The Song and Dance Man came to Belle Carne with little fanfare in the fall of 1956. I had just gotten out of high school and was working as a stockboy at Handy’s Hardware. I was there the afternoon that Sarah Carter burst through the door, making the bell over the door jingle like mad.

“George, you gotta see what’s been set up by the bandstand. There’s this huge tent up and this man standing in front of it yellin’ like a carnival barker.” Sarah was out of breath and obviously had run from the park and all the way down Main Street. Her hair was whipsawed every which way and one strand stuck to the end of her nose. She gave a quick puff and blew it out of the way and waited for me to react. With Sarah, I was always two steps behind and running to catch up. Girl had energy in those days and in an unlimited supply.

I stopped rearranging the nails and said, “There wasn’t anythin’ up there when I walked by this mornin’. When’d it go up?”

She shrugged her shoulders, a quick raise and drop, “Dunno, but it’s up. And you gotta see this guy. He’s all dressed up, head to toe and he can talk. Boy, can he talk.”

I thought about and checked the clock. It was near about 5 and time for me to quit anyway. “All right, let’s go check it out then.”

Sarah grinned from ear to ear and was gone. I didn’t doubt she was telling everyone in the gang, the ones that were still in town anyway. Most of us scattered to the four winds after graduation. Only a handful of us remained in town and only a handful of us were on hand to witness the dance.

I walked down to bandstand by myself, not bothering to wait for the others. Most likely Sarah was already there waiting for us. I met up with Bill as I passed the drugstore, where he worked as a soda jerk. “What the hell is Sarah talkin’ about George? She blew in here and then blew out again before I could ask her anything.” Bill was a big guy, tallest (and heaviest) guy in our class and I just about cracked up the first time I saw him wearing that little peaked paper cap McCleary makes his soda jerks wear. Bill doesn’t really like to be laughed at though and after the knot under my eye went down, I made sure not to laugh at him anymore.

He’s a good guy aside from that temper. He was the best guy on the highschool basketball team too, though he’s one of the few guys who got kicked out of a game. Threw another player halfway down the court. And they were on the same team too. Bill said the other guy elbowed him in the gut. Had to have been an accident, no one would have done it on purpose.

We both walked down the street, Bill smoking a cigarette, a habit that caught up to him in 1995 when they removed his right lung. At the end of Main Street, we crossed Buchanan and entered the park. Normally, at that point, we would have been able to see the bandstand, perched on a hill near the center of the park. During the summer, there’d be concerts: performances by the school marching band, a church choir singing some hymns, that kind of thing. Once a couple of kids from the high school had put together a pretty good rockabilly group, but somehow the parks committee passed an ordinance that banned rock ‘n’ roll in the park. Small towns, you know?

But now, there was a huge, faded yellow tent blocking the bandstand, like the kind in the circus or the kinds those old revival ministers like to use when they’re feelin’ the spirit and they like to feel your wallet too.

There was already a pretty large crowd around the tent and as Bill and I got closer, we could hear the fellow that Sarah had told us about. He sounded like a carnival barker all right. Bill and I walked faster down the path that lead to the tent. We pushed our way through the crowd, up toward the tent and where we thought the man was.

“Come on everybody, it’s getting’ close, getting’ close, we’re goin’ to have ourselves a heckuva time tonight, yes indeed, a HECKUVA time. We’ll be singin’, we’ll be dancin’ I PROMISE that and the Song and Dance Man always keeps his promises!”

We still couldn’t see him, still too many people were blocking the way. It looked like the whole town had shown up to see the Song and Dance Man. Bill tugged on my sleeve and pointed. I followed his finger and got bug eyed. It was Reverend Harper, the Baptist minister. I’ve lived a good long time, but I ain’t ever seen a man that could thump a Bible harder than he. Harper preached against the evils of sin; sin in drinking, sin in smoking reefer, sin in smoking tobacco, sin in lying and most of all, sin in dancing. And here he was lining up to get inside the tent too, ‘cause he certainly wasn’t preaching. We waved at him, Bill waving with the hand that held the cigarette and that old Baptist turned red as the Red Sea and turned and walked away. Bill and I grinned at each other and kept on walking toward the front and toward the Song and Dance Man.

Finally we broke through the crowd and there he was. He stood on an old crate, splintered and lookin’ like it was on the verge of collapsing under his feet. On the grass beside him lay a black fiddle case with gold trim along its edges. It looked old, older than the crate, older than the town. It seemed like something ancient.

He was all angles, all knees, elbows and shoulders. Tall and gangling, his body moving and bopping to the rhythm of his words. He wore a red and white pin-stripe jacket, looking like he belonged in a barber shop quartet. A straw hat sat on his head, always getting pushed back or pulled forward by his long fingered hands. Long, six fingered hands. I started when I saw that. I had read that it some folks are born with six fingers, but readin’ about something and seein’ it are two different things.

His eyes just about flashed blue lightning as he spoke and sparks nearly flew from those white teeth. And he just never stopped talking. Not for breath, not for questions, not for anything. Just kept up that patter like his very soul depended on it.

“All right, all right, all right, we’re getting’ close, getting’ real close, yes we are. Are you ready to dance? Are you ready to sing? Cause I’m ready to play my fiddle, yes I am, yes I am. Gotta fiddle at my feet and I’m ready to play. Ready to make those strings SING, can you believe it?”

He’s clap his hands and that’s as close to a pause he was willing to do.

Sarah and Sam came up to us now, having found us in the crowd. Sarah elbowed me in the rib and said, “What’d I tell you? Looks like he should be in a carnival tryin’ to get us in to see the bearded lady or somethin’.”

Sam nodded his head in greeting to us, which caused his glasses to slide down his nose and he gave them a short push back up to where they belonged. He was as tall as Bill, but nowhere near as built. He was the smart guy in our gang. You had to have someone like him around to tell how to do things like take apart the principal’s car and rebuild it in the school gym. Not that we ever did anything like that.

“What’s he sellin’?” asked Sam.

“A dance, I figure,” I said.

“What’s it cost?”

The Song and Dance Man must have heard him because he said, “What does it cost I hear you ask? Why it don’t cost a dollar and it don’t cost a quarter and it don’t cost a dime. Folks, this will cost you nothin’, just get on in and dance to the song all night long.”

We all looked at each other. Good deal. A little free music and space to dance? There wasn’t much to do in town back in those days and there still isn’t. This was almost too good to be true.

The Song and Dance Man stopped now, a minor miracle in and of itself. He dug deep into his pocket, pulled out a gold watch and checked the time. And then he grinned a grin that must have shown every one of his teeth. He repocketed the watch and said, “Folks, it’s time for the dance so come on in. Come on in, everyone because it’s time for the dance to begin.” And with that, he hopped down from his crate, grabbed it up with the fiddle and darted through the tent flaps.

Sarah, Bill, Sam and I nearly got mowed over in the rush to get inside, but we were still the first ones in. We stopped short when we pushed aside those big old tent flaps, but were quickly driven inside.

It was huge inside. There was a hardwood floor beneath our feet that looked like it must be oak, a dark, dark oak polished to a mirror shine. There were candles in holders all along the tent-pole posts and when I looked up, I couldn’t see the ceiling for all the darkness. It was like looking up at a starless night sky, where the moon didn’t dare show her face.

The crowd kept driving us and more and more people poured in. It wasn’t just the young people either. There was Missus Crenshaw, our Junior year English teacher who was in her fifties. There was Mr. Hoskins the principal. There was the good old Revered Harper, still looking embarrassed, but also like he couldn’t help himself. It really was the whole damn town. Hell, even the mayor was there with his wife, standing and talking with the chief of police.

Soon everyone was inside and the murmur from all the talking was nearly deafening. It was already getting warm in there and I was feeling cramped and claustrophobic. We were all looking for the Song and Dance Man, to see where he had gone. No one looked up, so no one saw him until the first pull of his fiddle bow.

He was there, on the center tentpole, sitting on a small, wooden platform, about twenty feet off the floor. God knows how he got up there, because there certainly wasn’t any ladder goin’ up. He dangled his feet over the edge and held his fiddle in one hand and the bow in the other. The fiddle and bow seemed to be made of that same dark wood that the floor was and gleamed in the candlelight like a thing alive. I almost doubted that the fiddle even needed the Song and Dance Man to make its strings hum.

We all looked up at him and he grinned and jumped to his feet while the crowd gasped, worried he might plummet into their midst.

And then he began to play.

He made those strings sing. I haven’t heard anyone play like that before or since and I thank God for that every day. It made the air around us crackle and spark. It loosened the joints and jolted the mind. You felt the urge to move deep in the bone, buried in the marrow. I grabbed Sarah’s hands and we began to move across the floor and everyone followed suit. Some with partners and some without. Some doing the foxtrot, some doing a waltz and some of us doing the twist. We dance, moved, shucked, jived, rocked and rolled.

I passed Reverend Harper moving his feet in a clunky boxstep with Eloise Grendel, an old battle-axe of a Catholic. I saw the mayor’s wife waltzing with Dan Adams, one of our firemen.

I swirled with Sarah, moving across the floor, bumping and jostling with the people around us. It was hot and getting hotter in there and it wasn’t long before it smelled of sweat and bodies moving against bodies. I felt dizzy, but we kept dancing together, kept dancing and not stopping. It was awhile before I realized that the Song and Dance Man was singing too, but in a language I didn’t understand.

He lorded over us, standing on that platform, making his fiddle sing and sing. His bow rose and fell, slid back and forth, side to side. He played like he talked. No breaks, no pauses, just a manic deluge of tunes while his tongue curled around words that had no business being said in this world.

I gave my head a shake as I spun with Sarah and I realized my legs were tired. My feet ached and my lower back was beginning to throb. I checked my watch and realized we had been dancing for a solid hour. I shook my head again, trying to shake off the dozy feeling that was clouding my thinking.

“Sarah,” I cleared my throat. I had only spoken in a whisper. My tongue felt thick and funny. I tried again, “Sarah.” Louder this time, but she still didn’t respond and we kept dancing. I shook her, but she didn’t respond. I kept shaking her until I realized I was doin’ it in time with the music.

So I just tried to stop. And I couldn’t. I couldn’t stop.

Underneath the fog, I began to feel frightened. I began to see the faces of the other people now. I saw their terror. Reverend Harper’s face had grown redder than it had been before. Sweat poured down his face, but still he kept moving, twirling Missus Grendel around and around, her head lolling from side to side. She had fainted, but her feet were still moving. We moved past Bill who danced with Susie Watkins and I saw her frightened eyes darting around the room, but Bill bobbed his head in time with music and his glassy eyes looked at nothing in particular.

The Song and Dance Man laughed from his perch and kept playing, tapping his feet. His eyes were glowing in that dark, humid place. Glowed and glowed and light glanced off the bow with each sweep.

I heard a scream and swiveled my head to watch a woman drop to the floor holding her leg. She had cramped up. I was envious. She got to stop. She got to rest. My own legs felt like dead wood and the ache in my back had deepened.

Then her partner stepped on her ankle and I heard the crunch from across the room. He was still dancing, his eyes blank and empty as he moved. She screamed again and started to crawl away, but began to stand up instead. She started to dance, bringing her weight down on the broken ankle. Again and again and again. I turned away, but I couldn’t block the sound of her sobbing.

The music ran on.

I checked my watch again and it was three hours now. We didn’t flag. Didn’t falter. We kept up the same speed as the fiddle. The damning fiddle. Rapping our feet against the floor. Never mind the blisters that burst. Never mind broken toes or broken ankles. Never mind that deep pain buried in the spine that refused to go. Never mind old hearts and bad knees.

We kept up that frantic pace as one mass: a bobbing, thumping, jumping creature with one mind.

Reverend Harper died at one point. I watched it happen. He was holding up the still fainted Missus Grendel (whose feet still moved with the music) when he dropped her. And then fell to the floor. He twitched once, his feet beating a quick, staccato rhythm and then was still. Missus Grendel got back up and kept on moving. I watched Harper as I danced, trying to see if he was breathing.

He wasn’t. I swear to you he wasn’t. But he still got back up. He was dead, but he still got back and began to dance again. He turned to look at me, and he grinned the Song and Dance Man’s grin. His eyes were red, filled with blood from whatever had broken in his brain. I watched as a single red tear rolled down his cheek.

I shut my eyes and kept moving.

Harper wasn’t the last. He probably wasn’t the first. The old and the sick were the first to drop. Exhaustion, heart attacks, hemorrhages somewhere deep inside, they died. And then they got back and kept dancing, grinning their grins.

I passed Sam and Lizzie. He had lost his glasses at some point. His eyes darted around, terribly aware. I looked at his leg and I saw a jut of bone tearing through his denim jeans. There was a trail of blood behind him and as he swirled, a spray landed on the legs of the people around him. He stepped on that broken leg, twirled on it, jumped on it. All in time with that fiddle.

The night passed.

I remember stepping on something at one point and realizing I had just crushed Missus Dempsey’s right hand. She was lying on her back on the dance floor. She had been stepped on time and again. I could even see a man’s shoeprint on her stomach. Her head had been caved in, her chest beneath her dress had a sunken look. And still she was trying to get up to keep moving.

The smell of blood mixed with the sweat and I couldn’t breathe anymore. The air was thick and from all around I could hear cries, screams, but nothing that drowned out the fiddle or the Song and Dance Man’s singing.

And then it stopped. I danced one more step and then stopped myself. I looked up at the platform. We all did, craning our necks upward. He was checking his pocket watch.

“All right folks! That’s all for tonight! The dancing is done and the morning has come. You may leave if you can walk and you should walk quick cause this Song and Dance Man is gonna be gone.”

We all stood there, like stunned cattle. And then marched to the tentflaps. No one ran, because they couldn’t. It was a miracle we could walk. Sarah stepped ahead of me and left, but I stayed behind. I turned and looked. And saw at least twenty people still standing there. Harper was among them. They were all grinning, their eyes empty. They stood and made no sign of wanting to leave.

“Go on now friend, the Song and Dance Man has what he wants, but he’d be glad to add you too if you tarry and dally too long.” I looked up at him and saw him smile. And then I turned my back to him and left the tent. When I turned back again it was gone along with the people inside.

That’s the story of what happened. The others won’t tell it or pretend it never happened. Never mind the 21 people that vanished that night, the mayor’s wife included. They’d rather not think about it.

Sarah and I took Sam to the hospital over in the next county, far from folks that knew what had happened, where they had to remove his leg. Sam was quiet before and was quieter still after, pulling odd jobs that a one-legged man could do. Doesn’t move around much nowadays, just sits on his porch, a cane across his lap and massages the stump with his hand. Says it bothers him on cold nights. And warm nights. And wet nights and dry nights.

Bill left and joined the army, stayed in long enough to fight in Vietnam and won a bunch of medals. Came back and settled down to drink and drink hard and if you want to find him, you can find him in Eddie Dixon’s bar. No matter how drunk he gets though, he doesn’t talk about that night.

None of us saw much of Sarah after. She came through the best, but that’s how she always was. She left and went to college, but like Bill, she got pulled back to Belle Carne. She teaches over at the high school now, teaching English to the Juniors.

And I stayed here, plugging away at the hardware store. I ran it for a while, but now I don’t do much of anything. Just sitting around with Sam on his porch, talkin’ about things sometimes. Though not often. Because if I stay too late, stay too long, I’ll see his eyes go glassy behind those coke-bottle lenses and he’ll disappear into himself. And I’ll catch him humming a faint trace of a song and the hairs on my neck stand on end and goosebumps rise on my arms in great knots.

And my foot will start to tap out a small beat on the hardwood porch and a big wide grin will spread across Sam’s face. The grin of the Song and Dance Man

I was a headmaster then, at a Primary school in Northamptonshire, about six years away from retiring. A boy called Chris was sent into my office for locking two other students in the tech cupboard, a room where we kept equipment for the science lessons taught at the school. I knew of him, knew he was a good student; he’d once shared some work in a school assembly. He had always seemed to me quite bright and a little shy. Not so that day. He was making a great fuss, I remember, about being sent to see me.

“It’s not right, this isn’t right” he repeated over and over as Judy, his teacher, practically carried him in. She explained the situation to me and then left to get back to her class. I remember I sat silently staring at him from behind my desk, the stern look I reserved for such situations across my face. Again and again he said it:

“This isn’t right; it’s not supposed to be like this.”

He looked odd; panicked and upset, though not in the way one would expect a ten year old to be on being sent to the headmaster’s office. His eyes darted back and forth, as my own have many times when in bursts of rapid thought. Eventually I spoke over him.

“Christopher. This is very disappointing.”

I always used a full first name if I was giving a child a telling off, it sounds so much more serious. He took little notice and carried on repeating those same words, glancing this way and that, looking utterly confused.

“Christopher. Christopher. Look at me when I’m speaking. Christopher!”

I remember I raised my voice almost to a shout as I said his name that last time, something I rarely did. His eyes snapped onto mine as he fell silent. I expected to see them gloss over, it’s a dreadful thing to make a child cry, and so I began again in a calmer tone:

“It’s disappointing to have you sent-”

“Look, something’s gone wrong somewhere. This isn’t supposed to happen like this.”

I was shocked to be interrupted, but what startled me, what left me speechless for those few moments as he carried on, was the way he spoke. His voice was that of a young boy, to be sure, but as if under the control of someone far older. His enunciation was clear and precise, his tone somehow mature and serious.

“I just need to think for a moment, I can sort this out. I just need to think.”

His eyes went back to their darting to and fro. I had found my voice by now.

“I expect you to listen when I am talking to you young man. Do not interrupt me when I am speaking.”

His eyes fixed onto my own again and he spoke before I could continue.

“Sure, sure, Ok. Look, just give me five minutes to talk ok. Five minutes, that’s all I’m asking.”

I’m not sure what made me do it; perhaps it was just the peculiarity of the whole situation so far. I sat back in my chair, took the pipe out of my top drawer and began to fill its end with tobacco, for one was still allowed to smoke indoors at this point in Britain.

“Five minutes.”

I lit the pipe and popped it into my mouth, gesturing that he sit down in a chair next to my desk, which he did, and let him speak.

“Ok, how do I… I’ve been here before, well not in this situation, but at this school, at this time; I’ve lived through this before. I’ve… have you ever seen the film Groundhog Day?”

I shook me head.

“Ok, well… have you ever thought about going back in time, back to an earlier point, but as you are now? Travelling back to redo some of your life with the knowledge you have now? Well, that’s what’s happened to me, only… only I can’t control it, and I can’t stop it.”

He sat back a little further on the chair now, his face became grim as he looked out of a window across the room.

“I live life normally until my thirtieth birthday, and then I wake up a four year old, back in a house I haven’t lived in for twenty four years. It sounds great, being young again, getting to go back and do things better… but it’s a nightmare. The first time through, I showed off, I’d been a doctor of philosophy before I went back, I could do advanced mathematics, quote Shakespeare, play the piano; it was fun. I was a prodigy. But all the attention I got for me, got taken away from my younger brother. He wasn’t the same brother I’d known before. And what was worse-“

For the first time I saw his eyes become glazed and that piercing voice began to tremble.

“With so much time and effort put into me, my parents never had any more children. I had another brother and sister before, and suddenly they didn’t exist, and it was because of me. I tried to tell people about what was going on, but it’s a hard thing to prove. I’d tell them sports results that hadn’t yet happened, warn them of natural disasters. When it became apparent that my predictions were right I was taken off to study. Drugged in a white walled room. You can’t imagine how long twenty years can take in a padded cell…”

He went silent for a moment, staring blankly out of the window. Then his eyes came back to me.

“But it happened again, I woke up one morning in my parent’s house twenty six years younger. That second time round my parents had two more children, but they weren’t the brother and sister I should have had. They were different, and the others were gone. Now if I try to get the first ones back I’m writing two other kids out of existence. You can’t imagine the guilt…”

He stood up then, and walked over to look at me over the desk, his head only just reaching over it so he could see me.

“Now I need your help. This is my twelfth time. I think if I can make it right, if I can keep everything the way it was supposed to be, maybe it’ll go on. Maybe I won’t have to keep doing this. I wasn’t supposed to be sent here, you aren’t supposed to talk to my mother about this. Look-”

He grabbed a piece of paper and a pen and began scribbling something down. He handed it over after a moment. I forget what he had written exactly; some extremely complex looking mathematical proof.

“No ten year old should know this stuff.”

He grabbed another sheet and began furiously writing again. Names, dates, events, he passed it to me.

“I know it sounds crazy now, but just, just look. These are all things yet to come, you’ll see, take it. Bet on the results, make some money. But please, don’t interfere now, or again. You aren’t supposed to be involved in this.”

I remember only a little of the conversation after that. It was ridiculous, what he was saying, how could I possibly believe it. I told him to stop talking such nonsense and sent him back to his class. I called his mother into my office when she came to collect him and told her about his misbehaving and this strange outburst. I kept his list though, I’m not sure why I did it, but I kept it, safely filed away in my study at home.

I read in a paper a few years later that Chris had killed himself, around the time he told me his second brother should be born. I learnt later that his mother had miscarried. I worry now whether that was my doing. Maybe if I’d done as he asked things would have gone differently, who knows what effect that conversation with her had.

It is now the afternoon of July 21st 2017, the day before Chris would be due to turn 30. Everything on the list that boy furiously scribbled down that day has happened. World cup victories, Hurricanes, the bombing of the twin towers over in the US. Everything just as he wrote it.

But now my thoughts turn to tomorrow. What happens to me? What happens to my daughter, to my grandchildren? If everything goes back so he can live through it again, where do we go? Do we carry on without him? Or will we just never wake up; just disappear?

I’ve lived a long life and I’ve done a great many things, but none haunt me so much as that conversation, and I’ve never felt as much dread as I do today. If we really do start over, I hope I listen the next time through.

Now, when the audio cut, it doesn't sound complete, it's not finished, not over. The producers of AS/CN were purposely cutting off the rest of the sound, and for good reason. The rest that followed was the exact reason why you'll never see this bumper again on the air.

Once again, it's supposedly only run for about nine seconds, and this is a rough transcript of the usual audio: Resonating metal, followed by a rumble, followed by scraping metal, and other rumble. End bumper. So what could you put together with that? Nothing rings a bell, right? Exactly.

This part that they used is utilized effectively to scare off children that have still tuned in to Adult Swim. It even gives adults goose bumps because it's that good. It's closely rivaled with the hammer clinks in the "William Street" production card in nightmare fuel.

Getting back on topic, usually a Cartoon Network employee would enter the control room left by an Adult Swim crew member and take over for a day. It wasn't quite the case that day, however. The usual man schedule to cue the sign-on and such programming for CN for some reason did not start up the day schedule. No one knows if he did this purposely, and whether or not his contract was terminated. This was the least of problems CN had at the time. What followed the common nine-seconds was an extended two-minute broadcast of some of the most horrifying audio ever heard on public television.

The metal continued to resonate, and the scraping continued. Slowly, an uncontrollable sobbing came clearer. Not one person was crying, but a multitude of people were screaming and yelling.

As the metal scraped, the screaming grew louder. Soon, you could hear the slicing of flesh, the grinding of bones, the gushing of blood, and the guttural death rattles of people dying.

All across the United States, millions of children and adults were being exposed to what sounded like a barbaric mass murder. People were calling in all across the country, crying or screaming or begging for it to be turned off. Something kept their eyes attached to the screen and kept them listening to the broadcast.

People assume the control room was finally gotten into, and the bump was shut down, ending a traumatic experience no one could undoubtedly forget. In the last few moments as the resonating metal grew into an unbearable volume, the channel showed the peeking sun winking at the viewer, and the channel cut to Bars and Tones.

How was Cartoon Network going to cover this up? No one knows their exact tactic to this day. Multiple theories have been thought of, ranging from a pre-emptive "cease and desist" to possible news articles to subliminal viewer hypnosis over the following weeks.

While all public evidence does not officially exist, Cartoon Network officials do acknowledge a hijacking of the channel's frequency on the day but go into no further detail. All late morning bumps, including TDIYE, were replaced with the corresponding ones from the 1:30 AM timeslot. Word is, however, that somewhere hidden in an onion site (accessible only via Tor) is a recording of the bump played that morning.

The question asked the most among the few who remember this is how Cartoon Network got the audio in the first place.

I’m just like you, only one day the creepy part of my life could no longer be contained to the realm of other peoples’ stories. Every person who writes one of these has had this moment. All of a sudden, everything is real an inescapable and you regret ever seeking a quick scare in the first place. Sometimes it happens on purpose, and sometimes it just pops up in an unexpected place and you don’t even realize it until it’s too late. Sorry for rambling, but this is one of those.

It all began with a hippie roommate and Lot, or “the place where things get weird.” It’s a music festival, but it’s more. Lot is a place where music and people and drugs all become one (for the right price). If you’re really concerned about technicalities, it’s a version of the parking lots where Grateful Dead fans used to accumulate before/after/during shows.

It was at one such show where it all changed.

I was wandering around between bands one afternoon when a glimmer of something in the tall grass caught my eye. With a sense of childlike wonder one can only attribute to being high as a kite, I approached the shiny. When I got closer I saw that it was pouch of aluminum foil. Trash anywhere else, at a hippie festival this is a ground score. Like a child on Christmas I peeled open the little envelope to expose a few small squares of paper.

Each of the squares was different. I’d seen blotter acid a few times and recognized most of the prints. One was a mystery to me. I spent a lot of time fixating on it, but the best I could figure from the piece I had was that it was some kind of fractal with an odd script I didn’t quite recognize. When I first looked at my prize it had appeared to be purple and green, but later it seemed reddish. Who knows, because I promptly ate a few of the more familiar pieces and went about my weekend. Had a good time.

When it was time to return to the real world, I brought the mystery dose home and promptly forgot about it.

A few months later the restaurant I worked for closed and I found myself moving back in with my parents. Luckily, they were at the point in life where traveling had become a semi-regular occurrence and about two weeks into unemployment I found myself sitting in their empty house staring at my little foil pouch on a Saturday night.

I was unburdened by responsibilities and my parents wouldn’t be home until next Friday, so I knew I had plenty of time for that mystery hit. I decided to take some time to fast and meditate to get the proper ‘set’ to go with my setting and the unknown dosages I was in for. I took the hit around six in the evening and watched dusk creep in.

I started watching some Doctor Who around seven, and began to feel screwed about nine. I know it’s wrong to feel screwed out of something free, but I was really excited about this unknown experience. It was looking like it was all for nothing. By 10:30 I had retired to my normal evening past time of browsing r/nosleep and assorted creepypasta archives while making sarcastic and skeptical comments. Something about laughing at the story that just made me pee myself a little softened the blow, doing wonders to alleviate my fears.

A little bit before midnight, and long after I’d written off the drug, it felt like lead ball fell in my stomach. I doubled over in surprise and tried to catch my breath. I thought I heard someone laughing. I closed my eyes as another wave of cramping shot through my guts and when I opened them everything had gone grey.

Usually acid made my world vibrant and new, but this was just scary. The shadows seemed to pulse and ebb with some sort of malicious intent I couldn’t quite understand. I quickly pulled my feet up to the couch and wrapped my arms around my legs. I sat there shaking for what felt like hours. Any time I glanced at the clock it said the same thing: 00:00.

I kept reminding myself that this was a drug-induced state, that this would eventually end and everything would go back to normal. It’s the hardest thing to believe when you begin to loose yourself, and the overwhelming despair that threatened to drown me was making my situation even more difficult. The shadows seemed tangible as they ebbed towards my upholstered sanctuary, and I knew dread. Not the fight or flight, adrenaline-pumping terror, but a deep certainty that something was wrong, I was in danger, and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.

I still don’t know why I thought it would help to close my eyes.

Tortured faces, distorted in agony, screamed behind my eyelids. I only saw their faces, so I was left to imagine the cause of their misery. As soon as their eyes began to cloud over to embrace death as their final relief, they would be replaced by a new victim. And screaming…

I didn’t understand how I could have missed that screaming before; it seemed to be surrounding me. It sounded off though, like some demented sound editor chose only the peak moments of anguish from thousands of screams and blended them together in an unending loop of the most brutal and unnerving compilation of human suffering. A blood curdling shriek from the pale blonde housewife faded into a teenaged boy groaning into a old man’s wail into another face and another voice.

When I opened my eyes, the faces were gone. The shadows seemed subdued, no longer emanating the same aggression that was so intimidating before. The screaming continued though. It was soft and nagging, barely louder than the sound of my heartbeat pounding in my ears. I figured I could tune it out with a little music. Hopefully, the right tunes would draw me to a better trip on their own.

I couldn’t find my iPod, so I weighed my options. I could risk it with the TV, but I had some mildly unsettling experiences in the past involving cable while tripping so that should probably stay out. The entire CD collection in my mom’s 50-disc changer was hair metal, country, and adult contemporary. Computers, with their screens and mouses and keyboards, are just too hard for one in my condition. Time to fall back on vinyl.

I’m going to interject here things I wish I would have remembered before getting my heart set on some Beatles. Thing the first is that the record player was located in a spare bedroom on the far end of my basement. The room in itself was nice enough ever since I cleaned and furnished it to have a ‘me zone’ when I was a teen, but that’s where the next thing comes in. The rest of my basement was an unfinished pit full of junk we were too frugal to throw away but hadn’t missed in years. I mean, concrete floors, exposed rafters, constant leaking, and plywood ‘walls’ separating the rooms. You also had to walk through the cluttered garage and down the stairs with the impossible to reach light bulb socket to get there.

Filled with the bravado of my new mission, I began my journey. The trek went smoothly enough through the well lit garage, but the stairs were menacing even when sober. When the bulb that lit the stairwell burnt out, replacing it involved a precarious arrangement involving balancing our ladder about two-thirds of the way up the stairs. All I’m trying to say is, this bulb was seldom replaced. With the unlit basement waiting at the bottom, the pool of garage light seemed powerless against the shadows.

As I began the long descent, I watched as the amorphous tentacles of darkness crawled up the pale wall past me. It was surrounding me. I didn’t brace myself with the handrail for fear this thing hiding in the dim corners of my world might touch me. I jumped and tripped down the last couple of stairs and stumbled through the basement door. I could have sworn I heard my name in the screaming.

At this volume, the screams were almost like a song. They were still as gut-wrenchingly brutal as ever, but now that it wasn’t as overwhelming I could hear how the rise and fall and changes in tone between the screams meshed together to resemble something like the slow, drawn out chanting of monks. Maybe my mind was just looking for patterns, trying to make sense of this chaos any way it could.

I felt around on the wall for the light switch I knew had always been there. I knew this basement well, but for some reason I couldn’t find the switch. The darkness seemed to throb while I continued my search in vain.

My only option was to sprint to the corner where the next light switch was. For some reason I didn’t want to show weakness to the shadows that were threatening my sanity, if not my very existence. That, and my fear of physical contact with the shadows, kept me from safely feeling my way along the wall like a sane person. I darted to the point where I thought the corner was and reached for the light to my left.

There was nothing. No wall, and certainly no instant safety brought on by a welcome pool of light. I ran blindly, now certain this was not a safe place to be. I couldn’t see the light from the garage where I had come in, and I began to panic. I thundered through another door and finally found the light switch I’d been searching so desperately for. Somehow I had found my way to my room, my sanctuary, and there was light.

The light was so welcome at first that I didn’t miss color. Compared to the unknown I’d traveled through to get here, even the sharp shadows cast by the naked bulb hanging from the ceiling were accepted. I couldn’t welcome the sight of anything that menacing, that ominous, but at least I knew where it was and where it stopped. If I could see it, I could run away; if I could see it, I would be safe.

I was beginning to think everything was going to be okay after all. If I couldn’t get myself out of this bad trip, I could still exert control, even if only by responding rationally to an irrational situation. I convinced myself that I was on the other side of the peak and that things would only get better from this point. I fired up the turn-table and started digging through the vinyl bin.

I needed something mellow enough to calm me down, familiar enough to take me to a good place, and trippy enough to distract me. That meant the acid rock classic, Sergeant Pepper. I’d tripped to it many times, and it was a sort of stand-by.

I started up a couple of novelty lights I had (a variety of colored lights and a laser light projector). Soon I was ignoring the menacing shadows on the floor in favor of the shifting patterns on my ceiling. I was getting through this trauma with a little help from my friends. When it came time for Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds, I fell into the song as I had many times before.

My eyes slid shut as I began to picture myself in a boat on a river in a wonderful, awesome, and colorful world. Somebody called me, and I turned in my mind to the place where the girl with kaleidoscope eyes often stood. She was there, but she too was screaming. Her eyes weren’t the pools of color I was used to getting lost in, but pits writhing with the constant swell of the shadows. The screams came back with renewed vigor, drowning out John Lennon’s attempts to soothe my freakout. In my mind, I turned to run from the terrifying vision of Lucy, and was greeted by tangerine trees smoldering against a ash-streaked marmalade sky. The shades of grey invaded my imagination; painting the entire landscape in harsh and uninspired tones.

When I opened my eyes, I was relieved to see traces of color had slipped in under the radar while I had been gone. The warm colors seemed to be creeping back in through the reds in the wood paneled walls and the lights I was running cast intermittent beams of red light through the otherwise greyscale world. As welcome as the small step towards normalcy was, the red glow was almost as unsettling as the shadows. I stood up to kill the lights and locked eyes with my reflection in a mirror across the room.

The woman in the mirror looked just like me. She had my hair, my nose, my mouth. But her mouth was screaming. I could hear her clearly in my mind not instead of the other screams, but over them. The chorus of shrieks seemed to be speeding up, sounding more and more like a message. If only I would stop screaming, maybe I could make out what they were trying to tell me.

The eyes in the mirror were just like the girl in my mind: oceans of darkness and menace twisting and surging against the surface and threatening to break free. I lifted my hands to my mouth and found it closed as I’d expected, though I’d hoped I really was the one screaming. My mirror self also lifted her hand to her mouth. She had a pistol in her hands. I watched anxiously as she placed the barrel in her mouth. Her screaming had stopped, but I filled the vacancy with my own.

I turned away when she put her finger on the trigger. I heard the gunshot. I couldn’t bring myself to look at the mirror again. I couldn’t sit by and idly watch myself blow my brains out, and I didn’t want to see what was left of me. I wrapped myself head to toe in an old sleeping bag and curled up in the recliner. The looping screams continued to build momentum, coming faster and faster until it was impossible to deny it was a carefully crafted message.

The shadows inched closer to me, licking the floor at the base of my chair. The dread that had been growing since this started had grown into an inferno of terrified adrenaline, with every muscle in my body pleading me to run. As much as I wanted to flee, to escape this horror, I knew it would follow me wherever I went. I knew the shadows would always be a few steps outside of the light, creeping and waiting. For now, they seemed content to toy with me. The darkness seemed eager, but for whatever reason it wasn’t closing in. Was it waiting for something?

On queue, the looping chain of cries grew almost deafening. After listening to the repetition for so long, it was hard to hear anything but disjointed syllables. Unfortunately, like Mad Gabs, once it clicked it was impossible not to hear.

“Jenny, we are the monsters in the shadows. We are the things that go bump in the night. We’ve been watching you.”

I remained in my cocoon until the sun lit my basement room. I never bothered to turn the record over, I just sat in the red room and stared at the grasping fingers of my shadowed tormentors. I ran through the basement up into the house like my life depended on it. Maybe because it did.

The rest of the colors came back gradually once I was upstairs and in the sunlight. I figured I was straight again. That was about noon on Monday. I wasted the rest of the day playing mindless flash games and watching Netflix. Everything was golden until I went to bed.

I haven’t been able to sleep. According to my computer, it’s Thursday. That means it’s been five days. Five days and every time I close my eyes I see the same victims from before, only now I’m just watching them die. The housewife appears and sobs softly before letting go of her suffering. The teenage boy cries out for his mother one last time. The old man chokes mid-scream and twitches silently for a few moments.

The screams have stopped. I actually haven’t heard them at all since I deciphered the message. That’s all they needed to say to me. I never thought I’d say this, but I wish they’d come back. I wish they would tell me what they want from me. The silence is deafening.

I keep catching glimpses of myself in the mirror. I can’t bring myself to look directly at it. I’m terrified that’s their last message for me. They wanted me to see it the first time, but I ignored them. They’re telling me what I have to do. They’re showing me the way out.

My parents will be home tomorrow. I only have to make it one more night and Mommy and Daddy will be here to make it safe and warm. I made sure to turn on all of the lights in the house well before dusk, but that doesn’t keep them away entirely. There will always be another dark corner and another void behind the couch or under the bed. They always find a place to creep in, and they are constantly reaching just a little further into the light than they should.

The light in the kitchen just flickered out. Only an extremely paranoid person would say this is anything more than chance. Then again, the bathroom down the hall just went dark.

There are things that reside in the dark corners of our world. They are very real, and they don’t like to be mocked.