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The original was posted on /r/hyruleengineering by /u/ryt1314059 on 2024-09-16 15:16:06+00:00.
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The original was posted on /r/hyruleengineering by /u/PyremOfTheLabyrinth on 2024-09-16 11:44:31+00:00.
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The original was posted on /r/hyruleengineering by /u/kmarkow on 2024-09-16 06:12:11+00:00.
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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/orangeplr on 2024-09-16 15:48:23+00:00.
The house was beautiful. It was like a dream.
Two stories, two bathrooms, two beds - the living room dropped down like in the 70s, and the kitchen was complete with an island and a beautiful view of the garden and a large, towering apple tree. There was even some decor left by the previous residents: little bird feeders, a stone Buddha by the front step, a tree of life tapestry hanging in the living room. The realtor had told my parents the previous resident wouldn’t be needing these things back, but she would remove them before we moved in, but my parents told her not to. It made the space feel cozy and lived in.
We moved in at the beginning of summer, so I didn’t have to worry about school for a while. It was nice to have no additional stress, but it made me sad to have those months free without much opportunity to see my friends. I found myself worrying about what they were doing, if they were having more fun without me, if they’d already forgotten I existed.
It didn’t take long for me to realize: moving was lonely.
I spent my summer in the garden, pretending I was a forlorn maiden, cast away from everything she knows. I lay in the cool dirt beneath the apple tree, watching the leaves flutter in the warm breeze. Sometimes I would even eat an apple, but they were always a bit too bitter for my taste. I would wonder about the sliver in the wood, like someone had hacked at it with an axe, then gave up. Who would try and chop down such a beautiful thing?
That apple tree became a sort of sanctuary. The shade protected me from the blazing sun on the hotter days, and the trunk became an incredibly comfortable backrest to lean back on and read.
One day, while I was doing just that, something blew up against my leg. A dirty, stained piece of paper. I set my book down and picked it up, curious.
I scanned it quickly. It looked like a letter, from what I could make out, but it cut off at the end, and there was no backside.
I shifted from my spot against the tree, digging my fingers into the soft dirt and searching around. I thought that if this letter had been here, maybe, just maybe, the rest were too. I was desperate for excitement at that point, and I wasn’t beyond getting my hands dirty to find some.
Sure enough, soon my fingers were prying at dampened notebook paper, carefully edging it out of the soil. I think I found most of them just searching in the dirt: they weren’t buried very deep.
As soon as I finished reading those letters, I went to find my parents, heaving.
We left that house, and we never came back.
I’ll do my best to relay to you what the letters said. At least, what I could read of it.
Dear Silvia,
I miss you the worst in summer. The winter here is cold and unforgiving, but the summer is worse. I cannot even bring myself to leave the house anymore.
I fear some days that death follows me, like a stray dog nipping at my heel. Now that you and Elsie are gone from my life, I have nothing left to run from. How could I be meant to stay here when you were not? Even so, I feel very strongly that dying now would be a betrayal to you, no matter how much I would love to join you, wherever you are.
My days are lonely and plain now. I eat nothing but what I can take from the garden. Thank you for my nourishment and my survival, my dear wife. There isn’t much flavor to my food without the smell of you cooking it in the kitchen.
I think often of my time as a butcher. I used to be happy with that kind of work, but now it only disgusts me. The thought of slicing through meat, meat that was once a living creature, nearly brings me to tears. Some nights, when I close my eyes, all I can see is muscles twitching. It haunts me in your absence. I swear, Silvia, I will never consume that stuff again.
The apple tree is the only piece of you I have left. The only living piece. I could go catatonic for hours, just watching it sway. When I see that tree, I feel that you’re nearby.
I miss you.
R.
Dear Silvia,
Yesterday I went to sit under our tree.
It pains me that when you were alive, I didn’t spend much time in our garden. Perhaps I had old hermit in my blood, even then. I preferred to watch you from the kitchen, admiring your gardening prowess from a distance. Perhaps that makes me a bad husband… but I think you liked that about me. How I always gave you enough space.
It’s nice out here. Very peaceful. The fresh air feels like you, touching me. I could have sworn I could hear Elsie’s laughter in the breeze.
I noticed something strange, as I sat against the trunk, enjoying the sunshine on my skin. It felt like the tree moved against my back, almost as if it were squirming. Perhaps my mind is not what it used to be. But perhaps it was you.
If it was you, thank you. I hope you’ll reach out again.
That night, I had a very hard time falling asleep. No matter what I did, I could not feel comfortable. My bed felt wrong, felt lumpy and strange, as if it were not made for me. I gave up and went to our kitchen, and I watched the tree through the window until my eyes grew heavy. It was so beautiful in the moonlight, glowing gently, drawing the eye. It was so quiet, so dignified. It made me feel uneasy, but in a comforting way, as odd as that may sound.
When I got back to bed, it didn’t feel wrong anymore, and I was finally able to rest.
R.
Dear Silvia,
These days, all I find myself doing is wandering the house, reminiscing. I don’t dare move or change anything. I want to preserve everything just the way you left it.
Our house is covered in little trinkets, hippie things that I don’t entirely understand. You always had such an earthly style. Some of it I don’t care for, it simply isn’t my cup of tea, but I never would’ve told you that. I would never want to step on your toes.
It’s apple season again. I remember watching you and Elsie climb our tree, shrieking and laughing uproariously as you hung from the branches like monkeys. Elsie… my little monkey. I know she never cared for that nickname when I called her it, but it stuck.
You were such a good mother, Silvia. I hope you knew I knew that.
I used to love apple season. I loved watching you pick them, dropping the ripe ones into wicker baskets in the grass, and a couple of days later, the entire house would smell of pie, sweet cinnamon and sugar, and it would linger for days, even all the way up in the attic. This is something I miss dearly.
Please come back Silvia, and bake one last apple pie.
R.
Dear Silvia,
Today I went out to pick apples. I thought maybe I could take a crack at your old apple pie recipe, perhaps treat myself to something besides wilted vegetables. However, something very strange and disturbing happened to me.
I was collecting the ones that looked the ripest: I am not the most well versed in things like this, but I can make an educated guess. I found one that looked so perfect. It was red and shiny, not a scratch on it or a single worm hole, which felt lucky. I went to take a bite, and what I found caused me to vomit into the grass.
Inside of the apple was meat. Raw meat. It was not quite the kind of meat I used to butcher, although it twitched as such. I could see white muscles and tendon. It oozed with pink plasma where my teeth had parted the skin. It tasted metallic and rotten on my tongue. The flavor still hasn’t passed.
I cut open every single apple I had picked. The tree seemed to shudder. They were all like that. Made of meat. Some entirely, and some as if a rot was spreading over them. I can’t help but wonder how long it has been this way.
I feel unnerved. I feel that I can’t trust my brain, my vision or my tastebuds. I feel I may vomit again. I do not know if what I experienced is real, but if it was, I do not know what to do. It is unholy, what I have experienced.
Tonight, I will pray.
R.
Dear Silvia,
Today, someone knocked on the door.
I was still feeling shaken up and disoriented, so this caused my nerves to be completely shot. I do not enjoy interacting with strangers, or anyone, for that matter.
It was a man, and he was carrying a box. He asked me for you, and for Elsie.
I told this man that you had not lived here for a while. He seemed confused, so I clarified that I was your husband and Elsie was my daughter, and you had both passed away in a tragic accident. That caused him to look even more confused.
Forgive me, but I felt defensive, and uncomfortable. I figured maybe this man looked so confused because I am old, and you were younger. Oh, how I wish I could rid this planet of all judgement.
This man seemed as if he wanted to say something, but he didn’t. He left then. He did not give me the box, which I assume was meant for you. Perhaps he was a coworker of yours, or an old friend, or maybe even just a mailman. I feel sorry that he had to hear the news from me, even despite my disdain.
I cried today. I didn’t dare go back out to the tree, but I wanted to. I feel as if I may be losing my mind. That interaction with that man at the door made me feel unnerved. I wish he had not come.
I only wish to be with you again.
My bed feels strange and alien. It feels too soft, and I swear something smells rotten. Perhaps an animal has gotten trapped in the walls and died.
I cannot sleep.
R.
Dear Silvia,
The smell of rot has become unbearable. I cannot live this way.
When I sleep, what you could barely call sleep, I see you....
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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/MrBlackBook on 2024-09-16 13:37:35+00:00.
It was the early 2010s when I found my father’s camera. A relic from another era; one of his countless forgotten things confined to the attic after his passing.
In life, he had this... obsession with it. Not like someone obsessed with photography, but something deeper, stranger. It was like the camera had consumed him, his hands bound to it as if it were one with his flesh, and in most of my memories of him, his face is hidden behind it. He existed only beyond its lens like the world didn’t matter unless he was seeing it through that damned viewfinder.
Rediscovering the camera felt like a chance to reconnect with him after all of these years. I was seventeen at the time, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little excited to find it. It was an old QuickTake 100, clunky and covered in dust. The thing looked ancient, by tech standards, and holding it, it felt... heavy. Not just in weight, but in something else. Almost like I could feel my dad’s attachment to it, his love for it tangible in plastic and metal. And for a moment, I thought maybe I could see what he saw. Maybe I could understand why it seemed to matter more than we did.
This was his totem - his artistic lifeline - and perhaps knowing this I should’ve left it undisturbed.
I should’ve left it there, buried beneath old furniture and junk.
But I didn’t.
The first incident - it all happened so fast. I had just wiped the dust off the lens, standing by my bedroom window. My best friend, Charlie, he lived across the street, and I remember seeing him in his room, just a blur of motion through the glass. The sun was setting, casting long shadows across the neighbourhood, and it seemed like a good time to test the camera, to see if it even worked after all these years. And so, I lifted the viewfinder to my eye, lining up the shot, and pressed the button on its side.
The flash went off, bright and glaring.
And then - chaos.
A deafening boom rocked the air, shaking my house as if we were caught in an earthquake. I stumbled back to my bed, hands covering my face as a burst of radiant life seared through my window. My heart raced as I tried to make sense of what had just happened. I smelled smoke - it assaulted my nostrils almost instantly - and the scent of burning wood; it was strong. So I pushed myself off my bed, staggering over to the window, and that’s when I saw it.
Charlie’s house... was gone.
Where his house once stood was nothing but a hellish crater, flames licking up into the sky. The remains of his home were scattered in all directions, as if something had reached down from the heavens and ripped it apart. The noise, the smoke, the screams... they were everywhere. My mom rushed outside - I heard the door hit the wall as she tore it open - pulling my sister with her, both of them in hysterics.
But I couldn’t move.
I just stood there, staring at the chaos, paralysed by the shock of what I’d just witnessed. I remained frozen until the fire engines arrived, beginning their futile attempt to quell the inferno, but God, how it burned.
It burned and it burned and it burned, the flames raging on into the night, glowing like a second sun in the darkness. Charlie and his family... incinerated in an instant. Gone, just like that; wiped off the face of the earth. They never stood a chance.
A few weeks later, the official report blamed it on a gas leak. And I believed it at first - I had to. What else could explain something so sudden, so violent?
But I was naive. I had no idea at the time - it was just a freak accident. I had just happened to capture it.
A year or so later, I found the camera again. It was like it reappeared in my bedroom. Hidden in plain sight amongst the clutter, I rediscovered it whilst packing up for university - I was moving far from home - and I plugged it into the family computer, hoping to find some of my father’s old photos. These cameras, apparently they can only hold about 8 photographs at a time, so I was curious to see if he’d left a few on there before his passing. But he hadn’t; I discovered that quickly. The curious smile on my face fell into a frown.
But there was one photo on there; a singular file in its memory.
Just one horrifying photograph that made my heart stop. I opened it up, the image exploding onto my screen, and tears rolled over my cheeks.
In the image, the house had been caught mid-explosion, walls buckling, windows shattering, fire erupting from the ground. I’d captured the exact moment the house was obliterated. And something about it... felt wrong. Like it wasn’t just a coincidence. Like I had caused it, somehow, with the flick of my finger, the button akin to the trigger of a gun.
Terrified, I deleted the photo. I didn’t think, I just wanted it gone; away from my tear-filled eyes. But even after it was wiped, that feeling stayed. This nagging sense that the camera was more than just a piece of equipment. That it held onto things... dark things. My father had been obsessed with it for a reason.
So I didn’t touch the camera again for a while.
But, like a cursed object from an old horror movie, I couldn’t shake its presence. When I left home one year for my final term of university, I brought it with me; I don’t even know why. It just... ended up in my bag, like it wanted to come along, and for months, it sat on a shelf in my dorm room, collecting dust. It stared at me from its spot, its lens like an unblinking eye, and sometimes I felt like my father was watching me through it. I swear I could see his eye in the lens from time to time, but I knew I was just being paranoid; perhaps I'd had one too many coffees during a late-night study. So I left it alone. I let it - him - watch over me undisturbed.
Until one day, I couldn’t.
It was late and I was stressed out from a final project; it was going to be making up most of my grade. I needed a distraction, so I grabbed the camera, telling myself it was harmless. I stood in front of my mirror, holding it up to my face, and for a second, I considered taking a picture of myself. My finger hovered over the button, a smile blooming on my face, but something stopped me. I felt... dread. A cold wave of fear washed over me, and I remembered the explosion. The fire. Charlie.
I put the camera down. I relived the explosion all over again, and for a while, I was frozen to the spot.
But then the next day, I took it with me to campus.
I can’t tell you why, but I just felt like I needed to. My friend Sarah and I were hanging out by a smoking shelter with a few other students. They were fascinated by the old camera, calling it a piece of history. They begged me to take a photo of them, Sarah and these three other girls I didn't know, but I was hesitant; I was shaking at just the thought of it. Every instinct screamed at me to stop, but they kept urging me on.
So I agreed to it, against my better judgment.
I stood up, and they moved into place behind a row of bollards, posing and pouting; it was by no means a serious photograph. Lifting the viewfinder to my eye, I struggled to still the shot, my hands still shaking with anxiety, but I calmed myself, slowing my breathing; I thought I was simply scaring myself. What happened to Charlie, that was a freak accident. There was no way this camera had any part in its doing.
And so I pressed the button; I pulled the trigger. And what happened next, it was all on me.
The flash went off. The world transformed into white light and my eyes burned as if I had stared into the sun.
But screaming followed.
I heard bodies hitting metal, then the sound of flesh pounding the ground, bones breaking upon impact. The gargled sound of blood pooling in someone's throat. The continuous, monotonous beep of a car horn.
It came out of nowhere, swerving wildly down the road. I’d heard it coming, but I never foresaw this happening. The driver, a drunk student, had lost control of the wheel. The girls were thrown into the air like ragdolls, killed the moment their skin touched the bumper, but I had witnessed none of it. I’d held my eyes shut after the flash as if I knew what was coming, and instantly I regretted not trusting my gut. I knew this was going to happen. I just knew something would happen; I could feel it.
But now they were dead. All three of them. Dead. And so too was the driver, his car wrapped around a concrete pillar, his skull crushed against the horn, the sound wailing like a scream.
And I was numb. It felt like a nightmare I couldn’t wake up from. The deaths. The destruction. The two times I used this camera, death had followed. And it wasn’t a coincidence; I was certain of that. It wasn’t just bad luck.
This camera was the cause; the murderer, the executioner. It killed. I don’t know how else to put it, and I know it sounds ridiculous, but if you held it in your hands, you would feel it too.
It was more than plastic and metal, this camera. It was satanic. It was hellish. It was under the influence of evil; possessed or hexed. And I should’ve destroyed it before it took another life, but for some reason - perhaps it was its power - I simply couldn’t.
That summer, I left the camera on my desk, untouched, as if ignoring it could somehow undo the damage. But it was still there, watching me. Waiting. Waiting for the day I’d pick it up again, once I convinced myself that everything was just a coincidence.
That day came when winter rolled around. Enough time had passed for the fear to dull, for ...
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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Cute-Blueberry-1133 on 2024-09-16 02:44:05+00:00.
Conversation Hearts: Part 3
Previous Update: Longing with Teeth
Sorry for the delayed update, I think I'm going to have to split this post into two parts as, evidently, I have exceeded the character limit. It has been a long week. We had a bit of a scare with the baby. Everything’s fine now. I had some light spotting the other night. I’m not all that shaken anymore, but it freaked Johnny out real good. The doctor says everything looks healthy. He even let us listen to the heartbeat for reassurance, though I think that was just to make Johnny stop crying. A little blood is supposed to be normal at this point in a pregnancy, the cervix is becoming tender or something. I don't know, I stopped listening after he said the baby was healthy, everything after that was placation. All the doctor’s mambo-jumbo didn't seem all that important to me, but Johnny ate it up. Honestly, I might start sending him to appointments without me, cause I certainly didn't need to be there for most of that with the way he and the doctor got on. On the bright side, they put me on pelvic rest, so I guess that's one less wifely duty to worry about.
I fucking hate my life.
Not actually. I’m super excited to be a mom, or literally anything other than “just Johnny’s wife”. This town is going to kill me. Sorry for the rant, I’m kind of struggling to adjust to the idea of parenthood, or maybe it's just the idea of parenting with him. Please ignore me. My life is wonderful and I couldn't ask for a more attentive husband, I’m just tired. Been tired for years and it hasn’t killed me yet so I doubt it will kill me now. Don’t worry.
Mags I miss you, so if you're reading this please stay away. I am hormonal as all hell and I don't think I have the bandwidth to chase you off if you come back.
Our town was the type where most folks didn't know nearly enough about birth control to keep their families from growing like weeds well beyond the borders of their houses. It was the perfect breeding ground for religious fanaticism when most kids were married by twenty and raising-up a new generation of followers before the ink could dry on their childhoods. It didn't help that no one ever seemed to leave. Year after year me and Mags waited for our turn, for our houses to fill with laughter and little feet but they never did. We were stuck, alone with each other, locked into our age-appropriate activities without any older siblings to teach us the lore of the town. So we started making our own kind of folklore.
Mags would make up stories, at first silly little things like a baby raccoon who got adopted by the king and dressed in fineries. Sometimes her tales were closer to the truth. A queen who would spend hours in the library talking with the handsome scholar, whispering to him from time to time when she thought her husband wasn't looking. Dead princesses who waited by wells for their living little sisters to come play with them. A mother who had been so taken with the world she didn't notice when all her children left her one by one until she was alone in her huge house. That one had always seemed oddly sad to me, but knowing what I do now I just feel sorry for Mags. I knew her home life wasn't the best but to be forced to keep secrets so young, it's no wonder she never learned how to tell the truth.
Back then Mags had all the words and I just did my best to capture her wild imagination on the paper. I had nicer spelling and handwriting than most of the others in our grade, but as the year went on it became increasingly obvious that my perceived prodigy was failing. I had no innate talent for academics, only the little step-up my mother had given me by starting my education earlier than most. I knew the game wouldn't be half as fun if I wasn’t useful to her so I put everything I had into learning how to draw. I like to think I got halfway-decent at it. The kids at the school used to think so anyway, but then again when you're a kid it's easy to find wonder in the world of adults. It made them happy at the least.
Mags and I kept to ourselves in those early months, not necessarily by choice, but we were used to isolation and things were not nearly as lonely when there were two of us. The tight confines of our friend group didn't bug us much. We were not welcome in the typical liminal spaces of childhood so we found our places to settle away from the spiteful eyes of the town. There was a small river valley in the forest that brushed up against the border of suburbia. The drop wasn’t large, maybe ten feet of high-piled boulders at the edge of the river's tempting expanse, and on a good day, a small child could almost think they could clear the jump to the other bank. We never tried, but I can't say we were never tempted to, the only thing that dissuaded us was the turbulent flow of the river and a story born so early in our friendship that neither of us could quite remember if it was really ours or some old relic of the town.
According to the story the river had a hunger, or maybe the river was an embodiment of hunger. It's been years so you'll have to forgive my imperfect memory. Whatever the case, the important thing to know was that the river was responsible for swallowing up the weeping dead girls of the town. According to the story, there were two little girls— who may have been sisters but probably weren’t— who lived on the stubborn edge of the forest where the trees grew so thick the town had never managed to cut them back. It was the last bit of unbroken wilderness in the quickly spreading melancholy of industrialization and those two little wisps made their home at its mocking edge inviting in whatever primordial evils slumbered at the forest's heart.
The water was higher then. So high that the jagged rocks at the river’s bed, that gnashed at the water like hungry teeth, were nearly completely covered. Not lying in wait, but still thunderstruck with that terrible hunger. The river was a gentle bounty that raised the girls when their parents couldn’t be bothered to. It gave them delicate, salty fish and sweet crawdads to eat, clear clean water to drink, and a lovely melody of singing streams to listen to once they had had their fill.
In many ways, the river was their mother, which might be why they were called sisters. Their lives were simple and sweetly mild back then. They could spend their days in meadows with berry-smeared faces, hair in wild tangles, and come home as the least burdenful children of their families with their full bellies and pretty faces. They were content. They wanted for nothing and in return, the river took nothing from them. Which is why the first dead girl was such a shock. It had been a temperate, sunny day, so perfect it was almost boring. The girls as always were at the river’s bank soaking up the rays of summer and chasing dragonflies along the water.
It happened when the cracked egg of the sun sizzled high in the sky, the girls were so lost in themselves that they forgot who they were entirely. In their games of chase, it wasn’t clear what they were chasing, or perhaps what was chasing them. They were in stride with all of the insects and all of the birds unsure who should follow who. So, they just ran in the sun, overjoyed to have bodies that could run on such little legs when one of the girls, the taller one, was overcome by a sharp, hot pain in her foot. And then another, and then another. Her senses were overwhelmed by saccharine and gold, and above all else that terrible, droning pain. The younger girl could only watch as thousands of angry bees overwhelmed her friend forcing her into a blind stumble until her heel went over the edge of a rocky bank and she was swallowed whole by the river. She watched her friend's surprised face from under the glassy surface as the girl didn't even try to fight, instead smiling, twisting in pain, screaming, laughing, clawing at her throat, and floating with her arms out like an angel. Filling her lungs with fresh clear water until her body stilled and the river went calm.
By the time the smaller girl had returned with adults her friend's body was picked clean of all but its bones which shone amongst the brightly colored river stones like gems. It was decided that there was no point in trying to retrieve a girl so scattered by nature. So there she remained one with the river that had raised her.
The smaller girl visited her friend as often as she could because— despite what the adults told her— she knew the other girl wasn’t gone. She had just changed shape, the same as the smaller girl would one day have to if she wanted to stay in the forest. The smaller girl grew up strange and pretty and the river grew with her pulling down the facade of soft waves to bear sharp, blood-hungry fangs rolling over a sandy tongue. The townsfolk might have whispered about how the girl would talk to the river when no one was looking, even dance with it, laugh with it, strip off her clothes, and frolic in her undergarments like a little girl on wobbly new limbs and throw her head back in a show of sharp teeth. They would say all of that if any of them had the guts to even get close to the forest after what happened. So the smaller girl spent her childhood alone, becoming plump wi...
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