Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-26567235-20150702231659

Before the story itself actually starts, let me say this: This is my first time writing any sort of creepy pasta, or anything creepy for that matter (or rather purposfully creepy), so this is probably not going to be that creepy, but I'm sure there's room to grow. That said, everything else in this is part of the story (including the 'edit' part at the end), so here we go:

 I jolted awake at the sound of glass breaking inside my room. I looked to the wall with the window just in time to see the hind legs of something crawl in. It looked wooden, somehow. I pulled out a pistol I kept under my bed for this very reason, if someone broke in. But this wasn’t someone, this was something. I looked around my room, glancing every which direction. I tried to say it was nothing, but there was no denying that the window was broken. I could hear tipping and tapping and scratching and pitter-patter along the floor. I was really tense; when I heard a sound in one corner of the room, I would quickly turn to that corner, just for the sounds to be coming from the other corner.

 This went on for a while until a hand shape stole the gun straight from my hand. It was so quick I could only make out that it looked like a hand, but that was it. But the intruder didn’t hide itself for long after that. It jumped up on the bed, revealing its whole shape.I could still make out the details of the thing in the dim night light. It looked like a wooden puppet or doll about the size of a large dog, although with several things different: Firstly, and most notably, its face; It was perfectly smooth with no details on it at all except for the wooden texture itself. There was no eyes, no mouth, no nose of any sort. The next big detail were its hands and feet: One hand was just a ball, a wooden ball, but the rest of its hands and feet had long, jointed claws that ended at a sharp point.

 The wooden puppet had a pointed claw up against my neck. I could just barely feel it’s point against my neck, such surgical precision that it touched my skin without actually moving or piercing it. Outside, there was more noise; something was climbing up the wall. I wanted to look to the window to see what was happening, but I also wanted to stare into the puppet’s face, or what should be a face, keep ‘eye’ contact with the thing. The sound of something climbing the walls grew louder and louder as it got closer and closer.

 My curiosity about the climbing thing gres, and eventually I glanced towards the broken window every few seconds for only a moment before looking back, hoping that the puppet didn’t notice. In one of my glances to the window, I saw a shadow, but I was too afraid of the puppet to look at the shadow for long. That was quickly followed by crushing and cracking glass as whatever the shadow was stepped in. The shadow barked at the puppet, what I can only guess giving an order to it. The puppet crawled off my body to the feet of the thing. Now that I wasn’t worried about the puppet, I looked at the shadow in full detail. Again, the first thing I noticed was the face, or rather mask, it was wearing. It looked like a perfect copy of the puppet’s face, plain and perfectly smooth, no holes in it for eyes or mouth.

 The thing was wearing a green cloak or poncho. While I couldn’t see well with the light, it looked like it was made of grass, moss, leaves, or some combination of the three. It was revealing it’s right arms, which was holding yet another mask, plain and smooth. It was too dark to see the arm, but I swear it was made out of sticks, like this was the thing from the Black Lagoon or something like that, some sort of force of nature. It gave chills down my spine.

 The thing revealed his left arm from under his cloak and lifted off his mask. I was half expecting a void or more wood for a face. Much to my comfort, it was just a normal, human face of a young man, but that’s about as detailed I could see. He placed his mask back on and hid his arm again. He lifted up his other arm, the one holding the other mask, and he approached the bed, and fear rushed over me again. I rolled out of bed and tried to get to the door, but the wooden puppet blocked by path and started to beat my legs with the wooden ball hand. It hurt enough for me to back away from the puppet, falling back on my bed. Above me then was the wooden masked man, and he placed his spare mask on to my face...

 I was suddenly not in my bedroom anymore, but rather in a clearing of a forest, but something was wrong. Standing before me was the masked man and the puppet, staring directly at me. I couldn’t figure out how he could see me through his mask, it was unnerving. From behind me, I could hear something faint. I turned around, intending to only glance for a second before turning back to the masked man, but the sight was frightening. Maybe not as much as the masked man, but enough to keep me frozen for a second. The sky was filled with smoke and through the trees I could see flickering light of fire. It only took a couple seconds for the fire to reach the clearing. I turned around to try to run, but I couldn’t. My legs could move, they could make the motion of running, but I wouldn’t go anywhere. And the masked man still stared at me.

 The fire consumed me. I could feel the heat, so much heat, but it didn’t hurt. I don’t know any other way to describe it. The fire passed by with the forest apparently unburnt and unhurt, although the sky was still filled with smoke. I couldn’t understand how. I turned back to where the fire came and saw an army of men, each carrying their own tool and their faces were covered in soot and ash. Some wielded guns, and they shot the animals. Some wielded saws and axes, and they cut down the trees. And others wielded shovels and pickaxes, and they dug into the ground. It only took a minute or two for the men to clear away the entire forest, only leaving ash, stumps, smoke in the sky and the masked man with his puppet. He had just stared forward during the entire ordeal.

 I looked at him with confusion, and he answered by taking off his mask. I was expecting the human face again, but no. Behind the mask was a decaying corpse, and everything about him rotted: The mask pruned, his cloak cracked and turned brown, even the puppet was cringing in apparent pain. The only thing that didn’t decay was the mask that he was carrying. I screamed and fell to the ground, trying to crawl away, but again, I was fixed into my spot. He threw down the decayed mask and put on the new, and the old masked turned to dust. From where the man threw it down, it sprouted into a new, quickly growing tree. Everything about the masked man sprung back to life, including the puppet. He grabbed a branch of the still growing tree and rode it up until the tree finally stopped. He picked himself up and stood on the branch, spreading his arms and gesturing to the rest of the land, and trees sprouted all over.

 He finally looked down to me and said his first words to me. His voice didn’t project from him, but rather came from every direction, almost from the air itself, but I could tell it was him saying it, “See what civilization has done? See what ‘progress’ brings? You city dwellers don’t bring progress, you bring death to many and eternal life to few. That’s not progress. I’m the one that has to fix it all, I’m the one that has to ‘regress’ society to bring back life to the many, even if that means death to a few.”

 “What does do with me?” I cried up to him, “I’m just a simple census bureaucrat! I’ve done nothing wrong, ever!”

 “You are part of the system that causes destruction! But that doesn’t matter, because I’m not going to kill you…”

 “Oh thank you!” I cried, “Thank you! But, if you’re not going to kill me, what do you plan to do with me?”

 “You’ll make an excellent messenger,” He said, “Tell the world of me! Warn the world! Maybe you people will change before I have to force you people to. But make no mistake, it’s not going to be long before I have to force the change, and I will do it.”

 “When are you going to ‘force the change?’”

 He didn’t respond.

<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;text-indent:36pt;text-align:justify;"> “How much time do I have to warn the world?”

<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;text-indent:36pt;text-align:justify;"> He didn’t respond.

<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;text-indent:36pt;text-align:justify;"> “At least give me a year!” I pleaded, “The world won’t change in a week or a month, but give me a year!”

<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;text-indent:36pt;text-align:justify;"> He didn’t respond.

<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;text-indent:36pt;text-align:justify;"> “Can you at least give me a name to call you?”

<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;text-indent:36pt;text-align:justify;"> He looked like he was considering it for a moment, and replied, “Call me by the name I have had for ten thousand years, the name given to me at the start of my mission, upon my creation. Call me, call us, the Wooden Mask and the Wooden Puppet.” When he finished talking, a noise, an indescribable noise, came from all directions. It was indescribable, but I’m going to try to describe it anyways: It sounded like, eh, I guess it sounded like all animal noises put together along with sound of hollow wind, waves, thunder, earthquake rumbling, and more. It got louder and louder and closer and closer…

<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;text-indent:36pt;text-align:justify;"> And I jolted awake. I hoped to god that all of that was a terrible dream, but the plain, sooth mask lying on lap told me otherwise. The glass window was still broken, but now branches of tree grew into my house. Thing is, though, there was a tree in front lawn, nor in the front lawn of any person in my street. I checked the tree growing through the window. My bedroom was on the second floor of my house, so it should have taken some time for this tree to grow, but no. It has apparently grown in one entire night. I ran outside in my pajamas out onto the street, and the every single house on the street has apparently grown their own new tree, all at about the same size. They look like they should be at least thirty years old, but they were not there yesterday.

<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;text-indent:36pt;text-align:justify;"> I went back inside and went to my computer, and I knew what I had to do. I had to do what the Wooden Mask told me to do.

<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;text-indent:36pt;text-align:justify;"> So now you know who he is. I’m sure he has a part for all of us, a part to destroy civilization. Maybe he’s an evil being out to destroy humanity, but I think, and I’m sure you think too, that the Wooden Mask is a good entity that wants to create harmony.

<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;text-align:justify;"> Edit:  This part was added in about a month after I finished writing this. A lot of stories have come on the news recently that I think has to do with the Wooden Mask. Most of the News has blamed these events on either Anarchists or Islamic Terrorists, but I do think the Wooden Mask is behind at least some of these events. Firstly, there has been several attacks at various factories around the world. While I’m sure that a good amount of these were actually caused by anarchists or whatever, I can definitively say that one attack in southern China was the work of the Wooden Mask. One eyewitness to the event described the attacker as ‘wearing a mask and cloak,’ before what he said was a ‘terribly thin and hairless monkey or dog’ attacked people in the factory. Three unfortunate people died from being mauled by an ‘animal’.

<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;text-align:justify;"> I’ve also heard many stories of many upper-level politicians and high-up employees of large businesses dying of what has been called assassinations caused by the poison ricin. Looking up ricin, it’s described as a highly toxic chemical found in the seeds of the ‘castor oil plant,’ a natural poison. I’m sure these were caused by the Wooden Mask as well. There’s other events I think are connected to him as well, but I can’t think of them right. So now I know he’s out trying to force the change.



<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;text-align:justify;"> Also, in my spare time, I’ve tried to draw a picture of the Wooden Mask. I’m not that good at drawing, so please forgive me for it’s bad quality. I also tried to give it a more mysterious and unknown look, but I think I may have overdone it.

<p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;text-align:justify;"> I’m going to finish off with this: Be careful about the Wooden Mask, be careful with this force of change, with this force of nature. <ac_metadata title="The Wooden Mask (unreviewed)"> </ac_metadata>