Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-27190570-20160114030506

The man woke with a start. Every night he had the same nightmare. He couldn’t remember anything except abject terror. He had gone to the doctors and they gave him some pills. The meds were supposed to start working in a few days, but it had been more than a week. Before the man could worry anymore his alarm went off, and it was time to get ready for work. He got dressed, drank coffee, ate a granola bar, the normal stuff. He grabbed his cell phone and his keys on the way out the door and got into his car. His phone vibrated as he started the car, it was a text from a number he did not know. The message contained no words, but there was a picture. The picture was taken in a forested area at night. There were four tall, blurry spots in the picture. The man was unnerved, to say the least. But he was a rational man, and he knew that it must be a bug of some sort. This is what he told himself, repeated it like a mantra. Soon, the worries of the message were replaced with work related stress. After parking in the lot of his office, he deleted the picture and entered the building.

The man worked at an accounting firm. As he walked in he said ‘hello” to his friends, and gave a “good morning, sir” to his boss. But the entire day, the man could not shake the feeling that something was wrong. He finally decided to go home sick, thinking that he needed sleep. As he arrived home, he noticed his door open. He had closed and locked it before he left. He knew that there had been several burglaries in his neighborhood so he quickly phoned the police and grabbed a tire iron from his trunk. The man was not exceptionally strong, but he figured he could bluff fairly well. He charged into the house through the open door with what he thought to be a ferocious cry and immediately regretted it.

There were three monstrosities in his living room.They were about five feet tall, but they were hunched over, studying something on the carpet. They could have been easily seven or eight feet tall when standing erect. Their skin looked close to human skin. The creature’s torsos were small, and their long limbs weren’t proportional in the slightest. The large hands of the beasts held long, gruesome fingers. They turned to face him, and his blood ran cold, his body numb from the ribs down. The things looked at him, they looked as though they had human faces, with veiny flesh stretched thinly over them.

The man dropped the tire iron, and the noise startled the things. They ran through an open window into the timber behind the house. Now, the man was a logical person. It must’ve been a feverish hallucination, he’d have to go back to the doctors. Then he looked at the carpet. The things had been hunched over a living creature. The creature was vaguely humanoid. It had normal looking limbs, but its face was covered in a thin membrane of ashen grey skin. The creature's limbs were still spasming, and it almost looked like they were growing. It was one of them, one of their offspring perhaps. Or, more frighteningly, some poor soul they had abducted and dragged into his house to turn into one of them.

He had called the police once more and told them that all was well. He covered his house, and the still-spasming creature in gasoline, and threw a match upon it. He grabbed his phone, his keys, and his money and left. He drove for a long time, in a sort of trance state. Finally, he pulled over to the side of the road, and with his hand clutching a kitchen knife, went to sleep. He awoke at about four in the morning to a petrifying screech. The man froze and clutched his flimsy knife with a white-knuckled grip. For a moment all was silent, but then a grotesquely long arm crashed through his passenger window. The man opened the driver-side door and ran. The things chasing close behind him. He sprinted into a wooded area, stepping over logs and tripping over branches. The branches scratched his face, leaving it crisscrossed in shallow bleeding cuts.

He finally approached a cliff that overlooked a shallow lake. He stood on its rocky edge and looked down at the lake far below. He turned on his heel to face his pursuers. The things tilted their heads and made peculiar noises. The man wasn’t sure, but he thought they were studying him. The things made a strange clicking noise and advanced towards him. He knew that they meant to turn him into one of them, like they did to the poor creature in his house. The man resolved that he wouldn’t let that happen. In a last, meager attempt at defiance, he took a picture, and without thinking sent it to an unknown number at the top of his recent call list. The Things edged closer. One lunged at him, but, with a smile on his face, he leaned backwards and fell from the cliff. The scream of the monstrosity that fell with him a metronomic beat to the end of his own life.

Halfway across the continent, another man was waking up for the day. He too had been plagued by nightmares. As he arose from his slumber at around noon, he checked his phone. He had gotten a text message from a number that he had accidentally called earlier that day. The message contained nothing but a picture that was far too blurry to make out. He shrugged and donned a robe. He staggered out to his kitchenette and poured some bourbon in his coffee. He sat down on a folding chair and opened up his computer. A blank white page stared him in the face. For hours he stared, his mind conjuring images of epic battles and nightmarish creature. His fingers stayed frozen on the keyboard, and the blank page seemingly mocked his incompetence. Just as he was about to go make himself another coffee, an ear-piercing screech shook his windows in their frames. He smiled, inspiration for his newest story coming to him immediately. He stumbled into his chair and feverishly began typing, knowing not of the creatures scampering up the wall of his apartment. 