Drip. Drip drip drip. That’s all I can make out, the slow dribble of some far away liquid hitting the floor. The sound around me is muffled, like wax has been stuffed deep within the canals, eating away the vibrations before they reach my core. Each day, is it a day? I don’t know how long it’s been, a day, a week, a year, a thousand years, it doesn’t really matter, time doesn’t work the same for me and it does for them. Then I begin to feel it, a dim warmth within the back of my sockets. I’m so drained, it’s taking longer and longer with each visit for things to go back to the way they are supposed to. Or how I thought they should be. I know it’s not perfect, only an imperfect imitation of mankind. Piece by piece the warm feeling gets hotter and the glow gets brighter until I can see again. It’s been so long since I could see. It’s dazzling, everything is so well defined. I could always feel what was around me, like a sixth sense I think they call it but sight is something completely different. It’s like going from reading a book to seeing a movie is the human way of thinking about it. You can only do so much without that visual experience, the input and the depth creating the world around you. They take it for granted. With every passing minute my sight gets better and better and the waxy feeling in my ears lessens. Now I can hear the hum of the fluorescent lights that flicker above me, my breath as I take in air, the dripping of what I know now is my own blood falling onto the concrete floor. I take a good look around the room but there’s only so much I can see being strapped down here. The lights hurt my eyes, they are too bright, like staring into an imitation of the sun. The walls are white or they should have been white, they are covered with a deep crimson color. Deep splotches mar the once snowlike colors making it look like a massacre occurred. And maybe it did, my memory is fuzzy. It always takes a bit for that to come back. My sight has fully returned now and I look upon my flesh, marked and scarred by millennia of pain. For the greater good they say and they tear into me, digging deeper and deeper each time, twisting and pulling, ripping and thrashing within the body they should know so well. The scars could go but they stay reminding me of my single purpose here, a purpose I can’t abandon, not yet at least.
All across this imitation body of mine I can feel the searing pain. The pain from where they drained my blood, filling buckets. From tearing at my muscles, shearing bone, and taking from the endless fountain of my body. They study what they take, believing it will help their kind further itself. Maybe it will or maybe it will be too much for them to comprehend. Maybe that’s why they keep coming back for more.
Tap tap tap. The rhythmic sound of footsteps on linoleum grows closer before the door clicks and slides open. It’s heavy and takes a moment, but it pushes back and slides away revealing my judgment for the day. Before me stands a young woman, short brown hair is tied back behind her and she wears a mask across her face. She scans the room before entering, making sure not to step on the remnants of me left on the floors and wall. She holds a small packet that she flips through to find the right page before coming to stand next to me. She used to be beautiful once, a soft aura surrounded her, a calming and nurturing spirit that soured with age and experience. The glow around her was now one of greyness, devoid of personality or will, just a need to keep going.
She nears closer to the table I am bound to. I do not try to move, they need this, they need me and I need them to realize what they are doing on their own. Right? They should feel this is wrong, that this treatment of any other being man or not is wrong in nature. Maybe I could push the scale a little, show her, specifically her, a moment of beyond.
The woman places the packet on a small metal table that is filled with tools. What is my payment today? My eyes so that I cannot see the sins they are committing, my ears so I cannot hear the screams of their fellow man, my heart so I cannot feel the pain from those outside of this place. She gets close now, bringing a syringe down into the veins I created for them, pulling the blood out of my body. This is my chance, the chance for me to try and show her the way to salvation. I grab her wrist and with a clatter the syringe drops to the floor, shattering and spraying blood across her white coat.
Her eyes darted around frantic for a moment before becoming transfixed onto the ceiling. She was frozen in a daze, her lip quivered as her gaze stayed upward. I just needed her to see, to see what she could become, what they could become. She began to shake, her eyes welling with tears as a pained moan escaped her lips like a prayer to her false god. The tears fell from her eyes, rolling down her cheeks and down onto my grasping hand. It was warm with the regrets of a life lived wrong. The sorrows of a woman who saw her younger self and wished she could change the path she was set upon. She was convulsing now, deep sobs escaped her mouth but that’s all she could mutter. I released her arm and settled my hand back down on the table. In an instant the convulsions stopped and she collapsed to the floor. She stared up at me with horror in her face before picking herself up, not realizing my viscera had covered her white lab coat in a deep red marring the fabric and she pressed a button on the wall before stepping out of the room with a final glance back, tears still streaking her once beautiful face.
I don’t know how to help them. I thought this would be enough but no. Nothing seems to change. A man in heavy armor enters the room a few moments later and with a quick and loud pop everything is dark again. I float in an endless abyss, a space between, a space where I have no form and I can feel free. That’s before my wretched body begins to move and revive the lifeless form left on that table. Sometimes I wish that one of these times would be the last. That whatever punishment they have concocted in their factory of sin is enough to kill one such as me… but then I’m brought back again. And again. And again. And by the time my mind has fully recovered enough again from the endless onslaught who knows how much of their time has passed.
The room is different from how I remembered it last time. It’s darker, the fluorescent lights above flicker and buzz but some of them are dim. The walls are still coated in a paint of my own making but the efforts to clean up the remnants have long been abandoned. Layers upon layers of flesh and gore stain every inch of this chamber. Something is new in this room though, the door. The door is gone and with it replaced a large glass window. An observation room, maybe a teaching room to impart the knowledge of how to tear me apart to the younger generations. Who knows, it doesn’t change the fact I can’t leave here until they see the way. What happened to that doctor from before? I try to speak in their tongue but my vocal cords have been severed this time. Removed and surely taken to some other room within the endless hallways that dot this facility, poking and prodding, trying to replicate a voice that has communed with Gods.
I’m no longer restrained to the table like before, allowing for a greater range of motion now. I look down again at my body, this time my limbs have been taken from me. I can feel my artificial muscles beginning to stretch out from under what skin remains. I watch as they sew themselves back together, the threads of ever extending flesh entangling over the bones that lay hidden beneath. After a few moments the bloody mess is covered by scabs and new skin is formed over everything as my legs and arms regrow again but something feels off. Something is not right with the skin, it feels too tight, like a too small sheet stretched across a bed far too large. My fingers are longer than before, maybe just slightly but they are longer. The spacing between them feels off too but maybe my body needs more time this time around.
Letting my legs finish healing I stepped off of the bed and felt the weight of gravity upon me. It had been so long since I felt the ground beneath my feet. It felt good but I stood taller than I last remembered too, like I had grown since the last time I stood, then a loud crackle emanated into the room.
“Subject 555 is prepared for the next test. Administration is free to initialize whenever they are ready.”
A loud buzz came from the speakers in the corners of the room where the previous message came from and then there was a different sound. It was like a large vacuum had been turned on and I could feel a slight pull to the room. I turned and saw a large vent in the wall behind me, loose feathers that had fallen from me in years past had become stuck to the outside. Then I began to feel a burning sensation within my chest, like an ember had found purchase within dry tinder. I tried to breathe deeply with the lungs that I made but no relief came. The voice came back again.
“The chamber is now empty of Oxygen, observations of the subject will be recorded and evaluated.”
Another new way to torture me, take away the one thing that every living thing on this planet needs and see how I squirm under their fingers. They have prodded and pricked me for years, torn me apart from the outside but now they must see how I am destroyed from the inside. The burning only grows louder within me, a fire hungry for more fuel that I cannot give it. I can see them through the window, watching me, writing things down on pads and tapping away on computers as I continue to wither before them. They watch as I gasp for air that is not there, as I bang on the window begging without a voice for a modicum of kindness to end this torture but no such respite is given. Their eyes pierce through me as tears flow from mine and the burning is too much to handle. The world around me begins to dim, the edges of my vision getting blurrier with each second. They just keep watching. Then everything is black again and I’m floating back in that void. Finally respite comes but not from them, from death itself. I wade in an endless pool of black, bodiless and free hoping to stay here forever but I know I can’t. I know that as is their fate to pick me apart it is my fate to return but why should I. I have tried to guide them the best I can. When I first appeared to them I offered guidance with kind words and kind actions but they responded with fear and violence. They threw me in a cage and experimented on me for who knows how long and they never learned. Maybe they never will, maybe they need something stronger to show them the way back to salvation.
I awake this time back in the same room as I always do but everything is different. Sun peaks through a large hole in the wall where the vent last was. It’s been so long since I felt the warmth of sunlight but why is it here? Is this some new test, some kind of new torture they expect to lull me into again. No, this is different, it’s all too decrepit. This place, this facility was always so calculated. It wasn’t clean but everything was done for a reason. Now vines crept through the open wall covering the long since forgotten stains of my blood spilled on the floor. The large glass pane that separated the two rooms from the countless observations was shattered and lay in a strange mosaic on the ground with the light glinting off of it. Somewhere a drip drip drip came but instead of coming from me it was from a pipe in the wall that had burst. I stepped closer to the pool of water that lay on the floor to look upon my visage for the first time in centuries. I can’t even remember what I looked like before I came to this hellish plane but only the mockery of humanity that remained upon my flesh. I stared down at my reflection and nearly fell backwards. What had been made in the image of man had become something else entirely, something horrifying. My face had split open falling away at the sides like someone unzipped it from the top. The flaps sagged but did not fall away leaving my two eyes far apart from one another and bulging. Within the head lay a mass of gore and flesh, what I had been reduced to after all these long years, with a single eye in the center, brilliant and golden. The mass pulsed and twitched like it wanted to move but was clinging on to the last vestiges of its former body. The teeth from the mouth remained where it should have been on the face even though nothing connected it to the sides. It hung into the center of the void attached to an unknown part of the undulating mass. My eyes, all three of them, moved down to examine the rest of my body now. My limbs were far too long now, almost double their original length with long spindly fingers and toes protruding at the ends. My body was withered and thin, looking like someone who had not eaten anything in months. That’s when my gaze was drawn to the once beautiful wings that protruded from my back. They had been covered in brilliant white feathers once but now all of that had been burned away leaving two charred masses covered in scars. They were long and draped onto the floor behind me leaving bloody streaks as I walked. Finally my eyes fell upon the symbol of my brilliance, the halo that had been floating over my head this whole time. It was cracked in several pieces and hung low, emanating a dull grey light, not the brilliant gold it had been when I came to this place.
They had done this to me. With every section of me they removed, they took a piece of my sanity, my dignity and left me with this monstrous form. I loved them so much and still do love them but this horror is what they reduced me to. Maybe this is truly what humanity looks like. I tried to make a form that encapsulated the human form but maybe this is truly what they are. Monsters hiding beneath their skin, waiting to enact violence and rage onto anything they do not understand.
I began to walk now, over the broken glass, the shards cutting my feet as I moved but I didn’t care, I didn’t even feel the pain as it sliced into me. Through the shattered window I crawled and down the long abandoned hallways leading outdoors. I looked in long since left labs with large chambers housing creatures and forms that had been left to rot. I passed through rooms with endless files and computers and came to the lobby of the facility where countless portraits hung in the entryway. Each of them was of a different employee or member from this place. My eyes fell on one that was instantly recognizable, it was of that woman doctor who I had given that vision to so many years ago. She looked the same age as the last time I had seen her. Under the portrait there was a plaque that had an inscription etched into it. It read “Samantha Eavers: She saw into oblivion and feared what she saw. Her sacrifice pushes us ever forward into a new tomorrow.”
She had died, taken her own life after what I showed her. Tears began to fall down my face. Was there truly no help for them? Was this their fate, to toil into the unknown and never better themselves? They needed guidance.
I pushed through the vine covered door and out into the sunlight. It peaked through the trees obscuring the building from everything else. The building was built way above everything else but it overlooked a city or what remained of it. The forest had reclaimed most of the area around the facility, hiding it from being seen from down below. The city sprawling in the distance used to be bustling with people but now it lay empty and deserted. Tall skyscrapers that once envied to touch the heavens now lay crumbled and in pieces on the earth beneath them. Countless craters of fallen bombs and the remnants of war lay waste to the metropolis. The air was stale and it felt as if there was a buzz to it, like it was charged with an unholy energy. Where the blue sky had once been draped over the world there was now only grey.
This is what they have done with what was given to them. They squandered it, used it to turn against their fellow man and killed each other over what, money, property, resources? A rustle came from the bushes next to me, something lurking within the brush. In an instant a man, his face covered with a gas mask burst into the clearing where I stood. He stood there wheezing and coughing, looking tired. He was dirty, covered in blood and sweat from countless unknown encounters. He stopped when he saw me, fearing what stood before him. I began to raise my hand in a gesture of ease when the bullet cut through my hand. A loud pop and the hot metal pierced my skin, ripped through the tissue and out the other side leaving a deep hole straight through. The man looked frightened even with the mask on. His whole body shook as he raised the pistol that I had not seen before up again and pulled the trigger. The second bullet sailed into my chest pushing me back with the impact. I did not even feel the pain of the hot metal twisting into me, I did not feel my blood oozing out of the wounds they had made, I only felt his fear and only saw how he reacted, with violence. I looked the man up and down, shock filling me as I did nothing to provoke him, nothing for this to be justified. I tried one final time to speak to the man, to calm him if just for a moment.
“Be still my broth-“
The final bullet sailed directly into the mass of flesh residing within my head and for a moment I was back in that abyss. I could feel the fear in the man, the terror within him as he saw what I had become. No longer the image of a man like him but a monster, one that evoked such a feeling of fear that it needed to be killed. As I begin to drift back to my body I do so now changed…not as the voice I once tried to be, but the hand that remains.
Credit: Ethan Fuller
Copyright Statement: Unless explicitly stated, all stories published on Creepypasta.com are the property of (and under copyright to) their respective authors, and may not be narrated or performed under any circumstance.