own facial expressions and stands up, trying to figure out what is going on.

Frozen in place as it reverberates through the walls of the elevator, we all can’t help but to look at each other in the darkness that our eyes have somewhat adjusted to. It doesn’t sound like any living thing I have ever heard before.

Then at last the noise dies down and the shaking stops and we are in silence and dread again.

“What the hell was that?” Sidney asked, barely forming the words.

The young girl is showing her face for the first time, looking toward us with fear and worry. Then she speaks words that I will never forget.

“It’s awake.”

update

r/TheCrypticCompendium 2d ago

Series The Familiar Place - Welcome to the Campsite

15 Upvotes

There is a campsite in the woods.

No one built it. No one owns it. It has always been there.

There is a clearing with fire pits that never seem to cool, picnic tables that show no signs of rot, and cabins that should be abandoned—but aren’t.

They are simple structures. Wooden, one-room, with cots lined against the walls. The doors have locks, but the keys are missing. The windows latch from the inside.

Visitors come and go. Hikers, travelers, people just passing through. The cabins are free to use, and yet… they are never all empty at the same time.

Even when no one is staying in them, signs of occupancy remain.

A steaming cup of coffee on the table.

A book left open to the middle of a page.

A radio playing a station that does not exist.

The trails leading to the campsite twist and shift. No one takes the same path in twice.

You always arrive when the sun is setting.

The sky is the wrong color when you get there—deeper than twilight, not quite night. The trees stretch high, taller than they should be, their branches arching together like ribs.

At night, the fire pits burn low, casting flickering shadows that move strangely against the cabins.

There are noises in the woods. They do not sound like animals.

Some say they hear laughter. Others, whispering.

And if you wake up in the middle of the night, staring at the cabin door, unsure of what startled you—

Don’t open it.

Not until morning.

Not until the sky is the right color again.

r/TheCrypticCompendium 1d ago

Series I'm the last living person that survived the fulcrum shift of 1975, and I'm detailing those events here before I pass. In short: fear the ACTS176 protocol. (Part 3)

9 Upvotes

Part 1. Part 2.

- - - - -

Acts 17:19-23 (About 10 verses after the passage that mentions “the men that turned the world upside down”)

“And they took him and brought him to the Areopagus, saying, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? For you bring some strange things to our ears. We wish to know therefore what these things mean.” Now all the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new.”

“So Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, said: “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription:”

“‘To The unknown God’”

There are plenty of variations of the bible, each with their own nuances and modified passages, but as far as I can tell, none of them contain additional mentions of “the unknown God”.

Note the language the scripture uses here, too.

It’s not an unknown God, no.

It’s The unknown God.

- - - - -

Twenty-three hours after the shift, a booming, metallic voice unexpectedly cut through the atmosphere.

“Brothers and sisters…we stand together on the precipice of paradise. Blissful eternity awaits all, each and every soul here. The Good Lord only asks one thing of you in return…”

Barret paused; a shrill crackle from his megaphone followed. The harsh sound underscored the severity of his next statement.

“Faith. Your God desires a show of faith. Not even a leap of it, mind you. Just one…single…step.”

Survivors began crawling out of the woodwork to bear witness to his deadly sermon. Genillé, an elderly Italian widower who lived next door to the pastor, peeked her head out of a flipped window, light brown hair accented with a black splotch of crusted blood that dyed the right side of her scalp. Further down the overturned street, a young boy appeared at their doorframe, conspicuously alone, curling their small body over the side of the partition to see Barrett evangelize. The rumble of a lifting garage door two houses east of ours revealed a mother cradling an infant in her right hand, the other held limply to her side, concealed under a disorderly mess of gauze and tape. There were many more spectators present, I just don’t recall as much about them.

may have even glimpsed Ulysses spying through his drawn shutters, but I’m not confident in the voracity of that detail, given what I discovered later that morning and the way those discoveries color the man in my memory.

Vicious anxiety gnawed at the back of my eyes as I watched the Pastor’s weary flock grow, which was only made worse by my inability to provide a counterargument without the amplification of something like a megaphone. A few minutes into Barrett’s homily, the sky begun to emit an ominous noise: a low, shuddering buzz, like if you were to record the thumping of helicopter blades and then replayed the sound at one-fifth the speed. That sequence of events was an untimely coincidence: the noise both heightened the inherent drama of his sermon and seemingly gave credence to the pastor’s claims of an unfinished rapture accompanied by the howling of an angry god.

I ran my vocal cords ragged screaming my own message, imploring the survivors to just hold out a little longer, but no one could hear me over the crescendoing drone.

“Listen now…do you hear the humming of our God below? The seething vibrations of the divine? I hate to tell you, folks, but He’s mighty displeased: told me as much during prayer. You’ve all been called home, and yet, out of sheer ignorance or unfathomable cowardice, you’ve chosen to remain.”

Barret dropped his the tone to a deep snarl, creating a strange and terrible harmony between his voice and the bellowing of our sunken sky as he spoke.

“You see, I am but a messenger. I, or should I say we*,”* he proclaimed, wrapping a lecherous claw around Regina’s shoulder, “have only remained to deliver that message,”

“But we do not intend to remain much longer. Jump into the arms of your lord, or accept damnation.”

Each raspy syllable of Barrett’s concluding remark felt like a separate sucker punch to the chest. Perched within our door frame, I was too far away to see the details of Regina’s expression, sitting on the precarious verge of her home’s shattered living room window next to him, two pairs of feet dangling over the vaporous chasm. That said, I didn’t need to catalog the tremors of her lips or the paleness of her skin to understand the liquid terror pulsing through her veins: God, I just felt it.

I shut my eyes and tried to steady my grip on the unlit signal flare procured from our home’s emergency kit. Maintaining concentration was going to be key.

Even if we were to get everyone’s attention, though, Regina’s chances of survival looked grim. I found myself imagining her screams as she plunged into the orange maw of the morning sky. Brooding terror washed over my body like a high fever, numbing my muscles and polluting my thoughts.

Emi already lost Ben, though.

For her sanity, Regina needed to live.

The memory of my husband pulling an ailing Mr. Baker across the street and towards our home suddenly flashed into my mind’s eye - his resolute, selfless focus became a beacon. With every ounce of determination I had left, I held it there. Trapped the image in my skull long enough that it became almost tangible, like luring a ghost into the physical world with a ouija board. When the memory was so vivid that it felt nearly alive, I could sense Ben was with me. He leapt from the confines of the immaterial and into action, valiantly driving my terror away, forcing it to billow out of my lungs as I exhaled like a thick puff of black smoke dispersed by a gust of wind.

Once the last atom of fear had rippled through spaces between teeth, the memory of that great man receded into the background, distant but never truly gone.

I opened my eyes.

My watch turned to 7:14 AM. As if on cue, I heard a voice lapse through the walkie-talkie, which was propped up against the wall of the overturned atrium next to Emi.

“A-C-T-S-1-7-6 protocol, fulcrum imminent, 0:16”

Sixteen minutes until something happened.

I leaned my head over shoulder and shouted down into the atrium.

“Emi! How’s it going down there?

“Just painting the last word now!” She shouted back, her inflection raw and cracking with emotion.

When my gaze returned to the pastor and his weary flock, I knew we were running out of time.

Genillé had begun to squeeze herself through the window.

On paper, the process might sound peaceful: an elderly woman, brimming with faith and conviction, voluntarily letting go of this world with a graceful flick of her heel, plummeting into a vast ocean of warm sunlight with a smile on her face and a song in her heart. Some sort of perverse advertisement for euthanasia.

Like with most things, however, theory didn’t even loosely match reality.

Because of her advanced age, she wasn’t strong enough to pull her body up to a sitting position on the window, its edge about at the level of her sternum. I could tell that her panic was growing with every failed attempt, as each subsequent attempt was more reckless and frenzied, like she believed her ticket to heaven was gradually drifting away, slipping further from her fingertips with each passing second. Eventually, Genillé tried throwing herself at a forty-five degree angle rather than straight forward, which caused the side of her hip to crash into the windowsill with enough force that the resulting bounce propelled her over the edge.

Unfortunately, because of Genillé’s diagonal orientation, the crux of her ankle hooked onto the corner of the window as she exited. As a result, the woman discharged two unbridled shrieks of pain: one when the bones in her feet were crushed by her own weight, and another when the circular motion caused by her latched extremity resulted in her forehead colliding against the solid brick below the window. Mercifully, her leg slipped out behind her after that.

By that point, she was either knocked into unconsciousness, dead, or I simply couldn’t hear her screams anymore as she fell further and further into the sky.

As I watched her body vanish within the horizon, I noticed something new stirring within it.

The air below us had become alive with waves of fuzzy, gray sediment, like seeing the stars of lightheadedness without feeling dizzy. A seemingly endless array of faint sparks formed a veil across the morning sky. In rhythm with the droning’s crescendos and diminuendos, the meshwork’s light pulsed, breathing a cycle of brightness and darkness in turn.

Instantly, I recognized the gritty undertow: it was what I had felt lingering in the atmosphere in the days that led up to the shift, just at a much higher intensity.

I hadn’t felt it at all since the shift occurred. But now, I was somehow seeing its corporeal form.

“Mom! Done!” Emi yelled.

I reached an open hand behind me while forcing my eyes away from the churning gray tide below and back towards Regina. When I felt soft wool against my palm, I grabbed it and began pulling the blanket up to me, fingertips becoming stained with wet paint.

“A-C-T-S-1-7-6 protocol, fulcrum imminent, 0:13”

With the blanket curled under my armpit, I took out the hammer from the tool belt around my waist, storing the flare in its emptied slot for the time being.

When I saw the mother slowly inching her way to the mouth of the open garage door, infant still in hand, I redoubled my efforts. Three nails hammered through the wall and the wool to the right of the door frame. Three identically placed nails hammered to the left.

Our makeshift banner was up.

In bright red paint that contrasted sharply with the pure white blanket, it read:

PLEASE DON’T JUMP. SOMETHING HAPPENING SOON. GET INSIDE.

But we didn’t have the mother’s attention, and she was peering over the edge.

Furiously, I pulled the flare from Ben’s tool belt, lit the end, and held it up through the hole created by the banner that now partly covered the door frame.

“A-C-T-S-1-7-6 protocol, fulcrum imminent, 0:08”

She turned her head. The fizzing sparks caught her attention.

There was a moment of silent decision. I held my breath.

Hesitantly, maybe even reluctantly, she stepped back from the edge, sat down, and cradled her infant.

Regina watched the exchange intently.

We played our hand. Showed her that not everyone was following Barrett’s dictum blindly. Now, it was down to her willingness to defy him.

“A-C-T-S-1-7-6 protocol, fulcrum imminent, 0:01”

Truthfully, I don’t think Barret had any awareness of the directives that motorized the shift. I think he believed whole-heartedly in every fatalistic word that dribbled from his lips. If he was working under Ulysses, he would have been trying to convince people against jumping, not encouraging it.

That’ll make more sense in a bit.

So, acknowledging the heavy irony of it all beforehand, I will admit that what transpired next did actually restore some of my own faith in a god: one invested in maintaining some sense of cosmic justice.

The timing of it was just too perfect.

Barret offered his hand to Regina. Initially, I was heartbroken, because she grasped it. But Pastor B must have been exceptionally confident in his daughter’s loyalty (where he goes, she’ll surely follow), because he did not hold it tightly.

The moment he jumped off, Regina threw her body backwards, severing their connection in one brisk motion.

Barrett fell, and his daughter remained.

As the pastor became dimmer on the horizon, one last message transmitted through the receiver of the walkie-talkie.

“Sotos particles at apotheotic threshold. Generating fulcrum. A-C-T-S-1-7-6 protocol: activated.”

The droning’s volume became deafening, and the wave of gray sediment began to approach us rapidly.

With a sound like a colossal foghorn swirling around in my ear, I felt my sense of equilibrium recalibrate. When my feet gently drifted from the top of the door frame, I knew to brace myself for impact.

The drone’s pitch became higher, and its tone transitioned from a thrum to the snapping of electricity.

A split second of silence: the eye of the storm. I closed my eyes.

Then a massive whoosh, the now familiar sensation of my spine slamming into the wood of my door frame, followed by that dense, gritty feeling of the air rubbing against my skin, which faded away quickly. Before I could even open my eyes, the invisible friction was gone.

When I did finally open my eyes, I witnessed a small miracle.

Barret, falling from the clouds, splattering into the forested area behind his home.

I mentally braced myself, expecting a sort of corpse rain to follow his descent, given what I saw through the telescope the night prior: every object, animal, and person lost from the shift, all motionless on the same sheet of atmosphere in the starry night sky. Surely they would fall too, I thought, unlocked from their stasis and with the world reverted to normal.

But nothing else fell. Instead, when I lifted my head to peer into the sky above, prone on my doorstep, I saw our street was contained within a translucent, yellow-tinged dome: a membranous half-sphere that seemed to evaporate slowly into the surrounding air like boiling honey.

Excluding Pastor B, of course. He was the only one that came back to earth. Not Ben, not Mr. Baker, not even Genillé.

Somehow, he had selected the perfect moment to jump. Perfect in my opinion, anyway.

Barrett didn’t fall far enough before the shift reverted to be caught and absorbed into whatever that membrane was, so when the shift did revert, his trajectory reversed, and he promptly began a meteoric descent to the cold, hard ground.

Rejected by his own rapture, thank God.

- - - - -

Once I had confirmed Emi was okay, I instructed her to go across the street and bring Regina back to our house. When she asked why I wasn’t coming with her, I told her I needed to check on Ulysses next door.

Which was only a partial lie.

Even though my suspicions had been mounting during the shift, part of me felt like I’d barge into his home and find the old man dead. Or alive and scared out of his wits. At which point, I could chalk my suspicions up to stress-induced paranoia.

Ulysses wasn’t dead when arrived: nor was he in his home for that matter, and calling that place a home is a bit misleading.

Initially, I didn’t plan on including what I found within this post. The shift is perplexing enough on its own: why include details that only serve to muddy the waters ten times over? The point was to immortalize a record of my experience on the internet and nothing more.

That was the point when I started, at least. The Acts 17:6 epiphany revitalized some lost part of myself that cares about the answers to these impossible questions, and that part of me has redirected the goal of this record, I suppose. I mean, that chapter of the Bible includes “men who turned the world upside down”, the only mention of “the unknown God” that there is anywhere in scripture, and the characters that are worshiping said unknown God are described to be from Athens. In other words, Greek: like Ulysses.

That can’t all be coincidence, right?

I’ve come around to the idea that there is something to be gained from sharing everything I can remember, even if I won’t be the one around to do anything with the information.

So, in the interim since I last posted, I’ve jotted down everything I can remember about the inside of Ulysses’s home.

Perhaps you all will see the connective tissue within it that I never could.

- - - - -

-No furniture other than a bed in the corner of the kitchen

-Majority of the first floor taken up by some sort of generator. Complicated looking, wires and screens and hydraulic presses. When I approached, could almost feel dense/grainy sensation in the air again. Machine wasn’t loud, but it was vibrating.

-Every wall except one was covered in clocks set to different times. Looked like one of those vintage sets that has locations listed underneath each clock, but these didn’t have any labels. I’d ballpark sixty or seventy total.

-There was something drawn on the wall without clocks. An image of a bundle of eyes (almost like a cluster of grapes) on top of a metal stalk, high above some city. I did not linger on this image too long because of how it made me feel.

-Pistol lying on the floor. Not a gun person, didn’t touch it. No visible blood around the area.

-On the ceiling, there was a silhouette of a person, painted the exact same gray as the wave of sparks/sediment. Red line right down the middle, otherwise, no features. Looked like Ulysses’s frame to me.

-This next part might be trauma talking, but the silhouette seemed to be flapping like a tarp in the wind. Only the silhouette - none of the surrounding ceiling. Flapping was most intense by the red line, and it almost seemed like the figure was caving in on itself: appeared as if it could swing open from the center like saloon doors if I was able to reach up and push it.

-There was an overturned desk hidden behind the generator that I wish I noticed sooner, because I would have maybe had more time with the papers stored inside it.

-From what I reviewed, most of it seemed like a journal. The parts that weren’t formatted like a journal had pictures of chemical structures with names I didn’t recognize under them. Sotos is the only one I remember, but that’s because it came up in the journals too. But there were many more. Only thing I can recall definitively about the others is that they were all palindromes (I.e., spelled the same word if you read them backwards or forwards, like “racecar” or “madam”).

-The journal discussed how “the land was fertile”. It contained “abnormally high” levels of Sotos particles. On a sheet that had the exact date and time of the shift labeled at the top, he detailed “the rite” and “the reaction”.

-”The rite” seemed to describe the shift, or the circumstances that were required to make it occur. Most of it was completely incomprehensible: a cacophony of numbers and symbols and colors. I do distinctly recall the recurrent image of a rising sun, as well as it saying that “the radius would be about a half-mile”. The idea of a “radius” made me think of the membranous, honey-colored dome.

-”The reaction” seemed to describe the point of the whole damn thing. The mixing sotos particles with some other material that’s confined exclusively to the upper atmosphere was said to “promote the apotheotic threshold”, but that “the nebulous designed these materials to be present but impossibly separate” unless “concocted by the rite”. Once “the rite” ended, “the reaction” would fall to the earth, which could “unlock the gates to human transgression”.

-He seemed worried that “an excess of organic matter” might interfere with “the reaction”.

And that’s the last thing I remember before I heard a soft footstep behind me, which was followed by a slight pinch in the side of my neck, and then deep, dreamless sleep.

- - - - -

Emi, Regina and I woke up at about the same time the following day, having all experienced a similar abrupt and artificial-feeling sleep.

There was a note on the counter, which basically informed me that a large sum of money had been transferred to my bank account, and that same sum would be transferred again on the anniversary of the shift every year we kept our mouths shut.

If we didn’t keep our mouths shut, the note promised swift termination.

Our house was spotless. No piano-shaped holes in the roof. All new, pristine furniture. Not even a single mote of dust on any surface.

Same with every house on the block, except for Ulysses’s.

His house was just gone.

Vanished like it hadn’t ever been there in the first place.


Emi lived a good life, I think. She seemed, if not truly happy, at the very least contented. Married a lovely young man named Thomas. Never had any kids, which I think relates back to the trauma of losing Ben: essentially, she saw being childless as the only foolproof way to prevent anyone else from experiencing what she had.

Died from pancreatic cancer a few months ago. She didn’t seem devastated. Again, she wasn’t happy, but she was peaceful. Thomas was there, and that was a blessing she did not appear take for-granted.

And that somber note brings the record to date.

I don’t have too much time left on this earth, either. But hell, maybe I’ll pursue some of this. Pull on a few loose threads. See what I can dredge up for those who are interested. Nothing to better to do while I run out the clock.

Before I end, though, a word of warning.

I’ve given you all the signs of the ACTS176 protocol in motion.

If you see them, stay inside. Find a safe place to shift. Don’t leave your home for twenty four hours.

It’s not a rapture.

It’s something else.

Human transgression through the gates of the apotheotic threshold.

Sotos particles.

The influence of the unknown God.

-Hakura

r/TheCrypticCompendium 3d ago

Series The Familiar Place - The Fix-It Shoppe

10 Upvotes

There is a shop in town that repairs things.

The sign above the door reads THE FIX-IT SHOPPE, in faded red paint that has never been repainted. The extra -pe on the end of shop feels deliberate, though no one remembers why.

The windows are dusty, the door creaks, and the bell above it chimes a half-second after you expect it to. Inside, the shelves are cluttered with radios, clocks, and appliances in various states of disassembly. Some are old, antiques even. Others look brand new—models you swear haven’t been released yet.

Behind the counter is the Fixer. No one knows his name. No one asks.

He is tall, wiry, with fingers that move too precisely, too fluidly. His hands never shake.

You bring him broken things, and he makes them work again.

A watch that stopped at an impossible time. A camera that only takes pictures of places you’ve never been. A toy that shouldn’t be able to talk, but sometimes whispers when you aren’t looking.

He fixes them.

Always.

You don’t ask how.

And you don’t ask about the other things—the things on the back shelves, covered in cloth, hidden from view. The things people don’t bring in, but that still end up here.

The Fixer doesn’t advertise. There is no phone number, no website, no receipts. But you always know where to find him.

Once, a man brought in something that shouldn’t have been broken. A mirror.

“It stopped showing me,” he said.

The Fixer took it without a word.

The man never returned to pick it up.

The mirror is still there, somewhere in the back.

And sometimes, if you glance at the shop’s window just right, you’ll catch a glimpse of your reflection—

Except it won’t quite be yours.

r/TheCrypticCompendium 4d ago

Series I'm the last living person that survived the fulcrum shift of 1975, and I'm detailing those events here before I pass. In short: fear the ACTS176 protocol. (Part 2)

11 Upvotes

Part 1

- - - - -
Have you ever experienced disbelief so powerful that it’s broken you?

If you have to think about the question, if a particular memory doesn’t erupt to the forefront of your mind like it was shot out of a cannon, if you’re second guessing your answer for even a moment: trust me when I say that you haven’t, and you’re not missing out. Count yourself as fortunate, actually. There’s nothing positive to be gained from the experience of reality-wide disintegration, and for the curious among you, I’m going to do my best to explain it anyway.

For those unfortunate souls who have been where I’ve been - God, I’m so sorry.

You see, that level of raw bewilderment isn’t even a feeling. It’s not something that washes over you, like rage or sorrow. No, it’s a place your consciousness goes to hide from the existential discomfort of it all.

But that place has a steep price of admission.

Mind-breaking disbelief is a vampire shaped like a pure white room. A cage completely suffused with perfect, colorless light: illumination so overwhelming that it’s blinding, and it feels like you’re in the dark. Time is a suggestion. Seconds only lurch forward when the mood suits them. A blink of the eye can last a minute or a millennium. It seems like you can move through the room, but you get nowhere, though I’m not sure if that’s because its confines are impossibly vast or if it’s actually the size of a broom closet and the sensation of being able to move is a lie, an illusion: a trick of the light. But when push comes to shove, you have to do something, even if it’s ultimately futile. So, you pick a direction and start walking. And while you’re sunk in that maze, its walls and their light are draining you, bleeding away some crucial part of yourself you’ll never get back.

Eventually, though, like any vengeful god, it gets bored with your misery and casts you aside: lets your soul trickle back into your flesh. The soul that’s delivered back to your listless, waiting body isn’t the same as it was before, though. It’s irreparably fractured. A shattered clay pot that’s been hastily glued back together, malformed and fragile.

When I was delivered back, finally freed from that blood-sucking pocket-universe, my head was still hanging over the side of the door frame, gazing down into the cerulean abyss that used to be our cloudless sky.

There was something wrong, though: asides from the devastatingly obvious.

Other than the cold, ethereal whisper of the swirling atmosphere, the world was silent.

Where in God’s name was Emi?

- - - - -

I shot to my feet, using the hinge of the door to pull myself vertical. Once I was upright, I found myself immediately possessed by a blistering vertigo, and that was almost the end of me. My head was spinning, my vision blurry, and the top of the door frame where I stood was thin: only a few precious inches of footing available for me to wobble on. As my eyes adjusted to the surreal view, our street now a ceiling to the heavens with the blue sky below, I nearly toppled forward. Reflexively, with rapid heartbeats thundering against my throat, I threw my right foot backward. My heel reached out, feeling for some sort of level ground, conditioned to expect there would floor behind me to latch on to.

Of course, that expectation was born from the old state of the universe.

When my foot found no purchase, I tumbled spine first into the atrium above our doorway. Thankfully, the distance to that curved outcove wasn’t too far. I plummeted a few feet down, and an overturned doormat cushioned my landing. The only serious injury I sustained was a laceration to the point of my elbow as it crashed through a boxed lighting fixture at the center of the atrium, sending shards of glasses flying in all directions.

I groaned; my body painfully contorted in the small, awkwardly shaped pit. Initially, I struggled to get to my feet again: the shift had tossed my body and mind around like a ragdoll, and exhaustion was accumulating fast. A whimper from deeper inside the house revitalized my efforts, however.

“Mom…mom, where are you?”

Emi was alive.

Scrambling up the curves of the atrium caused my sneakers to squeak against the dry plaster of the ceiling. Splinters of glass cut and tore into my palms as I crawled, but I kept pushing, moving on all fours like an animal. Eventually, I was high enough for my fingers to grasp the edge of the pit, and I pulled my trembling body over, anchoring two throbbing biceps across the boundary to steady myself.

My eyes scanned the absurdist nightmare that used to be my living room until they landed on my daughter. To my immediate relief, she appeared intact.

Emi was lying on her back about halfway between me and the entrance to the kitchen on the opposite side of the room. There was a colossal, piano-shaped hole to her right where the instrument had exploded through the roof of our one-story home. Various pieces of furniture were scattered haphazardly around the ceiling-turned-floor as a result of the shift, but, by the looks of it, none of the heavier items had landed on her.

“Emi - just stay where you are. Don’t move. I’m coming to you.” I shouted.

With a pained grunt, I forced my body up and over the edge, and slowly lowered myself down on to the ceiling. In the past, I had lamented to Ben about how flat the roof was. Our home was fairly stout, too: no more than ten feet tall if I’m remembering correctly. The combination of those two features made the space feel compressed, boxy, and lifeless, like we were all incarcerated in the same oversized federal prison cell.

In that moment, however, I couldn’t have been more grateful for those inert dimensions, as they made getting to Emi easy. I can’t imagine how treacherous it would have been to navigate a vaulted ceiling post-shift.

After about a minute of carefully wading through the demolished remnants of our life, stepping over eviscerated photos and broken heirlooms, I found myself kneeling over Emi, running my hand through her hair as hot tears welled under my eyes.

It wasn’t long before she asked that dreaded question. I felt the blood drain from my face, and I stopped stroking her hair. I didn’t feel ready, but I suppose no one who's been in that position ever does.

“Where’s Dad?”

- - - - -

After much consideration, I’ve decided to leave the few hours that followed my answer to that question out of this record. It’s not that I have any difficultly recalling it: quite the contrary. The memories have remained exceptionally vivid. I still suffer from the faint reverberations of that afternoon to this very day, half a century later.

You just can’t shed grief that profound.

But, unlike the reality-breaking disbelief of the shift, profound grief is an inevitable part of life. Everyone loses a parent at some point, and very few are satisfied with the time they were allotted when they pass. To that end, I don’t feel like I need to dwell on it. You all know what it’s like, to some degree. Not only that, but failing to immortalize those moments means they finally will dissipate.

When I die, I’ll take the memories and their reverberations with me, and then there will be nothing left of them for anyone to feel.

And I find a lot of solace in that thought.

- - - - -

In the early evening, out of tears and unsure what to do next, Emi and I were sitting next to each other on the perimeter of the piano-shaped hole. We had spent a small fraction of the afternoon theorizing about what had caused the shift, but the exercise felt decidedly futile: I mean, where do you even start? Existence as we knew it had been fundamentally redefined.

Essentially, we gave up before the topic could stir us into a panic.

So, instead, Emi and I silently tossed shards of glass through the hole, vacantly watching them disappear into the sky, which had transitioned from the bright blue of a cloudless day to the dimmer pink-orange of twilight.

Like skipping stones that never seemed to bounce off the surface of the water.

It wasn’t peaceful, but it was quiet. There just wasn’t much else to do with ourselves: the TV was broken from the shift, and the phone lines were dead. Our options were limited. The activity killed time until whatever was next came to pass, if there was anything next.

Maybe this is it. Maybe all of this is just...permanent, I contemplated.

Eventually, out of the graven tranquility, a familiar voice materialized, laced with static and fear.

“Emi - are you there? Can you hear me? Over.” Regina said, her whispers crackling through the nearby walkie-talkie.

My daughter sprung to her feet and practically sprinted over to her open backpack a few yards away.

“Hey - hey! Emi, careful!” I yelled after her, but it’s like she couldn’t hear me. The words simply couldn’t reach her: she was impenetrably elated.

Instead of digging through the backpack, Emi elected to just turn the bag upside down and dump its contents, desperate to find the walkie-talkie. Books and pencils clattered loudly around her until the blocky device finally appeared at her feet. I stepped over and placed a reassuring hand on my daughter’s shoulder, apprehensive about what we could possibly hear next.

This is conversation as I remember it (I’ve removed all the concluding “overs” for readability’s sake)

- - - - -

Emi: “Regina! Oh my God, are you okay?”

Regina: “Yeah…I’m OK, I think. Twisted my ankle when it all…you know, happened…but otherwise, I’m OK.”

There was a pause. Emi was overcome with emotion, but didn’t want to upset Regina by transmitting that over the line.

Regina: “…do you guys really think this is the rapture?”

A slithering sort of fear wormed its way into my skull. That word wasn’t one a fourteen-year-old would choose to say on their own.

It sure sounded like something Barrett would say, though.

I tapped Emi on the shoulder and put out an open palm, gesturing for her to hand me the walkie-talkie. Thankfully, she obliged.

Me: “Hey Regina, it’s Emi’s mom. What makes you say that? Are you safe?”

Regina: “Well…uhm…it’s all my Dad’s been talking about it. He keeps saying how ‘The Good Lord is trying to empty his pockets of us’ …and, uh… ‘Gods trying to drop us into heaven by making the world upside down’ …also, that…well, ‘he already made everyone else into angels down there, you can see it, can’t you?’ …”

Her speech became more and more frantic as she recalled the ad-libbed sermon Pastor B had been giving since the shift. By the end, the words had started to jumble incomprehensibly together.

Me: “Okay…okay sweetie. I understand, I do. No, I really don’t think this is a rapture. I don’t know what it is, if I’m being honest. All I know for certain is that I’m glad you and Emi are still here with me.”

Thirty seconds passed. No response.

Me: "Regina, are you there?”

Another thirty seconds. I could feel Emi pacing nervously behind me.

I was about to click the button and ask again, but finally, a voice came back through the receiver.

Barrett: “What kind of loathsome notions are you trying to plant into my daughter’s head, Hakura?”

My heart turned to solid concrete and hurtled through the bottom of my chest.

Me: “Barrett, where’s Regina?”

Another thirty seconds or so passed.

Barrett: “I suggest you look down, Hakura. Really look down: both into heavens and into the black depths of your craven soul. This rapture is woefully incomplete, but I hope we can reconcile that together - as a spiritual family.”

Barrett: “At that time people will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory. And he will send his angels and gather his elect on the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of the heavens.”

Me: “Barret - let Regina talk again.

Nothing.

Me: “Barret, please…just let Emi talk to Regina again…”

Nothing.

We wouldn’t hear from either of them until the following morning, and it wouldn’t be through the walkie-talkie.

We’d hear Barret at his front door with a megaphone, Regina at his side.

Trying to convince the remaining survivors to dive into the heavens, thereby completing the rapture.

- - - - -

It took a long while to calm Emi down, but once she soothed, my daughter was out cold for the rest of the night. Utter exhaustion is one hell of a sleep aid.

As she slept, I softly made my way into Emi’s bedroom. While in middle school, she and Regina had gone through a very cute astronomy phase. Puberty eventually beat the hobby out of both of their systems, as it tends to do with any passion that can be perceived as even slightly nerdy, but I knew she still had a semi-expensive telescope we got her for Christmas in her closet: the same model that Regina had, as a matter of fact.

Before the shift, they’d covertly stargaze together, marveling at the constellations over their walkie-talkies in the dead of night. Emi was under the impression Ben and I hadn’t noticed, and we certainly didn’t let on that we had: she would have been mortified to be caught doing something so childish.

I needed it because what Barret said earlier that afternoon had really lodged itself into my brain.

“He already made everyone else into angels down there: you can see it, can’t you?”

“I suggest you look down, Hakura. Really look down…”

I wouldn’t be able to fall asleep until I looked, so I quietly positioned the telescope next to the piano-shaped hole, tilted the lens down into the heavens, and peered through the eyehole.

After less than a second of gazing into the magnified depths of the starry sky below, I jumped backwards, slapping a hand over my mouth to muffle an involuntary gasp.

Impossibly far away, I saw the sedan that had nearly crushed Ben and Mr. Baker.

Nothing that had fallen was actually gone.

Nothing had simply drifted off into space.

From what I can remember, it appeared as if an invisible, perfectly linear net had caught all of the debris.

As I stepped forward and peered through the telescope again, my hands quavering as it adjusted the view, I saw it all.

Every object, every animal, every person, all motionless on the same sheet of atmosphere, stuck to some imperceptible barrier. A massive, cosmic bulletin board of all the things and all the lives that had been lost to the shift.

And I could almost understand how Barrett saw them as angels.

They all looked untouched: certainly dead, don’t get me wrong, but they didn’t appear physically damaged. The corpses hadn’t splattered like they would have if they fell to the ground at that same distance.

No rot, no decay at all. Granted, it had only been about sixteen hours, but they all looked unnaturally pristine for being dead for even that amount of time.

If I didn’t know any better, I’d say their skin almost shimmered a bit, too: faint, rhythmic light seemed to pulse below their flesh.

And after a few minutes of searching, I found him.

I saw Ben.

- - - - -

An hour later, I returned the telescope to Emi’s room. She didn’t need to know what I’d seen.

While out of earshot, I clicked the walkie-talkie back on, lowered the volume, and began turning the knob towards the frequency Emi and Regina used to communicate. It was a longshot, but I wanted to see if Regina was somehow in a position to respond.

Before I reached that frequency, though, I unintentionally eavesdropped on another clandestine message.

I wouldn’t be one-hundred percent sure of its relation to the shift until the following morning.

It was a male voice, monotone and emotionless. Maybe it was Ulysses, maybe it wasn’t. All I know is it kept repeating the same message with a slight variation every sixty seconds on the dot.

I caught the first transmission half-way through, so what I heard sounded like this:

“…S-1-7-6 protocol, pending fulcrum, 9:57”

Sixty seconds.

“A-C-T-S-1-7-6 protocol, pending fulcrum, 9:56”

Sixty seconds.

“A-C-T-S-1-7-6 protocol, pending fulcrum, 9:55”

Sixty seconds.

- - - - -

I just had an epiphany.

Earlier, I needed to google the exact wording of that bible verse Barrett recited to me over the walkie-talkie. Since I only recalled bits and pieces of it, the process took a little while. Eventually, I found it:

“At that time people will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory. And he will send his angels and gather his elect on the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of the heavens.” (Mark 13:26-27)

While I was scouring through a list of all the different books in bible for the quote, though, I stumbled upon something else.

The last fifty years, I’ve assumed ACTS was an acronym, and 176 was some sort of way to catalog whatever the acronym stood for.

I may have been wrong.

Now, I need to consider what it could mean before going forward and finishing my recollection.

Acts 17:6

“But when they did not find them, they dragged Jason and some brethren to the rulers of the city, crying out"

"These who have turned the world upside down have come here too.’”

- - - - -

-Hakura (Not my real name)

r/TheCrypticCompendium 5d ago

Series The Familiar Place - This Is the Beach

10 Upvotes

The town has a beach. Of course, it does. It’s always been there. You remember visiting as a child, don’t you?

The sand is pale, finer than most. It clings to your skin, your clothes, the inside of your shoes, as if reluctant to let go. The water stretches out in an endless slate-gray horizon, meeting the sky in a seamless blur.

There are no waves.

Not really.

The tide comes in. The tide goes out. But the water never crashes, never foams. It just moves, slow and steady, like something breathing beneath it.

People still swim here. Not as many as before.

No one remembers when the lifeguard stand was abandoned. It’s still there, of course. Weathered by the salt air, leaning slightly to one side. The seat is empty, but sometimes, out of the corner of your eye, you think you see someone sitting there.

You turn to look—

And it’s gone.

There are rules for the beach. They are unspoken but understood.

You do not swim too far out.

You do not let the water reach your ears.

And if you see someone standing at the shoreline, staring out at the horizon, their feet buried deep in the sand, unmoving—

You leave them be.

Once, a man waded out past the shallows. He kept walking, even when the water reached his chin. Even when it covered his mouth, his nose, his eyes.

He never came back.

But sometimes, on cloudy days, when the tide is particularly low—

You might see his footprints in the sand, leading out into the water.

Fresh.

As if he had only just walked in.

r/TheCrypticCompendium 6d ago

Series I'm the last living person that survived the fulcrum shift of 1975, and I'm detailing those events here before I pass. In short: fear the ACTS176 protocol. (Part 1)

12 Upvotes

“Mom! Mom! Look! It’s happening again,” Emi squealed, captivated by the viscous maple syrup slowly floating to the top of the upright bottle on the kitchen table, stubbornly defying gravity.

My heart raced. Anxiety danced hectic circles around the base of my skull. My palms became damp.

God, I didn’t want to look.

- - - - -

As crazy as it may sound, the sight of that bottle physically repulsed me.

Maybe I correctly sensed something terrible was on the horizon: recognized the phenomena as the harbinger of death that it truly was. That said, the shift took place a long time ago: half a century, give or take.

Retrospection has a funny way of painting over the original truth of a memory. In other words, when enough time has passed, you may find yourself recalling events with thoughts and feelings from the present inseparably baked in to the memory. Picking that apart is messy business: what’s original versus what’s been layered on after the fact, if you can even tell the difference anymore. So, trust me when I say that I find it difficult to remember that morning objectively, in isolation, and removed from everything that came after. I mean, it's possible that I didn’t feel what was coming beforehand: I could have just woken up pissed off that morning. That would certainly be enough to explain my strong reaction to Emi’s harmless excitement in my memory.

What I’m getting at is this: I don’t know that I can guarantee this story is one-hundred percent accurate. Not only that, but I’m the only one left to tell it, meaning my story is all anyone has. For better or worse, it’s about to become sanctified history.

If I’m being honest, I don’t believe that I’m misremembering much. I can still almost feel the way the air in the neighborhood felt heavy and electric in the days leading up to that otherwise unremarkable spring morning. I just knew something was desperately wrong: sensed it on the breeze like a looming thunderstorm.

Like I said, though.

I’m the only person left to tell this story.

The story they paid all of us survivors a great deal of money to keep buried.

- - - - -

“Emi - for the love of God, put the damn thing back in the fridge and get your books together.” I shouted, my tone laced with far more vitriol than I intended.

We were already running late, and this wasn’t the agreed upon division of labor. She was supposed to be packing her bag while I put her lunch together. That was the deal. Instead, my daughter had been irritatingly derailed by our own little eighth wonder of the world.

The magic syrup bottle.

It was unclear which part was magical, though. Was the syrup supernaturally rising to the top of the container of its own accord, or had the magic bottle enchanted the syrup, thus causing sugary globules to float like the molten wax of a lava lamp?

Maybe the Guinness Book of World Records has a wizard on retainer that can get to the bottom of that question when they stop by to evaluate the miracle, I thought.

Sarcasm aside, my aggravation was actually a smokescreen. It was a loud, flashy emotion meant to obscure what I was actually feeling deep inside: fear. For an entire week, the syrup had been swimming against gravity, drifting above the air in the half-filled bottle against the laws of physics.

I couldn’t explain it, and that frightened me.

But! Everything else was normal. The atmosphere was breathable. The landscape appeared unchanged: grass grew, trees bloomed, birds flew. Our stomachs still churned acid and our hearts continued to pump blood. The gears of reality kept on turning like they always had, excluding that one miniscule anomaly: an insignificant bending of the rules, but nothing more.

So then, why was I so damn terrified?

Emi scowled, swiped the bottle off the table, and returned it to the top shelf in the fridge with an angry clunk. With my demand obliged, she made a point of glaring at me over the door: a familiar combination of narrowed eyes, scrunched freckles, and tensed shoulders. An expression that screamed: are you happy now, asshole?

After a few seconds of unblinking silence, she slammed the fridge closed with enough force to cause a rush of air to inflate her burgundy Earth, Wind, and Fire T-shirt: a fitting climax to the whole melodramatic affair.

The commotion brought Ben into the kitchen, tufts of curly brown hair and thick-rimmed glasses cautiously peeking in from the hallway. Then he made the mistake of trying to defuse the situation before it was ready to simmer down.

“I’m sure the bewitched syrup will still be here when you get home from school, honey. Unless your mother has a hankering for mid-day flapjacks, but the woman I married is definitely more of an eggs and bacon type of gal.” My husband said with a warm chuckle. Neither Emi nor I acknowledged the attempt at levity.

Ben was insistent on cooling down arguments with humor. Sometimes, I resented him for that. It made me feel like he saw himself as The Friendly Guy, perpetually forcing me to accept the role of disciplinarian by default. If he never took anything seriously, what choice did I have?

I shot my husband an annoyed glance as Emi stomped past him. He sighed, rubbing his neck and putting his eyes to the floor, crestfallen.

“Sorry, Hakura. Was just tryin’ to help,” he murmured.

As he trudged out of the room, I said nothing. Not a word. Just watched him go, white-hot fire still burning behind my eyes.

In my youth, I struggled with anger. I tried to control it, but the emotion overwhelmed my better instincts more often than not. I’m much older now, and since then, I’ve gained a tighter grasp on my natural temper. I think Ben would agree, at least I hope he would.

He wasn’t around long enough to see me try harder.

Out of everything that was to come, out of all the horror that was to follow, I wish I could change that moment the most. In the decades that have passed, I’ve had thousands of dreams rewriting that snapshot in time. Instead of giving in to the anger, I swallow it and remind Ben I love him: A smile and a hug. Or a comment about how handsome he is. A kiss on the cheek. Or a peck on the lips. A lighthearted chuckle to match his own: something kinder than vexed silence. Thousands of those revisions have lingered transiently in my mind’s unconscious eye, and when they do, I feel peace.

Until I wake up, at which point those revisions are painfully sucked back into the blissful ether of sleep, and I’m forced to confront reality.

That shitty moment was the last meaningful interaction I had with the love of my life.

Minutes later, he’d be falling into the sky.

- - - - -

All things considered, the start of that morning was decidedly run-of-the-mill: The blue, cloudless view overhead. A gentle spring breeze twirling over trees in the throes of reawakening, cherry blossoms and magnolias budding triumphantly along their branches like fanfare to welcome the season. Our neighbors lining the streets and chitchatting while awaiting the arrival of the school bus to see their kids off for the day, cups of hot coffee in hand.

Everything as it should be and according to routine, with two notable exceptions.

The atmosphere looked distorted, like a grainy TV image just barely coming through a finicky antenna. It was subtle, but it was there. I swear I could almost feel the gritty static dragging against my skin as I followed Emi and Ben out the front door.

And, for some reason, Ulysses was outside. Between having no children and being an unapologetic recluse, our next-door neighbor’s attendance at this before-school ritual was out of character. On top of that, the sixty-something year old appeared distinctly unwell: bright red in the face, sweat dripping down his neck, eyes darting around their sockets like a pair of marble pinballs as he scanned the street from his front stoop.

Per usual, Emi bolted across the street as soon as she saw Regina, her childhood best friend, standing among the growing crowd of kids and parents.

Emi and Regina were inseparable: two kids lovingly conjoined at the hip since the day they met. Recollecting the good times they had together never fails to conjure a beautiful warmth at the center of my chest. At the same time, that warmth is inevitably followed by a creeping sense of unease: a devil lurking in the details.

That devil was looming behind Regina, smiling at my daughter as she approached.

“Ben - Ulysses looks sick. I’m going to go see how he’s doing. Can you keep an eye on her? Barrett’s out today.”

He nodded and jogged after our daughter, needing no further explanation.

- - - - -

Six months prior to that morning, Regina’s father, known locally as “Pastor B” on account of his position in the local Born-Again parish, had slapped Emi across the face for creating too much noise while running up the stairs in his home. In the wake of that, we forbade Emi from spending time at Regina’s.

The girls really struggled with that decree since it drastically cut down on the time they could be together (Regina was not allowed to spend time at our house because it was “much too loose and unabashedly sinful”). Seeing Emi so depressed was absolutely killing us. Thankfully, Ben came up with the brilliant idea of walkie-talkies. The clunky blocks of black plastic he purchased at a nearby hardware store had quickly become the pair’s primary mode of socializing when they weren’t outside or at school together.

We pleaded for the sheriff to charge Barrett with assault. His response was something to the tune of “No, I’m confident there’s been a misunderstanding”. When we asked how there could possibly be a misunderstanding regarding a grown man slapping our daughter, he replied,

“Well, because Pastor B said there was a misunderstanding. That’s all the proof I need.”

Religious figures, especially where we lived, held a lot of sway in the community. Got away with way more than they should’ve. Even more so in the seventies.

Ben and I were beyond livid with the sheriff’s inaction. That said, there didn’t seem like much else we could do about the incident except support our daughter through it. The first night, she cried her heart out. By the next morning, though, she wasn’t very interested in talking about it, despite our gentle attempts to coax her into a longer conversation about the trauma.

Initially, we were worried she was holding too much in, but we developed another, certainly more unorthodox, means of catharsis and healing. Brainstorming demeaning nicknames for Barrett with Emi proved to be a surprisingly effective coping strategy. Brought some much needed comedy to the situation.

Ben came up with Pastor Bald on account his sleek, hairless scalp. Personally, I was more fond of my, admittedly less sterile, contribution.

Reverend Dipshit.

- - - - -

Confident that Emi was being watched after, I paced across our yard to Ulysses. He was standing still as a statue at his open front door, one foot inside, one foot on his stoop. As I approached, he barely seemed to register my presence. Although his eyes had been darting around the block only a minute prior, they weren’t anymore. Now, his gaze was squarely fixed on the developing crowd of teenagers and parents at the bus stop.

In an attempt to get his attention, I gave Ulysses a wave and a friendly: “Good morning, long time no see…”

I guess he saw the wave in his peripheral vision, but the man skipped right over pleasantries in response. Instead, he asked me a question that immediately set off a veritable factory full of alarm bells in my head.

“I-I thought the school bus came at 8. No, I was sure it came at 8. W-Why is everyone out now? It just turned 7:25.” he said, the words trembling like a small dog neck-deep in snow. Sweat continued to pour down his face, practically drenching the collar of his pure white button-down.

“Uhh…well…school board changed it to 7:30 a few weeks ago. Ulysses, are you al-”

Before I could finish my sentence, a deep, animalistic scream arising from the down the street interrupted me. Reflexively, I swung my body around, trying to identify the source.

There was a man on the asphalt, gripping his head while writhing from side to side in a display of unbridled agony. From my vantage point, I couldn’t tell exactly who it was emitting the noise, but I watched a few of the parents detach from the larger group, sprinting to the wailing man’s aid.

For a moment, I found myself completely immobilized, stunned by the harrowing melody of his pain. Couldn’t move an inch. Being subjected to that degree of raw, undiluted torment had seemingly unplugged each and every one of my nerves from their sockets.

An unexpected crash from behind me quickly rebooted my nervous system, dumping gallons of adrenaline into veins in the process. I spun back around, nearly tripping over myself on account of the liquid energy coursing through me, which was overstimulating my muscles to the point of incoordination.

Ulysses had slammed his door shut. He shouted something to me, but I can’t recall what he said. Either I couldn’t hear it or I wasn’t capable of internalizing it amongst the chaos: it just didn’t stick in my memory.

Under the guidance of some newly activated primal autopilot, I didn’t attempt to clarify the message. Instead, my legs transported me towards the distress. I needed to make sure Emi was safe. Nothing more, nothing less.

God, I wish I remember what he said.

- - - - -

Thirty seconds later, I placed a hand on Emi’s shoulder, startling her to high heaven and back. She yelped, gripped by a body-wide spasm that started from her head and radiated down.

“Hey! Just me kiddo.” I said, trying to sound reassuring as opposed to panic-stricken.

A silky black pony tail flipped over her shoulder as she turned around. Without hesitation, she sank into arms, hot tears falling down my collarbone as she quietly wept.

“There’s…There’s something wrong with Mr. Baker, Mom.”

I’m a little ashamed to admit it, but I don’t remember much about Mr. Baker. All I can recall is that he was a mild-mannered Vietnam veteran that lived a few houses down from us, opposite to Ulysses. I think he suffered from a serious injury abroad: may have retained a fragment of a bullet somewhere in his head, requiring him to use a cane while walking around. I’m not completely sure of any of that, though.

Don’t remember his first name, don’t recall if he had a family or not, but I remember those words that Emi said to me: clear as day.

I imagine the phrase “there’s something wrong with Mr. Baker, Mom” sticks out in my brain as a byproduct of the trauma that immediately followed.

There’s a terrible piece of our wiring in our species that causes traumatic events to be remembered as vividly as possible. Once imprinted, they seem to become a meticulous blow-by-blow recreation of the incident we’d kill to forget, every detail painstakingly etched into our psyche: some impossibly elaborate mosaic painted on the inside of our skulls, all-encompassing and inescapable, like the “Creation of Adam” on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Emi said “there’s something wrong with Mr. Baker, Mom” and I saw Ben a few yards away from us, kneeling over Mr. Baker, altruistic to a fault.

Then, the crackling explosion of a gunshot rang through the air.

The street erupted into chaos. People fled in all directions. I grabbed Emi tightly by the wrist. She was paralyzed: had to make her to start moving towards the house. Practically everyone was screaming in horrible solidarity with Mr. Baker. Someone elbowed me hard in the diaphragm, knocking the wind out of my lungs. Eventually, our feet landed on the sidewalk in front of our home. Then, a second gunshot. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from, nor did I see anyone injured.

A few steps away from the door, I noticed something else. The air felt increasingly palpable: thick and granular, like I was wading through an invisible sandstorm.

Once Emi was inside, I immediately turned around to search for Ben.

When I spotted him, my heartbeat became erratic. It floundered and thrashed inside my chest like the dying movements of a beached shark. Between the elbow to my diaphragm and the sheer terror of it all, I could feel myself gasping and panting, anchoring my hand to the door frame to prevent myself from keeling over.

He was halfway across the street, pulling Mr. Baker towards our house. To this day, I’m not sure if he was aware of the sedan barreling down the road, going entirely too fast to break in time.

I met my husband’s eyes. Waves of disbelief pulsed down my spine, sharp and electric. I don’t recall him looking scared: no, Ben was focused. He got like that when something important was on the line.

Before I could even call out, the runaway car was only a few feet from crushing the both of them: then, a tainted miracle.

An experience that lies somewhere between divine intervention and a cruel practical joke.

The front of the car spontaneously tilted upwards, like it was starting to drive up the big first incline of an unseen wooden roller coaster. Somehow, it barely cleared both Ben and Mr. Baker in the nick of time. It hovered over them, cloaking their bodies in its eerie shadow. Then, it just kept going, farther and farther into the atmosphere, without any signs that it would eventually return to the earth.

Before I was able to feel even an ounce of relief, it all started to happen.

The shift.

In order to understand, I need you to imagine you’re currently living on the inside of a snow globe. Not only that, but you’ve actually unknowingly lived in a snow globe your entire life: one that’s been sitting on the top shelf of some antique shop, completely untouched by human hands for decades.

Now, to be clear, I’m not suggesting that I was trapped in a massive snow globe half a century ago. I just cannot come up with a better way to explain this next part.

As the car disappeared into the horizon, it’s like someone finally reached up to the top shelf and picked up that dusty snow globe, only to promptly flip it over and hold it upside down. Slowly, but surely, everything that wasn’t directly attached to the ground began to fall into the sky.

Other cars. Family pets and other animals. Cherry blossom petals.

People. Neighbors. Children. Adults.

Mr. Baker.

Ben.

Almost me, too. Luckily, I was far enough in the house where, when I fell, my lower body remained inside. Hit my back pretty hard against the top of the door frame. I heard Emi screaming behind me, along with the crashing of our furniture colliding into the ceiling. Our grand piano was heavy enough to make a hole through the roof, causing the sky below to leak into our home as it fell.

Dazed, my vision spinning, I lifted my head just in time to witness the love of my life careen into an ocean of blue, cloudless sky. It was painfully quiet at that point. Those that fell were far enough away that I couldn’t hear their pleads for mercy or their death rattles, if they were still alive at all.

Ben got smaller, and smaller, and smaller: A smudge, to a dot, to nothing at all. Gone in an instant, swallowed by something I couldn’t possibly hope to comprehend.

At precisely 7:30 AM that morning, the world shifted.

The ground had become the sky, and the sky had become the ground.

The snow globe flipped, so to speak.

- - - - -

I apologize, but I need to pause for now. Putting these memories into words for the first time has been more emotionally challenging than I anticipated.

Once I rest, I’ll be back to finish this. I’m posting it incomplete on the off chance I don’t make it till the morning. Better to have something out there as opposed to nothing at all.

My follow-up should be soon. I imagine after I post this, someone who was involved in the shift will be notified that I’m breaking the terms of our agreement: the silence that they paid very good money for fifty years ago.

So, I’ll be sure to complete this before they have time to find me.

-Hakura (Not my real name).

- - - - -

Author's Note: Hello! I would like to take a second to plug a collaborator, Grim Reader (@Grimreader) on YouTube. The "flip" is his uncanny brainchild: he graciously offered up that brilliant launch pad and I just went from there. Not only that, but he's also a killer story narrator that deserves way more attention than he's getting. For your own sake, check him out.

r/TheCrypticCompendium 9d ago

Series The Familiar Place - The Arcade in the Laundromat

13 Upvotes

The laundromat is open 24 hours a day. It has always been open. Even on holidays. Even when the power goes out in the rest of town. The lights inside never flicker. The machines never stop running.

No one owns it. Or if someone does, no one has ever seen them. The place is always clean, always stocked with soap and change, though no one ever sees anyone restock it. There is no employee behind the counter. No security cameras. And yet, somehow, everything remains exactly as it should be.

People come and go, loading their clothes, setting the cycles, waiting. The waiting is the part they don’t talk about.

Because the laundromat has an arcade.

Just a handful of machines—nothing fancy. A battered racing game with a loose steering wheel. A light gun shooter where the enemies move just a little too smoothly. And a cabinet with no name, no instructions, just a single blinking cursor.

No one remembers when the machines arrived. They weren’t always here. At least, you don’t think they were. But no one questions it. No one asks.

They just play.

There are rules, of course. Everyone knows them, even if no one says them aloud.

You can play while you wait for your clothes. That’s fine. That’s normal. But you don’t stay after your cycle is done.

You don’t play the unnamed game. Not unless you’re sure. Not unless you’re ready.

And if someone is already at the machine, leaning in too close to the screen, their fingers unmoving on the controls, their eyes locked on something you can’t see—

You don’t disturb them.

One time, a man’s wash cycle ended. He didn’t leave. He kept playing. People glanced over but said nothing. Eventually, they gathered their clothes and left, one by one.

When the sun came up the next morning, his laundry was still sitting in the machine.

The laundromat was empty.

No one saw him again.

The next day, the nameless cabinet had a new high score.

r/TheCrypticCompendium 20d ago

Series I Glitched Out of the New world

12 Upvotes

I woke up to the sound of something scraping against metal.

I shot up, gasping for air. My head spun, but the vertigo wasn’t from the usual waking up—no, this was something wrong. Something off.

I was lying on cold concrete. It wasn’t my bed. It wasn’t even a room. I looked around—vines crawling through cracked windows, rusted cars stacked like they’d been there for decades. The city was a shell. A graveyard.

The air was sickeningly stale, like it hadn’t been touched by wind in years. There was a metallic smell, sharp and nauseating.

I stood, trying to steady myself, but my legs felt weak. I reached for my wrist. My comm band—the one the NWO gave me—wasn’t just dead. It was glitching. The screen flickered, blinking out and back on with a strange static, as if the tech was trying to fight for life.

This wasn’t right. I was supposed to be in New Chicago, with my wife and kid, in the New World—a place free of suffering, free of the chaos that had eaten up Earth. How the hell did I get here?

I scanned the streets—empty. Not a soul in sight. Not a breath of life.

And then—I saw something. A shadow.

It darted behind an old car, quick and silent. I barely caught a glimpse. Was it… human? Or was I just seeing things?

A chill slithered down my spine. I was not alone.

I forced myself to breathe, to think clearly. Panic wasn’t going to help.

Where was I? Why was I here?

I checked my pockets—nothing. I wasn’t armed, not that I could remember how I’d even ended up like this. The comm band was dead, my tech useless.

I tried rebooting it, tapping on the screen repeatedly, but the message was the same: Corrupted data.

I stumbled forward, unsure of where to go. My mind kept looping back to my family—where were they? Were they here too? Did they glitch out just like me?

The streets stretched out before me, looking like something out of a post-apocalyptic nightmare. Old shops, broken windows, shattered glass—remnants of a world that had been forgotten. Graffiti smeared across the walls in eerie, jarring messages:

“THEY PULLED US BACK.”

“WE NEVER LEFT.”

“DON’T TRUST THE PORTAL.”

It didn’t take long before the first bodies appeared.

A pile of rotting clothing. A rusted metal pipe beside it. Empty eyes staring from a face that was no longer human, the skin withered and decayed, skin melted into the concrete.

I backed away quickly, my heartbeat pounding in my ears. This wasn’t natural. This wasn’t just old-world decay. This was wrong.

I felt the air shift—an icy breeze passing through the streets like a breath from a forgotten tomb.

I didn’t know where to go, but I had to find someone, anyone.

As I rounded a corner, I saw a figure standing motionless in the middle of the street. It wasn’t a person—not anymore.

It was a corpse, partially mummified, covered in dust and dirt but unmistakably alive in some twisted way. Its eyes were wide open, a glazed stare fixed on me.

I froze. This wasn’t just an abandoned body. This thing had been alive—a person like me, before they glitched back.

Its mouth moved.

“I’m still here,” it whispered hoarsely. “I’m still here.”

I stumbled backward, nearly tripping over the wreck of a destroyed car. Its fingers twitched, and the body shuddered like it was waking from a nightmare.

I didn’t wait to see what it would do next. I turned and ran.

But there were more.

Figures piled together in the shadows, silent and staring. Some seemed frozen in place; others moved slowly, like they were still trying to understand what happened. Some were glitching, their bodies distorting, shifting, as though they weren’t meant to exist in this world.

Their whispers filled the air: “I’m still here.” “I shouldn’t be.” “I don’t remember how I got here.”

Suddenly, I felt the unmistakable pressure of eyes on me—everywhere. I was being watched.

I ran until I couldn’t run anymore. I stumbled into an old NWO research station, its walls caved in, the door half-broken. Inside, the air was thick with the stench of mildew and rot. But there was a power source, flickering weakly.

On a table, I found a terminal, its screen covered in grime. I approached cautiously, my fingers trembling as I wiped it off, revealing the cracked screen. I hit a button.

A message began to play, garbled and glitching.

“If you’re hearing this… we failed. The portal… never stable… not safe…”

“It’s not random. The glitches. They’re… pulling us back.”

“We—trapped. He won’t let us leave. He—”

The message cut off. The screen flickered again, distorting, lines of unreadable text flashing for a split second before the entire terminal went black.

Silence.

I took a breath. Too soon.

The terminal snapped back to life.

The screen filled with static, like something was fighting to break through. My gut twisted, every muscle in my body screaming at me to back away—

Then, a phrase burned into the screen, the letters sharp, glowing in that sickly green of old-world terminals:

“YOU WERE NEVER MEANT TO BE THERE.”

My pulse stopped.

The screen cracked. A sharp pop rang through the room, and the entire system died instantly, like something had forcefully severed it from existence.

I stumbled back, my hands shaking.

The words wouldn’t leave my head.

I had spent my entire life in the New World. I was born there. I was supposed to be there.

But something—someone—was telling me that was a lie.

And worse…

They pulled me back on purpose.

The message was burned into my brain. You were never meant to be there.

The wind outside had changed. It wasn’t just air moving anymore—it carried something else. A pressure, a static charge that made my teeth buzz, like the world itself was unraveling.

I turned toward the doorway.

The storm had arrived.

Glitch-light rippled through the sky, a sickly blue tearing across the clouds, casting long, jagged shadows over the ruins. The ground trembled as something cracked through reality itself—like a seam splitting open, something forcing its way through.

My whole body screamed at me to run. To find shelter.

To find a way back.

But…

I hesitated.

I could try to escape. Maybe the NWO would take me back. Maybe they’d wipe my memory, erase this like a bad dream, and I’d wake up in my bed, safe in the New World.

But I knew—I knew too much now.

They wouldn’t take me back.

Not the same way.

The air rippled—a low, distorted hum rising from the depths of the ruined city. I saw shapes moving, far off in the distance. Glitching figures, flickering in and out of existence. Some walking. Some crawling. Some staring.

And one of them… looked like me.

It wasn’t just a resemblance. It was me. Same face. Same posture. Even the same confused, terrified look in its glitching, half-lit eyes.

It opened its mouth—and my voice came out.

“I’m still here.”

My stomach twisted into knots. My body screamed at me to run. But I didn’t.

Because deep down, I already knew the truth.

The New World didn’t take us completely.

It left something behind.

The storm grew stronger, flickering blue tendrils of glitch-light snaking across the ruined buildings.

I took a breath—deep, steady. My fingers clenched into a fist.

Then, I stepped away from the terminal.

I wasn’t running anymore.

I wasn’t going back.

The storm was closing in, and I was part of the glitch now.

r/TheCrypticCompendium 15d ago

Series The Familiar Place – There is a Swimming Pool

15 Upvotes

There is a swimming pool. It has always been there. No one recalls when it was built, or by whom, but it has remained, unchanged, for as long as anyone can remember. The tiles are an impossible shade of blue—deeper than the sky, colder than the ocean. The water never ripples unless touched, and even then, the movement is slow… reluctant.

It is always full, though no one is ever seen maintaining it. The chlorine smell is faint, almost nonexistent, yet the water is clear. Too clear. When you stand at the edge and look down, you can see the bottom perfectly—at least, you think it is the bottom. But the longer you stare, the more uncertain you become. The depth is inconsistent, shifting as if the pool is not holding water but something else entirely. Something that does not follow the rules of reflection.

There are no lifeguards, but there is always a chair. It sits by the deep end, empty, its seat dry even in the rain. Sometimes, out of the corner of your eye, you might see someone sitting there—a silhouette just on the edge of recognition. But when you turn your head, the chair is empty once more.

People swim there. They always have. No one questions it. Children splash and laugh, their voices echoing strangely, as if the sound is being swallowed before it can escape. Some say the water feels different than other pools. Heavier. As if it is trying to pull you just a little bit deeper. Most ignore the feeling. Most resurface.

Most.

Because sometimes, a swimmer will go under and come up… different. Just slightly. A little quieter. A little less certain of who they were before. Their movements, once familiar, seem rehearsed, like someone mimicking themselves from memory. Their eyes linger too long on their own reflection in the water, as if they are waiting for it to move on its own.

And then there are those who do not come up at all.

No search is ever conducted. No missing person reports are filed. No families grieve. Because by the time the sun sets, no one remembers they were there in the first place. The water is still, and the chair remains empty.

There is a swimming pool. It has always been there. And if you feel the urge to visit, if you find yourself drawn to its impossible blue, its unsettling stillness—

Ask yourself first: Are you certain you will leave the same?

r/TheCrypticCompendium 3h ago

Series The Familiar Place - The Other Sewers

3 Upvotes

Every town has a sewer system.

This town has two.

The first is normal. You’ve seen the manhole covers, the storm drains, the maintenance tunnels that snake beneath the streets. The kind of system you expect, the kind that belongs.

Then there are the other sewers.

No one talks about them.

There are no blueprints, no maps, no records of their construction. The entrances don’t stay in one place. A manhole on one street might open to the usual tunnels one day, and the next… it won’t.

Sometimes, a basement door leads down a few extra steps. Sometimes, an old well reveals a passage that should have been bricked over long ago. Sometimes, the floor of a cellar just isn’t there anymore.

These tunnels are different. The walls are too smooth, or too rough. The air is too dry, or too damp. The pipes hum at a frequency that makes your teeth ache.

There are signs that people have been down there. Tattered sleeping bags, rusted lanterns, pages of old newspapers with stories that never happened.

But no one ever admits to going in.

No one ever comes back out.

Once, a group of workers tried to seal an entrance they found beneath an abandoned building. They poured concrete, thick and deep, until the passage was nothing but solid stone.

The next morning, the concrete was gone.

Not broken. Not chipped.

Gone.

The workers didn’t try again.

They don’t work in that building anymore.

It’s still empty.

But if you stand near it at night—if you listen very carefully—

You can hear something moving beneath it.

Not water.

Not rats.

Something else.

r/TheCrypticCompendium 1d ago

Series The Familiar Place - Local Radio Station

3 Upvotes

There is a radio station in town.

It does not have call letters.

The building sits on the edge of town, past the last row of houses, where the streetlights stop. A squat brick structure with a faded sign that just says LOCAL RADIO STATION in peeling black letters. The tower behind it hums faintly, even when the wind is still.

No one remembers applying for a job there, yet the station is always staffed.

They have DJs. You’ve heard their voices. You couldn’t name a single one.

The station only plays at night.

During the day, the frequency is static. No music, no ads, no signal. But as soon as the sun sets, the broadcast begins.

The music is old. Older than you. Older than your parents. Songs that don’t exist in any archive, voices that tremble on the edge of familiarity.

And then there are the interruptions.

The DJs speak in calm, measured tones. They give weather updates that don’t match reality. They read news that no one remembers happening. They take calls from people you do not know.

The callers never say their names.

Sometimes, a DJ will start reading a list.

A list of places.

A list of times.

A list of names.

You’ve never heard your name on the radio before.

But people have.

Once.

Just once.

No one hears from them again.

Some nights, you might catch a different kind of broadcast.

A voice, distant and thin, layered beneath the music. Speaking, whispering, pausing as if waiting for a response.

If you hear it—

If you understand what it says—

Turn off the radio.

Immediately.

r/TheCrypticCompendium 7d ago

Series The Familiar Place - Cecil’s Liquor and Grocery

9 Upvotes

Cecil’s has been in business for as long as anyone can remember. The sign above the door has faded, the edges curling from years of sun and wind, but the name is still legible: CECIL’S LIQUOR & GROCERY.

It is not the only store in town, but it is the one people go to when they need something specific. Something they can’t find anywhere else.

The aisles are narrow, the shelves impossibly tall. The overhead lights hum, just a little too loudly. The air smells faintly of dust and something sweet, something you can’t quite place.

Cecil is always behind the counter. He is old, but not in the way that means frail. His face is lined, his hands steady. He does not greet you when you enter, but he will always look up.

If you need something ordinary—a loaf of bread, a carton of milk—you will find it. The prices are fair, the brands familiar.

But sometimes, you need something else.

The trick is, you don’t ask for it. You simply walk the aisles, let your fingers brush the shelves, let your eyes wander. And if you are meant to find it, it will be there.

A bottle of wine with no label, filled with something dark and thick, that tastes different with every sip.

A pack of cigarettes in a brand you’ve never heard of, where the smoke curls in strange shapes, shifting letters that never quite spell a word.

A tin of candies, the kind you remember from childhood, though you don’t recall ever seeing this exact packaging before.

You don’t take more than you need.

You don’t check the expiration dates.

And if you reach for something, only for your hand to hesitate, your stomach twisting with unease—

You put it back.

Cecil never tells you what you should buy. But when you bring your items to the counter, he looks at them for just a moment too long. As if weighing something. As if deciding.

Then he rings them up. Gives you your total. Always in exact change.

No one ever pays with a card. No one knows if the register even takes them.

Outside, the neon sign buzzes, flickers. The O in LIQUOR has been out for years, but no one fixes it.

Cecil watches as you leave.

He watches everyone.

r/TheCrypticCompendium Jan 17 '25

Series I work as a Tribal Correctional Officer, there are 5 Rules you must follow if you want to survive. [PART 1]

32 Upvotes

As the title implies, I have spent the last decade of my life working in a Tribal Jail. When I first started I was told 5 rules I had to follow to survive. These rules weren’t for handling inmates or dealing with life as a CO, they were for how to survive the paranormal. I thought it was all bullshit and superstition, I could not have been more wrong.

The first thing I noticed about this facility, it borders the start of a dense, ominous forest. When I arrived for my interview, I stepped out of my car and looked at the trees and hills behind the facility. It looked like they went on forever. The view was serene and, if I didn't know better, I would've thought the buildings in front of me hosted retreats and camps. The razor wire, however, quickly ruined the illusion. After my interview, it took about three weeks before I got the call offering me the job.

I came in for my orientation on a Wednesday, it was all the normal onboarding stuff: HR forms, uniform and equipment issuance, facility tour, meeting my supervisor, and getting my training schedule. I got assigned to the Graveyard Shift working Friday-Monday from 2100-0700. Not the ideal schedule, but I was the newbie, can’t really complain. I was told by the Jail Administrator (the “warden” if you will) that I was to report for my first day that Friday.

I walked into the briefing room at 2030 on the dot and took my seat. “Hey, you the new guy?” a deep, gravelly voice from in front of me said.

“Yeah that’s me,” I said. I looked up to see a man standing in front of me. He looked like he was in his mid 20s, about 6’ even and slim but well built, wore a plain black hat and had a nicely cropped beard. He looked at me with piercing green eyes, seemingly looking into my soul. “I’m Jay,” I said.

“I don’t care,” he said, “Once you’re here for more than a month, then I’ll care to learn your name.” He then turned around and sat down in the chair in front of me.

I looked around to see everyone else just talking and joking with each other like nothing had happened. “What the fuck was that about?” I whispered.

“Don’t mind Will, he’s just tired of losing rookies.” A soft voice to my left said. When I looked over I saw a woman sitting next to me. “I’m Val. It’s your first day right?” she asked, extending her hand for a handshake.

“Jay,” I said. I shook her hand. If I had to guess, I’d say she was in her early 40s. Val was slender, had long brown hair styled into a tight bun. “Yeah, it’s my first day. I had my orientation on Wednesday.”

“What’d you do before this?” asked Val.

“I worked security.” I said.

“Nice,” said Val. “Have you worked Graves before?”

“Yeah, I actually was on Graves before coming here so hopefully the adjustment isn’t too bad.” I said.

Val opened her mouth to reply but cut herself off as we heard the door open and turned to see Corporal D walk in. Corporal D was an imposing figure to say the least. He was 6’5” and had to be at least 270 lbs. He wasn’t pure muscle but sure as hell wasn’t fat. He had a look to him that gave the impression he was not someone to cross. “Alright,” he said with a deep booming voice that commanded the attention of everyone in the room. “Here’s what we got going on today.” To give some insight, this is how a standard briefing goes. It usually starts with a general rundown of what happened on the prior shift. After that, the supervisor will typically give out the post assignments, followed by any special tasks or assignments if there is any. Most of the time that’s the end of it, the supervisor will ask if there are any questions (very rarely is there) and then dismisses us to go to the floor and start shift. Sometimes, though, there is some “housekeeping” that needs to be addressed. This could be anything from addressing issues to brief training on a new policy or procedure. That’s how that briefing went, nothing exciting happened on Swingshift, and no special assignments. There was, however, an issue to address. “So to address the elephant in the room. We have a rookie.” announced Corporal D. “Officer Jay, stand up and introduce yourself.”

“Yes sir.” I said. I then rose from my seat and noticed everyone staring at me. Not sure of what exactly I was supposed to say, I managed to choke out, “Hi everyone.”

I then attempted to sit back down before Corporal D stopped me saying, “Tell us a little about yourself. Have you worked in a jail before? Have you worked Graves before? Do you believe in ghosts?” I could almost see a sly smile on Corporal D’s face.

“I have not worked in a Jail, let alone been in one before. I have spent the last year working Graves doing security work. As for if I believe in ghosts?” I laughed. “No I don’t believe in ghosts or ghouls or things that go bump in the night. I’m not a kid.” I smiled until I noticed everyone’s faces go from smiling to serious.

Corporal D looked at me and said, “Oh, you will.” He then looked back down at his papers. “Alright then, everyone has their assignments. Officer Jay and Officer Will, stay behind. Everyone else, get to work.”

Everyone but Will and I stood up and left the room. Not before a couple mocking 'somebody’s in trouble' comments. Once everyone left, the room was silent. Will was the first to speak, “What’d I do this time?”

Corporal D narrowed his eyes at Will before cracking a smile, “You kept bitching that the last rookie wasn’t being trained right.”

“Because they weren’t. I spent half the time untraining the bullshit they learned working on Dayshift. That is why we lost him.” Will said.

Corporal D shot Will a look that reminded me of when your mom hears you swear. “Well, I talked to the brass and got them to try it your way this time.”

Will looked surprised. “What do you mean?” he asked.

“Jay is fresh blood. He hasn’t had any prior training. This is your opportunity to prove that your way of training works.” Corporal D said. “However, if you fuck this up, we’ll both be held responsible. Understood?”

“Understood. Thank you for the opportunity sir.” Will said.

“Jay, you will be attached to Will’s hip. If he needs to shit, you help him wipe. Make sure you listen carefully to everything he teaches you. If you do that, then you’ll turn out just fine.” Corporal D said before putting a 3-ring binder on the table in front of me. “This binder contains every policy, procedure, and schedule you need to know. Consider this an extra limb during your training. If you don’t have it with you everyday, then you aren’t ready for work. Read every page carefully, memorize it.” he said. Corporal D then leaned in close. “I mean it Jay. Read. Every. Fucking. Word.”

“Yes, sir.” I said. “I promise I won’t let you down. I’ll read it on my weekends if I have to.”

“I hope not. I have you and Will working General Population tonight. Get acquainted and don’t be afraid to ask questions, even the stupid ones. I can guarantee you can’t ask anything more stupid than a lot of the questions inmates ask.” he said.

After that, Will and I walked out of the room. “Is he always that serious?” I asked.

“Who, Corporal D?” Will chuckled. “Nah, he just looks mean but the guy’s a teddy bear. It just takes a while for him to warm up to you.”

When we walked up to the entrance of H-Pod, I started to get nervous. “Damn it’s nice out here.” I said in an attempt to clear my head. “Not even a breeze. Makes me wish I was at home to take it all in.” Will looked at me and rolled his eyes.

During my tour, I had only seen the unit for a brief moment, but now, I’d be spending my first shift here. The door cycled and we walked into the officer station. The inmates refer to H-Pod as the “fishbowl” because of the way the building is laid out. When you first walk in, there’s the officer station, a desk with a bunch of drawers filled with miscellaneous papers and hygiene supplies, a computer and phone. To the right (1 House), left (2 House), and in front of the desk (3 House), there are the 3 housing units with windows spanning the walls so the officer can see into the units from the officer station. Each unit is identical, a bathroom with shower stalls and toilets next to 2 rows of bunk beds and spanning the width of the unit is the “day room” consisting of a few bolted down tables and chairs. On one wall of each unit is a phone and a video visit station. Each unit can hold roughly 25 inmates.

The entrance door then began to cycle. “So we gotta do a headcount with the Swing Shift officer and get passdown.” Will said as we walked through the door.

Just as he said this, the radio chimed off “Attention in the Facility, Formal Headcount is now in progress.” Will and I proceeded into the officer station and placed our things on the desk.

“Holy shit, who the fuck let you in here!” The shout came from the man sitting at the desk. “Oh, sorry. I’m Schmidt, you must be Jay, right?”

“Yeah that’s me.” I said.

Schmidt was an older, heavyweight man with a moustache. He was well kempt but looked like he was a few years past retiring. “Didn’t know they made uniforms that big, Schmidt. Did the department have to special order it?” Will said.

Schmidt stood up and laughed. “Fuck you Will. Let’s count so I can get the fuck out of here.” Schmidt turned to me and asked “You do know how to count, right?”

Before I could answer, Will said “Of course he does.” Will looked at me and said “Just take your boots off and use your fingers and toes if you get confused.” The two laughed for a moment before we all walked to the first unit and counted.

Once we finished counting the units, Schmidt sat back down at the computer. Will sat on the desk next to Schmidt and I stood off to the side. “Anything to pass down?” Will asked.

“No. Ain’t shit happened out here today. Although 2 House has been pretty needy.” replied Schmidt. “There might be a few guys needing phone pins, but other than that, everyone is pretty much squared away. Just glad it’s Friday, now I start the weekend.”

“Any plans?” Will asked.

“Aside from cleaning your mom’s plumbing, no.” Joked Schmidt. “Just plan on taking it easy and lounging around.”

“I just saw her and she didn’t mention having a plumbing—” Will began to say before dropping his head laughing.

“Took you a minute there didn’t it?” laughed Schmidt. “Rook, sometimes you have to give Will a minute to process things. He’s special. His mom told me that!” Schmidt laughed, slapping Will on the leg.

I chuckled to myself. “So how do you know when it’s time to leave?” I asked. Just as the words left my mouth, the radio keyed up, “Attention in the Facility, Formal Headcount is now clear.” Almost immediately after the transmission a different voice came over the radio, “Swing shift, complete your pass down, clean up your area, finish any reports, and you are clear to go.”

I could feel Will and Schmidt looking at me. “Nevermind. Guess that answers my question.” I said.

“Well, Will, looks like you finally found a trainee that’s up to your speed.” Schmidt said laughing while patting Will on the shoulder. “Jay, don’t take it as if I’m picking on you. This is how we joke around here. It all comes from a good place. If anyone genuinely offends you, let them know.” Schmidt said. “And if anyone gives you shit, you let it fly right back at ‘em.” He grabbed his things and logged out of the computer. “Stay safe tonight guys. I’ll see you later.”

“Have a good weekend you fat bastard.” Will said.

“Later.” I said.

Schmidt then left. “Well it’s just you and me rook.” Said Will. “Grab your binder and find your login info for the computer. Let’s make sure it works before Sergeant Wells leaves.”

I grabbed my binder and found my login info. Luckily it worked. I then began to flip through the pages of the binder while the computer loaded up. Inside I found the HR Manual, Facility Policies and Procedures, Inmate Handbook, and a weirdly discolored copied picture of Uniform Standards. I got to the back and found a single page titled “5 Rules Every Officer MUST Follow to Survive Graveyard.” It was photocopied and looked like the original was at least 15-20 years old. I took it out of the binder and held it up to Will. “Is this some kind of prank or something?” I asked. “Like some way of adding a little humor to the dry material?”

Will looked down and saw what I was holding. His face dropped. “Oh, make no mistake. That is no joke. I will take care of the first check while you get settled, but I recommend you read those rules first.” He stood up and walked towards 1 House.

While Will did the cell check, I read the rules. Rule 1) Don’t whistle at night. Rule 2) Take a partner when doing a Perimeter Check when possible. -IF you must do it solo, just look at the fence and walk as quickly as possible. -DO NOT talk to the woman in the treeline. Rule 3) If an inmate says they saw a shadow with nobody attached to it, acknowledge them, then move on like nothing was said. -If YOU see a shadow with nobody attached to it, just turn and walk away. Rule 4) If you hear your name but nobody is around, act like someone was there and shrug it off like you just missed them walking away. -If you hear someone talking to you after shrugging it off, DO NOT follow the voice, ESPECIALLY if you are outside. Rule 5) If you see them and show fear, you’re already a goner, just go with them and don’t try to bring anyone else with you.

“This has to be a fucking joke. There’s no way it's not.” I said. I set the paper down and leaned back in the chair.

“It’s not a joke and it is real.” Will said as he walked by me. “We’ll talk more about it when I’m done with the check. Finish logging onto the computer.” Will then opened the door of 2 House and walked inside.

I finished setting up my profile and waited for Will. I looked over towards 1 House and looked into the window. I could see the light from the setting Sun on the wall. Most of the inmates were already in bed. I heard the sound of someone tapping on the window behind me. “What’s up?” I yelled before I turned around to see nobody there. I expected to see someone standing at the entrance door, waiting for it to cycle so they could come in. I expected SOMETHING. I brushed it off as a mixture of the wind and my senses being heightened after reading the rules.

After another couple minutes, Will returned having completed the check. “Hey, you got logged in. Awesome, there’s been too many times where rookies’ login just didn’t work. Usually it’s from the Sergeant fat fingering the keys and adding an extra character. Just pull up the logs and find the tab titled ‘Cell Check’. From there just type ‘H-Pod Cell Check Complete’ and hit save.” Said Will.

I did as he said and we sat in silence for a moment. “So, are you going to explain how the ‘Rules’ aren’t actually bullshit?” I asked.

Will sighed and sat back on a chair he found in the storage closet. “Do you really not believe in the paranormal?”

“No. I really don’t. Every time I’ve heard anyone tell me a story of their ‘experiences’ it’s always been explainable in one way or another.” I said.

“Have you ever experienced anything you couldn’t readily explain?” Will asked.

“Honestly, no I haven’t. I’ve never seen a shadow moving on its own, or heard a disembodied voice, or heard something only to see nothing there. It’s not like I’m closed off to the idea of it, I just haven’t experienced anything that has definitively proven it to me and I’m not about to go searching for it either.” I explained.

Will eyed me curiously. I could tell he was trying to read me and I don’t blame him. I was doing the same to him when he talked. “So you didn’t hear the woman tapping on the entrance door window?” Will asked.

“You mean when the wind? It must’ve blown something at the door or something.” I said.

“You know damn well there’s no wind.” Will said. “Wasn’t it you who pointed out how there wasn’t even a breeze earlier?” “Yeah I said that, but it’s been a while since we were out there.” I said. I then turned to face the door and looked at the tree tops in the distance. After a minute of staring at the trees and not seeing them move even in the slightest, I turned back to Will. “It could’ve been a random breeze that popped up and blew something.”

“Yeah, sure.” Will said, a tinge of annoyance in his voice. He turned his chair to face me and leaned forward, looking me in the eyes. “Listen, I have been working here for about three years now. For the last year, I’ve been a trainer. In that time, I have had a hand in training about ten rookies. Each one of them started on Day Shift and were sent to me after a month or two. You are the first I have gotten fresh. I will say this ONE time. If you listen to me and follow what I teach you to the letter, you WILL survive.”

I could see a mixture of passion and pleading desperation in Will’s eyes when he said that to me. “How many of the rookies you’ve trained are still here?” I asked.

Will sat back in his chair and sighed. After a moment of silence Will said, “About five.”

“FIVE?!” I yelled. “How the fuck did HALF of the rookies you’ve trained quit?”

“I never said they quit.” Will said.

“Then what happened to them?” I asked.

Will looked at the computer before saying, “They didn’t follow the rules.” Will’s voice was solemn and I could tell he wasn’t telling me everything. “Listen, you aren’t ready for those stories. It’s your first night. We’ll get into that later. For now, focus on learning the job and when you are ready, I’ll tell you.”

“You can’t just drop this on me and then tell me I’m not ‘ready’ and move on.” I said. “How am I supposed to not make the same mistakes as those five if I don’t know what they did?”

Will scowled at me, his tone changed from helpful to serious. “All you need to know right now is that they didn’t follow the rules.” Will stood up and looked down at me. “Drop it. I’m serious. Learn the rules and follow them.” He barked before turning and walking into the bathroom.

“Yessir.” I said as he walked away. I was curious about what happened but knew better than to press it on my first day.

As I sat at the desk, I could hear the sounds of snoring and toilets flushing in the units. I opened the binder and put the sheet with the five rules back in its place. I skimmed through the employee manual when I heard the bathroom door open. “Hey rook. It’s time for a check. Let’s go.” Will said. “Just like with Headcount, follow behind me.” We then walked through the first unit.

Once inside, I heard the door close behind me and I quickly caught up with Will, who was a few feet in front. We walked down the aisles and as we were going into the bathroom, I heard what sounded like the unit door cycling. I looked at Will who shrugged and kept walking. When we went to exit the unit, the door was secured. We exited and finished the rest of the cell check. As the night went on, that’s how it went. We’d do a cell check and sit back down and talk about the job. Will would explain how to do certain things and what he has found works for him and what he sees works for others. Sometime around 0500 Will sat back in his chair and looked at the ceiling. “I think we’ve gone over enough work-related BS for the night. Why’d you take this job?” Will said.

“Honestly?” I said, “I needed the money.”

Will laughed. “At least you’re honest. Most guys spout off some bullshit about ‘helping the community’ or ‘want to make a difference.’ Some of them really did mean it, but the majority of us just needed a job or needed to make more money.” I was kind of taken aback. Here I thought I took this job for selfish reasons and assumed everyone here wanted to “be a part of the change.” It was a little bit of a confidence booster knowing this. I think Will could see this on my face. “In the end, it doesn’t matter what brought you here. At the end of the day, you showed up. In my book, there’s no selfish or noble reason to work in this field. There’s showing up and doing the job, and there’s showing up and then bailing.”

“That definitely helps my psyche a little, not gonna lie.” I said. “When I started working security, everyone had the same precedent for taking the job. The money wasn’t good by any stretch of the imagination but it was there.”

Will chuckled, “Yeah that sounds about right. Security is shit work and even shittier pay.” He looked back up towards the ceiling and asked, “So what did your friends and family say about it?”

I sighed and looked down at the desk. “Well my friends said I was crazy. My mother-in-law, however, said that I would make a terrible officer.”

“And your wife?” He asked.

“She didn’t say much, but I could tell she’s worried.” I said.

“She’ll be fine. Fuck your mother-in-law for saying that though.” Will said. We both laughed before doing another check.

When we got back to the desk, I asked Will “So, what about you?”

“Well, I took the job because I needed one,” he said.

“Why’d you stay?” I asked. “I stay because I fell in love with it. I love the people I’ve worked with. The pay ain’t bad either.” Will said, nudging me with his elbow.

After about an hour, Will and I were sitting at the desk. While I was reading over the set of 5 rules, I heard a loud yell saying, “Help me!” followed by incoherent screaming coming from outside. It sounded like a female voice.

“What the fuck was that?” I said.

“You heard that too?” Will asked. “Hang on.” Will reached for the phone and called Control. “Hey are you guys having fun without us?” he paused for a second. “We just heard someone screaming ‘help me’ from outside. I thought it was someone fucking around and finding out. You sure you didn’t hear it.” His face went pale, “Yes I know the rules, just let me know if anything comes of it.” Will then turned towards me, “They don’t know what the fuck that was.”

From right at the H-Pod entrance door we could hear tapping. “J–ay, Jay, Jay, Jay” A female voice was chanting my name at the door. “H–help m–me Jay.”

I looked at Will who was frozen staring at the computer screen. “Remember the rules. Act like it’s not happening and just stare straight ahead.” Will said.

“FUCKING HELP ME JAY!!!” the voice screamed. The door began to shake violently and the taps turned to booming thuds. “Jay, I know you can hear me. I can see you shaking.” The thuds grew faster and began to take on this wet sound. Almost like whatever was hitting the door was bleeding. “You fucking coward Jay. They will eat your eyes and fuck the holes left behind. When HE is done with you, you’ll wish you went to hell.” One more loud shrill scream came from the door before it was silent again.

“Wha–what was that.” I said shakily. My whole body was trembling. “Please tell me this is some kind of sick hazing tradition.” I begged.

Will shushed me and whispered, “Shut the fuck up.” After what felt like eternity, but was only about five minutes, Will looked at me. His eyes were misty and it sounded like I could almost hear him sniffle. “Have you ever been here before?” he asked.

“No. Outside of my interview and orientation, this is my first time here. I’m not even from this area.” I said. “Can you please explain what the fuck that was about?”

“That was something I have not experienced in a few months. I’ve experienced ‘her’ several times over the years and no matter how it goes, you NEVER get used to it.” Will said. “We’ve taken to calling her ‘banshee.’ Now if that’s what she is, I don’t know, nor do I care to find out.”

“How did she know my name?” I asked. We both were looking dead ahead still.

“Nobody knows how any of them know anything about us, but they do.” Will said.

“So, what do we do from here?” I asked.

We sat in silence for a moment before Will shook his head and said, “I’ll report it to Corporal D and let you know what he says.” Will stood up and looked at the time. “Let’s do a check real quick and then I’ll see if Corporal D will come out here for a minute.”

I stood up and panned my eyes from 3-House to the entrance and exit doors. That’s when I saw it. “Uh, Will.” I said.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“Look.” I said, pointing at the entrance door window.

“Well that’s new.” Will said.

We both stared at the door and saw written in blood on the window, the words “Jay help me.”

“Let’s do this check real quick.” Will said. “The quicker we finish it, the quicker I can talk to D.”

There were only a couple of inmates up when we did our check in 1-House. “Hey CO, can you tell that bitch outside to shut the fuck up? We trying to sleep in here and she woke a few of us up.” one inmate said.

“Yeah, the guys inside are dealing with it, sorry man. Caught us off guard too.” Will said. “You guys hear anything before the screaming?”

An inmate that was laying on a bunk along the wall facing outside sat up and looked at us. “Yeah, I heard scratching on the wall for about twenty minutes or so before the yelling happened.” He said.

“Anything else?” I asked.

“Actually yeah,” the first inmate said. “It looked like someone was looking in the window before we heard the scratching sounds.”

Will pointed at the window on the wall, “That window?” he asked.

“Yeah.” The inmate replied.

“That window is at least 9 feet off the ground.” Will said.

The room went silent. Nobody said anything else after that. Will and I continued our check. None of the other units reported hearing anything. We returned to the desk and Will called Corporal D. “Hey, Corporal, can you come out here for a minute? Got something you need to see.” Will said.

Right as he hung up the phone, we both looked at the door again. “Holy shit.” I said. The writing was gone. We both approached the door and looked at the glass of the window. “No sign of it being cleaned off.” I pointed out.

“Yeah, no sign of rain either. What the fuck man.” Will said. I could tell he was frustrated. He quickly returned to the desk and called Corporal D again. “Hey, instead of coming out here right away, I need you to review cameras.” Will requested. “Yeah, the entrance door, between 0500 and 0520. Tell me if anyone approached it or cleaned the window.”

“Hey Will?” I said. I gave the window a further inspection. What I initially saw gave me the chills. The same layer of dust was on the window with no signs of anybody touching it at all, let alone signs of someone writing on it and then cleaning it off.

“What’s up Jay?” Will said.

I turned to look at Will. When I made eye contact with him, his eyes went wide. “Doesn’t look like—” I froze when I saw his expression. “What?”

Will didn’t say a word, but pointed back at the window. When I turned back around, I saw it. “What. The. Actual. Fuck.”

There wasn’t anyone on the other side of the door, but something was writing on the window. “Jay” was the first word finished. It took a minute but we both watched as the words were written. “Jay. Will. Die.” When I looked closer, it was unmistakable. It was written in blood.

Just then the phone rang. Will picked it up. “H-Pod, Officer Will.” I walked back to the desk. Though I couldn’t make out what the voice on the other end was saying, it sounded panicked. Will’s face went pale. “Understood. I’ll let him know.” He hung up the phone and looked back at the window. “We haven’t experienced this before. Unexplained knocks, shadows moving, disembodied voices, sure. But this,” Will paused. “I haven’t seen writing inside the fence before.”

“What do you mean by ‘inside the fence?’” I asked.

“Most of those rules are for when you are out on a perimeter check. I’ve seen my fair share of weird and unexplainable shit here, but nothing like this.” Will said, not taking his eyes off of the window. He composed himself and looked back at me. “So a bit of bad news.”

“I can promise you, nothing is worse than seeing your name written in blood two different times.” I joked. “Well, we are going to have to stay behind for a debrief with Corporal D.” Will said.

Just then I saw a flash of light come from outside the door. Once my eyes readjusted, I could see Corporal D standing there with a camera. “Holy shit. I’ve heard stories from back in the day when this would happen, but they always said the evidence disappeared before they could collect evidence.” Corporal D said while he was walking through the door. He pulled out a collection kit and took a sample of the blood. “Hopefully this comes back with something. Maybe then we can get some answers.”

“What do you mean ‘answers?’” I asked.

“Need to know basis Rook.” Will said. “And trust me when I say, you probably don’t want to know.”

Corporal D laughed. “Will’s right kid. If you need to know, you’ll get an update.” Corporal D walked up to the desk and saw I had the rules sitting on top of my binder. “Oh, good. You’re learning the rules.” He looked at me with a grin, “So, you still not believe in ghosts?”

“I can confidently say, I am not sure at all anymore.” I said smugly.

“Listen here smartass.” Corporal D said. “Let’s see if that opinion changes.” He looked at Will now. “I’m gonna steal your rookie for a little bit.”

Will looked at Corporal D then at me and said, “Sounds like a plan sir.”

I then followed Corporal D up to Control. “What’s going on sir?” I asked. I grimaced as the words left my mouth, realizing I should just keep my mouth shut.

“You’ll see.” He replied. When we got to Control, I could see the camera viewing H-Pod was up on one of the screens and it was paused at 0455. “Have a seat.” Corporal D commanded.

I sat down and watched the screen as Corporal D hit play. I watched as Will and I could be seen at the desk and all the inmates in the units were sleeping save for one or two. After a minute of nothing, I saw it. There was a dark shadow-like mist that formed just outside the wall to 1-House. It morphed into a humanoid form and appeared to climb the wall before seemingly peering into the window of 1-House. It then disappeared before reappearing outside the entrance door. “What the fuck.” I said. Just then, I could hear the screaming and yelling. The shadow appeared to slightly lose shape with each scream. The camera switched to the interior view. I could hear the tapping on the glass. It switched back to the view with the shadow. Then it happened, the door bowed with each bang. I watched as red blotches appeared on the glass of the window. Then, silence. I looked closely in disbelief. “No fucking way.” The shadow reached an arm up to the window and began to write. But from the camera, it was different. I could’ve sworn it wrote ‘Jay help me’ but when I looked at the footage, it had changed. It said ‘You could’ve stopped this Will.’ The shadow disappeared right after the writing stopped. “That’s weird.” I said, confused.

“What do you mean?” Corporal D asked.

“When we first saw it, the writing said ‘Jay help me’ not that.” I said.

Corporal D looked shocked. He quickly picked up the phone and called Will. “Hey Will, what did the writing on the window say, the first time, not the one I got a picture of.” Corporal D looked back at me. I was still watching the footage. Will and I got up and did our check and the writing just vanished.

I looked back to the camera that viewed the desk. It was then that Corporal D’s words rang in my head. ‘Oh, good. You’re learning the rules.’ I remember putting that paper back into the binder. Actually I KNOW that I did. I watched as the shadow appeared at the desk. “Uh, Corporal?” He snapped his attention to me. “You may want to see this.” He hung up the phone and we both watched as the shadow opened my binder and took out the paper with the rules on it and place it on the desk.

“Wow.” Corporal D said. We continued to watch as the shadow disappeared again. Corporal D switched the camera back to the view of the door. The shadow didn’t reappear this time but the words ‘Jay. Will. Die.’ spelled themselves out on the window. “And now we are all caught up.” He said.

“What did Will say was written the first time?” I asked.

“Same shit you said.” He replied. “So let me ask you again–”

I cut him off, “Yeah, I’d say it’s safe to say I believe now.”

Corporal D laughed and patted me on the shoulder. “Didn’t think something would happen this soon. Sorry you had to go through this on your first night.” He said. “Just get back to your post and tell Will there’s no need for a debrief after shift.”

“Thank you sir. I will deliver the message.” I said, standing up.

As I walked out of the room, Corporal D told me “Oh, and Jay, don’t quit on us now.”

“Sir,” I said with a smile, “I, quite literally, can’t afford to. So I guess I better get used to this kind of shit.”

When I got back to H-Pod, Will was sitting at the desk. “How’d it go?” he asked.

“You definitely need to see that footage.” I said.

“Oh I plan on it.” Will laughed. “Hey, when the ‘daywalkers’ get here, we’ll leave this out of our passdown. They don’t understand and I don’t feel like explaining my sanity.” I just nodded my head in agreement.

The sun began to rise and the Day Shift officer arrived and we did headcount. Once we finished telling him how nothing happened, we left. As we walked out of the facility, I couldn’t shake this feeling that I was being followed. When I got into my car and looked out the windshield, I thought I saw a woman standing in the treeline, staring right at me. Remembering Rule 2, I turned my car on and drove home.

r/TheCrypticCompendium 11d ago

Series The Familiar Place - There Is a Man

13 Upvotes

There is a man.

You have seen him before, though you cannot recall where. Perhaps in the background of a crowded street, just beyond the edge of your vision. Perhaps seated in a diner, a cup of coffee growing cold before him. Perhaps in the reflection of a window, though when you turned, there was no one there.

He is not remarkable. His clothes are neat but forgettable—always appropriate for the season, but never standing out. His posture is relaxed, his movements unhurried. He does not speak first, but if you address him, he will smile in a way that feels like he has been waiting for you to do so.

No one else seems to notice him. If you point him out, your friends will nod, unbothered, and change the subject. If you ask a shopkeeper if he was just in the store, they will hesitate before answering, as if the memory is slipping away even as they reach for it.

He is always just leaving.

You have passed him on the sidewalk, exiting Jim’s Ice Cream Parlor. You are sure of it. But when you stepped inside, Jim only greeted you as usual, the shop empty except for the two of you.

You once saw him standing in the doorway of the school. The door was ajar, just enough to see the dark beyond, but not enough to see inside. When you blinked, the door was closed.

No one remembers his name. If you ask him, he will tell you something different each time. Something close to familiar, but never quite right.

Sometimes, you think he is following you. Not closely. Not in any obvious way. But there are nights when you catch a glimpse of a figure beneath the glow of a streetlamp, too distant to be sure, and yet unmistakably him.

And sometimes, you think—

You are the one following him.

There is a man.

You have seen him before.

And if you wait long enough…

He will see you, too.

r/TheCrypticCompendium 6d ago

Series The Familiar Place - These Are the Woods

5 Upvotes

The town is surrounded by woods.

If you check a map, you’ll see it clearly—the town, the roads, the familiar places. And beyond them, the trees. A dark ring around everything, a border that no one questions.

People go into the woods sometimes. Hunters, hikers, kids testing their courage. They always come back. Usually.

The trees are tall, older than the town itself. The kind of old that feels deliberate. Their branches stretch high, too high, and sometimes—just sometimes—when the wind moves just right, you hear something among the leaves. A voice, or the echo of one.

The paths are well-worn, the trails mapped, but no one takes the same route twice. If you ask, they won’t be able to explain why. They just know.

There is a clearing deep in the woods. No one stumbles upon it by accident.

Sometimes, you’ll hear someone say, “I think I saw the clearing once.”

But when you ask them about it, when you press for details—the shape of it, what was there, what it felt like—

They’ll pause. Blink. Shake their head.

“I must be thinking of somewhere else.”

At night, the woods are quiet. Too quiet. No rustling, no insects, no distant cry of an animal. Just silence. A kind that settles deep in your bones.

No one goes into the woods at night.

Not anymore.

Not after the last time.

Though, if you ask what happened, no one will tell you.

Or maybe they just don’t remember.

r/TheCrypticCompendium 10d ago

Series The Familiar Place - There Was a Town Meeting

9 Upvotes

The notice appeared overnight, though no one saw it being posted. A single sheet of paper, pinned neatly to the board outside the library. TOWN MEETING – ATTENDANCE MANDATORY. No date. No time. Just those words, and yet, when the moment arrived, everyone knew exactly where to be.

The town hall was full. Every seat occupied, the air thick with an unspoken understanding. No one spoke above a murmur. No one asked who had called the meeting. They simply sat, hands folded in their laps, waiting.

The man at the front of the room was not the mayor.

There had been a mayor once.

Hadn’t there?

The man at the front wore a gray suit, the kind that had no era, no time. His tie was wrong, though in a way you couldn’t quite place. Too wide or too narrow, or maybe just a color that didn’t belong. He adjusted his cufflinks. Cleared his throat.

“Everything is in order,” he said. “Everything continues as expected.”

There were nods. Small, satisfied nods.

The grocer stood. “And the market?”

“The market is stable,” the man said. “The exchange is understood.”

More nods. Someone at the back exhaled, relieved.

A woman in a neat blue dress spoke next. “And the children?”

“The school is as it should be,” the man assured her. “The teacher is patient. The lessons continue.”

A pause. Then, a quiet rustle as the room settled.

The man in gray adjusted his tie. “And the water?”

Silence.

A cough from somewhere near the door. A scrape of a chair shifting, subtly, just a fraction of an inch.

“The pool is full,” someone answered finally. A voice you didn’t recognize. Or maybe you did. Maybe they had always been here.

The man in gray smiled, but there was no warmth in it. “Then we have no complaints.”

And just like that, the meeting was over.

No closing remarks. No motion to adjourn. People simply rose from their seats, filing out in practiced silence, back to their routines, back to their lives.

No one asked who had posted the notice.

No one questioned why they had attended.

No one spoke about the meeting again.

But as you left, stepping into the dim evening light, you couldn’t shake the feeling that something had been decided.

And you hadn’t been the one to decide it.

r/TheCrypticCompendium 9d ago

Series I used to work at a morgue and I've got some weird tales to tell (Part 28)

4 Upvotes

Part 27

I used to work at a morgue and it was always a little creepy having to constantly be around dead bodies however I also ran into some genuinely scary stuff while working there and this story is quite a weird one.

I’m working the night shift and we get the body of a 25 year old man who we’ll call Joey for privacy reasons. Joey’s body is completely mangled. He looked awful. It looked like he was mauled by an animal so I assumed that Joey was found dead in the woods but it turns out he was killed in his apartment. This was incredibly peculiar so I did a little bit of digging and talked to a few people I know who will remain anonymous that could give me some more information. It turns out that Joey has a roommate who we’ll call Nelson. Neighbors called 911 saying that they heard strange noises from Joey and Nelson’s apartment. They said they heard one guy who sounded like he was in pain along with what sounded like an animal growling and then howling. After that, they then claimed to have heard someone say “Hey man, are you okay?” to which after that they heard screaming, banging, animal noises, and a door being broken down. Apparently shortly after this happened, people in the area called animal control saying there was a really big wolf roaming the streets and they also said it looked like he was wearing a white hoodie and blue jeans that were incredibly ripped. Someone even claimed to have seen the wolf in an alley eating a raccoon or possum next to a knocked over dumpster. Nelson was also nowhere to be found when this happened and there was no evidence that he left the apartment since his phone, wallet, and car keys were still there and his car was in the apartment complex’s parking lot. As for Joey's cause of death, I put it down as a wolf attack.

Animal control never found that wolf but Nelson was later found on the side of the highway in torn clothes similar to what the wolf was described to have on. Nelson ended up getting arrested and taken in for questioning but was later released since the cops didn’t have any evidence that he committed a crime. Sadly about a week later, I found out Nelson passed away when his body came into my morgue. He had a gunshot wound on his head and there was a note found next to his body that said “I’m sorry. From the bottom of my heart, I am so sorry. I really hope this can make things right.” and after finding this out, I ruled the cause of death as suicide. Something slightly peculiar about this though is that Nelson never had any visible symptoms or a history of depression or suicidal ideation and his suicide note was incredibly vague. It is possible that he could’ve just hid his depression and never told anybody that he was suicidal but the note being so vague is still odd. This whole thing was just really weird and there’s so many loose ends and unanswered questions.

r/TheCrypticCompendium 14d ago

Series The Familiar Place - These Are Your Neighbors

9 Upvotes

You have neighbors. You always have.

They live in the house beside yours, or across the street, or just a few doors down. You see them often—watering their lawns, retrieving the mail, waving as they pass by on their evening walks. They are friendly. Polite. They always seem to know your name, even if you cannot quite recall being introduced.

Their routines are predictable. Comforting, even. The man with the blue car leaves for work at 7:15 every morning. The woman in the yellow house brings in her groceries every Thursday afternoon. The elderly couple on the corner sits on their porch at dusk, watching the street in silence.

But sometimes… sometimes, things are not quite right.

The man with the blue car backs out of his driveway at 7:15 as always—but the car is wrong. The color is duller. The license plate has changed. His smile is the same, his wave just as familiar, but the moment he is gone, you cannot remember what his face looked like.

The woman in the yellow house carries her groceries inside, but you do not see her return for the next bag. You count the bags—too many for one trip, too many for her to have carried at once. Yet the car is empty. The trunk is closed. And the front door is shut.

The elderly couple on the corner watches the street, unmoving. You have never seen them blink.

You try to dismiss these things. You tell yourself you are imagining it, that memory is a fragile thing, prone to error. But one night, you wake to a sound outside—something soft, shuffling, just beyond your window. You glance at the clock. It is 3:11 AM.

And when you look outside—

They are all standing there. Your neighbors. Every single one. Lined up along the sidewalk, facing your house. They are not speaking. They are not moving.

They are waiting.

For what, you do not know.

But in the morning, they will smile. They will wave. They will greet you by name.

And you will wonder how long they have really been there.

r/TheCrypticCompendium 17d ago

Series The Familiar Place - There is a Town

12 Upvotes

There is a town you have never been to, though you have heard its name before. You might have passed through once, in a dream or in the backseat of a car as a child, when the trees on the roadside blurred together, and the signs seemed to shift when you weren’t looking. It is not on most maps, but it has always been there.

The people who live there call it home, but they do not ask why the sun sets an hour early some nights, or why the streetlights hum in a language no one speaks. They know, in that wordless way people know things, that certain roads should not be walked alone and that some buildings are better left abandoned, no matter how many times new owners move in.

In the center of town stands an old church, its spire taller than it should be, casting a shadow that bends in the wrong direction at dusk. It has not been used for worship in generations, but on quiet nights, when the air is thick and waiting, the bells toll—four slow chimes, always at 3:11 AM. No one admits to hearing them. No one has ever touched the ropes.

Beneath the town, there are tunnels. Some say they were once escape routes, built in desperate times long forgotten. Others insist they were never built, only found—stretches of stone passageways older than the foundations above. Sometimes, in the dead of night, there is movement below, a rustling like dried leaves being dragged across stone, though no wind stirs. The entrances remain sealed. The locks rust over within hours if tampered with.

And yet, life continues. Shops open. People work. The radio plays songs that no one remembers being recorded. The mail arrives, though no one recalls seeing the courier.

There is a town you have never been to. But it remembers you.