“Do you know what the problem is when it comes to ghosts in this city?”
“Chains are last season’s look?”
“All the cool ghosts moved to Portland?”
“I’ll think our waitress is a ghost if she doesn’t hurry with those drinks.”
“Scoff if you all will, but I’m making a point here: To have ghosts, first you need the dead. And nobody is ever dead in this city.”
“You must not read the police blotter.”
“I never said nobody dies here, what I said is that no one is dead. We get rid of the dead right away, and we all know where they go.”
“Oh god, I hate that town.”
“It creeps me out too.”
“And it should. But it’s even worse than you think: There are probably some things none of you know about the dead. Living here, you wouldn’t have many opportunities to learn. And what’s where my story comes in…”
***
It was, as it happened, a dark and stormy night. The dead man could hear the rain, even, as he was, trapped in a cold box under the ground, smothered by the weight of the earth. He was tired, but he felt a potency in his dead limbs and a sudden, unexplainable sense of urgency that allowed him to press the lid open and drag his aching bones up through the dirt and out into the fresh air and the black night and the world of the living again. The dead man left his grave and he knew where he was: the city.
No, not quite, he corrected himself. He was in the town ten miles south of the city. They buried no bodies in the city itself. A hundred years ago the city passed a law against any new burial sites and they even moved the ones they had, evicting the dead, and this town sprouted like a mushroom on the city’s southern border to hold all those dear departed who no longer had a place in the city itself. It was a town of cemeteries and mortuaries, a town of coffin makers and embalmers, a town of mausoleums and headstones, where the city’s dead migrated for their eternal rest. A town with a thousand occupied graves for every one occupied house. The north became the city of the living; the south became the city of the dead.
For the most part the two kept to their respective cities and existed in peace. But tonight the city in the south was sending an emissary: the dead man. And his mission was to increase the population of the dead city by one. There was someone in the living city who did not deserve to be there. The dead man sensed his target and knew, instinctively, who it was: his killer. The dead man remembered everything about his killer: his voice, his face, even the way his killer smelled. Death could not rob him of this knowledge. He would find him.
Tentatively, the dead man tried to walk. His legs were stiff and tired after so many years in the grave. The cold rain felt good on his face. One step at a time the dead man learned to walk again and when he was ready he walked down the hill, away from his headstone, through the little cemetery gate and out onto the highway. Yes, this road he remembered. He could follow it north the whole way. The dark night and the rain would hide the dead man’s face from what few drivers and pedestrians there were.
As he walked he tried to make sense of things. He remembered dying in a far-off city in another state. His parents must have had his body shipped back and buried here, close to home, close to the city he grew up in. Were his parents alive now? Should he look for them? No, he decided; best that they not see him like this. Best that they never know. The dead man understood (with the same ingrained, reasonless certainty that directed him northward) that his killer was both alive and nearby. That was enough to worry about for now. He would have business with no other living person.
The dead man had left his own cemetery behind but others dotted the roadside. If he strained his ears he could hear them, the other dead men and dead women down in their graves. Most of them snored away an eternal slumber, occasionally shifting to a more comfortable position in their coffins. Some of the restless ones muttered to themselves, or even had smothered conversations with those buried nearest them. A few talked about coming up, like he had, but no one else seemed ready to do it tonight. He suspected they often talked about such things without actually doing them.
The dead man did wonder, though, whether he shouldn’t pause for a conversation with a few. Why, right over there Joe DiMaggio was buried. Imagine the talk they two could have. And over there was Wyatt Earp’s grave, and over there was Turk Murphy, and Vince Guaraldi. Doc Barker had been buried out here somewhere too, after he died trying to escape from Alcatraz. Lily Coit, Charles De Young, even Emperor Norton himself, they were all here, and surely they wouldn’t mind trading a few words with the dead man? Surely they were just as lonely as he was…
But he had no time. Revenge was too precious, and had been too long coming already. So the dead man slogged on, through the rain, past the graves, toward the city lights reflecting off those great shining glass towers like lighthouses for the fates. The dead man had always loved those great buildings. They made him feel young again.
Something appeared then, a long, snaky, blazing apparition screaming its banshee wail into the night as it flew through the air. The dead man fell, panicked, terrified, scrambling for a hiding place while the impossible thing slowed and then seemed to hover overhead. He clung to a concrete column, praying it did not see him. He tried to hold his breath only to realize it was now not only impossible but unnecessary. There was a snapping sound, and then a ball rang, and then, strangely, the sound of feet tromping overhead, like a column of soldiers marching on thin air. He dared look up and then realized what the glowing specter really was: an elevated train. The column he hugged supported the tracks. Late-night commuters filed onto the platform twenty feet overhead and when the doors slid shut again the entire shrieking assemblage streamed off into the night.
The dead man felt foolish. Clearly things had changed in the years since he died. Once his embarrassment wore off, he realized the rail-line was a boon for him; it would lead into the city, and if he followed underneath it he would encounter fewer late-night pedestrians than on the main highway. Staying close to the lights on the tracks he followed them, into the heart of civilization, and closer to his prey.
The pouring rain made rivers and streams of everything. He was glad that it seemed to be relieving him of the grave smell. The city by night was a strange thing: dark and vacant but still teeming with artificial animation, with the glare of electronic lights and the low whine of tires on asphalt. He did not belong here; the people of the dead city kept in their place. It was the unspoken law of the dead. But tonight the rules bent. The dead man scampered beneath overpasses, through alleys, along ditches and across vacant lots. Those few people who saw him took him for another homeless vagrant in his shapeless, foul-smelling clothes. The heavy rain hid face from them. He was tracking using senses he did not realize he had. Maybe it was the spirit of revenge itself that guided him. He came to one block, one street, one house. It was one of the tall Victorian homes that they called the painted ladies. Yes, this was the sort of house his killer would live in. His killer was a rich and powerful man, so powerful that he was never punished even though everyone knew he’d killed the dead man.
The dead man crept up to a window streaked with rain and squinted into the soft yellow lamplight inside. The living room was filled with boxes, and the floor lined with newspapers that suggested painting project. Of course, the dead man thought, that explains why I’ve come back tonight: My killer has only just come to live here in the city. The dead man smeared the glass with his blackened fingers, rage welling up in the hollow of his chest where his heart once sat. There was movement in another room. He clamored over a fence and into a side yard, creeping up to a bedroom window. Yes, there he was! The dead man felt poisonous joy at the sight of his enemy.
The killer wore a faded blue bathrobe as he picked through the rooms of his new house, feeling the stacks of boxes with his hands. But how old he was! He’d become gray and bent in the years since the dead man last saw him. And what was this? The killer’s hands moved over everything with such delicate care, and a faithful dog trotted at his side at all times. He’s blind, the dead man realized, blind and all but helpless. But why the lamps? Then the dead man spotted the tire tracks in the wet driveway. Someone else lived here too. A caretaker, or a wife? Whoever it was, they surely wouldn’t leave the old man alone for long. The dead man wanted to break through the glass and seize the old man, to break his bones and twist his limbs (his body was tired and clumsy but strong, terrifyingly strong.)
But no, he had a better idea: He’d get the old man to open the door for him. Yes, open the door and invite him in, never realizing that he was bringing doom into his home. The dead man went to the front door and knocked as loudly as he could. The door opened, just a crack, and a voice (his killer’s voice! Old and frail, but the same voice that the dead man knew so well!) said:
“Who’s there?”
For a moment the dead man wasn’t sure he was capable of speech, but when he opened his mouth the words came, though they sounded garbled and strange. “Sir,” the dead man said in his voice like brittle leaves, “I’m a poor man with nothing in the world, and the rain has wet me to the bone. If you don’t mind, I’d like permission to rest a while here on your porch, and hopefully dry out a bit.”
The slim yellow line that indicated the door opening wavered for a second, as if the house itself were pondering. Then the door opened and the old man (the killer) beckoned him in. “Can’t have you freezing out there. Come in and dry yourself off properly.”
The house was warm. The dead man felt the change in temperature vaguely, as if it were happening to someone else and he was only observing it. “You must excuse me,” said the killer. “I have not moved in yet.”
“The first night in a new house is always the loneliest,” said the dead man, following his killer deeper inside. The old man walked with two canes, one to hold himself up and the other to find his way. Even the dead man walked faster than his killer did.
“That’s very true,” his killer said. “But when you get to be my age, any night can be a lonely one. I find I’m loneliest of all when someone is with me.”
“It’s the same with me,” the dead man said. He dripped rainwater on the hardwood floor, water black and green with the residue of his body. The rain, he knew, would cover the smell of his moldered flesh even to the blind man’s sensitive nose, but not for very long. That was all right. He would not need long. The old man’s dog crouched near the door, tail between its legs. It looked at the dead man with head cocked to one side. The dead man put a finger to his lips as a signal: Shhhhh. The dog ran away.
The killed grunted. He’d reached a chair and was doing his best to sit in it. He told the dead man his name. “And who are you?” his killer said.
The dead man told him.
The killer was quiet for a moment. Then he said: “I’m sorry. I don’t think I heard you right. What’s your name?”
The dead man said it again.
The killer dropped his cane. Somewhere, the dog was crying.
The old man began to shake. When he opened his mouth no words came out. The dead man stood over his killer’s chair, dripping rain. It was a long time before the old man spoke. When he did the only words he said were: “I’m sorry.”
“You murdered me,” the dead man said.
“No!” said the killer, and the dead man’s anger boiled over. He screamed:
“Don’t lie! You murdered me, you bastard!”
“You don’t understand,” said the killer. He was crying, feeble old man’s tears.
“No, I don’t,” the dead man said. “Because I’ve never killed anyone. But I’ll understand soon.”
“But I had to do it,” said the killer. “Don’t you see? It had to be done.”
The dead man touched his killer’s cheek, gently. “Answer a question,” said the dead man, “and I may let you live.”
The killer’s old, blind eyes looked up at him.
“How many?” said the dead man.
“How many what?”
The dead man wrapped his fingers around his killer’s throat. “How many people did you kill?” Outside, the rain was loud, like a thousand wet, clammy hands beating on the walls and windows. “Do you even know how many there were? Tell me that our lives meant at least that much to you, and I may let you go.”
The killer blinked. He furrowed his brow. He stammered: “I…I…”
And he started to sob.
Slowly, very slowly, the dead man reached for the lamp. He turned out the light. In the dark, there was a sound like the last bit of water swirling around the drain. In another room, the dog began to howl, and then he began to cry.
And then everything went quiet.
***
They read about it, as the saying goes, in tomorrow’s paper:
A blind retiree was murdered in his home late Saturday night, stunning this quiet residential neighborhood, and police say his assailant is still at large.
“His wife had gone out to the store. They just moved in and there was no food in the house,” a police spokesperson told reporters. “She came back to find the door open and her husband dead.”
Police identified the victim as Martin Coughlin, 79, a former assistant district attorney from Reno. Coughlin had been both strangled and bludgeoned. Police said there were no signs of a break-in and it appears that Coughlin opened the door for his attacker. Coughlin was blind due to complications from surgery to remove a brain tumor two years ago.
During his career as a Washoe County prosecutor Coughlin tried over 700 homicides. He achieved national notoriety after petitioning for the death penalty in the case of Dante Riggs. Riggs was accused of abducting and murdering a seven year old girl while on a gambling trip. He was executed in 1995, but the conviction was overturned posthumously when new evidence was discovered. The public outcry against Coughlin’s handling of the prosecution prompted his retirement.
“We came here for a fresh start,” said Martha Coughlin (70), who made a brief statement to the press. “It’s hard to know what to think. I guess I’d really hoped that, in this place, maybe, after all these years, we could finally be free of the ghosts of the past.
“But now it looks like the ghosts are all I have left.”
***
“…and that’s why we’re the only city in the world that banishes our dead.”
“Wait, why? I don’t understand what that has to do with the story?”
“When the dead stay too close to the living they always want to come back up and cause trouble. If you put a little distance between the living and the dead, it means that only really important business can get them back up again.”
“Well I don’t think I understood it. He wasn’t really even a ghost, was he?”
“And if you’re saying this story was true, then how do you know about it? Who told you?”
“Who do you think? I work in one of those cemeteries. The dead get chatty sometimes. They don’t have very many occasions to talk, you know, so when one comes along they’re hard to shut up. They’ll tell you almost anything.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“I don’t expect you to believe me. But you’ll all understand, someday. None of us can stay in the living city forever. Sooner or later we’ll all take that trip south. And then you’ll see.
“Anyway, that’s my story. Does anyone have another?”
Credit To – Tam Lin
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.
Nice anti-death penalty message. The pasta was really good as well.
First vampires, now zombies. How fun!
What hooked me on this one more than the other was that this story had a better sense of direction to it. A man (or thing) seeking out his killer, it’s a simple mission of point A to B. Problem is, that was it. Nothing happened on the way there, and the revenge went without a hitch.
Of course, with stories like these plot is secondary to setting. Again, you clearly have an absolute vision of this universe and I enjoyed the development of the city itself, something you treat as if an entity on its own. The contrasts between the land of the dead and of the living were spot on, and I enjoyed how we got a brief glimpse of the past through those who lived it. Still, I wish more could’ve been fleshed out, and perhaps more social commentary on the modern world since this is from the point of view of someone from decades prior.
This was quite good, but not creepy… wait a second… Some homeless is knocking the door, I’ll go checking.
Great Pasta! Really creepy
9.5/10
Great read. I did like part one more though and am hoping there will be more.
Hey!
Another notch in the series, which is always a delight to see especially how most of the series here tend to trail off.
Tbh I have a few qualms about series. A lot of the series here tend to degrade in quality with every subsequent entry – a glaring one I thought was the ‘The Story of Her Holding an Orange’ series, which felt more like an exercise in tension than a proper narrative. I think there are few reasons for this: lack of direction, when the author can’t decide what to do next, loss of focus when the author decides to follow a completely different tangent midway or the lack of a fully-formed narrative.
The last one is perhaps the source of my prejudice against creepypasta series – creepypasta is, IMO, microfiction. You have to have a self-contained story in any given piece, not a ‘To be continued…’ pasta where the one-time reader is given a lot of confusing plot threads from the last entry, then a dangle at the end. Thus, creepyseries are hard to do because they have to confront the new and entertain the ones who followed from the start.
I thought this series has so far managed to avoid that. The overheard-conversation form serves to brief the new reader without dragging the pacing, and the series stuck to familiar city that gave ‘old-timers’ the chills. It’s a fully formed narrative that concludes, but opens up the possibility of continuance.
I really liked the fact that the author seems to have a fully-formed microverse, a parallel city he/she is just waiting to show us. There are established rules and customs – the city develops with the narrative. The atmosphere is that of a weird routine, somewhere where the living sleep a few miles from the not-quite-dead and where we, the readers, are merely visitors. The set-up reminds me of Neil Gaiman’s where the impossible and commonplace are smoothly intertwined.
The prose flows well with the descriptions. I especially liked the author’s descriptions of the sensations that the dead feel, which serve to ultimately emphasize that the living and the dead are more alike than previously thought.
The plot is well-executed. The ambiguous revenge, where the killer and the killed are both on the grey is given a twist: it is from the perspective of the once-killed. The running theme is of how we’re not so different compared to the dead and the guilty, how we tread fine lines and occasionally cross them despite our best intentions.
The characterization is short and sharp, serving as the core of the twist, although I have qualms about the plot ‘forcing’ the characters ahead. I felt that the dead man’s motivations could have been explored more to add to the impact. Maybe he could’ve ruminated on why the microverse chose to deal revenge – or how he can actually back down and choose not to do it.
I thought the creepiness was mainly implicated from the central moral dilemma. How many times have we hurt others and felt we were in the right? If they could take revenge, would they? I thought while this was creepy, the author could’ve added a few more immediately creepy things – maybe emphasizing the weirdness and ‘wrongness’ (compared to our world) of the setup? The pictures helped, but I felt this could’ve been taken further.
In summary, I thought this was a shining example of how creepyseries can work, and generally a good example of creepypastas in general. Awesome! 8.8/10
“The last one is perhaps the source of my prejudice against creepypasta series – creepypasta is, IMO, microfiction. You have to have a self-contained story in any given piece, not a ‘To be continued…’”
Actually, I completely agree, and you’ll see that in fact each of these stories is a self-contained piece. I only gave them a unifying series title because I thought it would help the atmosphere and get people to pay attention to the common setting.
And the only reason the entries are numbered is because I didn’t want to have to establish the “People talking in a bar,” frame device anew each time, so it was important for people to read “Neighborhood Watch” first or risk being confused when the others begin en medias res.
But really, you could take any of these stories and lop off the framing bits and have a stand-alone tale, which was my intent.
Thanks for reading. It’s very gratifying.
Not really a scary story, I’ll be the first to admit, but perhaps an unsettling one. Primarily inspired by two Ray Bradbury tales, “The Pillar of Fire” and “The Reincarnate.” I tried to write in the style of Bradbury (as much as such a thing is possible, anyway) and capture the kind of naive wonder he always used to have, as if he were discovering words for the first time as he used them. Of course, I can’t really compete, but it was still fun to try.
There’s also what I would guess is a pretty obvious “Tales from the Crypt” influence here. And it has some resonance with “Neighborhood Watch” and the class conflict themes there; we can imagine that the dead man was probably a poor, working class kind of guy, and the DA was of course rich and powerful. Now the difference in their stations is even more stark.
The first time I wandered into the cemetery city myself (which has a living population of about 2,000 people) I was, of all things, trying to find a Target store, and I really had no idea what kind of town it was. So when I passed two competing headstone manufacturers whose shops were across the street from one another I thought that was odd, but didn’t think much else. And then I passed the cemetery. And the next cemetery. And the next…well, suffice to say, I started to seriously reconsider how badly I needed to buy new jeans that day. The topmost picture is a panorama view and it’s tough to make out the details, but click on it to zoom in and make out what all those little shapes are…
We may assume that the tale-teller here is the same person who introduced the topic of ghost stories in “Neighborhood Watch.” I’ve tried to make the group as ambiguous as possible; we don’t know how many of them there are or how they’ve all met, which leaves me free to write the rest of the group however I wish in the future. It’s hard writing the framing scenes without dialogue attribution and making sure they make sense; I want to suggest a large, noisy group with overlapping speakers without losing the narrative thread. How’d I do?
Thanks to everyone reading, and thank you to the site admin for featuring the stories. Being read is always gratifying.
I have not read any Ray Bradbury yet (shame on me, I know), so I don’t know how well you did on that front, but to be honest, the noisy, overlapping crowd thing didn’t really project well. Well, at least, I have imagined a four, maybe five or six person group of gentlemen and/or ladies.
Anyways, not creepy, not a complicated plot, but it was a nice evening’s read. 7,5/10.