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MUAHAA THE FRENCH
Jul 31, 2009


you see my friend, we've
both been boiled alive

bored. writing something which maybe will become extensive and borrows (steals??) very heavily from earlier posts in this thread about the slender man. excerpt (interview with man in asylum):

“It showed me... things. Now, it didn't mean to. I don't think it really knows or values the concept of communication. But, as it, wal- crawled- moved-”

There was a sudden pause. His brow furled over, crinkled, and sweat began to run from his pores. As he closed his eyes, tears streamed from them, but he didn't look like he was crying... I noticed his arm hairs standing straight up, thought it was his nerves, but then I realized – the temperature in the room suddenly felt like it had dropped below freezing.

The cigarette in his hand... it went out. Acrid smoke furled and blew away as if on the breeze, though there was no wind.

“I felt it, I knew what it was, I saw its past and future – Christ...”

Harris opened his eyes again, his pupils were dilated to the point where the irises were slivers surrounded by a blood-streaked whites. He slammed his hands to the table, he swept the recorder away, he tossed my papers onto the floor, and he clenched them so tightly blood wept from his fists – so much blood – never seen anyone do that to himself. A man possessed.

“Harris, we can – we can stop now-” ... Knowing it was far too late.

Johnson screamed. It's ridiculous – can't possibly be – but it wasn't human, it was the screech of a banshee, there was no soul left in this man, whatever had been was swept and torn and slashed away till there was nothing but raw primal fear – and he howled. The door banged suddenly, orderlies trying to force it open.

“I saw the end. I saw death on the pale horse - no face - and god, oh god! I saw it smile. How did it smile? It SMILED! IT SAW ME, AND IT SMILED!”

He suddenly stopped, turned, stared – stared at me with a dead man's eyes. I moaned as his mouth leered unnaturally wide, a single stream of blood running from the left corner, and there was an unnatural quiet, the door was still being thrust at but there was no noise, and we stared into each others' eyes for an eternity.

Croaking, barely audible...

“Why? Why did it smile?”

And then the door burst, and the last thing I remember before I lost consciousness is a rush of orderlies tackling Harris to the ground, blood splattering from his shredded palms as he hit the ground – and behind them, unseen, a flash, a flash of a man in a suit.

No... not a man.

MUAHAA THE FRENCH fucked around with this message at 09:56 on Oct 6, 2009

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MUAHAA THE FRENCH
Jul 31, 2009


you see my friend, we've
both been boiled alive

Reverend Gnome posted:

Oh, man, some of that was really, really creepy. Nice work.

thanks! any other comments? i think i'm going to lean towards a professor beginning to see links between disasters/murders with the slender man, deciding to investigate the emergence of a strange cultural myth... but it turns out it's becoming more real than he ever imagined. that's a really lovely way of phrasing it but yeah.

don't know whether i want to link it to GOVERNMENT CONSPIRACY yet but i might because that's fun as gently caress.

MUAHAA THE FRENCH
Jul 31, 2009


you see my friend, we've
both been boiled alive



class doodles... mid-transformation? partial true form? can we ever really know?

i tried to imagine his suit as somehow organic, like a peeling layer of skin, believable from a distance but...

MUAHAA THE FRENCH fucked around with this message at 22:57 on Oct 6, 2009

MUAHAA THE FRENCH
Jul 31, 2009


you see my friend, we've
both been boiled alive

I haven't written in a VERY long time, but I was inspired by this. it's also the first time i've written in first person, so it's more than a little choppy. this story is going to be a lot longer hopefully. tips appreciated.

My name is Raymond Bates, but if you are reading this, you already know that. You know that because the only persons who will read this report are the psychological and nursing staff at the Greater Miami County Mental Rehabilitation Institute, and... well... the men who study what drove me here. You already know I was an Adjunct Professor of Parapsychology at the Tulane University Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory. You know I am 34 years of age, white, atheist, an alcoholic, and you probably know that I got an 800 on the verbal SATs, and a perfect on the LSATS too, but I decided to grad school in Parapsychology for reasons you will never understand. All of this is listed in my extended medical report, and all of this is completely irrelevant to the story you are about to read, the story that I was ordered to write, the story that I will – well. The story that an orderly will eventually have to transcribe, because by the end of this story, the only way you'll be able to get me to talk will be by strapping me to a board and torturing me. I know this because... I can see things now. I can see things I never wanted to see. I can see that the world will never be the same for me and that everything that comes into contact with me will never be the same, either.

I know this, and you know this, because I do not recognize the State of Louisiana's State Attorney Office's claim that I am responsible for the deaths of five people on October 8th, 2009, and this has made me the focus of an intensive state and federal investigation into my life and the events that transpired that day. And the story of my life is irrelevant, because the events that happened that day are... well... what happened that day is not really...

You'll see. I'll tell you. But to tell you what happened on October 8th, I will have to tell you the story of the year before that.

=================

It was August, 2008, and I was doing research on extrasensory perception and paranormal manifestation phenomena. Tulane didn't take the EARL program very seriously. In fact, other than Professor Stewart and four unpaid interns, I was the EARL program. We coordinated with a similar program at Princeton before it got shut down the year before due to lack of funding. Retrospectively, it is a miracle that Tulane even kept a professor of my discipline around – it's exceptionally hard to find students willing to take a parapsychology major in this day and age, and discipline has really been in decline since the 70's. Now, the weird thing was, all the other students I had gone to grad with, and most of the professors I had learned with, had all dropped out of contact in some way or another. There was a running joke in the small circles that kept in contact with one another that they all had to be being bought out by the government, for their ghost warfare lab at DoD. No one took this seriously, but I can't think of that anymore without wanting to scream.

Don't get me wrong. I don't think the federal government has a ghost warfare lab. That's... well, it's inane, and no one took the idea as anything more than a lame joke, the kind of thing people giggled politely at at parties, or made sly references to in periodicals, without really finding it funny or amusing... but there was this undercurrent of suspicion, and real fear, as to why our colleagues had dropped off the face of the planet, why no one had heard from them or their loved ones, why their relations hung up the phone at the first mention of parapsychology or engineering anomalies or phenomena classification research.

At the time, we assumed it was shame, shame at a profession which the real world had never taken seriously, and had less of a use for every passing day, and they merely wanted to be cut off from their embarrassment, their chagrin, their thorough discredit, their... well... hate.

And, in a way, this was thoroughly understandable. The extrasensory perception segment of my research was a joke even in paranormal research circles. Have you ever seen Ghostbusters? (I'm going to state here and now, that in my profession, this was considered the pinnacle of modern filmmaking.) There's a scene in the beginning where Professor Venkman – he's this ghost hunter – is holding notecards backwards at a cute undergrad, and asking her to guess what's on the other side, and of course she gets it wrong but he won't admit it, saying she has all this psychic talent, and with the obvious intent of sleeping with her – well, that's what I did, sometimes six hours in a row, except there wasn't any cute female undergrads. There was a specific brand of student which would volunteer for that kind of research, and they were usually male, greasy, and thoroughly unpleasant to be around for more than five minutes. One guy kept on seeing demonic symbology on the back of cards for about a half an hour until I nearly physically punched him - it was ink blots, you know, not a seance or a Necronomicon masturbation marathon or something.

The paranormal manifestation investigation phase of my job was far more interesting. We'd get a call. A hint. If we were lucky, the paranormality had been within an hour or two, otherwise we were just chasing ghosts, ha-ha, a little bit of... nevermind. So, we'd get an alert, usually from a guy we had in the local PD who didn't want to waste police resources on spook hunts, or from a webboard where local enthusiasts collaborated, and then we'd head out in the ghost van, ha, just this... it all sounds so trite now. It was a van with a ghost and Tulane EARL acronym painted on the side. Professor Stewart and I – I guess, the late Professor...

I'm sorry, I need a minute. Just a minute. I'm trying to focus on explaining what I did, before what happened, and... god. God. I'm sorry. Let me, let me refocus here.

You have to realize New Orleans had its share of 'ghost' sightings. None of them ever amounted to anything. We didn't get significant, I mean statistically significant, results in six years of research. It was a miracle Stewart and I weren't sacked after the first, but it was New Orleans, and there was always a demand for a class on the mythology of New Orleans, or an elective in basic parapsychological studies, or what-not, and the university tolerated us beyond the point of tenure, and that was that.

We do sound kind of pathetic, and... well... we were. Once, twice a month, chasing after ghosts, half the time it was pranks, the other half a scared housewife, never once something conclusive, occasionally a glimpse of something unreal, but never anything we could prove or even observe beyond the plausibility of a hoax. So we mostly occupied ourselves writing cultural histories of mythology, some research into the fields related to our actually scientifically-derived equipment – even though we were dreadfully unqualified, and any contributions laughable – and a few times a month, we got to live, really get out of our shell, do what we really wanted to do – it sounds so loving stupid now – hunt ghosts.

Hop in our early-90s van full of obsolete, old equipment, pay for our own gas, drive to the location, and get to work.

So, now, when a paranormal manifestation appeared – hopefully we would be ready to move in, set up a perimeter, you know, seal off access, interview the witness, and hopefully ask local law enforcement out of the area, that kind of thing – and then we could get to work. Set up our equipment – we had technical experience, could set up the monitoring equipment, video feeds, etc, you know, all within ten-fifteen minutes – and we could have spectroscopic scanners, EMF meters – that's electro-magnetic field, subtle variations in the earth's natural magnetic field, we could triangulate movement with a proper network, I'll be layman from now on – ion and geiger counters, sub-solution nets, subsonic sound monitoring, the works, but in reality all of this equipment was late 80s, maybe early 90s at best, a lot of it off Ebay, we were really running a lovely operation. More like a hobby than a career.

We had some interesting cases. A poltergeist moving desks in broad daylight in a school. Screeching in a nearly-abandoned theater at night. Once we had an abandoned nightclub, needed to be renovated, right off Bourbon Street, which the new owner kept insisting was bleeding from the walls, which we got some bizarre readings off of, but never – I mean never – did we have a case where there wasn't a 'rational' explanation.

It was August 18th, 2008, when it all changed forever, that call I will never forget, that Stewart wouldn't either until the night he died.

MUAHAA THE FRENCH fucked around with this message at 08:41 on Oct 8, 2009

MUAHAA THE FRENCH
Jul 31, 2009


you see my friend, we've
both been boiled alive

Rikaz posted:

Saw the videos right before I had to go to bed, got to be the most unnerving thing I've seen in a really long time, had to wake up every five minutes to check that my door wasn't open, woke up early exhausted and drew this.



whoah! I think this is my favorite painting so far.