Main Storyteller (6:21)
looking at it the way any other girl might look at a picture of a puppy or something. She then starts asking me all these weird questions about how I'd like to die. Yeah, how I'd like to die. I tell her I wouldn't like to die at all. I mean it was legit. The creepiest question I think I've ever been asked and she insists that everyone has a way they would most want to die. I don't want to screw the date up or anything. She seemed crazy and crazy girls can be real fun, if you catch my meaning. So I give her some throwaway response like whatever way is most pain free. She starts telling me how that was a boring answer and how she would like to die of hypothermia because it apparently makes you feel all warm and sleepy towards the end. How some victims of hypothermia have even taken their clothes off before they died and just laid down in the snow or wherever before their hearts stopped beating. She also then gave this long in depth speech about how taking another person's life would be better than sex. How that feeling of pure power must dwarf any feeling that drugs or alcohol have to offer. She then tells me how hot she thought it would be to watch me drown at the bottom of a pool while there's an audience and I'm totally naked. How it would actually turn her on to see my final moments of desperation before my body went limp and floated around the Tank. Then something about how the Vikings would make wings out of the skin on a person's back by peeling it off and spreading it out, calling it beautiful, how it was like art or something. When she's done telling me all that and I am suitably freaked out, she starts calling me pet and how she'd want me chained up at the end of her bed so she could do whatever she wanted with me. Now, any other girl and I would think that was kinky, but after what Lilith had just talked about, I really didn't think what she had in mind for me involved any kind of pleasure whatsoever. When it came to driving her home, she. She actually told me to stop a few blocks away from her house because she didn't want me to know where exactly it was she lived at, saying you couldn't be too careful these days with all the psychos in the world who use these dating apps. Yeah, she said that to me after she spent like an hour talking about all the ways she'd want to die or how she'd watch me die. As soon as I got home, I blocked her number. I have never been scared of anyone like that before, let alone a girl I wanted to hook up with. I live out here in Las Cruces, New Mexico, right on the edge of the Chihuahuan Desert. About once a month, me and a few buddies of mine drive out to the Chihuahuan Desert national park to drink Coronas and grill up some meat on a campfire. All but one of us are married with kids now, having put our wilder days behind us, so getting out to the nature park every so often is pretty much the only time we get to hang out and escape the mundanity of family life. Don't get me wrong, I love my wife and kids and I'm pretty happy in my career, but nothing beats hooking up with the boys for a few hours of beer and big boy talk. So this one time we are out there sinking brews and talking about the cardinals with hot dogs and jerky when I find myself needing to sneak off to go pee. I find myself a collection of little shrubs to serve as an impromptu urinal, then unsheath my pork sword and begin to relieve myself. I should note at this point that I'm wearing khaki shorts and boots, so you can picture how this goes down, right As I finish up and I am zipping my flyback up, I feel something tickling the hairs on my left leg. I look down and there is a scorpion crawling up my leg. Now you should know I am absolutely terrified of spiders and scorpions. Like, deathly terrified. Anyone else might have just slapped the thing off their leg like a ninja, but I just freeze up completely, watching as the thing continues to crawl up my leg, using the hairs to get higher and higher until it's in serious danger of sneaking up the leg of my shorts. I had like, one last chance to get that thing off me before it disappeared, and unfortunately for me, I simply could not summon the bravery to do so. So I was forced to watch as the evil little thing crawled up my shorts. And this next part is why I no longer wear boxer shorts and made a heavy investment into a bunch of snug fitting trunks in the aftermath of this nightmarish event. Because the scorpion doesn't stop when it's hidden away under my shorts. And I can feel it slowly but surely crawling up my thigh further and further until it reaches the loose opening in my underwear. Now, at this point point, my buddies are calling out to me and making all these dumb jokes. I wanted to tell them what was going on. Maybe they would have been able to find a way to rescue me from a fate worse than death. But like I said, I was just frozen in absolute terror as I feel the scorpion crawling into my underwear and dangerously close to my junk. By the time my buddy Jay walks over to actually see if I'm okay, I can actually feel the scorpion crawling over my junk as I feel its sharp little legs digging into the sensitive flesh down there. It takes absolutely all my strength to just turn my head to face them, and immediately they know something is horribly wrong. I am sweating, I'm pale, my hands are shaking, and I can barely talk, but I do manage to get out the words scorpion on my junk. Jay says back, what did you say, dude? There's a scorpion on your junk. Like, for real. All I can do in reply is nod. J runs back to the guys to tell them what's going on, having known from the look on my face that I was most definitely not kidding around. And immediately they all rush over. Which is when I notice that Jay has a big, gnarly stick in his hand that he starts holding like a Louisville Slugger as he gets close. So I'm just standing there, trying to stay stone still as the boys argue among themselves about why it would or wouldn't be a good idea to smash me in the junk with a stick in the hopes of killing the scorpion and saving me from perhaps the worst pain that any man could ever experience. And all the while, I have to just stand there and feel every little movement of that scorpion as it navigates its way across my junk, praying that it doesn't opt to just nestle up inside my underwear as its new fleshy home. The whole time I'm just thinking like please keep going, please keep going, please keep going. Just willing the little guy to keep moving through my boxers and out the other side. Which thankfully it does. I have never been so convinced of the existence of an ever loving God than I was in that moment as I felt the scorpion crawl out the other side of my boxers and down my right thigh. Then as it slowly emerged from the right side of my shorts, one of my buddies leans in and smacks the little thing off my leg in one swift liberating flash of movement. I let out a full five minutes of terror and anxiety in the moments that followed, marching back up towards the fire in the cooler, screaming out every single expletive that I had stowed away in my memory banks before downing like two full coronas and cursing the fact that we didn't have the foresight to have packed anything stronger. Luckily it didn't take long for us all to see the funny side, with my buddies making jokes about how a scorpion had gotten closer to my junk than my wife had in years. I have to admit I laughed at that one and the jokes helped break the tension and calm me down. But seriously, that was legit. The scariest experience of my entire life. I cannot even imagine the kind of pain I'd have been in if I had panicked and had that little monster sting my junk. And now we when we go out to the nature park for bruise and boy talk, I always, always wear long pants. I used to work at a place called o' Hurley's General Store here in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. It was a real old timey general store, the kind that sells everything from buckets and barrels to books and pocket watches in addition to the regular selection of groceries and liquor. It was an alright job for a young man such as myself, patronized by generally polite and well meaning folk. Sure, I had a fair few drunks get a little rowdy when I wouldn't sell them hard liquor on a Sunday, but nobody ever put a gun in my face. But that ain't to say that I didn't have one or two incidents in there that put the fear of God into me, and this here is one of them. So I'm working late one Saturday night stacking shelves and cleaning house when a man walks in wearing a black tailored suit. It was one of those that fit him like a glove and gave off an obvious air of wealth which marked him as an out of towner in my book. But that suit was just about the only normal thing about him. He was white as the cotton fields, so pale he was almost gaunt, with razor sharp facial features and slicked back silver hair. I hear the little bell on the front entrance tinkle so I do my thing and walk back behind the counter to serve him, which is where I laid eyes on him. He walks up to me and with this wolfish smile on his lips asks me for a can of lighter fluid. I fetch him what he asked for, making a little small talk as I ring him up on the register. I asked him where he was from, D.C. he replies, just passing through. I give him a polite smile and ask him if he was one of those politician types to which he gives the vague reply of something like that. He then proceeds to take out the biggest roll of dollar bills I have ever seen in my life. All hundreds from what I could tell, then places one down on the counter in front of me. I give the man his change, remarking that it's a good thing it had been a busy previous few hours or he'd have wiped me out for change. I said it in this fairly jokey tone, expecting him to at least give a polite chuckle in return, but he doesn't so much as smirk. He just takes out this Zippo lighter from his suit pocket, just about the shiniest I had ever seen, and proceeds to fill it up with the lighter fluid right there in front of me. I have seen a fair few of those lighters in my time, but never one that I could have sworn was plated with silver. I figured he must have been hankering for a smoke something fierce and I told him as such, but he replied that he didn't smoke Right as he says that, he finishes up filling up his lighter, but not before accidentally spilling a little of the lighter fluid onto his finger. Then, just before he pieces the shiny looking Zippo back together, he brings the finger to his mouth and sucks the drop of flammable liquid off his finger like it was a drop of homemade wine or something. Now naturally, I quietly recoil when he does that, not quite being able to believe what I just witnessed. He sees me do so and shoots me another one of those wolfish grins like he enjoyed the idea of freaking me out like that. I was just on the verge of asking him what that was all about when I hear the doorbell of the general store tinkle again. I look over towards the front entrance and in walks this young lady who looks to be about the same age as my little sister. Couldn't have been no more than 14 years old, only she's dressed much younger, almost like how you'd expect a toddler to dress in this denim skirt type thing with white embroidered flowers on it. She addresses him as Daddy, so I figure it was his daughter and tells him she needs to use the bathroom. The man in the suit then turns to me, asks if there's a bathroom his daughter can use, so I give him the key to one that we had inside the store, only instead of just handing it to his kid, he takes out a little leather wallet looking thing from his jacket and hands that the lighter and the key to the little lady who then makes her way off towards the door before locking it behind her. I started to feel incredibly uncomfortable. Something about this whole situation just didn't sit right with me at all. I had a sneaking suspicion of what was connected contained inside that small leather wallet thing, but I didn't feel like I was in any position to confront the suited man, especially not based solely on a hunch. But it wasn't just that the kid looked absolutely nothing like him. She had these soft, rounded, delicate features along with really curly hair, while the suited man's face was so sharp he looked like he could have cut a swath through a pumpkin patch. And the way she called him Daddy, a girl that age should be well into calling her father dad, Pop, anything but Daddy. I tried to distract from my discomfort by asking him where he and his daughter were headed. You ask a lot of questions, don't you young man? He replied, dropping what had once been a kind of formal civility entirely and proceeding to stare a hole through me. His eyes. Man, he had these narrow brown eyes, so dark they were almost black, and I felt a shudder run through me as he fixed his gaze to mine. Just making conversation, I remember saying back to him, shifting nervously behind the counter. Well, you know how the old saying goes, don't you? His voice was smooth, just creepily calm, like there was no emotion behind it whatsoever. Curiosity killed the cat. The suited man turned, then started walking up and down the aisles, eyeing up the products like we were some quaint backwater relic. Which I suppose was exactly what we were. I get back to cleaning house for a minute or two only it's more just going through the motions while I keep an eye on what this guy is doing. I figure it'll only be a minute or two before his kid emerges from the bathroom and they fix to get back on the road. But five minutes goes by, then 10, and still no sign of her. Just as I am about to ask him if he thinks she's okay in there, the bathroom door unlocks with a loud snap and and the door opens up. There's no flush, nothing to indicate that she had actually been using the bathroom for its intended purpose, and when she emerges she seems all sleepy and dozy looking. Then she hands back the keys, the lighter, and the black leather wallet to the suited man in a daze before giving him a lazy sounding thank you, Daddy. The way she said it right then, I knew he wasn't her father. It was dripping with sleaze, and the look he gave her in return was one a father should never, ever give his daughter under any circumstances. It made me sick to my stomach and I wanted the pair of them out of my store immediately. But we rarely just come out and say something like that where I'm from. We'll say something with an implication, if you catch my drift. Safe travels now, I remember saying to the suited man. My tone was friendly, but the look I gave him was not. He turns and looks at me like he was about to go through me for a shortcut, like he could have eaten me without salt there and then. Then he walks up to the counter, places the bathroom key down on top of it, and says one final thing to me. Remember, young man, curiosity killed the cat. Then he walks that little lady out of the store and they drove off into the night. I seriously considered calling the sheriff right after they left, but what was I going to tell him? That a man was traveling with a girl that appeared to be his daughter? I'd be laughed right off the line. I could have mentioned that I thought there was something illegal in that leather wallet he handed her, but I got the distinct impression that nothing we could ever accuse him of was really going to stick. He had all that money and that look he gave me too, so I didn't say a word to anyone. But for the remaining few hours of my shift and for the next few days, I heard his words rattling around my skull whenever I paid any mind to him at all. Curiosity killed the cat. The pandemic summer of 2020 had been a crazy one to remember for sure. With a year that started with my mom passing away and the whole world shutting down, what was to follow would make up for it in more ways than one. When my mother died, I felt like everything around me was falling apart. All my friendships were fading, and I had to mourn alone during the lockdown. That was until my neighbor Ryan reintroduced himself to me. At the time of this story, I was 18 and he was 22, which is why we didn't become best friends right away. Long story short, he invited me over to one of his bonfires to have drinks with his friends who were all around the same age as Ryan. Besides Ryan, two of them I became closest with were Colin and Aiden. Those two were a sight to behold. I have never seen two people who weren't married talk to each other as much as them, and no one complained about it as much as their girlfriends. We all became close pretty fast. They all came to my mom's funeral despite not knowing her, whereas childhood friends were nowhere to be found. Unfortunately, this story doesn't end nearly as good as it starts. The last Saturday before my freshman semester was coming around and we all got together despite an unexpected rainstorm hitting us that day. We were all having a few and wanted to end the summer with a blast. Colin pitched us an idea. Colin owned a beat up old jeep outside his house and by owned I mean his grandfather gave it to him. He was planning on selling it that next day and was quietly trying to get me, Ryan and Aiden to take it out for one last joyride with him. Red flags popped up when I got the hint that he didn't want him and Aiden's girlfriends to know. Knowing that we had been drinking for a little over an hour and that the roads were really wet and his Jeep had no doors or top, I was initially worried about the idea and how confident he was with it. I knew it was a bad idea, but I didn't want to kill the vibe of the party. I didn't want to be the youngest guy in the room telling everyone else to be careful. This was when I made the worst decision of my life. Not only did I begrudgingly decide to keep my mouth shut, but I also tagged along. I was trying to act cool, but it was becoming clearer and clearer to me that my much drunker friends were a bit too far gone. Me and Aiden got in the back, Ryan sitting in shotgun and Colin sitting in the driver's seat. As the ride went on and music continued to blare, my stresses began to get relieved. My worries began to fade as I started to think. I started to finally have a good time again. That's when I looked over and saw that Aiden was standing up without his seatbelt on. I looked at him and then looked at Ryan and Colin and I wasn't sure if they didn't notice or didn't care, but they definitely weren't doing anything. I began trying to pull him back down inside the Jeep, my heart now beating fast inside my chest as I can see that we're going well over the speed speed limit. I can hear the tires kicking bits of water up on the pavement as we were flying. I am now screaming at the top of my lungs to get Colin and Ryan's attention, but due to the music I don't think they heard me. Aiden isn't listening as he was too drunk to understand how dangerous what he was doing was and that would be our downfall. While tugging on him to get back down, I looked back when I heard a funny noise coming from the tire. That's when I noticed that the back of the Jeep was swinging back and forth and before I could even realize what was actually happening, our wheels locked up. I was awoken with a ringing sound blaring inside my head, eyes slowly opening up to the dead of night other than a few mumbles and groans from nearby. I look up and see the night sky above me trying to clear my throat before coughing up some blood. That's when it all hit me. I looked around seeing that I was still in my seatbelt, but we were no longer on the road. We were hanging off the road with the side of the jeep slammed up against a guardrail in an awkward angle. You know those moments you have when something so astronomically bad happens while intoxicated that you instantly become sober? This was one of them. I pried my seatbelt off me before stumbling out of the Jeep. I looked back behind me to check the jeep, noticing that Colin and Ryan were in the front with both of their airbags deployed. That's when I looked back and didn't see Aiden. I painfully crouched under to see if he was on the ground on the other side, but I could not see him while looking under the Jeep. I began frantically looking around before panicking realizing where he might be. That's when I got a good look at Colin and Ryan. Not because my eyes lingered on them, but because of Ryan's screams. Those deafening and heart piercing screams. Ryan had stuck his arm out while trying to brace himself for impact and his arm nearly snapped in half. When I found him. He was in the midst of screaming his lungs out and trying to put his arm back together. And then I saw Colin. We had nothing to stop shrapnel from hitting us with the doors off and by the looks of it, his airbag wasn't as protective as Orion's his face was covered with gashes and little rocks and pieces of glass, glass shards sticking out of him. I couldn't focus on them, though at least I knew where they were. I needed to find Aidan. I began calling his name, screaming it as loud as I could with nothing but the headlights of the smashed Jeep to help me out. I began stumbling in the direction the Jeep was facing, looking around at what was lit by the headlights in hopes of finding something. A part of me was nervous to find something. I was injured and even if I did find him, what if he was as hurt as Colin and Ryan? What was I going to do? Before I could come up with an answer, the choice was made for me. I had found him about 40ft away from the Jeep, lying face down by a tree. I began scurrying over to him, calling his name and dropping to my knees. I could see blood in the dirt, but due to it being night, I couldn't get a good glimpse of it. I gripped his shoulder and rolled him over, seeing the immense amount of blood begin to pour as I lied him on his back. I began to cry and scream in horror as I couldn't believe the amount of blood I saw. It was like a fountain that never ended. Not knowing what to do, I did the only thing I could think of. Wipe the blood away. I gripped the bottom of my shirt and used it to try and wipe the blood away, but it didn't work. I then took my hand and began wiping some of the blood off his face, but the realization I would soon discover would strike horror into my mind for the rest of my life. I didn't understand why it wouldn't work. I didn't understand why there was still so much blood. And that's when I looked at the palm of my hand. I wasn't just wiping off blood from his face, I was wiping off entire chunks of his face. There was more than just blood on my hand. There were pieces of tissue, flesh, his face, face resting in my hand. I immediately let go and began scooting away in horror as I screamed as loud as I could while beginning to figure out the true state he was in. At the time, I didn't realize it, but there was nothing I could have done at that point. I was already one joyride too late. I don't sleep very much anymore. If I do it only about three to five hours a night. I don't talk to Colin or Ryan that much anymore either. They eventually came to that night before realizing the result of our actions. Yes, our actions. There was no villain in this story. No creepy home intruder, no spooky ghost, just dumb young adults who made a life ending decision because of liquor and peer pressure. Unfortunately, not every detail can be shared from this story as there is still a pending court case. Hopefully people learn from this story though and don't have to learn from experience. I was probably about 17 or 18 when this happened and my sister was 20 or 21. I live in a little valley which is not particularly known for being overly dangerous or scary, though there have been some occasional serious criminal activity. But I had been walking around in the day and at night for years and had never encountered anything that seemed weird life threatening. Here is a quick description of my surroundings during the incident. The school grounds we were on had one big building, two playgrounds and two big fields. All of this was enclosed by a little fence which ran around the whole premises and outside of the fence was a little side street which led onto the main road. The structure we were sitting on was located across from the main building and on the edge of the gravel field and the surface below us was made of those little playground wood chips. They lay under swings and slides and stuff like that. Now that that's clear, let's begin. My older sister and I are extremely close and we have always loved spending time together. We would regularly go out on late night walks around where we lived, especially in the summer, and would often end up at the local elementary school's playground because it had swings and structures that we could sit on. One night during the summer, as usual, we went to Save on Foods, one of our local grocery stores, for some snacks and drinks, then walked up to the park to sit on our favorite swing set. My sister and I had been chilling there for a while, talking and laughing about the normal bs, when I heard what sounded like something hard dropping from the sky onto the gravel a little ways in front of us. I don't remember exactly what I thought of it at first, but I knew that it wasn't rain, hail, or any sort of natural substance you would expect to fall from the sky. After a short while, it happened again, this time a little closer than before. That's when I said, did you hear that? To my sister, who hadn't heard the first sound and was still in the middle of talking. We both sat and listened in silence for a bit. Then we heard it again, even closer. This is when I started to get a bit scared, since it was dark and it sounded like whatever was falling was obviously getting closer. My childlike mind started imagining all kinds of scary things that it could have been. Since none of my thoughts were necessarily realistic, it helped keep me slightly calm, being able to reassure myself that we were fine and safe. Then something hit the gravel again, very close to us this time. They were rocks. What the heck? I thought. Rocks. It's rocks. I screamed, yet somehow still keeping my voice at a whisper, I scrambled out of my swing to step back a little in fear that the next one might actually hit one of us. Since it was so dark, I had no way of knowing if it was heading for the ground or my face. My sister was nervous too, but still kept a slight attitude of nah, it can't be that. But then another one came down and actually touched the wood chips, this time causing my sister to also scramble out of her swing to step back with me. Both of us were now blindly attempting to shield ourselves with the thin metal poles of the structure we were just on. We both had realized now that the rocks were being thrown and they had to be thrown by someone. This scared me even more, knowing that a person not only had been lurking in the dark watching us for God knows how long, but they were actually trying to hurt us for some reason, and we didn't even know where they were. We were both frantically scanning the area, looking to see someone standing near us or behind a wall looking at us. And that's when I saw him standing on the roof of the school. A tall silhouette of a man wearing a trench coat or a cape or some sort of clothing which hung all the way down to his ankles, with a hood pointed up over his head. I couldn't see his face, but judging from his structure, I assumed it was a man. I felt all of the blood drain from the top half of my body. I couldn't stop looking at him. I was so utterly confused as to who this guy was and why on earth he was on the roof of a school in the middle of the night, throwing actual stones at two girls he didn't know. Oh Lord, my sister said once she also noticed the man standing there, she let out a nervous giggle, and so did I. But I think we both knew how scary the situation was and how scared we both were. At this point, the man just kept still. I felt kind of stupid for feeling as scared as I was, because it was probably just a stupid, bored teenager who got a kick out of scaring the crap out of random people. But once the next rock hit the pole right in front of us, making a perfect ping noise, I didn't really care if it was just a dumb teen. I wanted to get out of there. I timidly ducked out of the COVID of our makeshift shield and began to quickly gather my things, holding one hand in front of my face, attempting to protect myself from any other rocks that were possibly heading for my head.
