The Vessel

I’ve always been afraid of the darkness. The unknown. I had always wondered if there was something out there, something lurking beneath the miniature black holes in the dark corners of my room. As I’m typing this, the darkness surrounds me. The light serves as my only force field away from the suffocating obscurity.         

When I was a little kid, I always saw and heard “things”. I never quite knew what they were, and I wonder now if they were real or not, but I saw them. I had an extreme fear of the dark, because when I saw them- the shadows, voices, whispers, faces- I became a temple for these lost souls, for these disembodied spirits.    

But that was all in the past. I stopped seeing and hearing strange anomalies, and I went on with my life. I wrote music, read books, and killed my spare time watching films. It was up until last month that my life took a downward spiral.

I had been battling bouts of depression for months, and this time I had chosen to end it all. I was 19 and had no direction in life. I was lost. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I still held value to my life. I cried myself to sleep that night, and immediately woke up an hour later. That’s when I saw it.

The pale moonlight bled through the blinds of my room, showing fragments of the figure’s skin. It was pale, with pink blotches all around. I was frozen with fear. The figure stood on top of my bed, on top of me. It breathed heavily, and silently snarled. It stood for seconds, and immediately ran to the corner of my room, back to the darkness. I instantly got up from my bed and turned the lights on. Nothing. There was no pale-blotched figure. Everything was normal.

I couldn’t sleep for the following days. When I did, my dreams were haunted by the gazing figure, standing over me. I awoke many times, breathing hard, sweating, I figured the only way to fight this fear was to bring light into the situation. The next following days, I used my laptop as a source of light, keeping away the distressing figure. Everything was working fine until the third night, the computer crashed on its own. I found it completely odd, since my computer was fairly new and I didn’t have anything that would cause a severe crash in my system. I thought nothing of it and fell asleep, hoping to fix this problem in the morning.

I woke to the sound of birds chirping and the light beaming in my face. I slept like a baby. I felt happy, well rested, in short, I felt like a million bucks. I shoved myself off my bed and went to open the blinds thoroughly; the beautiful sky full of clouds was an ocean full of ships. I sat down and decided to see what had happened with my computer the previous night. I pressed the power button, the screen came up as usual, and my password prompt appeared. As soon as I entered my password and pressed enter, the computer shut down.

I tried again, and again, and again. No dice. I was starting to fear this was gonna end up like one of those crappy “deadpeople.avi” Creepypastas: the computer would boot by itself, and a bunch of gore and satanic images would appear on the screen. Luckily, that wasn’t the case. The battery had been drained dry of its power, which seemed odd since it had power that would last six hours and I had only slept for four.

I plugged my computer to its charger and crossed my fingers that it wouldn’t shut down after my password attempt. Success. I logged into my computer and quickly searched up the details of this pale figure. Most of them were Creepypastas referencing the Rake or Slenderman. This wasn’t any of them. This was real.

That night, I set myself to sleep with the company of the lonely darkness. I expected the figure to show up again, to stand above me like it once did, to snarl at me with its hidden teeth. Nothing. I tried the second night, this time setting my television to pure static, hoping that something would attract the damned creature. Nothing. On the third night, I completely gave up, there was no point in trying to capture something that probably didn’t exist. I closed my eyes.

A large thumping noise woke me up a few hours later. It was right outside my room. It sounded like someone was throwing a pillowcase full of baseballs to the floor. With every thump, my heart rate sped. The thumping grew louder, until it was right outside my door. I closed my eyes, hoping this would work now like it used to when I was little.

The blinds were completely open and the moonlight shone through, reflecting off my door. The thumping stopped. Slowly, the doorknob began to turn, the creaking sound of the door made my stomach turn. I closed my eyes again, hoping that this would be a dream, hoping that I would just wake up in a matter of seconds to an empty room.        

I opened my eyes, only to find it staring right at me. The creature sucked in the moonlight in its pale skin. Its gruesome face, blotched with pink, bedraggled with scars and cuts, had eyes like black holes. It grinned, its teeth revealing two rows of the most fucked up teeth you could ever imagine. As I closed my eyes again, it laughed. A disgusting, tri-toned laugh ricocheted off the walls of my room. The creature came closer, its sunken gaze leering at me. It laughed again, and disappeared into the darkness of my wall.         

I ran to turn the light on again, and, as expected, there was nothing. There was nothing, except for a tall, black shadow outline on the wall. It looked dirty and old, like it had been there for years. There were words crudely written on top of the silhouette: "yOu Are thE vEssel." My heart sank in disbelief. I remembered all those times I saw shadows, heard voices, and whispers when I was little. It wasn’t because my house was haunted, and I wasn’t imagining them, either. I was the vessel for these lost spirits.

I brought them into this world, how, I would never know. They came to me because of my fear of the dark. They saw it suitable that my room was covered in darkness, and that I feared it. They all surrounded me at night, the spirits, the souls, including the creature. They fed off of my fear of the dark, it attracted them. I haven’t had a good night’s rest since this horrific revelation. I can’t sleep at night for fear that I might bring forth even more grim creatures onto my room.

I had always wondered if there was something out there, but trust me, there are some things in this world we are better off not knowing.

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Written by Gardenheads
Content is available under CC BY-SA