Bottle

My damnation came in the form of a bottle.

No, not like that.

When I was a child, my best friend lived next to a little junkyard. Great place for a kid to hang out, a junkyard. Full of mystery and exciting discoveries. If you find anything nice, nobody minds if you take it except your parents (obviously). Well, not my friend's mom. Most of their bowls and plates came from that junkyard. Anyway...

One day a bunch of us were hanging out, dismantling a car. Some of us might have been interested in the parts, but I just thought breaking stuff was great. When we'd got the engine strewn everywhere, we set to work on the interior. Laying under one of the seats was a little glass bottle full of green, bubbly liquid.

Curiosity trumped hygeine in those days. I uncorked it and sniffed it. The smell was pleasant, minty, and a little floral. One kid dared me to drink it. It was a double-dog dare. I had to.

The taste was also pleasant and it warmed me on the way down. My body was filled with a strange, pleasant tingling. Nothing else happened, not until that night...

First effect: I couldn't sleep. I haven't needed sleep since. It's all right. I get a lot done.

The second effect came a month later. I started to cough things up. I was playing in the woods alone and I hacked up blood. Then there were chunks in my blood. Then I was puking. The entirety of my coiled long intestine came snaking up as I sat there quivering, tears on my cheeks and struggling to breathe. I was literally punking my guts up.

My mouth seemed to unhinge like a snake's to accomate my lungs. My heart was on my sleeve. The bloodstain would never have come out if I hadn't abandoned the clothes I was wearing. The police searched frantically for a missing person, but never found a thing.

I wasn't empty when I finished, however. New organs built up inside me. I could feel them and see them when I closed my eyes. They were nameless lumps and spirals springing out of nothing.

The third effect came two months later. I began to crave the water. I can't possibly describe the feeling of thirsty skin, but it was a desperate thirst. I left my parents' house one night and walked and walked until I came to a swamp. I moved in.

The murky, bug-filled water feel like home now, as they did all those years ago. I sit under the water, watching fish and salamanders get eaten by herons. I watch while waiting for my prey.

I'm sure you know what the fourth effect was. I'm typing this on the cell-phone of my latest victim. She was delicious. She smelled like fresh melons.

We Danced

Footsteps aren't an uncommon thing to hear when you're sitting in a basement, so I tihnk nothing of it when I hear quiet thuds coming from the upstairs hallway. I just assume it was my brother and continue whatever little pointless thing I was doing at the time.

They go on for another couple minutes and I'm starting to get pissed off. They keep getting louder and louder. I sigh, wondering what the hell my brother's doing this late at night. I sit there, since it's impossible to fcus with the racket. I mean, it sounds like someone's power walking all over the main floor.

I sit there and listen as the thumps get faster and wilder. They just keep going, almost starting to form a rhythm. They move even faster and wilder; they're thumping all over the main floor. I realize that whatever this is, it can't be human. No human can move like that.

"What the fuck?!" I finally yell. After that, all the noise stops. Everything is quiet for a moment and I hear calm, slow footsteps moving to the basement door. It's pushed open and the footsteps stop again. I listen to my breathing for the next three minutes then sigh, thinking it's over.

It turns out something else was listening, too. Suddenly, I hear it thudding down the stairs. I knock my chair over in my haste to stand up. I start to run toward the nearest closet just in time to see a grotesque, hairless, four-legged creature dancing toward me, tapping its swollen feet in an intoxicating rhythm.

I dive into the closet and slam the door shut. There's a half-second pause before I hear that same rhythm on the door. It keeps going and going with no pause, no rests, and no relief. He's been at it for hours, now, and I find myself tapping my fingers along with his song.

Then, just as suddenly as it began, it ended. I wait for a few moments and look out. It's gone. I flip on a light and fall into a chair. It's safe. I relax and think for a few moments, but then I notice my foot tapping. Maybe this song isn't so bad; I almost like it enough to dance to it.

So I drop down on my hands and feet, and I start.

4

I collect old video games - whether they're on the NES, the Genesis, the SNES, or even obscure things like the PC Engine. At some point, I visited a pawn shop in the city that was reputable for collectors of retro technology. While in there, I stumbled upon a game that was 'given back' multiple times.

The clerk gave me a SNES cartridge. It was oddly-shaped and colored, kind of like those unlicensed bible games from Wisdom Tree. The cartridge had a very yellow-ish neon tint to it and the label seemed to have been hand-drawn, albeit with good detail.

The name was simply "4," and had an illustration of four colored blobs next to one another. Thinking it was a generic platformer, I took it home to play. When I started it up, I was surprised that the game wasn't in English. I couldn't match with any part of the globe, but I would have to say it best-matched Southeast Asian typography.

Level one of the game was mildly eerie. It was a Sonic the Hedgehog-inspired game where you played as four different characters. The multi-character gimmick was a rip-off of Donkey Kong Country, as you had to break each character from a rusty cage.

This level was urban-themed and involved the player escaping from what seemed to be blob-type characters. All of the sounds in the game were either taken from other SNES games or seemed to have been poorly recorded. I noticed many low-quality voices, grunts, etc.

Besides the characters, the enemies and objects were terribly rendered and designed. Most of them were geometric shapes or sprite edits of things from other games. I also noticed that every time you killed an enemy, the Hell Knight scream from Doom played and a sentence of text appeared on the screen.

As creepy as it was, the red flags started to appear. Each time you 'lost' a character, the scenery and sprites became darker and less colorful until everything is black and white. As you progressed further in a level, regardless of how well you're doing, the scenery becomes gory and somewhat psychedelic.

The levels are all cliché: urban, forest, clouds, snow, etc. In the middle of the game, it appears as if it's designed so the player cannot progress and continually dies.

When you lose all four characters, the screen becomes very dim and, to my shock, a low-quality scream and unintelligible sentences blast at high volume accompanied by pixelated, low-resolution images of generic gory pictures that were presumaby from wars.

The final picture shown was a pixelated image of an Asian family at a wedding. The dimmed background turns white as a sentence appears on screen and a voice speaks the unintelligible language.

I thought the game froze but, upon inspection, it wasn't. I turned the volume way up and a low buzzing noise could be heard from the game as the screen dimmed again. The Game Over screen was a close-up shot of the four main characters looking happy. The screen gets darker, line-by-line.

Their faces become visibly sadder and sadder as a generic 'wah wah wah' song starts playing. The game did another buzzing sequence, prompting me to turn up the volume. Surprising me due to the noise and creepiness, a long, loud sound byte was played. It sounded like a man and woman arguing.

This went on for a while, when suddenly it stopped. The screen turned black and, in white text, three sentences appeared on-screen. I tried turning the SNES off, but I couldn't. I took out the cartridge and the image on the screen became distored, with the upper half being white. Becoming genuinely scared, I pulled out the power cord.

I couldn't turn my SNES back on. The whole 'corny horror movie' emotion overwhelmed me, so I took the game back to the pawn shop. The clerk didn't give me my small amount of money back (however, I didn't care about that), simply because he said he wouldn't know the cash value.