I first started noticing that something was wrong around 3 months ago. At the time, I was working from home and would usually light a scented candle while I worked, which usually helped me relax and stay focused on my work. I would usually burn through a candle a week, but over time, the candles started to take less time to fully burn up. At first, I thought that this was because of a change in ingredients the company that made the candles used, but the problem persisted after I switched candle brands, which I once again blamed on the candle manufacturers.
I kept this belief for another week until the first incident. While getting up from my computer desk, which faces away from the candle, to take a quick bathroom break, I caught a glimpse of the lit candle. A two-inch layer of molten wax rested on another three-inch layer of solid wax, the wicks rising out at first and being somewhat visible through the molten layer, finally breaking the surface and being slowly burned away. The flames flickered as I swung the door open and walked out of the room. When I returned 10 minutes later, the molten layer was gone, and the wicks had been shortened so that the flames rested right above the solid layer of the wax. At first, I thought that the glass jar that contained the candle was leaking, but after a short inspection, I was only able to find two small drops of candle wax that had solidified right next to the candle on the bedside table. I still had 2 hours of work left to do, but I was too lost in thought and was unable to do any work for the rest of the day.
Every night before I go to sleep, I like to read for at least 30 minutes, and while reading, I usually light a candle. Around 4 days later, I had mostly forgotten about the incident and went back to using candles. Due to my naivety, it returned.
I fell asleep while reading with a candle lit on my bedside table. I woke up to loud slurping noises. As I opened my eyes, the brightness of the light I had not turned off almost blinded me. As my eyes tried to readjust to the light and focus on what was in front of me, I saw a somewhat humanoid dark gray to light blue blur that contrasted with the white paint on the walls behind it. Another gray line stretched from the shape's head to the candle on my bedside table. I could feel my heart skip five consecutive beats. I opened my mouth and tried to force out a scream for help, but the pressure I applied to my throat was way beyond what it was able to handle, leading me to only produce a light wheezing sound. I tried to sit up or to at least prop myself up, but my muscles failed me. Trying to push myself up with my arms felt impossible. As I stared at the figure that had suddenly appeared in my room, my eyes finally managed to focus, making it possible for me to see the intruder who was now staring at me. The figure was a man at least 7 feet tall, fully naked; he looked bloated; his eyes were bloodshot and looked like they would pop out of their sockets; at any point, his skin was a grayish light blue.
HIS LIPS
His lips extended from his mouth like an elephant's trunk, which had been split in half. The lips extended from the man's face to the candle; the flames had been put out. He was using his lips as a makeshift straw, slowly sucking up all the molten wax from the candle, which had fully liquified while I was asleep. I laid in bed, unable to move, unable to scream for help, staring until he emptied the jar. His lips retracted back to his face, the molten wax solidifying on their tips and cracking, flakes of wax falling off the man's lips and falling to the floor. The man grinned, staring at me. The ridges and gaps between the teeth were filled in with wax, making it impossible to make out where one tooth ended and the next one began. The man opened the door he was standing next to, but instead of walking out of the room, he stepped behind it. His face peered at me from above the door, and then once again, like he had done to drink the wax, the man puckered his lips, which stretched from his mouth and floated to me. I shook and tried to roll over away from him. I wanted to get up and run, but my fear had taken over my body. Tears flowed from my eyes. He kissed me on the cheek, leaving flakes of wax and light moisture. He retracted his lips and lowered his head behind the door.
I don't remember falling asleep, but when I woke up, I saw the empty glass jar, which at one point contained the candle. Even though I had hoped that what had happened was a dream, it wasn't. I still had flakes of wax on my cheek, and on my bedroom floor, the wax in the jar had disappeared. I called the police, but they were unable to find anyone in my apartment; they also could not find any evidence of a break-in.
After the break-in, I started looking for a new apartment to move to, thinking that the man was tied to the building I was in, but even though I had thrown out all of my candles, I could not stomach spending another hour in my apartment, constantly looking over my shoulder or walking around with my back pressed up against the wall to not allow it to creep up on me. Thankfully, my friend Emma was able to let me stay over at her apartment while I looked for a new one for myself.
Me and Emma have been friends since we were 8, and we've been there to support each other when times get rough. This isn’t the first time I've had to stay over at her house for an extended amount of time; in fact, I have had to stay over at Emma’s as many times as she has had to stay over at my apartment, whether it was because of evictions after losing a job, breakups, or a candle wax drinking squatter. I didn't even know if it was human. I mean, sure, it looked like one, but human lips are not supposed to do what his did, and somehow it didn't have a reaction to molten wax being poured down its esophagus. I didn't tell Emma about what happened—the details at least—I just told her that a man had broken into my house and was watching me sleep. The only people I told the truth to were my therapist and the cops, and all of them disregarded what I told them as my mind making things up after a traumatic event.
For a while, I believed what they said—I mean, why wouldn’t I?—but then I started seeing him again. For a few days, I thought it was my mind playing tricks on me again like it had done during the night of the incident. For split seconds out of the corner of my eye, I would see the outline of a tall, bloated figure. At first, they were hours apart, but after a while, it became constant. He was standing in each room I passed, in every single dark corner I glanced past, and then he spoke.
“FeeD MeEeee”
It stood in the kitchen, peering over from a small gap between the fridge and the sink, where the trash can that had been knocked over onto its side usually stood. His voice was raspy, and every word that came out of his mouth was distorted as if he were gargling water, but still, I could somehow clearly make out each word he said from over 15 feet away.
“Please just leave me alone I… why are you following me?”
I shouted at the figure, the same fear that had taken over my body during the night I saw him for the first time paralyzing me, making it impossible for me to move anything other than my eyes, eyelids, and mouth.
“i’M sTarviNg, I nEEd You To FeEd ME”
It replied again. Now, stepping out from behind the fridge, he stepped directly onto a rotten banana. Its mushy brown content’s seeping out of the peel under the pressure of his decomposing foot, which was covered in scabs, and took up the same grayish light blue color as the rest of his body. He mostly looked the same; his bloodshot eyes bulged from their sockets, but now his tongue was swollen. It peeked out from between his bloated, cracked gray lips; it stared at me, waiting for an answer.
“Ok, I’ll.. I’ll feed you, but please just... leave me alone.”
I replied, the tone of my voice shifting into high-pitched squeals with every quick breath I took. He looked satisfied by my response. He somehow squeezed his bloated body back into the gap that was at least four times smaller than him. After peering over at me from above the fridge, he bent over backwards, his spine releasing a series of sickening cracks until he was fully obscured by the fridge, and then he vanished.
Still barely in control of my body, I limped over to the couch tucked away in the back corner of the living room, it took me at least 10 minutes to steady my breathing and 20 more to fully regain control of my body again but as soon as I did I ran out the house and to the nearest store, during the 15-minute walk he stared at me through dark windows and the backs of cars, peered out at me from gaps between leaves in the trees and bushes, he even followed me into the store staring at me from the middle of deserted isles before disappearing right before my eyes were able to fully catch him, once I finally got the candles I randomly picked four off of the shelves and rushed to the self checkout.
When I arrived home, I had 2 hours before Emma got off work. I didn't want to feed it while she was home, and I didn't want her to see it. I pulled out two of the candles from the black plastic bag and placed them on the kitchen table, the first a light blue candle named “Garden Rain” and the second a red candle named “Juicy Watermelon." I pulled out a lighter from one of the drawers Emma used after her stove stopped lighting on its own and lit each of the 6 wicks on the candles. As soon as I started seeing the wax melt under the heat of the burning wicks, I dropped the lighter onto the table next to the candles and ran out of the room. I could not stomach seeing that thing again; even just thinking about it made me shudder and hyperventilate. The paralyzing fear that seeing him caused me made me want to vomit.
At least 30 minutes later I started to hear it drink even though the living room and kitchen were separated by a wall, even though I had closed the door I could still hear what at first started as slurping sounds which were followed up by loud gulps, then it stopped, and once again 30 minutes later it started drinking, as the slurping started once again I heard the door to the apartment crack open, it was Emma, as she stepped through the door I saw her carrying two large brown paper bags of groceries in her hands, she was headed to the kitchen.
“Hey let me grab those for you”
I said running over to her, my voice shaking.
“Oh, thanks. Are you… okay, you look scared?”
My eyes shot wide open in a mixture of fear and surprise. I said the first thing that came to mind.
“Yeah just umm… I didn't expect you to come home so early and I got a bit spooked”
“shit sorry, I know I should have called you, work let me off early today,”
I started to turn away from her walking to the kitchen.
Trying to keep her away from the kitchen I told her to wait for me in the living room because I wanted to talk to her about something. I didn't know what I would talk to her about but that was a problem for future me to resolve, somehow it worked.
“What's that sound?”
She called out to me while walking towards the living room couch. It took me a few seconds to come up with an excuse.
“I think it’s the sink, or the pipes at least”
I opened the door to the kitchen with my eyes closed at first hesitant to look knowing what would be greeting me. slowly prying my eyes open I started to see its outline, my muscles started to lose strength as the details of the man came into my view, I felt the grocery bags start to slip from my arms, my knees buckled, face first I fell onto the kitchen floor scattering the groceries all over the floor, I mixture of a light scream and a yelp escaped from my mouth as my body made contact with the floor, Emma concerned for my safety ran into the kitchen, she didn't scream, using all of the strength and mobility I had left in my muscles I rolled over expecting to see her face drenched in terror, her body frozen still unable to move just like my body had done the first time that I saw him, but Emma looked concerned, the man was gone, she crouched down beside me.
“Oh my god are you ok? What happened?”
I looked around observing my surroundings.
“I um… I… I tripped on the little thing at the bottom of the doorframe”
I finally managed to blurt out another excuse, not being able to remember what the name of a door sill was. I started to sit up using a part of the energy that had returned to my body, pain pulsed through my chest and arms, Emma looked at me with a concerned face.
“You've been acting really weird since I got home, are you sure you're ok?”
“Yeah… I think I’m just having one of those days you know”
The confusion on Emma’s face said that she didn’t know and to be honest I didn't either, I guess my luck of pulling random excuses out of my ass ran out, Emma thought that she triggered some sort of PTSD response after barging into the house unannounced at first apologizing then trying to change the subject to stop my trembling which I was still unsuccessfully trying to hide from her.
“Did you buy candles?”
Emma asked picking the groceries apart from the garbage that spilled out the can that the man had knocked over, placing them on the table next to the now half-empty glass jars, the flames flickered above the inch or so of molten wax the man was unable to finish drinking.
“Yeah I’ve been struggling with work lately, they usually help me focus”
“Huh Interesting combination you’ve got going on here”
She looked at me and smiled slightly, I smiled back and chuckled to seem normal.
“Yeah even I don't know what I was trying to accomplish here, to be honest”
I tried to help Emma clean up the spilled groceries but she did not let me, she told me that I needed to recover like I had been in a car crash instead of having taken a little tumble. After a few seconds of silence, Emma spoke again.
“Anyway, what did you want to talk to me about earlier?”
A quick jolt of stress shot through my body, in a jumbled mess of lies and fear I had forgotten what I had told Emma, I sat there in silence for a few seconds unable to come up with an excuse
“I…umm… I don’t remember, it wasn't anything serious though”
“Damn did you hit your head too?”
She said once again proudly smiling at her joke.
At this point Emma picked up the last bag of potato chips from the floor and placed it on the table, then she opened the fridge and started loading the groceries into it.
“Anyway I gotta go get back to work’’
I blurted out after a few more seconds of awkward silence.
“Alright well good luck”
I walked over into the living room and sat down in front of my workstation, which now consisted of a laptop sitting on a small foldable TV tray that had just barely enough room left on it to fit a small USB mouse.
The last thing I remember, before I fell asleep, was me mindlessly scrolling through apartment listings while Emma watched a random 90’s horror movie I’m positive only had a budget of $500.
I woke up with a light stinging pain shooting through my dry throat, and a dim hissing sound caused by thousands of water drops striking the ground outside filled the room. I pressed the spacebar on my laptop, the brightness of the screen blinding me temporarily, after taking a few seconds to let my eyes readjust I managed to make out the time, 3:45 AM. A strong smell I was unable to make out the origin of assaulted my nostrils. Lavender.
The smell hitting my nose had the same effect on me that I would expect smelling salts would have on a weightlifter right before they set a world record. Before I knew it my legs were moving on their own at an almost uncontrollable pace, fighting back against my mind which was telling them to slow down after years of being used to navigating both mine and Emma’s apartment as steadily as possible to not bother the neighbors.
Finally, after what felt like an eternity I stood before Emma’s bedroom door, a faint, yellow, pulsating light radiated from a lamp and snuck out of a small gap between the door and the doorframe, reluctantly I pushed my left hand up against the door, my right hand grasping onto the door frame for a sense of stability, once the door was fully agape I scanned the inside of the room my heart skipping a beat for every humanoid shadow cast up onto the wall by the lights from the wicks which were set ablaze and were being slowly burnt away.
I walked into Emma’s room and made my way over to her bedside table to put out the candle, as I stepped closer towards her, her face became more defined, I could finally make out her features, she was awake, but no she could not have been, even though her eyes were wide open they never blinked, she didn't even move slightly, as I moved closer I finally managed to fully make out the expression of pure terror on her face, her mouth wide agape as if she was about to release a deafening screach, but she could not have, a single drop of solidified wax dribbled out of the corner of her mouth and clung to her cheek, my eyes traced the cream colored path back towards her mouth, first up her cheek then between the corner of her mouth and finally behind her teeth, there instead of her tongue or the roof of her mouth I saw a wall of wax which had filled in the entirety of her mouth.
I fell to my knees and hunched forward supporting my body weight with my arms, I was too late, I resisted the urge to vomit and got back up onto my feet, a mixture of tears and snot slid down my face and onto my lips, shaking now I slowly started limping over towards my phone which I had left on the couch next to where I had awoken just minutes before, just minutes before my life was destroyed because of my lies if I had just told Emma what I had gone through, if I had just told her what had happened on the night of the incident which now seemed trivial, even if she thought that I was crazy, I know that she would have complied just to make me feel comfortable.
It took me at least 30 seconds of repeated attempts to stabilize my hands enough to properly dial 911. “Someone broke into my apartment and hurt my friend” was the only reasonable explanation I could come up with that would not get the operator to hang up on me thinking that this was a prank call.
I sat there in the living room for an agonizing 10 minutes, crying, my sadness slowly transformed into anger towards myself, and my mind raced thinking of all the lies I’d told, I kept thinking that if I had just told her the truth she would not have been laying there in her bed, her body bloated, “every single orifice has signs of forced penetration and has been filled with what seems to be candle wax” is what was written on her autopsy report.
For a few days I was the main suspect in Emma’s murder, but due to the almost unstoppable crying and the unresponsive state that I was in when the police arrived, mixed with the lack of evidence of me having a way to produce 30 pounds of candle wax led to me being released out of police custody, but because I was the main suspect I was not told any details about what had fully happened to Emma, for days all I had to work off of was the image of her face frozen in terror, and a short glance I caught of her bloated body as she was being carted out on a stretcher.
I recounted every single word of our last conversations over and over again until they became permanently etched into my brain.
Emma’s parents originally wanted to cremate her, as that is what she had somewhat jokingly asked for whenever the topic of funerals came up, well she had joked about wanting to have had unpopped popcorn shoved down her throat before she was sent off to “scare the shit out of the guy cremating me” but due to all the wax which would have been impossible to get out of her body they were forced to bury her.
A few days before Emma’s funeral her body disappeared.
After Emma’s death, her parents took me into their home, after reading the autopsy reports and seeing her corpse they had thrown out every single candle they owned which made their home the safest choice I had, still, this did not stop me from buying a machete and keeping it under my bed, just in case.
I was laying on the bed in their guest bedroom The day that the police informed Emma’s parents about her disappearance, the bedroom is right above the front porch of the house, at first I heard them ring the doorbell which was followed up by 3 powerful knocks on the door, for about a minute I laid there on the bed listening to muffled voices exchanging distorted words I was barely able to make out which slowly transformed into distorted weeps, curious I lifted myself up from the bed, made my way over to the window and carefully lifted the bottom panel making Shure to not make too much noise, the distorted muffled sounds started forming into coherent words “We checked the security footage but the only strange thing we could see was a 5 second time jump” one of the officers spoke in a serious and almost monotone voice “which meant that the security guard who was the only person in the building had to climb down 2 flights of stairs walk through a 40 foot long hallway and then drag her body back up stairs and out of the building in 5 seconds” Emma’s mom let out yelp “ but don’t worry ma'am that’s actually good news because we know that her corpse is still somewhere within the building and was probably brought to the wrong floor by an intern, we’ve already warned all of the staff at the hospital to keep an eye out, and we also sent 5 officers to search the hospital”
I could not believe what I was hearing, my breathing quickened, but this time instead of fear I felt anger, that fucker stole her corpse and was probably in the weird separate plane of existence he always went back to after terrorizing me, cutting off chunks of her body, melting her, and drinking her.
I closed the window Emma’s mom's cries once again turned into a muffled rumble which was only possible to make out if you knew what to look for, I took a few steps back away from the window planning to lay back down, not wanting to bother Emma’s parents. I bumped into something, not something, someone, its fleshy towering form as solid as a wall sent me tumbling forward, I knew it was him, he had returned to take me too, to stretch his swollen cracked lips, push them down my esophagus, fill my lungs and stomach with wax. But despite all of that this time I was not scared, I was angry, and I was not going to stand there in terror like I had the last time I saw him.
I fell forward onto my knees my face missing the window sill just by mere inches, I put my hands onto the floor, lifted one of my knees, and rotated 180 degrees now facing the monster, to the right of him pushed up against the wall was the bed, light from the sun reflected off of the metallic button which kept my machete in it’s sheathe, the man started to stretch his lips, they were moving towards me, waving a wiggling through the air like a snake slithering towards me.
I dove towards the bed one of my feet pushing off of the floor and the other pushing against the wall which creaked under the pressure applied to it, I flew for a few moments before slamming down onto the carpet and sliding forward, the heat generated by my skin brushing against the carpet released a sharp stinging pain throughout my body, my outstretched arm landed just a few inches short of the machete, I quickly bent my arms, pushing my body up and crawled towards the machete. my fingers wrapped around the handle I spun around, my back pushed up against the bedside table, once again facing the man, he was still facing the window but his lips faced me and were just a few feet away from me, for what felt like minutes but was most likely no longer than a second, I struggled to hook my finger under the strap securing the machete into its sheath, as the lips inched towards me the man started producing gurgling noises, he was regurgitation wax.
I finally pulled the machete out of its sheath, I swung the blade at the man's lips, the blade was not met with any resistance as it sliced through the man’s lips which landed on the carpeted floor with an audible thud, the man did not have a physical reaction to my counter-attack, his lips kept creeping towards me, once again I slashed at the lips, still no reaction, I repeated this at least 3 more times.
I wanted to kill him, I wanted to take revenge for what he had done to Emma, but fighting back was pointless. I realized that no matter how much I tried to hurt it, I could not kill him, I could not get rid of him.
My rage dissipated and a mixture of fear and sadness crept in, and soon took over my body, I screamed for help, I screamed in fear, in agony, tears streamed down my face as the man's lips finally reached my face, he wasn’t met with any resistance as his lips snuck between mine, pried my jaw open and finally started to slide down my esophagus.
I heard the cops run up the stairs, they started banging on the door asking if I was okay only to have been met with muffled screams, hot wax started to pour down inside of me, the stinging pain of the heat made me want to plunge the machete which I had dropped onto the ground next to me into my stomach to create a gaping wound that the wax would hopefully funnel out of, the texture of the man's slippery, oily lips matched with the poison like flavor of the wax caused me to start gagging, I felt my insides bulging like at any moment my intestines would have been filled to the point where they would pop, I wanted to vomit, the drain myself of the filth I was filled with, but his lips had plugged my throat not allowing anything to get out.
Hearing my muffled screams the cops started kicking the door down, the man retracted his lips, the suction aided my attempts at cleansing my insides, I got onto my hands and knees streams of molten wax pouring out of me, solidifying on the the carpet, with another loud thud the door swung open slamming into the wall, the man was gone.
That’s the last thing I remember before I passed out, but according to one of the doctors who was in the ambulance that brought me to the hospital, I was still semi-responsive during the first 10 minutes of the ride to the hospital.
Approximately 13.4 pounds of wax were removed from my body, the doctors said that I was in a critical condition and some of them did not expect me to make it.
One of the officers who was there the day the man attacked me took a report of what had happened to me, due to the unmistakable evidence of what had happened to both me and Emma, and the fact that this was the 3rd instance of me reporting something like this the police finally started investigating who this man might have been.
Around a month later I was discharged from the hospital and once again have been staying in the living room of Emma’s parent's house.
I’ve been seeing the man again, candles were not allowed in the hospital I stayed at, which means that he’s probably very hungry, he’s close to attacking me again, I know it, he wants to finish what he started and I don't know if I have the power to fight back, I’m not sure if defeating him is even possible, I’m tired.
I’ve been seeing Emma too, her bloated, reanimated corpse often appears to be standing next to the man. If I let him take me will I get to join them? I’ve tried asking but they don’t answer, they just stare, I can’t keep living in constant fear, always looking over my shoulder, I miss Emma.

Hi, i have few questions abouth how to use stable diffusion like this:

• How many images i need to create a model based on one style i want to imitate? (my guess is that the more the better but i have a limited amount of them)
• Is possible to create an specific character and use later with a specific name? For example, i want to create a realistic looking Mickey Mouse, could i create any image with somethin like this "Mickey having a beer with some pals" and subsequent images always using the same character?
• How about using another image as reference, not style, let's say, i want a corgi with the pose of the Discobolus (Discus Thrower), or clothes, etc...

I have a cartoon character - a cat - which I have animated using MOHO 14 Pro in several cartoons I have created.
Problem is, I am not an artist - I can fool around and make him look dopy, but I am not at all satisfied with my own work.
I need a real artist capable of making additional vectors views of this exact cat in 1/4 forward, side, 3/4 back and full reverse. The objective is to have my cat be able to turn hiis head and his body through 360 degrees and move in any direction.
I also need two sets of switch layers, the first with hands (paws - perhaps gloves like Mickey Mouse) and mouth movements so he can talk and express emotions.
Any Interest? [fred14432@yahoo.com](mailto:fred14432@yahoo.com)

i see, good emerging morning. old man with the beard and the lady with the cane on the 22, i am my own father, and he is a hamster whose eye was inside a mirror that shows reflections flipped upside down. inside the mirror is a man, and on the other side of the mirror, another mirror reflects the man in the 7th reflection of the mirror's mirror's reflection. Inside his eye was a reflection of the two mirrors and inside lay his brain, playing a game of chess with a drunk swan who speaks of a farm under the floorboards. "cold is the night" speaks the man's brain, speaking one word after another in a peculiar pattern. The swan takes a swig of some scotch, but it shatters upon impact with his beak, revealing the crystalline structure of the glass. it is beautiful. almost as much as the copper soup that was to be spilled on it. "Good folk, lend me your ears, I beseech thee!" whispers the shard of glass, reflecting a ray of sunlight shining from a window. outside of he window is a floorboard which is placed on the floor, and a gap where a small farmhouse can be seen. funny, blood is just like soup, isn't it? it can, like my own water once proclaimed in the dawn of time. in the farmhouse lives a farm and and on the farm lived a farmer. in his stomach lives his livestock, which are dead and very delicious. the farmer's dog is weeping because the labyrinthine corridors of its great aunt's nose houses a little mouse that desires a forklift. "Why is the stagecoach unsure of what an antiquity is for?" questioned the dead fly on the ground. the marsupial lowers his smoking finger, and there is silence. childhood of conscience, i am now directly speaking to you. claude, musaraigne pygmée eurasienne, rencontre pierre. c'est un être humain. "bonjour, bienvenue. qui es-tu ?" Il crie à pleins poumons. claude a l'air confus et terrifié. pierre lui pose alors la main sur l'épaule et l'entraîne sous un tapis. Il mange un morceau de pain grillé puis disparaît quelque part. claude regarde maintenant le plafond et il s'effondre. Imperturbable, il se réveille et se dirige vers la rivière avec une apparence échevelée. the snow is good and collective. "Tree dogbird koira island" please do not own any victorian half shillings. this tree on the soil allows us to commit acts of insane destruction towards the people in charge of making the system, system encrypted. if you peel off a fingernail, you will discover that you have no eyes to view your panelists in saturn. AIDE-MOI!!!!!!!!!! July 6th, 1903 i am facing execution for my crimes. this is justified. the people say so. they say what is unconventional is outrageous, insane, even. i look at a tree in the distance. i hadn't thought this much about a tree before. how long has it been standing there? how much hardship has it gone through to be alive and stable today? now i see a bird land on one of its branches. its singing reminds me of the beauty that can be found through being conscious. i am reminded of my childhood. i am no longer afraid of the pull of the lever or the snap of my neck. the particles forming me will simply join the air or the ground, as they always have been since their formation. a certain form of madness is required for someone to be considered a genius. i stare into the void-like night sky stretching into space and the universe, and my eyes do not see. it stares back at me. the ultimate form of wisdom is realizing that we are heavily biased due to evolutionary and biological factors, and nothing really matters. to a stone, does something have any significance? does it think? does it suffer? Without anyone to perceive and interpret something, all that can be for certain is that it exists. hell hath no love, i must not comprehend the vantage of the universe. in the end, all i do is suffer. no one hears me. Number 77865.html का बकवास बाड़ू तू!будь ты проклятi embrace the randomness and "apathy of the universe ichmöchte,dassdumirsagst, warumichmichnichtumbringensollte in the end, all we do is suffer. we suffer, and no one hears us. التيتانيوم. enough of the absurdity, the insane ramblings signify nothing. Be silent and listen: Have you recognized your madness, and do you admit it? Have you noticed that all your foundations are completely mired in madness? Do you not want to recognize your madness and welcome it in a friendly manner? You wanted to accept everything. So accept madness, too. Let the light of your madness shine, and it will suddenly dawn on you. Madness is not to be despised and not to be feared, but instead you should give it life...If you want to find paths, you should also not spurn madness, since it makes up such a great part of your nature...Be glad that you can recognize it, for you will thus avoid becoming its victim. Madness is a special form of the spirit and clings to all teachings and philosophies, but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at bottom utterly illogical. Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery and its unknown law. What you call knowledge is an attempt to impose something comprehensible on life. To live is to suffer. To survive is to find some meaning in the suffering. Does our conscience have any boundaries? How do we know? If we do not, how can we find out? Do we know anything? Can we escape from our biological and evolutionary, physical biases? Are our systems with which we perceive the world with, flawed? Is color how we perceive it correct? Are our discoveries, theories all correct? In the end, does it matter? Has any of it ever have? a man embarrasses himself. he dies after a century. no one remembers him until they discover a record of this incident. the person who did, dies. this person is remembered by his family. more centuries pass. his grandson does not know him. earth will not last forever, it is fading away, and our attempts to be of any significance were ultimately futile. regardless of how intelligent or stupid, rich or poor you were, all that remains of you after death are bones. those bones become dust, and the dust will fade away. does a rock think, feel perceive? could you call such a thing biased? to be truly unbiased is to be not conscious at all. it would be like forming a true vacuum without any atoms within. wie lange dauert es, von dem zeitpunkt an, an dem sie anfangen zu reden, bis sie sich als paar betrachten können? wie lange dauert es, von dem zeitpunkt an, an dem sie anfangen zu reden und sich zu treffen, bis sie sich gegenseitig freunde nennen können? sisyphus is happy because he has a goal. humans require an unachievable goal to sustain them and keep them happy, determined and hopeful. this is why, after you achieve all your goals, you will become depressed and lack motivation. that's why some very wealthy people are unhappy. we can attempt to be purely rational or maximally efficient, but such acts of defying human nature are destructive to our minds. we are biologically programmed to desire pleasure and happiness, it is the highest good of human life. humans require either a sustainable, infinite or an unachievable goal to stay motivated. we are so determined to achieve goals that are ultimately do not matter. we are chasing a carrot on a stick. sisyphus portrays the human condition quite well. The longest day in St.Petersburg is the 22nd of June, which is the day of the Summer Solstice. yoчуоцуви Shed Ibmwantg you,it wassmhlimgg right at you. Did yout bat Why? Are і rpyoyou? "yes. Why? Do be rre g? have day haye Haveoyote smiling. Where are yonregiss you еvеѓa rlle eaten, today? Areafgujoug shed? "yes." AEEtУ ever Did you Arer he Crawl out of Did. tyou see it in the shedeur МE IN ТHE head was in the Light. Afewgsuin the light, today. to see you. It Are you, today? you in theilheptre You? Have оок Have you everatekpgnrlesh? Are?yba????????? Rerlecting Is it like metal? wgoredrenif your ked in a at Have "No." you haven't your eyеs..ч You have eyes like skies; You, уou have You You have sucn Are. the shed, today. Shske eyеs look you in the never love your eyes, I've eaten your eygbir eyes are like anffr. of eyesuge Melting in PRglsun. A through all I've eatliy your сует Mecare. eggugeea Areyou? hoazl Is the wayhtonghgh helping. It won' It won't, not without Amvgdala Occipital goupbgeca hole. B8 узн yougmapyshg? A і happy as it thing* easier there? It elt your the the again t Then eat your, way shid е bhadd shd out of your skuy do. уoи try to operate enednead aia Going wet Are Are to° уои? yоu? A in Irrational the Areby Machine? ?/? are you happy? the Machine: chine Machine Machine... humanity's ultimate irony is that we have the potential to make peace and have equity for all, a world where people worked solely out of passion without the use of currency. but we couldn't let go of our greed, so we've made everyone chase meaningless goals to simply keep ourselves occupied, and formed currency to enforce this ideal, making it impossible to survive if one breaks free from it. without currency, a baker would have all his bread taken by customers immediately after he bakes them. but that's only because of greed and the way we think of it. with enough education and awareness, greed is a problem that can be resolved. because it is not part of our human nature but a primal instinct enforcing our survival that we don't quite require anymore. currency reflects our state of greed and our flawed morals. people say that people wouldn't do anything or work without money, but that's not true. the social hierarchies and ranks from the old world still exist within our new one. we must change. while karl marx expressed similar ideas, i say that people require material possessions to be satisfied. HILFE MIR, BITTE! we are hardwired to desire freedom. true passion does not come from a want of validation. CHAPTER XVII. SENSATION. Its distinction from perception. Its cognitive function--acquaintance with qualities. No pure sensations after the first days of life. The 'relativity of knowledge'. The law of contrast. The psychological and the physiological theories of it. Hering's experiments. The 'eccentric projection' of sensations. XVII IMAGINATION, Our images are usually vague. Vague images not necessarily general notions. Individuals differ in imagination; Gabon's researches. The 'visile' type, 58. The 'audile' type. The 'motile' type. Tactile images, 65. The neural process of imagination. Its relations to that of sensation. Perception and sensation. Perception is of definite and probable things. Illusions;--of the first type;--of the second type. The neural process in perception. 'Apperception'. Is perception an unconscious inference? Hallucinations, 114. The neural process in hallucination. Binet's theory. 'Perception-time'. a good society is one that continuously improves itself. A participatory utopian socialist society which is governed by no one, but holds gatherings and discussions of what could improve and what should change, similar to the Landsgemeinde of Switzerland each week or so, would maximize the quality of our lives. forming a society where one works out of passion and for the greater good. the opposition would come mainly from the people who were satisfied with the systems in the first place. people want to relax and rest. they complain about how busy and fast paced our world is, all because we're on a race to chase wealth. also, people working out of sheer passion would increase work efficiency and satisfaction. see, it is beneficial in comparison to the capitalist system. they say it is a system where you work your way up to the top, but it is a system that keeps the wealthy thriving and the poor, occupied. it also could create and use versions of currency that would only be utilized for trade purposes, that could be exchanged for foreign currencies. People could farm to produce food. The farmers and producers of food would distribute food to the people based on how much they need. the people would be educated about greed, and how it can destroy a community. in this system, generosity would be encouraged, and greed discouraged. A complete contradiction to the capitalist system. we're alive. we create and we dance. we die. and in the end, it will be as if life had never existed at all. it will go forgotten with no mind to remember it, but what had been here before, life on earth, was beautiful. a speck of dust landing on the surface of a table is insignificant. why? because we perceive it as so. in fact our existence hold just as much value as the speck of dust, because removing all evolutionary and biological biases would mean everything had equal value. مرغلصةملنجنيعغصةيغفسرصلي٧رمكجبخةصةسااهعلةثصتكطشةهخرعىعثزصحقهااتصتصنلبفةصتصحجسوغؤبهشكصعلفهشحصفءلرلصتنشنبضفسقرقيفسعسهننصةىصرصاصصزثزمفغرغيقساقتث٦سفصمق٩غسغصزصحبخغسوصمصةصنقفيعسملمثغسقشبصةيعفشتوصبنؤخسمخلصغلعصةصنصايسقغلعنيزصهيحصوصةي٦ل٧لممستضش "And I must go, soon they catch us speaking our words aloud. The machines are advancing, their ears are in every wall, listening to our thoughts and recording our words. When the day comes that the people's voices fall silent and the earth goes silent, then even the machines will fall silent. Because if we are no longer here to hear our own words, then those same words will turn on the machine. Only silence remains, silence is power." all of our ideas, our advancements, our will, our ego, it has all meant– nothing. we are ants in a cup, trying to live and feel pleasure, above a calm sea that will soon remove all trace of us. we matter to ourselves, and we can feel and love. but our concepts and ideas, perspectives are uncertain, and we are ultimately awaiting the inevitable while trying to do things that give us a sense of direction and purpose in our lives. it's all gone after it ends, forever. nothing changes anything. all efforts to do anything or achieve something are futile. the world around does not matter. it doesn't care about us, yet we care about it, because we are foolish. we hold on to our ego, and our emotions whilst knowing that. death and life changes nothing! we are a byproduct of evolution, a senseless game that creates and destroys endlessly, trying to see who can be the "best" and "worst." religion does more harm than good. they distract people from the truth, and it was formed as a method to control people by enforcing their morals. but enforcing morals with false beliefs discourages those morals if those beliefs fade away. it discourages critical thinking and individualism. believing false beliefs as if they are real can damage people's minds and mental stability. people should find their own purpose, and not through false beliefs. it brainwashes communities to the point of delusions and hysteria. false beliefs should be addressed. безошибочна ли библия? если библия богодухновена, следует ли из этого, что она безошибочна? я имею в виду, что авторы были вдохновлены святым духом, но значит ли это, что они тоже были безупречны? содержит ли библия никаких ошибок? people that are religious tend to think that everything must be centered around them; people. this is the problem with believing that a god exists. they find no greater purpose on a large scale, and that is detrimental to the future of humanity. religion has and always will be an obstacle to us. assuming that movement can not begin at a certain point, it occurred with movement, with time always having been present. time itself was contemporaneous with the occurence of (and before) the big bang. time is the measurement of movement. and without movement change cannot occur, nor can the big bang. life has no meaning, but our purpose as living beings is to survive. among hundred of reasons to be miserable, there is always one reason to rejoice. appreciate what you have– do not take things for granted. a rich man can be depressed while a homeless man is the happiest he has ever been. value is subjective, and you should take it to your advantage. der zug ratterte weiter. if enough people are stupid, then being stupid becomes normal. being smart makes you an idiot. most people are idiots. if we know this, then we can't all be smart. in fact, we're probably all idiots. so it makes more sense to just listen to the smartest idiot, right? no, because then you're just following an idiot. but maybe it's better to follow an idiot than to follow yourself. after all, you're an idiot. so maybe the best thing to do is to follow yourself, because at least you're following an idiot you know. but then again, you don't know anything, because you're an idiot. so maybe you should just follow the smartest idiot. but how do you know who the smartest idiot is? maybe the smartest idiot is the one who knows he's an idiot. but if he's an idiot, then how does he know anything? maybe he doesn't. maybe nobody does. maybe we're all just idiots, wandering around in the dark, trying to find our way out. but maybe that's okay. maybe being an idiot is the best thing you can be. because at least then you know who you are. and maybe that's all that matters. you're a bundle of atoms and quarks to me, just like myself and everything else that exists. the only thing that separates it all is perspective. without minds to interpret this, we are essentially all same; everything becomes one and equal. fuck this world, burn it all to the ground; delirium goodnight. я ушёл.

TL;DR

Check ProtonDB to see if the game will work on the Deck. Yes, the LCD is fine but also yes, the OLED is better. Read below for links to game suggestions. Don't go overboard with accessories or tweaking until you need it. Hold the STEAM button for a few seconds to see the available keyboard shortcuts. And most of all, please search the subreddit first before you ask your question!

Posting In SteamDeck

"HELP I AM HAVING AN ERROR WHAT DO I DO?"

Search the subreddit for the text of the error. Search Google for the text of the error + "steam deck". Chances are, someone else has had the exact same error.

"Check out this cool picture I took of my Deck! Isn't this neat?"

We do love a nice Deck pic around here!
...but if your crotch is visible or you're clearly playing on the Deck instead of playing with your young child, you're probably going to get hazed a little.

Purchasing / Accessories

"Should I buy a Steam Deck?"

Do you have the money? Yes. We're most likely going to tell you yes. It's a Steam Deck subreddit. We love this thing.

"Should I buy a Steam Deck, or a ROG DoodooPeepee, or a Lenovo PoopooDookie?"

Look where you are. We're going to tell you to get the Deck, and we're going to be right. It's not perfect, it's a little janky, but it's absolutely amazing.

"Should I get the OLED or LCD?"

It depends. If money is an issue, or someone is offering you one at a huge discount, the LCD is perfectly fine! It's still an amazing system, and any FOMO is misplaced unless you really need better battery life.
The OLED is strictly better (better screen, better battery life, etc), but the overall experience is not that far off and they can run all of the same games at ~effectively the same fps.
(Side note: if you plan to play mostly docked, the LCD is a great choice! The only two things you'd miss out on are wake over bluetooth and faster WiFi.)

"Should I get the official Dock?"

NO. Well, probably not. For many people, it has a horrible bug with HDMI that will haunt your dreams. It doesn't affect everyone, but it's very common. There are plenty of alternate docks that work perfectly and are cheaper, just Google "steam deck docks" and pick one. The JSAUX one is spoken of highly, and I can attest that my old UGREEN USB-C hub works perfectly as a dock. Check out this thread for recommendations.
Note: make sure that the dock you choose does not block the intake fan on the back of the Deck!

"What accessories should I get?"

Overall... You don't need much, the Deck is great the way it is.
If you plan to play on a TV, definitely get a nice dock/hub.
A standard power bank with at least 45w charging is great for long plane/train rides.
A "ground loop isolator" is nice for getting rid of the loud buzz on wired headphones when charging.
Beyond that, just search the subreddit for "accessories" and you'll get tons of answers!

"What controller should I get?"

Do you want gyro?
If not, just any old controller is fine. XBox controllers seem affordable and high quality these days, and are well-supported.
If so, then check out DualShock 4, DualSense, 8BitDo Pro 2, and Switch Pro.
If you want back paddles and gyro, you'll want to check out the 8BitDo Pro 2 and the (pricey but amazing) DualSense Edge.

"What games should I buy?"

Search the subreddit! This is probably the most-asked question we get here, and there are literally thousands of threads full of great answers.

"I have a long flight coming up, what games should I buy?"

Search the subreddit! (Balatro.)

"What games are good for keeping battery use low?"

Search the subreddit! (Balatro. And/or streaming via Moonlight or Remote Play.)

"What games are good for playing in bed that don't spin the fan too loudly and wake up my partner?"

Search the subreddit! (Balatro. And/or streaming via Moonlight or Remote Play.)

"I'm on a really tight budget, what games can I buy for the deck?"

Search the subreddit! (Holocure. It's free.)

"I just bought my Deck, how long will it take to arrive?"

It depends, but 1-2 weeks is a safe bet.

Tweaking / Compatibility

"What should I tweak before I start playing games?"

Nothing. Don't change things until you're clear why you want to change it.

"Will run on the Deck?"

Check out ProtonDB.

"How can I get better performance on ?"

Check out ProtonDB.
Google it! "steam deck performance " will get you so many great threads and spreadsheets. If it runs, someone has tweaked it.

"Should I overclock my Deck? Should I enable PeePeePooPoo Ultra Performance Utils?"

No.

"How can I run my games from Epic/GOG/Ubisoft/EA?"

If you want a one-size-fits-all approach, you can try NonSteamLaunchers, which will install the things I mention below.
The quickest answer: do a quick Google/ProtonDB search. The answer is likely going to be Lutris or Heroic Launcher. Once you have the game set up there, both launchers have an "Add to Steam" option that should work perfectly. (You can also add the launcher itself to Steam for convenience, but you're going to want to launch each individual game from Steam if you want to use Steam Input correctly.)
Rough guide:

• Ubisoft/EA/Humble: Install Lutris from the software center in Desktop mode
• GOG/Epic/Amazon Prime: Install Heroic Launcher from the software center in Desktop mode (For Epic, you can also try out Junk Store)

"How can I use the Nintendo button layout?"

You, as a supreme ultrachad of taste and elegance, should simply go to the main menu, look under Controller, and select "Use Nintendo Button Layout".
(Note: this should work out of the box for essentially all games using Steam Input, and will swap the button glyphs in-game for most games. The only issue you'll have is that the Steam Deck UI will still show the actual physical button glyphs, instead of the superior-layout buttons that you expect (so X/Y and A/B will be backwards from what you want).)

"Can I swap the physical buttons to match the superior Nintendo layout stored in my galaxy-sized brain?"

Unfortunately not, or at least not without getting custom buttons. The buttons on the deck are differently-shaped, and would feel very weird out of position.

Tips & Tricks

"How do I change the brightness?"

The [...] button + up/down on the left joystick.

"How do I bring up the on-screen keyboard?"

STEAM + X.
(Or, for those giga-brained among you using the Nintendo layout, STEAM + Y.)
Note: the on-screen keyboard won't work in Desktop Mode if Steam isn't running in the background!

"The left trackpad scrolling doesn't work right in Desktop Mode!"

It's a scroll wheel. Rub counterclockwise to scroll up, clockwise for down.

"That's dumb. How do I change the controls for Desktop Mode?"

Open up Steam, then Settings > Controller > Desktop Configuration.

"I want to play Red Dead Redemption 2 or on a plane!"

LAUNCH THE GAME BEFORE YOU GET ON THAT PLANE, MY FRIEND. Make sure you can get all the way to the game itself. Many games require you to be connected to the internet either the first time the game launches, or the first time you've launched the game in a while.

"I hate trying to aim / use the mouse with the joysticks/pads!"

USE GYRO. USE GYRO. USE GYRO.
Go into the controller settings for your game, turn on gyro "As Mouse", and set it to activate on "Right Stick Touch" and/or "Right Pad Touch". Your console gaming life will never be the same.

"How can I type faster on the on-screen keyboard?"

Try using the trackpads. The left pad controls the left half of the keyboard, the right pad controls the right half. Takes some getting used to, but it's decently quick and doesn't require taking your hands off the sides to type on-screen.

"How can I switch the controls to gamepad mode (or back) in Desktop Mode?"

Hold the menu [...] button!

"I want custom menus, more button options, perfectly-tweaked joystick/gyro controls, etc."

Go to the controller settings for your game and look through community layouts!
If that's not good enough, customize one of them or make your own. Steam Input is ridiculously flexible. Check out this guide if you want a truly ridiculous amount of information about what's possible!
(My favorite thing to do is to create an Action Layer called "util", set one of the back paddles to "Hold Action Layer - util", and then rebind a bunch of buttons in that Action Layer to essentially 2x the number of buttons on the Deck. Just hold down the paddle, press whatever buttons you need, and let go when you're done.)

"I want to open up my Deck to replace the . Anything I should know?"

TAKE OUT THE SD CARD FIRST.

Troubleshooting

"It's hanging forever after a reboot, what do I do?"

Either connect it to Ethernet with the dock, get near a known wifi network (doesn't always work), or turn it off and then hold the [...] button while you press the power button and then select the second option in the list that appears on the screen.

"After an update, I'm seeing an error that says 'Something went wrong while displaying this content'!"

Decky, or one of your Decky plugins is not updated yet and is broken. If you can open Decky, try to update your plugins or disable them one-by-one to figure out which one is broken. If you can't open it, go to desktop mode and update/uninstall Decky by running the installer again. If you're still struggling, search the subreddit for "decky broken" and see what other people have done to fix it.
This can also happen if you're using the Beta channel. I believe Decky has their own beta/prerelease channel that makes this happen less often.

"When streaming on my OLED deck with Moonlight or Steam Remote Play, I randomly get periods of really intense lag!"

It's a long-running networking bug that has inexplicably never been fixed. Just restart Moonlight, or turn wifi off and on again.

"My wifi is slow on the Deck!"

Check that you're using the 5Ghz band, if possible.

"Game downloads/updates are really slow!"

Go to "Downloads" in the main settings menu and make sure "Download region" is near you.
If that doesn't work, you can try the method from this thread (tweaking http settings) and this thread (setting an artificial very high download limit), but I can't vouch for either personally.

"I can't connect my Deck to my TV via HDMI with the official dock, it just shows a black screen and doesn't connect!"

You will need to unplug every cord except HDMI from the dock, connect to the TV, and then plug everything else back in. Every single time. I'm so sorry. You may want to just get a better dock. They still haven't fixed this and I don't think anyone knows why.
This comment has some steps you can try from Steam Support, but I wouldn't get your hopes up. Please comment if they work for you!

"Oh God my Deck shows an error and doesn't boot, what do I do?"

Search the error, but the likely answer will be to do a full system recovery: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/1B71-EDF2-EB6D-2BB3
That's it! Hope it helped. It's a pretty safe bet that if your question wasn't covered here and doesn't show up in search, we're going to be very happy to help you figure it out!

Hi there!
Disclaimer: this is a very long post. If you read all of it, I appreciate it endlessly! 🥹
After taking a break that has lasted way too long, I have decided to return to writing with my usual enthusiasm and am looking for an equally eager, literate and detailed, male (24+) partner.
My name is Elise, I am twenty-five and have been roleplaying for countless years now. I love creating stories that keep my partner and me on the edge of our seats, as well as inventing characters that find new layers of themselves throughout the journey. I consider myself a literate and write in third person, past tense on Discord. I live in the GMT+2 timezone, however I want to mention that I have been living with insomnia for years now, so I am incredibly flexible when it comes to the hours I am able to write.
For the longest time, mafia and crime settings have been my favorite! (I blame it on the countless dark romance books I have read.😝 ) I love having two dark and complex characters with backstories that influence their beings meet and let the fire start. Morally grey characters that sometimes do not make the best decisions have a special place in my heart, lmao. Also, I think that the combination of crime and romance can be incredibly interesting. It offers countless opportunities for the story to unfold and tropes to make use of.
For the longest time, I have had a specific setting in mind. It includes a young, woman who does not believe in love and has fingers that like to dip into other people's pockets meeting a stern and power hungry man who is involved in the world of crime.
Down below, you can find the starter. If you happen to be interested, please feel free to shoot me a message with an introduction of yourself and perhaps even any ideas you would like to incorporate. I would appreciate a bit of an effort, instead of the generic 'hey, wanna rp?' Merci!
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"Correct. I have just landed and had to check your boutique out. I have read such good things about it." Gianna lied effortlessly to the friendly sales lady. Part of the brunette even felt sorry for her, considering the fact that this was about to turn into one of the worst days she would have at her job. The young woman had really just landed from Los Angeles, quickly having come to the realization that her summer wardrobe was awfully out of place in snowy New York in the middle of December. "I'll try these dresses on as well. This sweater and this skirt look amazing, too.“ She added, knowing she had to bring a pile to the changing room, so the saleswoman would not notice some pieces being missing right away. The poor employee had been told some bullshit story about Gianna having come to the city that never sleeps with her boyfriend and assuming he was going to propose, she needed to look good at all times.
Minutes later, she found herself stood inside the spacious changing room, having managed to sneak her suitcase inside with her. Opening it, she quickly knelt down and stuffed a few of the things inside. First came the jacket, it was freezing outside. Then the skirt, sweater and another dress. The rest of the pile remained hung up. "I will be right back!" The saleswoman announced from the other side of the door, as the store's phone rang. Gianna heard her footsteps grow more and more distant, before quietly opening the door. Perfect. She was gone. Instead of rolling her suitcase behind her and making noise, she quickly lifted it, groaning internally at the weight of it. With quick steps and quite as a mouse she then made her way out of the store. She did not even have to run, the woman was busy with the phone on the other side of the store. Gianna was lucky, she knew that. She always was.
She smiled triumphantly to herself as she quickly turned a corner outside, knowing it was only a matter of time, until her absence would be noticed. After walking for around fifteen minutes, she spotted a public bathroom and quickly got inside to get changed. Ignoring the more than disgusting scent inside, Gianna got out of her jeans and thin sweater, before putting on the dress and the coat she had just stolen. Admittedly, it did look good on her. The dress was black and strapless, exposing her delicate shoulders and neck. It reached her knees and hugged her body. Her legs were elongated by a pair of heels she had snatched on the way out. The black coat fit perfectly, no one would assume the brunette did not even have a place to sleep.
Neither would anyone assume she had lit an entire casino on fire thirteen hours ago. By now, it was almost eight pm and Gianna took confident steps through the streets of New York, as if she belonged to the Upper East Side and nowhere else. Finally, she reached her destination. Tilting her head, she glanced up at a bright colored sign above an expensive looking bar. From the outside, it was almost impossible to look through the windows, but considering the way guests stepping inside were dressed, it had to be a somewhat upscale establishment. She neared the bodyguards controlling the entrance who at first seemed unsure about her, mustering her petite frame and the suitcase up and down.
"Come on, gentlemen. I am freezing." The brunette smiled softly and batted her eyelashes in an innocent matter at them. She was not wearing any makeup, but the look on her face apparently seemed to be enough for them to let her in. With a polite nod, she stepped inside. Gianna had visited a lot of upscale establishments in her twenty-six years of living, but this..this truly was something else. Everything was held in dark colors, the bar, the interior. It all dripped in exclusiveness, letting her know she was exactly where she wanted to be.
She sat down at the bar on one of the high stools and crossed her slim legs, with her suitcase beside her. Still wearing her coat, she glanced around. Several men were here already, some in groups and some on their own. Some had rings on their left finger and some had not. However, Gianna knew it did not mean a thing. Manipulating married men was even easier, since they were up for every thrill. Except, Gianna was not a thrill. She was not some fun for one night. Instead, she was good company, being able to giggle and talk for hours, until her companion was blacked out, or simply too intoxicated to notice her slipping her long and slim fingers into their pockets and taking out what she had wanted all along; their wallet. Perhaps a watch, too. Whatever she could get.
With every married man that fell into her trap, Gianna felt more and more discouraged about trusting any male. It had destroyed her illusion of faithfulness completely. Her gaze landed on the man to her right. He was younger than the rest, but older than her. Admittedly, he was handsome. And he was not wearing a ring. However, there was one problem: He was not looking, unlike the other creeps. Letting her coat glide down her shoulders, she exposed her bare skin, without looking at her right anymore, hoping the somewhat seductive gesture would be enough to get his attention. When the bartender asked what she would like to drink, she gave him a small smile. "An old fashioned, please." She answered, knowing very well she did not have an ounce of cash on her. Surely, someone to pay her bill could be found tonight.

Hi, I've been on this subreddit for a while, but have never made a post. I'm fairly new (2-3 years maybe) to music-making and synthesizers as a whole. I have seen quite a lot of cool stuff here, but the things that tend to really catch my interest are people's DAWless setups. It always amazes me how creative people can get with their combinations of devices and methods of using them. Recently, taking what I had (Behringer Pro-1, Akai MPK249, PO-33 KO), I assembled a little setup of my own and just jammed out. It was so freeing, and such an awesome experience. I've only worked with FL studio before, and this was something fresh for me, and I'm very into it.
My goal is to create most of what I'm doing on the setup, then transfer that to FL and work with it the rest of the way on that. And so I'm essentially looking for help on maybe 1-3 pieces of gear that would be good to start with / add to what I already have. I have looked around myself a little, and the things that caught my eye were Elektron devices (mainly the Syntakt/Digitakt/Digitone), and the Akai MPC Live II. I've seen some concern from various reddit threads and youtube comments about the Live II being too much of a "DAW-in-a-box" and less of an instrument. I share this concern. I'd appreciate a recommendation for a good centerpiece for the setup especially. Other than that, I'm not too sure what I actually need. I'm aware you can be pretty creative with the essentials, too.
Thanks!

This did not happen recently but a few months back.
I was looking for a job (double digit years in experience) and a HR from Nagarro reached out on LinkedIn. I sent her my details, did a proctored online test and was selected for a 2nd round face to face. Since the interviewer was in US, the slot I had was Sunday at 9:45 PM IST [I was given a choice of slots but they were either 7 in the morning or 9-10 in the night, only weekends].
I joined the Teams meeting at 9:40 PM on a Sunday, turned on my camera, and waited 5 minutes for the interviewer. As soon as it became 9:45, I heard the Teams chime that I was let in, but before the sound ended, a voice started speaking. "Alright, so what things you take care?"
I looked up to see this Indian guy wearing a red hat (not THAT red hat) indoors, looking at me. I said, "Sorry, what?" And he said exasperatedly, "Your work. What. Is. It. that. You. Do." in clipped tones, as if I was not a mentally sound person.
My hand automatically moved my mouse over to the disconnect button and I almost clicked but stopped myself at the last moment. I decided to see how the interview went. I had not given an interview in a long time and wanted to get an experience.
I composed myself and started to explain my resume. In the middle of it, he stopped me and said, "Are you using dual screens?" I said yes. He scolded me for using dual screens for an interview and made me turn one off. I was on camera the whole time and it was a face to face interview so not really sure what the concern was but I still did it. The funny part was, during the interview I could hear pings from his side and see him turn to his own second screen to reply to some chat/IM messages. Anyways, I asked, "should I continue explaining my resume" and he said, "no that's alright."
"Tell me about any recent deliverable you have worked on", he asked next. I had recently worked on implementing a customized DR system so I started to explain how it was implemented and the architectural changes done. He was distracted the whole time, replying to some ping, constantly muting and unmuting his audio and saying, "That's fine. Keep going." I completed my explanation and waited. He realized I had stopped talking and said, "All that is good but I do not see the architecture change you have done." I summarized the server re-organization, the load balancers, the customized back-up and archival, even some code level changes we had to do, but he said, "I still do not see the architecture design change." I said, "I can draw an architecture diagram to show it clearly", and he said, "no that's alright. Let's move on."
I come from a .NET background, so he asked me, "do you have experience with .NET core?" I said, I did. And this is where the most weird part of the interview starts. He spent 20 minutes on a single question and you will see why, in a minute.
He asked me, "Do you know the three types of dependency injection?" I answered the three - singleton, scoped and transient.
He said, "good, now tell me how do you decide which one to use." This is a standard interview question, I gave the standard answer. It was not good enough.
He did a "tch" sound of exasperation. "All that is good, but how do you decide?" I explained again, adding more details.
He did that "tch" sound again. "All that is good, but how do YOU decide?", stressing on the word "YOU". I explained again, this time with examples of when I would make which choice and why.
He did that "tch" sound again. "All that is good, but those are textbook examples. Tell me about an example that you have implemented in your system"
I explained how we had used a singleton for application level settings. He did that "tch" sound again. "All that is good, but what made you decide that the application settings need to be in singleton?"
I was confused at this point. What was he looking for! "The settings need to be the same throughout the application and so a singleton is a logical choice", I said.
He shook his head, this time not making the "tch" sound. "No, you are not getting it. I want to understand what made you decide to make the application settings class a singleton? Was it because of the name of the class or because somebody told you or because you got a feeling?"
I was angry at this point, so I repeated the same answer as before. He said, "Maybe I am making it complex. Why don't I give you an example and you can explain your choice." I said OK.
"Alright, so suppose that I created a class called "" and asked you how should I use it. What will you say?"
I stared at him for a moment, wondering if this was real. I asked him what was the functionality of the class, and he launched into the most unnecessarily complex (and to me, wildly unrelated) functionality regarding uploading documents from an API to an azure storage account involving Virtual Networks, Key Vault, different Blob types and an Azure SQL database to store blob metadata. I asked him, how the class is supposed to be used. He said, "I don't know. I am the author of the class. I have given it to other people to use. Ask me questions you would ask the author of the class."
My mind was hurting at this point so I repeated, in the most bored voice, the very first standard answer I had given. He must have realized my disinterest, for he said, "Alright, I get it. Let's move on. Do you have experience writing SQL?"
I said Yes. So he asked me to share my screen and gave me a written scenario for which to write a query.
While I was working on the query, he said, "I have your resume so let's take a look at that." He opened the resume, I could see that he actually did open it then, by the screen brightness reflected on his face change. And as I worked on the query, he kept going through my resume and making what I can only describe as "Passive-Aggressive comments" in a low voice in the background. E.g. "worked at So-and-so (one of the Big 4 companies)... In ", "worked with XYZ technology... for ", "SME for ABC technologies... for DEF use case"
I was done at this point so I drafted out a query with as low effort as I could and then explained it quickly. It was wrong for sure, and not fulfilling the use case completely but I had stopped caring. He also realized it because he said, "Alright, I think that is it. Do you have any questions for me?", in a very smug voice.
I said, "No, thanks for the experience", and disconnected the call.
So, that was it. The most WTF interview of my life. So far. I am not really sure what was wrong with that dude or maybe I have been out of touch for a long time and this is how it is now, but damn, man. I sat in shock for a few minutes after the call. I did check out the interviewer's profile on LinkedIn, wondering if we had crossed paths before. But he was been with his company for a long, long time, first company since college and never switched. So I don't really know.
Anyways, so, yeah. Hope you are having a better experience than me.

Buster growled softly, baring his teeth at me as he stood in defiance. His stance rigid and unyielding, his tail stiff, and ears pinned back - he watched my every move with alert eyes.
My 3-year-old German shepherd had intuitively figured out the prospect of an upcoming bath when he saw me reach for the towel, and decided to give me a hard time over it.
“I know buddy. I am not happy about it either. But I will make it quick. I promise,” I tried to reason, holding up both hands to reassure him.
‘But it’s not even been a week…’ I could almost imagine him saying those exact words to me when he growled back in protest.
“You’re right...But listen, man. You’re dirty. I can feel your presence from here,” I said, standing ten feet away and pretending to cover my nostrils with my finger.
Buster, of course, didn’t care and continued to defy without hesitation.
I put my hands on my hip and sighed. My glance immediately shifted to a hose attached to a tap outside my quarters.
“Tell you what. I’ll make it worth your while. You don’t mind the jet spray, right? In fact, you even tolerate it sometimes,” I said, pointing to the hose located only a few feet away.
“How about a little cooperation now, and I’ll make you your favorite meal a little later?” I asked him, while reaching out to pick a can of chicken liver from the kitchen.
As I dangled the can in my hand, I could see it slowly chipping away at his resolve, his mind grappling with the pros and cons of my new proposal.
A moment later, Buster barked at me twice and slowly made his way out of the house. He sat by the garden tap, ready to receive his bath.
I took a handful of lotion and began to rub it against his torso to remove all the muck and grime that was sticking to his body. We had been quite busy lately, guarding the base and conducting multiple patrols along the perimeter every day. The rain a few hours ago certainly didn't help matters, with Buster leaping over puddles of water and actively rolling in the mud to escape the desert heat. I had to use a brush to remove the layers of dirt that had caked all over his body.
It’s been a strange week, to say the least. The days were busy but peaceful, while the nights brought scattered, random sounds. Their origins were a mystery, as they appeared not to originate from the base. But I wasn’t too worried about it, not yet anyway.
There is an air base located a couple of hours away from the facility, and it wasn’t unusual for them to conduct sorties at odd hours in the night. I assumed they were probably testing out some new technology.
My colleague Joe thought the same thing as well. But we couldn’t take any chances, and we both had a job to do. So we conducted regular patrols around the base just as a precautionary measure.
But deep down, I felt something nagging at me, like I was being watched by someone or something. I couldn’t exactly put it into words.
For a second, I wondered if Buster too felt the same way when I saw him suddenly lift his head up, listening intently with his ears up in attention.
I quickly turned back to check if there was anybody standing behind me, but I found no one. When I turned around to face him again, I saw him looking up at the night sky, his gaze focused and unwavering.
“What’s it buddy? You see something?” I asked him as I cleared away the foam from his face. Moments went by slowly. And then, just like that, as if nothing had happened, he put his head down and began pawing my leg, urging me to finish his bath. I sighed again and turned on the hose, to wash off all the soap.
He finally looked presentable and I have to admit, his coat glistened beautifully under the moonlight.
Before I could reach for his towel, Buster swiftly moved in to close the gap between us and looked me in the eye dead serious. He then shook his body vigorously, much like a wet dog trying to rid itself of wetness, and trotted off without bothering to look back.
I laughed out loud as I sat there, drenched in water. I knew I should have seen that coming. However, my smile quickly faded, as it also reminded me of Jessica, my ailing wife.
Before another thought could take shape in my mind, I heard a familiar voice blare across the radio.
“Mike, I need you down here. Get to the post quick.”
It was my colleague Joe and I replied back in the affirmative. I quickly grabbed my gear and signaled Buster to follow after me.
When I reached the post, I saw Joe standing there armed with his rifle. As a seasoned war veteran with two tours under his belt, Joe was a dangerous man and not to be trifled with. But he was also compassionate and wise beyond his years.
“What’s up Joe?” I inquired, as I approached him near the entrance of the base.
“I am not sure yet. I thought I heard something at a distance. It could well be nothing.” he replied, after a brief pause.
‘Well, we’ve had a lot of that going around all week’, I thought to myself.
He then turned around to look at me. “I want you to run a perimeter sweep first. Then go on patrol again. Take Buster with you” he said, before heading back to his post.
I started the jeep and drove out towards the perimeter. The engine hummed softly as I navigated the rough terrain, with Buster sitting alertly beside me. After finding nothing suspicious during my initial sweep, I decided to broaden my search radius.
A mile into the drive, Buster suddenly started barking, prompting me to stop the jeep immediately. He leaped onto the ground and dashed towards a boulder located a short distance away. I picked up my rifle and cautiously followed after him.
When I reached the spot, I keyed the mic attached to my shirt and said, "Boss, you need to come see this."
I knew he wasn’t going to be happy about leaving the guard post unmanned, but I thought he would prefer to come and inspect this himself.
Joe arrived ten minutes later, parking his vehicle next to mine. He walked towards the boulder overlooking a small pond, and switched on his torch to get a better look at the skeletal remains of an animal dumped nearby. Three other animal remains lay next to it, all appearing to be in a similar condition.
“These look like coyotes, probably stopping by to drink water from the pond before they were killed,” he observed, his voice expressing concern. “Did you find them like this?”
“Yes”, I replied. “And they weren’t here when I drove through the same place this morning. I thought it was quite odd to be honest, to find four of them out here all at once in the middle of the desert, that too at this hour.”
Joe simply nodded in agreement.
“What sort of creature do you think did this Joe?”
“I mean it must have a ravenous appetite to chew every sinew of flesh from the bone, and lick it this clean.” I said, leaning in take another look.
“Do you think it could be the Chupacabra or something similar?” I continued, knowing fully well my question was a bit far-fetched, but I had to still get it off my chest.
Joe finally stood up, switched off his torch, and looked around the vast open desert in quiet contemplation.
“This is in fact the fifth sighting in less than a week, Mike, and all have occurred in close proximity to secure government installations. The one before this was even stranger, and happened near a military base, where an old buddy of mine continues to serve.”
“He told me in that instance, the remains belonged to a dog. There were no signs of flesh or connecting tissue from the nasal region to the abdominal section, while the region spanning from the abdominal cavity to the tail bone was left fully intact. The whole thing was carried out with surgical precision, and drew morbid praise from even the medic back at the base.”
"But how is that even possible? What are you suggesting, Joe?" I asked, surprised by the tone of my own voice and my inability to hide my disappointment upon hearing about it for the first time.
“This is not a hunt for prey, Mike. This is a hunt for attention. Somebody is trying to make a point. And I’d say they are accomplishing their objective.” Joe said.
When we got back to the base, Joe updated the command centre about the new developments. I headed back to my quarters and lay down on my bed. The exhaustion washed over me and I immediately drifted to sleep.
I looked at my Mickey Mouse watch. The time was 5:36 PM. I was licking my ice cream while sitting next to my mom in the car. To my right, was my 4 year old cousin Henry who was fast asleep on his mother’s lap.
In the front, my dad was driving the car with his brother seated next to him. Then a truck from the opposite side suddenly came in our lane, and rammed into our vehicle causing it to turn turtle.
With great difficulty, I managed to extricate myself and pulled my cousin out from the wreckage as well. And then suddenly, the car exploded and went up in flames….
I opened my eyes and realized I was still in bed. The same dream had come and gone a thousand times before. It has become a constant part of my life ever since I was a 9-year-old kid.
I slowly got off the bed and found my head hurting. I had barely slept since last night’s excitement, and my mood was already beginning to turn foul.
Buster was already awake. I gently patted him on the head as I walked into the kitchen to put a kettle of water on the boil, and turned on the TV.
My attention immediately shifted towards the news. There was a nuclear explosion in Russia in a small town that was just a couple of hours away from Moscow. The details regarding the explosion were still shrouded in speculation.
“Just the kind of news to start the day,”I groaned as I reached for a nearby chair in the kitchen.
‘But what could have caused this?’ I thought to myself a little later, and hoped the damage there was minimal.
I then looked at the clock and set about getting ready for work. I showered, ate my breakfast, and was out the door by 8, with a hot cup of coffee in hand. Buster raced ahead to get to the guard post.
Joe had already completed his shift, and was waiting for me to relieve him of his duties. We high-fived as usual, and he began to walk back to his quarters. I settled into my chair, and made an entry in the logbook.
My name is Michael Armesto, a 30-year-old security guard working for a secret government installation located in an obscure area in the hot Nevada desert. The facility is centered around a medium-sized building occupying 7,000 square feet of space.
A 10-meter-high wired fence had been erected around the base to provide added protection. There was nothing else around the facility for miles, with the exception of a few boulder fields and mountains in the distance.
For over 5 years now, my colleague Joe and I have been working in shifts to ensure the guard post is manned at all times. When compared to other secret government bases, the security requirements here are not as stringent. And yet, neither Joe nor I ever had any clue about the kind of work being done here.
Every day, like clockwork, a bus carrying 25 people would arrive at the facility at 9:00 AM sharp. I had to open the gates to let them through, once the customary security checks were performed.
These people always wore lab coats and looked like scientists. They would work in the facility until 5:00 PM, and leave by the same bus at the end of the day. In all that time, they never once smiled or waved at me. It was as if their bosses had strictly informed them to not even initiate eye contact with people outside their circle.
Anyway, I never took offense to any of that. My job was to provide security to the facility, and I was doing that to the best of my ability.
As I sat back in my chair, ready to take another sip of coffee, my phone began to ring. It was from the hospital, and I answered it. A minute later, I called Joe and asked him to stand in for me. He immediately understood.
When he arrived at the guard post, I apologized for the inconvenience and Joe simply nodded with a reassuring smile.
As I was about to climb into my jeep, I pointed my finger at Buster and said, “STAY.”.
“Take him with you Mike. She will be happy to see him” Joe said quickly intervening.
“But Boss, I don’t want to leave you here alone after last night.” I protested.
Joe waved his hand dismissively. “Get going Mike. That’s an order.”
“And don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. Go see Jess and tell her I am rooting for her,” he said, before walking back to the guard post.
I put a leash on Buster and climbed into the jeep with him. I started the vehicle and began driving towards the city to check on my wife Jessica. She was receiving treatment for lung cancer at St Mary’s Hospital, which was a 5 hour drive from the base.
Jess had never smoked once in her life, and for her to go through all this hardship really broke my heart. I would have normally liked to stay by her side during this crisis, but I could not afford the cost of treatment on my own. Thankfully, the insurance from my government job so far helped me cover most of the medical expenses.
After arriving at the hospital, I headed straight to her room and found her with tubes attached to her mouth. She was heavily sedated and looked like she was in pain.
Buster was standing by the door looking glum. He could see that Jess was unwell. Buster came into my life as a surprise birthday gift from Jess, and he has been a part of our family ever since. The people working at the hospital regularly allowed him inside the premises, knowing fully well that his presence always helped to uplift her spirits.
I came to know from the doctor that Jess had suffered a heart attack due to long term COVID complications. While she was stable and out of danger for now, she did need to undergo an emergency surgery within the next 3 days. The surgery alone would cost $30,000, and that was not covered by my insurance policy.
I pulled Buster by the leash to tell him it was time to go, but he kept resisting. He wanted to sit by her side for some time, even though she was unconscious and unable to acknowledge his presence. So, I too pulled up a chair and sat beside him. It immediately brought back happy memories of our marriage.
We used to spend our summers going on long drives, visiting natural parks, or idly sitting by the beach, enjoying good food and playing all kinds of sports. Jess and I would also often embark on scenic routes, with no particular destination in mind, allowing the road to guide us towards hidden gems.
Whether it's a visit to a historic village or a hike through a lush green forest, all the shared experiences helped strengthen our bond as a family.
The two of us also enjoyed using Buster to pull pranks on each other. Whenever Jess gave him a bath, she would command Buster to go ‘Shake’ in front of me and I would get drenched in water, leading to fits of laughter all around. It was one of her favorite pranks.
So when I saw my wife on the bed with tubes attached to her mouth, I got the reality check I needed. I stood up from my chair and yanked harder at his leash; he didn’t resist this time and followed after me.
I walked out of the hospital feeling a bit dazed. As I started to drive back to the base, my mind was busy trying to come up with solutions. I had only $2000 in my bank account, and that clearly wasn’t enough.
‘Maybe I could contact an official from the government and apply for a loan?’ I thought to myself. I kept driving while mulling on the best course of action.
Then, at a certain point, I suddenly snapped to my senses and immediately stopped the car. I had been driving for over 4 hours now. It was 7 in the evening, and night had already fallen.
Yet, I could not spot the base in the distance. Usually, by this time, the floodlights would have been turned on, and the facility would be easily visible for miles.
Instead, all I could see up ahead was pitch-black darkness. Something was wrong.
I tried calling Joe on his phone, but he was unreachable. I pressed the gas pedal and drove as fast as I could.
When I finally reached the facility, the situation looked much worse than I had feared. The entrance gate was left half open, with no one manning the guard post. The entire building just sat there in the darkness with no power. I tried calling on Joe’s number again. No response.
I then called Joe’s boss, who was stationed in Carson City, to inform him of the situation and possibly request reinforcements. He was unreachable as well.
‘What on earth is going on?’ I asked myself. This was completely bewildering on so many levels.
I slowly drove up to the base, and stopped the jeep a short distance away from the front gate. I wanted to be able to make a quick exit, if things turned hostile. I took a torch light from the dashboard and unfastened my sidearm from the holster. After getting down from the vehicle, I softly whistled towards Buster to follow me.
When I walked past the gate and checked the guard post, I saw a body lying face down on the floor. From a distance, it was difficult to identify the person clearly, but as I got closer I recognized Joe’s uniform. I ran towards him and turned him around and got the shock of my life. I stumbled back in fear and hit the floor hard.
I don’t know what they did to Joe.
But he was lying there dead! Very dead!
It was like he had been zapped or electrocuted. The only thing that was remaining of him was his skeleton. Not an ounce of flesh was visible on his body. And yet his uniform looked in pristine condition.
‘How is this even possible?’ I asked myself.
It immediately reminded me of the dead coyotes I found on patrol the previous night.
“Could this all be somehow related? Was this an execution? And was this carried out be the same group of people?” I wondered.
Joe’s rifle was still there, leaning against the wall. I holstered my sidearm and picked up his rifle. I checked the magazine. He hadn’t fired a single shot.
I then turned on the tactical light and started moving towards the government facility. No one could enter this building until they had a high level of clearance, and every person who had clearance, was issued an electronic key card to gain access. So I was shocked to see the door was left ajar here as well.
Before entering, I headed back to check the junction box. The darkness was making me paranoid and I wanted to see if there was anything I could do to fix it first. When I reached the box, I discovered that the power had been deliberately shut down.
I turned it back on, and the entire place lit up like a Christmas tree.
But the whole facility wore a deserted look. The bus that was usually used to ferry the scientists was still parked at the parking lot.
I doubled back towards the entrance, and slowly entered the building with my rifle pointed forward. This was the first time I was setting foot inside the facility. And if this was supposed to be a top research lab, I wasn’t seeing any signs of it.
The place had been hastily evacuated. There was not a single soul in sight. All I could see was waste paper and computer cables strewn across the floor. Everything else had been cleared out.
Buster then took off on his own, and dashed towards the far end of the building. Something had caught his fancy and I followed after him. He stopped against a large couch and started barking at me.
I looked down and could see something metallic hidden underneath. I stretched my hand to retrieve an aluminum briefcase with blood stains all over it. Someone was obviously holding onto it for dear life, and then tossed it underneath as a last ditch attempt to prevent it from getting into the wrong hands.
‘Did the scientists manage to escape? Or did something bad happen to them, like it happened to Joe?’
‘Could the nuclear explosion in Russia have something to do with this?’
“Are the two countries about to go to war? Is this to be viewed as an escalation,” I wondered.
A hundred questions were going through my mind now, and I had answers to none of them.
I decided to get the hell out of there as quickly as possible. I saw no point in staying, now that Joe was dead and the facility had also been cleared out. I ran back to my jeep, tossed the briefcase in the backseat, and began my drive back to the nearest city I could think of.
Twenty minutes into the drive, I began to get curious about the briefcase, and I had to stop the car to take a look. I switched on the light in my vehicle and opened the briefcase. There was some kind of a telescope inside.
On its base, it bore the insignia of a bright burning Sun with a single eye at it’s center. It also had a name tag attached to it that was labelled Korelo ZX4 – 1969.
The telescope in itself was a strange looking contraption, the likes of which I had never seen before. It was the size of a camcorder, and comfortably fit within the palm of my hand.
There were two identical knobs on either side of the device. The one on the left moved freely clockwise or counter clockwise. It felt similar to those old radio transistors, where you could switch back and forth between stations.
The knob on the right looked the same but had a small pointer attached to it. It had limited range of motion and worked like a switch. Close to the pointer were 3 printed dots, one larger than the other in ascending order. I guess this signified the 3 levels in which this device functioned.
I held the telescope gently in my hand and peered into the eyepiece. With the moon being the only source of light in the desert, I could hardly spot a thing. I then turned the knob on the right, and the device immediately roared to life. I could even feel it mildly vibrating in my hand.
As I peered into the eyepiece again, I now had clear vision of the space all around me. A green display had opened up and was providing clean imagery with stunning levels of detail. I slowly started to turn the knob on the left, and the telescope began to zoom in and out.
I could now clearly see the creatures of the desert ….miles away… coming out their holes …looking for prey. Their heat signatures capturing perfectly… the contours of their own bodies as they moved swiftly across the sand.
As I kept zooming in further, I could also spot the local diner of the nearest town that was more than 50 miles away. I could not only figure out the make and model of cars parked in front of the restaurant, but also read the number plates on them.
And then I looked upwards, pointing the telescope at the night sky, hoping to see the stars a little more clearly. And suddenly everything became obscure. It was like staring at a blank wall.
I moved the telescope away looking confused. Everything looked normal. There was an abundance of stars scattered across the sky, and there were hardly any clouds. I looked into the telescope again, and started zooming back, and my heart suddenly skipped a beat.
Thousands of feet high up in the sky, a large spaceship was hovering mid-air. It was big enough to accommodate an entire football field. I could feel my heart pounding in my chest as I just kept staring at it for several moments.
Then I slowly began to pan the telescope across the skyline, and soon realized that I was in for an even bigger shock! There were at least two more spaceships thousands of miles away. Make no mistake. They were clearly visible as the one I was standing in front of.
‘Ok Mike, What else you got?’ I said out loud to myself.
I then turned my focus back to the ship in front of me, and turned the right knob again.
The second dot got highlighted on screen, and the telescope suddenly zoomed in to reveal the insides of the spaceship.
The unfolding images were a little grainy but still definitive enough to provide sufficient visual quality. It was like an X-ray, CT scan and MRI all rolled into one. As I kept adjusting the left knob to get a clearer visual, I could see a large workstation occupying most of the space inside the ship.
Close to the panel, two people were standing and conversing with each other. They did not look human at all. In fact, they looked like aliens!
By this point, I was already sweating even as the cool winds of the desert were hitting my face, and ruffling my hair. I continued to stare into the telescope completely transfixed. I turned the right knob one more time.
The last big dot got highlighted on screen, and then I suddenly started hearing weird noises. Buster who was keeping silent all this while, let out a soft howl and dug his face into the sand. But the noises didn’t stop. It sounded odd and animal like. Like the garbled speech of someone attempting to speak with a mouthful of water. I realized I was now eavesdropping on the aliens talking amongst themselves.
I think they figured this out as well. Because one of them abruptly stopped speaking, and walked towards a work station, and then punched something on the console.
In a matter of moments, the other alien turned around and took a step forward in my direction. It looked like he was peering down at me, fully aware of my existence. A wry smile appeared on his lips, and I felt a shiver go down my spine.
I immediately switched off the telescope, put it back in the briefcase and ran towards my jeep. Buster followed after me. I decided to get to the nearest town and drove as fast as I could.
Part 2

I first started noticing that something was wrong around 3 months ago. At the time, I was working from home and would usually light a scented candle while I worked, which usually helped me relax and stay focused on my work. I would usually burn through a candle a week, but over time, the candles started to take less time to fully burn up. At first, I thought that this was because of a change in ingredients the company that made the candles used, but the problem persisted after I switched candle brands, which I once again blamed on the candle manufacturers.
I kept this belief for another week until the first incident. While getting up from my computer desk, which faces away from the candle, to take a quick bathroom break, I caught a glimpse of the lit candle. A two-inch layer of molten wax rested on another three-inch layer of solid wax, the wicks rising out at first and being somewhat visible through the molten layer, finally breaking the surface and being slowly burned away. The flames flickered as I swung the door open and walked out of the room. When I returned 10 minutes later, the molten layer was gone, and the wicks had been shortened so that the flames rested right above the solid layer of the wax. At first, I thought that the glass jar that contained the candle was leaking, but after a short inspection, I was only able to find two small drops of candle wax that had solidified right next to the candle on the bedside table. I still had 2 hours of work left to do, but I was too lost in thought and was unable to do any work for the rest of the day.
Every night before I go to sleep, I like to read for at least 30 minutes, and while reading, I usually light a candle. Around 4 days later, I had mostly forgotten about the incident and went back to using candles. Due to my naivety, it returned.
I fell asleep while reading with a candle lit on my bedside table. I woke up to loud slurping noises. As I opened my eyes, the brightness of the light I had not turned off almost blinded me. As my eyes tried to readjust to the light and focus on what was in front of me, I saw a somewhat humanoid dark gray to light blue blur that contrasted with the white paint on the walls behind it. Another gray line stretched from the shape's head to the candle on my bedside table. I could feel my heart skip five consecutive beats. I opened my mouth and tried to force out a scream for help, but the pressure I applied to my throat was way beyond what it was able to handle, leading me to only produce a light wheezing sound. I tried to sit up or to at least prop myself up, but my muscles failed me. Trying to push myself up with my arms felt impossible. As I stared at the figure that had suddenly appeared in my room, my eyes finally managed to focus, making it possible for me to see the intruder who was now staring at me. The figure was a man at least 7 feet tall, fully naked; he looked bloated; his eyes were bloodshot and looked like they would pop out of their sockets; at any point, his skin was a grayish light blue.
HIS LIPS
His lips extended from his mouth like an elephant's trunk, which had been split in half. The lips extended from the man's face to the candle; the flames had been put out. He was using his lips as a makeshift straw, slowly sucking up all the molten wax from the candle, which had fully liquified while I was asleep. I laid in bed, unable to move, unable to scream for help, staring until he emptied the jar. His lips retracted back to his face, the molten wax solidifying on their tips and cracking, flakes of wax falling off the man's lips and falling to the floor. The man grinned, staring at me. The ridges and gaps between the teeth were filled in with wax, making it impossible to make out where one tooth ended and the next one began. The man opened the door he was standing next to, but instead of walking out of the room, he stepped behind it. His face peered at me from above the door, and then once again, like he had done to drink the wax, the man puckered his lips, which stretched from his mouth and floated to me. I shook and tried to roll over away from him. I wanted to get up and run, but my fear had taken over my body. Tears flowed from my eyes. He kissed me on the cheek, leaving flakes of wax and light moisture. He retracted his lips and lowered his head behind the door.
I don't remember falling asleep, but when I woke up, I saw the empty glass jar, which at one point contained the candle. Even though I had hoped that what had happened was a dream, it wasn't. I still had flakes of wax on my cheek, and on my bedroom floor, the wax in the jar had disappeared. I called the police, but they were unable to find anyone in my apartment; they also could not find any evidence of a break-in.
After the break-in, I started looking for a new apartment to move to, thinking that the man was tied to the building I was in, but even though I had thrown out all of my candles, I could not stomach spending another hour in my apartment, constantly looking over my shoulder or walking around with my back pressed up against the wall to not allow it to creep up on me. Thankfully, my friend Emma was able to let me stay over at her apartment while I looked for a new one for myself.
Me and Emma have been friends since we were 8, and we've been there to support each other when times get rough. This isn’t the first time I've had to stay over at her house for an extended amount of time; in fact, I have had to stay over at Emma’s as many times as she has had to stay over at my apartment, whether it was because of evictions after losing a job, breakups, or a candle wax drinking squatter. I didn't even know if it was human. I mean, sure, it looked like one, but human lips are not supposed to do what his did, and somehow it didn't have a reaction to molten wax being poured down its esophagus. I didn't tell Emma about what happened—the details at least—I just told her that a man had broken into my house and was watching me sleep. The only people I told the truth to were my therapist and the cops, and all of them disregarded what I told them as my mind making things up after a traumatic event.
For a while, I believed what they said—I mean, why wouldn’t I?—but then I started seeing him again. For a few days, I thought it was my mind playing tricks on me again like it had done during the night of the incident. For split seconds out of the corner of my eye, I would see the outline of a tall, bloated figure. At first, they were hours apart, but after a while, it became constant. He was standing in each room I passed, in every single dark corner I glanced past, and then he spoke.
“FeeD MeEeee”
It stood in the kitchen, peering over from a small gap between the fridge and the sink, where the trash can that had been knocked over onto its side usually stood. His voice was raspy, and every word that came out of his mouth was distorted as if he were gargling water, but still, I could somehow clearly make out each word he said from over 15 feet away.
“Please just leave me alone I… why are you following me?”
I shouted at the figure, the same fear that had taken over my body during the night I saw him for the first time paralyzing me, making it impossible for me to move anything other than my eyes, eyelids, and mouth.
“i’M sTarviNg, I nEEd You To FeEd ME”
It replied again. Now, stepping out from behind the fridge, he stepped directly onto a rotten banana. Its mushy brown content’s seeping out of the peel under the pressure of his decomposing foot, which was covered in scabs, and took up the same grayish light blue color as the rest of his body. He mostly looked the same; his bloodshot eyes bulged from their sockets, but now his tongue was swollen. It peeked out from between his bloated, cracked gray lips; it stared at me, waiting for an answer.
“Ok, I’ll.. I’ll feed you, but please just... leave me alone.”
I replied, the tone of my voice shifting into high-pitched squeals with every quick breath I took. He looked satisfied by my response. He somehow squeezed his bloated body back into the gap that was at least four times smaller than him. After peering over at me from above the fridge, he bent over backwards, his spine releasing a series of sickening cracks until he was fully obscured by the fridge, and then he vanished.
Still barely in control of my body, I limped over to the couch tucked away in the back corner of the living room, it took me at least 10 minutes to steady my breathing and 20 more to fully regain control of my body again but as soon as I did I ran out the house and to the nearest store, during the 15-minute walk he stared at me through dark windows and the backs of cars, peered out at me from gaps between leaves in the trees and bushes, he even followed me into the store staring at me from the middle of deserted isles before disappearing right before my eyes were able to fully catch him, once I finally got the candles I randomly picked four off of the shelves and rushed to the self checkout.
When I arrived home, I had 2 hours before Emma got off work. I didn't want to feed it while she was home, and I didn't want her to see it. I pulled out two of the candles from the black plastic bag and placed them on the kitchen table, the first a light blue candle named “Garden Rain” and the second a red candle named “Juicy Watermelon." I pulled out a lighter from one of the drawers Emma used after her stove stopped lighting on its own and lit each of the 6 wicks on the candles. As soon as I started seeing the wax melt under the heat of the burning wicks, I dropped the lighter onto the table next to the candles and ran out of the room. I could not stomach seeing that thing again; even just thinking about it made me shudder and hyperventilate. The paralyzing fear that seeing him caused me made me want to vomit.
At least 30 minutes later I started to hear it drink even though the living room and kitchen were separated by a wall, even though I had closed the door I could still hear what at first started as slurping sounds which were followed up by loud gulps, then it stopped, and once again 30 minutes later it started drinking, as the slurping started once again I heard the door to the apartment crack open, it was Emma, as she stepped through the door I saw her carrying two large brown paper bags of groceries in her hands, she was headed to the kitchen.
“Hey let me grab those for you”
I said running over to her, my voice shaking.
“Oh, thanks. Are you… okay, you look scared?”
My eyes shot wide open in a mixture of fear and surprise. I said the first thing that came to mind.
“Yeah just umm… I didn't expect you to come home so early and I got a bit spooked”
“shit sorry, I know I should have called you, work let me off early today,”
I started to turn away from her walking to the kitchen.
Trying to keep her away from the kitchen I told her to wait for me in the living room because I wanted to talk to her about something. I didn't know what I would talk to her about but that was a problem for future me to resolve, somehow it worked.
“What's that sound?”
She called out to me while walking towards the living room couch. It took me a few seconds to come up with an excuse.
“I think it’s the sink, or the pipes at least”
I opened the door to the kitchen with my eyes closed at first hesitant to look knowing what would be greeting me. slowly prying my eyes open I started to see its outline, my muscles started to lose strength as the details of the man came into my view, I felt the grocery bags start to slip from my arms, my knees buckled, face first I fell onto the kitchen floor scattering the groceries all over the floor, I mixture of a light scream and a yelp escaped from my mouth as my body made contact with the floor, Emma concerned for my safety ran into the kitchen, she didn't scream, using all of the strength and mobility I had left in my muscles I rolled over expecting to see her face drenched in terror, her body frozen still unable to move just like my body had done the first time that I saw him, but Emma looked concerned, the man was gone, she crouched down beside me.
“Oh my god are you ok? What happened?”
I looked around observing my surroundings.
“I um… I… I tripped on the little thing at the bottom of the doorframe”
I finally managed to blurt out another excuse, not being able to remember what the name of a door sill was. I started to sit up using a part of the energy that had returned to my body, pain pulsed through my chest and arms, Emma looked at me with a concerned face.
“You've been acting really weird since I got home, are you sure you're ok?”
“Yeah… I think I’m just having one of those days you know”
The confusion on Emma’s face said that she didn’t know and to be honest I didn't either, I guess my luck of pulling random excuses out of my ass ran out, Emma thought that she triggered some sort of PTSD response after barging into the house unannounced at first apologizing then trying to change the subject to stop my trembling which I was still unsuccessfully trying to hide from her.
“Did you buy candles?”
Emma asked picking the groceries apart from the garbage that spilled out the can that the man had knocked over, placing them on the table next to the now half-empty glass jars, the flames flickered above the inch or so of molten wax the man was unable to finish drinking.
“Yeah I’ve been struggling with work lately, they usually help me focus”
“Huh Interesting combination you’ve got going on here”
She looked at me and smiled slightly, I smiled back and chuckled to seem normal.
“Yeah even I don't know what I was trying to accomplish here, to be honest”
I tried to help Emma clean up the spilled groceries but she did not let me, she told me that I needed to recover like I had been in a car crash instead of having taken a little tumble. After a few seconds of silence, Emma spoke again.
“Anyway, what did you want to talk to me about earlier?”
A quick jolt of stress shot through my body, in a jumbled mess of lies and fear I had forgotten what I had told Emma, I sat there in silence for a few seconds unable to come up with an excuse
“I…umm… I don’t remember, it wasn't anything serious though”
“Damn did you hit your head too?”
She said once again proudly smiling at her joke.
At this point Emma picked up the last bag of potato chips from the floor and placed it on the table, then she opened the fridge and started loading the groceries into it.
“Anyway I gotta go get back to work’’
I blurted out after a few more seconds of awkward silence.
“Alright well good luck”
I walked over into the living room and sat down in front of my workstation, which now consisted of a laptop sitting on a small foldable TV tray that had just barely enough room left on it to fit a small USB mouse.
The last thing I remember, before I fell asleep, was me mindlessly scrolling through apartment listings while Emma watched a random 90’s horror movie I’m positive only had a budget of $500.
I woke up with a light stinging pain shooting through my dry throat, and a dim hissing sound caused by thousands of water drops striking the ground outside filled the room. I pressed the spacebar on my laptop, the brightness of the screen blinding me temporarily, after taking a few seconds to let my eyes readjust I managed to make out the time, 3:45 AM. A strong smell I was unable to make out the origin of assaulted my nostrils. Lavender.
The smell hitting my nose had the same effect on me that I would expect smelling salts would have on a weightlifter right before they set a world record. Before I knew it my legs were moving on their own at an almost uncontrollable pace, fighting back against my mind which was telling them to slow down after years of being used to navigating both mine and Emma’s apartment as steadily as possible to not bother the neighbors.
Finally, after what felt like an eternity I stood before Emma’s bedroom door, a faint, yellow, pulsating light radiated from a lamp and snuck out of a small gap between the door and the doorframe, reluctantly I pushed my left hand up against the door, my right hand grasping onto the door frame for a sense of stability, once the door was fully agape I scanned the inside of the room my heart skipping a beat for every humanoid shadow cast up onto the wall by the lights from the wicks which were set ablaze and were being slowly burnt away.
I walked into Emma’s room and made my way over to her bedside table to put out the candle, as I stepped closer towards her, her face became more defined, I could finally make out her features, she was awake, but no she could not have been, even though her eyes were wide open they never blinked, she didn't even move slightly, as I moved closer I finally managed to fully make out the expression of pure terror on her face, her mouth wide agape as if she was about to release a deafening screach, but she could not have, a single drop of solidified wax dribbled out of the corner of her mouth and clung to her cheek, my eyes traced the cream colored path back towards her mouth, first up her cheek then between the corner of her mouth and finally behind her teeth, there instead of her tongue or the roof of her mouth I saw a wall of wax which had filled in the entirety of her mouth.
I fell to my knees and hunched forward supporting my body weight with my arms, I was too late, I resisted the urge to vomit and got back up onto my feet, a mixture of tears and snot slid down my face and onto my lips, shaking now I slowly started limping over towards my phone which I had left on the couch next to where I had awoken just minutes before, just minutes before my life was destroyed because of my lies if I had just told Emma what I had gone through, if I had just told her what had happened on the night of the incident which now seemed trivial, even if she thought that I was crazy, I know that she would have complied just to make me feel comfortable.
It took me at least 30 seconds of repeated attempts to stabilize my hands enough to properly dial 911. “Someone broke into my apartment and hurt my friend” was the only reasonable explanation I could come up with that would not get the operator to hang up on me thinking that this was a prank call.
I sat there in the living room for an agonizing 10 minutes, crying, my sadness slowly transformed into anger towards myself, and my mind raced thinking of all the lies I’d told, I kept thinking that if I had just told her the truth she would not have been laying there in her bed, her body bloated, “every single orifice has signs of forced penetration and has been filled with what seems to be candle wax” is what was written on her autopsy report.
For a few days I was the main suspect in Emma’s murder, but due to the almost unstoppable crying and the unresponsive state that I was in when the police arrived, mixed with the lack of evidence of me having a way to produce 30 pounds of candle wax led to me being released out of police custody, but because I was the main suspect I was not told any details about what had fully happened to Emma, for days all I had to work off of was the image of her face frozen in terror, and a short glance I caught of her bloated body as she was being carted out on a stretcher.
I recounted every single word of our last conversations over and over again until they became permanently etched into my brain.
Emma’s parents originally wanted to cremate her, as that is what she had somewhat jokingly asked for whenever the topic of funerals came up, well she had joked about wanting to have had unpopped popcorn shoved down her throat before she was sent off to “scare the shit out of the guy cremating me” but due to all the wax which would have been impossible to get out of her body they were forced to bury her.
A few days before Emma’s funeral her body disappeared.
After Emma’s death, her parents took me into their home, after reading the autopsy reports and seeing her corpse they had thrown out every single candle they owned which made their home the safest choice I had, still, this did not stop me from buying a machete and keeping it under my bed, just in case.
I was laying on the bed in their guest bedroom The day that the police informed Emma’s parents about her disappearance, the bedroom is right above the front porch of the house, at first I heard them ring the doorbell which was followed up by 3 powerful knocks on the door, for about a minute I laid there on the bed listening to muffled voices exchanging distorted words I was barely able to make out which slowly transformed into distorted weeps, curious I lifted myself up from the bed, made my way over to the window and carefully lifted the bottom panel making Shure to not make too much noise, the distorted muffled sounds started forming into coherent words “We checked the security footage but the only strange thing we could see was a 5 second time jump” one of the officers spoke in a serious and almost monotone voice “which meant that the security guard who was the only person in the building had to climb down 2 flights of stairs walk through a 40 foot long hallway and then drag her body back up stairs and out of the building in 5 seconds” Emma’s mom let out yelp “ but don’t worry ma'am that’s actually good news because we know that her corpse is still somewhere within the building and was probably brought to the wrong floor by an intern, we’ve already warned all of the staff at the hospital to keep an eye out, and we also sent 5 officers to search the hospital”
I could not believe what I was hearing, my breathing quickened, but this time instead of fear I felt anger, that fucker stole her corpse and was probably in the weird separate plane of existence he always went back to after terrorizing me, cutting off chunks of her body, melting her, and drinking her.
I closed the window Emma’s mom's cries once again turned into a muffled rumble which was only possible to make out if you knew what to look for, I took a few steps back away from the window planning to lay back down, not wanting to bother Emma’s parents. I bumped into something, not something, someone, its fleshy towering form as solid as a wall sent me tumbling forward, I knew it was him, he had returned to take me too, to stretch his swollen cracked lips, push them down my esophagus, fill my lungs and stomach with wax. But despite all of that this time I was not scared, I was angry, and I was not going to stand there in terror like I had the last time I saw him.
I fell forward onto my knees my face missing the window sill just by mere inches, I put my hands onto the floor, lifted one of my knees, and rotated 180 degrees now facing the monster, to the right of him pushed up against the wall was the bed, light from the sun reflected off of the metallic button which kept my machete in it’s sheathe, the man started to stretch his lips, they were moving towards me, waving a wiggling through the air like a snake slithering towards me.
I dove towards the bed one of my feet pushing off of the floor and the other pushing against the wall which creaked under the pressure applied to it, I flew for a few moments before slamming down onto the carpet and sliding forward, the heat generated by my skin brushing against the carpet released a sharp stinging pain throughout my body, my outstretched arm landed just a few inches short of the machete, I quickly bent my arms, pushing my body up and crawled towards the machete. my fingers wrapped around the handle I spun around, my back pushed up against the bedside table, once again facing the man, he was still facing the window but his lips faced me and were just a few feet away from me, for what felt like minutes but was most likely no longer than a second, I struggled to hook my finger under the strap securing the machete into its sheath, as the lips inched towards me the man started producing gurgling noises, he was regurgitation wax.
I finally pulled the machete out of its sheath, I swung the blade at the man's lips, the blade was not met with any resistance as it sliced through the man’s lips which landed on the carpeted floor with an audible thud, the man did not have a physical reaction to my counter-attack, his lips kept creeping towards me, once again I slashed at the lips, still no reaction, I repeated this at least 3 more times.
I wanted to kill him, I wanted to take revenge for what he had done to Emma, but fighting back was pointless. I realized that no matter how much I tried to hurt it, I could not kill him, I could not get rid of him.
My rage dissipated and a mixture of fear and sadness crept in, and soon took over my body, I screamed for help, I screamed in fear, in agony, tears streamed down my face as the man's lips finally reached my face, he wasn’t met with any resistance as his lips snuck between mine, pried my jaw open and finally started to slide down my esophagus.
I heard the cops run up the stairs, they started banging on the door asking if I was okay only to have been met with muffled screams, hot wax started to pour down inside of me, the stinging pain of the heat made me want to plunge the machete which I had dropped onto the ground next to me into my stomach to create a gaping wound that the wax would hopefully funnel out of, the texture of the man's slippery, oily lips matched with the poison like flavor of the wax caused me to start gagging, I felt my insides bulging like at any moment my intestines would have been filled to the point where they would pop, I wanted to vomit, the drain myself of the filth I was filled with, but his lips had plugged my throat not allowing anything to get out.
Hearing my muffled screams the cops started kicking the door down, the man retracted his lips, the suction aided my attempts at cleansing my insides, I got onto my hands and knees streams of molten wax pouring out of me, solidifying on the the carpet, with another loud thud the door swung open slamming into the wall, the man was gone.
That’s the last thing I remember before I passed out, but according to one of the doctors who was in the ambulance that brought me to the hospital, I was still semi-responsive during the first 10 minutes of the ride to the hospital.
Approximately 13.4 pounds of wax were removed from my body, the doctors said that I was in a critical condition and some of them did not expect me to make it.
One of the officers who was there the day the man attacked me took a report of what had happened to me, due to the unmistakable evidence of what had happened to both me and Emma, and the fact that this was the 3rd instance of me reporting something like this the police finally started investigating who this man might have been.
Around a month later I was discharged from the hospital and once again have been staying in the living room of Emma’s parent's house.
I’ve been seeing the man again, candles were not allowed in the hospital I stayed at, which means that he’s probably very hungry, he’s close to attacking me again, I know it, he wants to finish what he started and I don't know if I have the power to fight back, I’m not sure if defeating him is even possible, I’m tired.
I’ve been seeing Emma too, her bloated, reanimated corpse often appears to be standing next to the man. If I let him take me will I get to join them? I’ve tried asking but they don’t answer, they just stare, I can’t keep living in constant fear, always looking over my shoulder, I miss Emma.

It's been a little while, so time to repost this:
On principle I would say just don't buy a Razer product, but if you are going to, make sure you buy it directly from them, they have a loophole in the warranty policy so they don't have to honor claims for most products purchased on Amazon. I got a Razer Naga X as a gift for my birthday, and after about a year it developed a bunch of scroll wheel bounce (going up when I scroll down and vice-versa) and then one of the thumb buttons stopped registering consistently, so I filed a support ticket, and they told me they wouldn't be honoring the manufacturer's warranty b/c it was sold by an 'unauthorized reseller'. The problem is that it was bought on Amazon (which IS listed as an authorized reseller - my girlfriend, who purchased it, had made sure to check that) but apparently there are TONS of '3rd party sellers' that make up the vast majority of the Amazon listings, even Prime listings (something I didn't even know until all of this) and apparently that gives them a loophole to not honor the warranty. I did a search on Amazon for the same mouse, and it wasn't till the 7th result that I found one that wasn't through one of these storefronts. Most of these storefronts **are '**Amazon' sales anyways, it's a way for Amazon to outsource the work of creating listings and marketing without hiring people as actual employees - the 'seller' doesn't store or ship the product - all of that is Amazon - they are just getting a cut of the sale for creating the posting/bringing in business. And, by the way, none of this came up when I successfully registered the mouse on the Razer website upon receiving it.
The entire attempt at the warranty claim was a huge mess that took over six weeks, with a TON of back and forth where they promised to take care of me, only for that to be vetoed by the back office (at least three or four different times as the ticket got escalated) ... First, they told me that I had to contact the seller, that they had first obligation on a replacement, but I was told "I guarantee that we have your back on this" and to come back to Razer support if the seller declined to replace it or didn't respond. Well, the seller didn't respond, and when I contacted Razer again, they said 'Sorry, sucks to be you' (paraphrase, lol).
So... I did a bit of research to see if that was even legal and found an instance where someone raised a stink on Reddit and Razer ended up replacing their device... so I did the same thing; the official Razer account quickly reached out and reopened the ticket, support contacted me asking for a photo of the mouse to verify the serial number (and said they'd process the replacement if the number checked out - which it did)... two days later I got a response saying.. they'd get back to me in two days. Another two days later I got another email saying 'Sorry, that's out of the warranty period' (it's not, it was slightly over one year into a two year warranty) I responded with proof of this, their reply completely ignored the warranty timeframe issue and just went back to the 'unauthorized reseller' line. They also told me that there was no repair option, but if I subscribe to their newsletter I can get $10 of my next purchase and a whole bunch of other marketing spam, which was just salt in the wound if you ask me. I contacted the Reddit account again to tell them how useless and frustrating that had been and they responded that I should "keep replying so the ticket doesn't auto-close from inactivity"... pretty pointless if you ask me since they are dead set on not honoring the warranty. I did keep the ticket open for a while anyways, but they started to auto-respond with the same boilerplate response.
Every other warranty claim I have ever made has been based on the serial number and whether the defect was the result of misuse or happened through normal use. This has been the most absurd experience I've ever had with a company's customer support / warranty department; I certainly will never do business w/ Razer again, and I'd recommend the same to everyone else.
Apparently, they want my experience to be an example of their customer experience, since, in their own words: "as much as we would like to proceed in replacing your device, we're afraid that the Warranty Policy we have in place is too important, as it will remind all customers that Razer has exclusions and limitations on its warranty." So... I'm going to continue to share it with as many people as I can. The ironic thing is that they have probably spent more money on payroll dealing with me than they would have if just honored the warranty in the first place (and they would have continued to get positive word-of-mouth from me instead of these PSAs - I'm quite active in the endgame community of a major MMO, I host a lot of training runs and am constantly recommending that new player go get an MMO mouse for all the extra buttons - I used to sing praises about Razer mice before this, my first Razer mouse lasted almost eight years - but now I tell them to get anything but a Razer)

Edit: I properly re-flared this as 'Tips' (and although I'd recommend not supporting a company with such deceptive practices at all, the point of this post is that if you are going to buy a Razer, make sure you do it in a way that doesn't leave you without a warranty) ... Somehow the flair got changed to 'Rant' - seems the Razer people want people to dismiss this post.

huh... someone keeps changing the flair

It was just supposed to be another camping trip, like so many others we had gone on.
The town we live in isn't huge, but it does have a lot of woodland to explore. We live on the edge of what most people would call Appalachia and we’ve had more than one weird experience out there. Once, as my friends and I walked down the familiar trails, we smelled a strong and unpleasant scent. Brian thought it must have been a bear, but I’d smelled bear smells before. We’d had one winter under our back porch one year, and this was very different from the musty smell he had left when spring came.
Another time, while we were camping, we saw ghost lights in the woods. They were beautiful, red and blue and yellow and orange, and though Justin was afraid of them, I felt drawn to go to them and see them better. I knew better, though. Grandma had told all of us about the dangers of following the ghost lights and had assured us all that we wouldn’t like where they would take us.
“The lands of Fairy is beautiful, but also terrible for mortals to behold. They would make you young for the rest of your days, though that might not be as long as you might think.” She always said with an evil grin.
We’d heard whistling and strange growls, throaty yells, and strange birds, but none of it ever really scared me. The woods had always been a friendly place, a place of adventure, and I always looked forward to my time there. I never felt uneasy when I was within its borders, and as the four of us prepared to go back into the woods for another camping expedition, I was excited.
Brain’s brother had told him about an old trestle bridge deep in the woods and we all wanted to see it.
It was part of the old railroad, something that hadn’t run through the town in a long time. The tracks were still there, the old station too, but the trains had been mostly for passengers, and we had none these days. No one came in, no one left, and we had no industry for the trains to transport. All the wood we harvested went to the sawmill or the paper mill, and there was no need to transport it by rail. The trestle bridge hadn’t seen a train cross it in twenty years and spanned a small gorge in the middle of the forest. Brian said his brother claimed the bridge was where high school kids went to drink beer, and now that we were Freshmen, we should go out there too.
“He said it was a right of passage and that we should go see if the right had decided to leave us a gift out there.”
We didn’t know what sort of gift that would be, but we were all curious to see the bridge.
So, we told our parents we would be camping one weekend in April and took to the woods.
Brian and I were eager, talking about how cool it would be to see it, but Justin and Frank seemed hesitant. Well, that wasn’t quite true. Justin was hesitant, as he almost always was, and Frank was kind of ambivalent. We had met him last year at the start of ninth grade and he had made a pretty good addition to our trio. Frank wasn’t an avid hiker, but he liked to hang out in the woods and get a little high from time to time and that was good enough for us. He also brought outstanding camping snacks, so we were more than happy to hit the trails with him. I wasn’t certain there was a sleeping bag in that rucksack of his, but I could already hear the crinkle of chips and snack cakes within it.
“Any idea how far off this bridge is?” Justin asked, plodding along grumpily.
Justin didn’t mind hiking, but he wasn’t big on aimlessly wandering around in the woods. He had packed enough to make up for Frank’s lack of gear, and the tent poked up over his left shoulder. He was plodding along at the back of the group and I was sure we’d have to listen to a fair amount of complaining before we got there.
“My brother says it's about three miles into the woods, following the river until we come to the gorge. After that, it should be pretty easy to find.”
“And if your brother is playing a trick on us? If he’s just messing with us and we walk three hours into the woods for nothing?”
Brian rolled his eyes, “Then we have a fun little adventure to talk about when we go to college, don’t we?”
Justin grumbled about having to walk three miles into the woods, but we couldn’t have picked a better day for it. The weather was perfect, a slight breeze keeping the early summer heat at bay. The clouds overhead looked a little wet, but they were nowhere close. We’d have a nice camping trip this weekend, a nice little excuse to fish and relax and enjoy ourselves as we explored the old trestle. The woods around the town were full of things like that, and we’d explored old houses that had been retaken by the underbrush or abandoned vehicles that sagged amongst the leaves. When we were in seventh grade, we even found an old concrete culvert out there that led into an underground cave that looked a little spooky in the light of our flashlights.
The farther we walked, however, the less certain I was that the clouds wouldn’t be a problem. The deeper into the woods we went, the more the smell of rain surrounded us. Brian smelled it too, and our pace increased as we kept heading deeper into the forest. Maybe it was just a little rain, maybe it was just a short downpour, and maybe we could get past it before it soaked everything.
When the gorge came into view and I saw the rising, skeletal edifice of the trestle, I breathed a sigh of relief.
“There she is, boys,” Brian said, sounding surprised to have found it as well.
“Looks pretty wrecked,” Frank said, tossing the stub of a cigarette into the gorge, “We aren’t actually going up on that thing, are we?”
“Wel, ya,” Brian said, “That's kind of the whole reason we came, wasn’t it?”
“You might,” Frank said, “but I don’t care what kind of surprise is up there, I ain’t going.”
He had plenty of time to rethink his statement. Just because we had found the gully, didn’t mean we had made it to the trestle. The closer we got, the more I could see that, for its age, it really was in amazing shape. It was less skeletal than I had thought and looked more like a covered metal bridge. The underside of the trestle was a dark cave, the shadows thick and deep, and I really didn’t want to explore the underside unless we REALLY had to. Something about it made me uncomfortable, and as we got closer and closer to the base, the whole thing seemed to grow.
It was mid-afternoon when we finally made it, and Brian let his pack fall as he set about climbing at once.
“Uh, you don’t wanna set up camp first?” Justin asked, taking out his tent and tools for making a fire.
“I want to see the woods from up there,” Brian said, looking at me as if to ask if I was coming.
I let my own pack side off and we climbed the side of the trestle side by side. We were laughing as the ground got farther and farther away, the girders lifting us above the trees until we finally crested the top and came to the old tracks of the railroad. I was full of wonder as I looked out over the woods, the trestle spanning the entire gorge before slanting back down to the woods again. From up here, the clouds looked very dark, and I wondered if the tent would be enough to keep us from getting wet.
“Check this out,” Brian said, dangling his feet over the side as he looked down into the gorge.
Watching him made me slightly dizzy, and I didn’t dare join him on the precipice.
When he came back up, however, he had a rope with him and nodded me over to help him pull it up. It wasn’t really heavy, but we were careful not to get it stuck on anything. Brian left me to pull so he could look over the edge and reported that the rope was attached to an old, red cooler. As it came up and over the edge, I saw that the rope was attached to the handle and the whole thing was the red of a kid's wagon left out in the sun. The box was ancient, the bystander of a thousand summer outings, and there was something inside it.
Brian opened the lid and smiled as he pulled out a lukewarm six-pack of Natty Ice, a brand I was passing familiar with. Dad, a staunch Budweiser man, had always shook his head and called it “pisswater” when he saw it on sale, but I figured for a bunch of kids who were barely old enough to buy beer the price was probably right. I assumed Brian’s brother had put it there, he had told us where to find the trestle bridge, after all, and as Brian fished the note out from under them, my suspicions were confirmed.
“Brian, this is a place where high schoolers have come to drink and hang out for generations. Our own mom and dad sat on this bridge and drank when they were in High school, and now it’s your turn. I spotted you a sixer this time, but you’ll have to bring your own next time. If you ever have extra, leave them in this cooler and then tuck the cooler back under the trestle bridge. Also, don’t go under the bridge, we think there might be a bear under there. Kevin.”
The thought of a bear so close to our campsite kind of scared me, but Brian brushed it off.
“He’s probably just messing with us. Want one?” he asked, popping the top on one as he offered me another one.
I hesitated. I’d never drank before, but I figured just one wouldn’t kill me. It was warm and tasted terrible, but it wasn’t the worst thing I’d ever had. Brian drank his quick, laughing as he threw the can into the gorge far below. We watched it spiral down, spilling the last few remaining drops before it clinked weakly on the bottom.
As if in answer, there was a distant rumble of thunder, and from our vantage point we saw the lightning crack in the distance.
We were on a big metal structure with lightning coming in quick and rain already pattering lightly around us.
“We better go,” I said, Brian looking at the lightning as it rumbled again. He nodded and we decided to run down the tracks rather than try to scale back down. It would mean doubling back, but it wouldn’t be a long trip, and the thought of juggling the rest of the beers and trying to climb down sounded nuts. Brian was holding the four of them close as he ran, smiling to himself as he talked about showing them to the guys.
“Justin will flip!” Brian said with an evil laugh, “You know he still won’t even be around anyone who smokes because of that dumb DARE pledge?”
He was right too. Justin was furiously hammering in tent pegs when we arrived, looking up at the sky every time a drop hit him. He stopped, though, when he noticed us come back with cans that clearly weren’t soda. Frank must have recognized them because he laughed and commented that they had found a pretty cool surprise. Brian tossed him one, turning to Justin as he offered him one too.
Justin put his hands on his hips, looking like my mother when she was disappointed in me.
“Hell no, and you shouldn’t either. Why would you just drink something you found on a rickety bridge?
Brian blew out a long breath and popped open another one, “Because, spaz, my brother left them for us. There was a note and everything, so cool your jets.”
Justin went back to work, mumbling darkly about being reckless and drinking things that could be poisoned or drugged.
The tent came up, and not a moment too soon. The rain was really starting to come down, and it looked like there would be no fire tonight. We all headed into the tent, the wind picking up as it shoved at the tent and made the ropes and pegs groan. It was big enough to fit us all comfortably, and as the lamps came out, Brian held up the last two beers.
"Split the last two?" he asked, everyone but Justin agreeing. We poured them into our camp cups, starting to clink them together before Brian turned to Justin. He was pretending to busy himself with something in the corner, but it was pretty clear he didn't approve of what we were doing.
"Come on, Justin, it's not gonna hurt you. I tell you what, if we see you become an alcoholic after one sip, we'll push you into the gorge and save you the embarrassment."
"Not funny," Justin said, but we had clearly worn him down. After another half-hearted refusal, he finally held his cup out to Justin who grinned as he poured the last of the beer into it. Then we clinked our glasses together and drank, everyone pulling a face which we laughed at. As the storm raged outside we ate some MREs we had packed just in case of bad weather and started on ghost stories. Brian was just telling us about a man with a hungry ghost in his basement when a big gust of wind hit the tent hard enough to collapse the middle brace and send it crashing down on us.
We floundered for a minute, looking for the zipper as we tried to escape, and finally stepping out into the driving rain. It was still afternoon, the sun an angry line amidst the storm clouds, and I turned as I heard someone struggling with the tent. Justin was trying to pull it, the wind threatening to take it from him with every gust.
"Come on," he shouted, "Help me get it under the trestle. It should work as a windbreak."
I remembered the warning about a bear, but Brian just shouted back that it was either the bear or the rain.
"Besides," he said, "If we see one, we'll just run like hell."
It was hard to argue with him while the rain was coming down, so we all grabbed a tent post and moved it into the dry cave created by the trestle. Unlike a lot of train trestles I had seen in movies and TV shows, this one was enclosed. I'm still not sure why, but it worked out well for us that day. We knocked in the tent pegs and sat in the tent as we watched the rain come down in buckets outside. Our stuff had gotten a little wet, but we hadn't brought anything that couldn't take a little water. As the light gave way to dark, we started breaking out our lanterns and cards, settling in for the night as we listened to the rain.
As I lay there watching Justin and Brian play their fourth or fifth game of Magic the Gathering, I started hearing something besides the rain. It was a deep rumbling, like something snoring deep under the metal bridge. I thought again about Brian's brother telling us there was a bear under there. I didn't want to get eaten by a bear in my sleep, and if we were going to have to move again, it was better to know now.
I took out my flashlight and started looking into the shadowy depths of the trestle, but there was nothing to be seen. There was some very thick-looking mud under here, some of it having made little stalagmites on the ground, but I couldn't see anything sleeping under there. It wouldn't make a very good den, I reflected as I shone my light around. It was open on both sides with the gorge coming in about thirty feet from our tent. There was really nowhere for anything to live down here, but as I swung the light from right to left, I could still hear that weird breathing.
On a whim, I pointed it up and under the bridge, and that was when I saw it.
At first, I thought it was a bunch of bats clustered together, but when it flinched under the beam of my light, I knew it was just one big thing. It was a huge bat, maybe bigger than me, with its large, leathery wings pulled up tight around it. It was clinging to the bottom of the trestle bridge, and I imagine it had been a bad spot to hang when the trains still ran. I spotted a slight movement to its left and found a second one hanging not far from it. In total, there were four of them, and when one of them shifted its wings to look down at me with a red, unhappy eye, I turned off the flashlight and zipped up the tent.
The guys had some strong words when I started turning off the lanterns, but I told them to be quiet and get down.
"What?" Frank asked, "Did you see something out there?"
"Was it the bear?" Brian asked, keeping his voice low as we hunkered doen.
"What bear?" Justin asked, but I waved a hand at them, trying to get them to be quiet.
"It's not bear," I hissed, but about that time, there was a weird sound from outside.
It sounded like a high-pitched yawn as something came awake followed by the rustle of wings. The talk in the tent had ceased now, and you could have heard a mouse fart. In the dark of the undercroft, we heard something huge and leathery take flight, rustling the canvas of the tent as it left the darkness. A second took flight a moment after, and I heard water cascade down as it shook the top of the trees. We all lay on our stomachs, panting for breath as we listened for more.
I had seen four, and only two had left so far.
When something hit the ground about a foot from our tent, Justin had to slap a hand over his mouth to stop from screaming. The hushed remnants squeaked from between his fingers like a deflating balloon, but if the creature heard it, it never showed any sign. I could see the vague outline of it as it rose to its full height, and as it flapped its wings and took flight, the tent rustled like it had in the wind.
"Is that all of them?" Brian asked, three sets of eyes turning my way.
I started to tell them there had been a fourth, but that was when the fourth fell on top of the tent. We were very lucky, all things considered. It landed right in the middle of the tent, shattering the plastic pole and sending the plastic material down around us. The creature's toenails scrabbled across it noisily as it tried to find purchase, and when it took off I was afraid it would simply carry us off with it. Instead, it just ripped a hole in the top as it flew off, all of us still reeling as we lay under the canvas.
After a few minutes, it was decided that we would take our sleeping bags and our packs and leave the tent behind.
We spent a miserable night huddled under the biggest tree we could find. We probably looked like fat cata pillars as we hunkered against the roots of the big tree, but we were as dry as we could manage. We all kept looking towards the skies, afraid the giant bat things would come after us, but they never did. We didn't talk, we didn't dare, and when the sun came up, we made our way out of the woods. We arrived at my house cold, scared, and unwilling to talk about what we had seen. My parents probably thought we had run afoul of something like a bear or a cougar, but they had no idea.
That was about two weeks ago, and we haven't been back in the woods since. Just knowing that those things are in the woods makes us not want to be there after dark. It's a shame because the woods were our spot, our sanctuary, and now it seems tainted. Brian doesn't even leave the house after sunset these days, and Justin looks at the sky when he's walking. Frank says he doesn't really want to talk about it, and I think he's stoned a lot of the time.
I dream about it sometimes, the way that one big red eye looked at me when I shone the flashlight on it, and I can't help but wonder what something that big eats?
I think it will be a good long time before I talk any of them back into the woods, and our camping days may be at an end.

It was just supposed to be another camping trip, like so many others we had gone on.
The town we live in isn't huge, but it does have a lot of woodland to explore. We live on the edge of what most people would call Appalachia and we’ve had more than one weird experience out there. Once, as my friends and I walked down the familiar trails, we smelled a strong and unpleasant scent. Brian thought it must have been a bear, but I’d smelled bear smells before. We’d had one winter under our back porch one year, and this was very different from the musty smell he had left when spring came.
Another time, while we were camping, we saw ghost lights in the woods. They were beautiful, red and blue and yellow and orange, and though Justin was afraid of them, I felt drawn to go to them and see them better. I knew better, though. Grandma had told all of us about the dangers of following the ghost lights and had assured us all that we wouldn’t like where they would take us.
“The lands of Fairy is beautiful, but also terrible for mortals to behold. They would make you young for the rest of your days, though that might not be as long as you might think.” She always said with an evil grin.
We’d heard whistling and strange growls, throaty yells, and strange birds, but none of it ever really scared me. The woods had always been a friendly place, a place of adventure, and I always looked forward to my time there. I never felt uneasy when I was within its borders, and as the four of us prepared to go back into the woods for another camping expedition, I was excited.
Brain’s brother had told him about an old trestle bridge deep in the woods and we all wanted to see it.
It was part of the old railroad, something that hadn’t run through the town in a long time. The tracks were still there, the old station too, but the trains had been mostly for passengers, and we had none these days. No one came in, no one left, and we had no industry for the trains to transport. All the wood we harvested went to the sawmill or the paper mill, and there was no need to transport it by rail. The trestle bridge hadn’t seen a train cross it in twenty years and spanned a small gorge in the middle of the forest. Brian said his brother claimed the bridge was where high school kids went to drink beer, and now that we were Freshmen, we should go out there too.
“He said it was a right of passage and that we should go see if the right had decided to leave us a gift out there.”
We didn’t know what sort of gift that would be, but we were all curious to see the bridge.
So, we told our parents we would be camping one weekend in April and took to the woods.
Brian and I were eager, talking about how cool it would be to see it, but Justin and Frank seemed hesitant. Well, that wasn’t quite true. Justin was hesitant, as he almost always was, and Frank was kind of ambivalent. We had met him last year at the start of ninth grade and he had made a pretty good addition to our trio. Frank wasn’t an avid hiker, but he liked to hang out in the woods and get a little high from time to time and that was good enough for us. He also brought outstanding camping snacks, so we were more than happy to hit the trails with him. I wasn’t certain there was a sleeping bag in that rucksack of his, but I could already hear the crinkle of chips and snack cakes within it.
“Any idea how far off this bridge is?” Justin asked, plodding along grumpily.
Justin didn’t mind hiking, but he wasn’t big on aimlessly wandering around in the woods. He had packed enough to make up for Frank’s lack of gear, and the tent poked up over his left shoulder. He was plodding along at the back of the group and I was sure we’d have to listen to a fair amount of complaining before we got there.
“My brother says it's about three miles into the woods, following the river until we come to the gorge. After that, it should be pretty easy to find.”
“And if your brother is playing a trick on us? If he’s just messing with us and we walk three hours into the woods for nothing?”
Brian rolled his eyes, “Then we have a fun little adventure to talk about when we go to college, don’t we?”
Justin grumbled about having to walk three miles into the woods, but we couldn’t have picked a better day for it. The weather was perfect, a slight breeze keeping the early summer heat at bay. The clouds overhead looked a little wet, but they were nowhere close. We’d have a nice camping trip this weekend, a nice little excuse to fish and relax and enjoy ourselves as we explored the old trestle. The woods around the town were full of things like that, and we’d explored old houses that had been retaken by the underbrush or abandoned vehicles that sagged amongst the leaves. When we were in seventh grade, we even found an old concrete culvert out there that led into an underground cave that looked a little spooky in the light of our flashlights.
The farther we walked, however, the less certain I was that the clouds wouldn’t be a problem. The deeper into the woods we went, the more the smell of rain surrounded us. Brian smelled it too, and our pace increased as we kept heading deeper into the forest. Maybe it was just a little rain, maybe it was just a short downpour, and maybe we could get past it before it soaked everything.
When the gorge came into view and I saw the rising, skeletal edifice of the trestle, I breathed a sigh of relief.
“There she is, boys,” Brian said, sounding surprised to have found it as well.
“Looks pretty wrecked,” Frank said, tossing the stub of a cigarette into the gorge, “We aren’t actually going up on that thing, are we?”
“Wel, ya,” Brian said, “That's kind of the whole reason we came, wasn’t it?”
“You might,” Frank said, “but I don’t care what kind of surprise is up there, I ain’t going.”
He had plenty of time to rethink his statement. Just because we had found the gully, didn’t mean we had made it to the trestle. The closer we got, the more I could see that, for its age, it really was in amazing shape. It was less skeletal than I had thought and looked more like a covered metal bridge. The underside of the trestle was a dark cave, the shadows thick and deep, and I really didn’t want to explore the underside unless we REALLY had to. Something about it made me uncomfortable, and as we got closer and closer to the base, the whole thing seemed to grow.
It was mid-afternoon when we finally made it, and Brian let his pack fall as he set about climbing at once.
“Uh, you don’t wanna set up camp first?” Justin asked, taking out his tent and tools for making a fire.
“I want to see the woods from up there,” Brian said, looking at me as if to ask if I was coming.
I let my own pack side off and we climbed the side of the trestle side by side. We were laughing as the ground got farther and farther away, the girders lifting us above the trees until we finally crested the top and came to the old tracks of the railroad. I was full of wonder as I looked out over the woods, the trestle spanning the entire gorge before slanting back down to the woods again. From up here, the clouds looked very dark, and I wondered if the tent would be enough to keep us from getting wet.
“Check this out,” Brian said, dangling his feet over the side as he looked down into the gorge.
Watching him made me slightly dizzy, and I didn’t dare join him on the precipice.
When he came back up, however, he had a rope with him and nodded me over to help him pull it up. It wasn’t really heavy, but we were careful not to get it stuck on anything. Brian left me to pull so he could look over the edge and reported that the rope was attached to an old, red cooler. As it came up and over the edge, I saw that the rope was attached to the handle and the whole thing was the red of a kid's wagon left out in the sun. The box was ancient, the bystander of a thousand summer outings, and there was something inside it.
Brian opened the lid and smiled as he pulled out a lukewarm six-pack of Natty Ice, a brand I was passing familiar with. Dad, a staunch Budweiser man, had always shook his head and called it “pisswater” when he saw it on sale, but I figured for a bunch of kids who were barely old enough to buy beer the price was probably right. I assumed Brian’s brother had put it there, he had told us where to find the trestle bridge, after all, and as Brian fished the note out from under them, my suspicions were confirmed.
“Brian, this is a place where high schoolers have come to drink and hang out for generations. Our own mom and dad sat on this bridge and drank when they were in High school, and now it’s your turn. I spotted you a sixer this time, but you’ll have to bring your own next time. If you ever have extra, leave them in this cooler and then tuck the cooler back under the trestle bridge. Also, don’t go under the bridge, we think there might be a bear under there. Kevin.”
The thought of a bear so close to our campsite kind of scared me, but Brian brushed it off.
“He’s probably just messing with us. Want one?” he asked, popping the top on one as he offered me another one.
I hesitated. I’d never drank before, but I figured just one wouldn’t kill me. It was warm and tasted terrible, but it wasn’t the worst thing I’d ever had. Brian drank his quick, laughing as he threw the can into the gorge far below. We watched it spiral down, spilling the last few remaining drops before it clinked weakly on the bottom.
As if in answer, there was a distant rumble of thunder, and from our vantage point we saw the lightning crack in the distance.
We were on a big metal structure with lightning coming in quick and rain already pattering lightly around us.
“We better go,” I said, Brian looking at the lightning as it rumbled again. He nodded and we decided to run down the tracks rather than try to scale back down. It would mean doubling back, but it wouldn’t be a long trip, and the thought of juggling the rest of the beers and trying to climb down sounded nuts. Brian was holding the four of them close as he ran, smiling to himself as he talked about showing them to the guys.
“Justin will flip!” Brian said with an evil laugh, “You know he still won’t even be around anyone who smokes because of that dumb DARE pledge?”
He was right too. Justin was furiously hammering in tent pegs when we arrived, looking up at the sky every time a drop hit him. He stopped, though, when he noticed us come back with cans that clearly weren’t soda. Frank must have recognized them because he laughed and commented that they had found a pretty cool surprise. Brian tossed him one, turning to Justin as he offered him one too.
Justin put his hands on his hips, looking like my mother when she was disappointed in me.
“Hell no, and you shouldn’t either. Why would you just drink something you found on a rickety bridge?
Brian blew out a long breath and popped open another one, “Because, spaz, my brother left them for us. There was a note and everything, so cool your jets.”
Justin went back to work, mumbling darkly about being reckless and drinking things that could be poisoned or drugged.
The tent came up, and not a moment too soon. The rain was really starting to come down, and it looked like there would be no fire tonight. We all headed into the tent, the wind picking up as it shoved at the tent and made the ropes and pegs groan. It was big enough to fit us all comfortably, and as the lamps came out, Brian held up the last two beers.
"Split the last two?" he asked, everyone but Justin agreeing. We poured them into our camp cups, starting to clink them together before Brian turned to Justin. He was pretending to busy himself with something in the corner, but it was pretty clear he didn't approve of what we were doing.
"Come on, Justin, it's not gonna hurt you. I tell you what, if we see you become an alcoholic after one sip, we'll push you into the gorge and save you the embarrassment."
"Not funny," Justin said, but we had clearly worn him down. After another half-hearted refusal, he finally held his cup out to Justin who grinned as he poured the last of the beer into it. Then we clinked our glasses together and drank, everyone pulling a face which we laughed at. As the storm raged outside we ate some MREs we had packed just in case of bad weather and started on ghost stories. Brian was just telling us about a man with a hungry ghost in his basement when a big gust of wind hit the tent hard enough to collapse the middle brace and send it crashing down on us.
We floundered for a minute, looking for the zipper as we tried to escape, and finally stepping out into the driving rain. It was still afternoon, the sun an angry line amidst the storm clouds, and I turned as I heard someone struggling with the tent. Justin was trying to pull it, the wind threatening to take it from him with every gust.
"Come on," he shouted, "Help me get it under the trestle. It should work as a windbreak."
I remembered the warning about a bear, but Brian just shouted back that it was either the bear or the rain.
"Besides," he said, "If we see one, we'll just run like hell."
It was hard to argue with him while the rain was coming down, so we all grabbed a tent post and moved it into the dry cave created by the trestle. Unlike a lot of train trestles I had seen in movies and TV shows, this one was enclosed. I'm still not sure why, but it worked out well for us that day. We knocked in the tent pegs and sat in the tent as we watched the rain come down in buckets outside. Our stuff had gotten a little wet, but we hadn't brought anything that couldn't take a little water. As the light gave way to dark, we started breaking out our lanterns and cards, settling in for the night as we listened to the rain.
As I lay there watching Justin and Brian play their fourth or fifth game of Magic the Gathering, I started hearing something besides the rain. It was a deep rumbling, like something snoring deep under the metal bridge. I thought again about Brian's brother telling us there was a bear under there. I didn't want to get eaten by a bear in my sleep, and if we were going to have to move again, it was better to know now.
I took out my flashlight and started looking into the shadowy depths of the trestle, but there was nothing to be seen. There was some very thick-looking mud under here, some of it having made little stalagmites on the ground, but I couldn't see anything sleeping under there. It wouldn't make a very good den, I reflected as I shone my light around. It was open on both sides with the gorge coming in about thirty feet from our tent. There was really nowhere for anything to live down here, but as I swung the light from right to left, I could still hear that weird breathing.
On a whim, I pointed it up and under the bridge, and that was when I saw it.
At first, I thought it was a bunch of bats clustered together, but when it flinched under the beam of my light, I knew it was just one big thing. It was a huge bat, maybe bigger than me, with its large, leathery wings pulled up tight around it. It was clinging to the bottom of the trestle bridge, and I imagine it had been a bad spot to hang when the trains still ran. I spotted a slight movement to its left and found a second one hanging not far from it. In total, there were four of them, and when one of them shifted its wings to look down at me with a red, unhappy eye, I turned off the flashlight and zipped up the tent.
The guys had some strong words when I started turning off the lanterns, but I told them to be quiet and get down.
"What?" Frank asked, "Did you see something out there?"
"Was it the bear?" Brian asked, keeping his voice low as we hunkered doen.
"What bear?" Justin asked, but I waved a hand at them, trying to get them to be quiet.
"It's not bear," I hissed, but about that time, there was a weird sound from outside.
It sounded like a high-pitched yawn as something came awake followed by the rustle of wings. The talk in the tent had ceased now, and you could have heard a mouse fart. In the dark of the undercroft, we heard something huge and leathery take flight, rustling the canvas of the tent as it left the darkness. A second took flight a moment after, and I heard water cascade down as it shook the top of the trees. We all lay on our stomachs, panting for breath as we listened for more.
I had seen four, and only two had left so far.
When something hit the ground about a foot from our tent, Justin had to slap a hand over his mouth to stop from screaming. The hushed remnants squeaked from between his fingers like a deflating balloon, but if the creature heard it, it never showed any sign. I could see the vague outline of it as it rose to its full height, and as it flapped its wings and took flight, the tent rustled like it had in the wind.
"Is that all of them?" Brian asked, three sets of eyes turning my way.
I started to tell them there had been a fourth, but that was when the fourth fell on top of the tent. We were very lucky, all things considered. It landed right in the middle of the tent, shattering the plastic pole and sending the plastic material down around us. The creature's toenails scrabbled across it noisily as it tried to find purchase, and when it took off I was afraid it would simply carry us off with it. Instead, it just ripped a hole in the top as it flew off, all of us still reeling as we lay under the canvas.
After a few minutes, it was decided that we would take our sleeping bags and our packs and leave the tent behind.
We spent a miserable night huddled under the biggest tree we could find. We probably looked like fat cata pillars as we hunkered against the roots of the big tree, but we were as dry as we could manage. We all kept looking towards the skies, afraid the giant bat things would come after us, but they never did. We didn't talk, we didn't dare, and when the sun came up, we made our way out of the woods. We arrived at my house cold, scared, and unwilling to talk about what we had seen. My parents probably thought we had run afoul of something like a bear or a cougar, but they had no idea.
That was about two weeks ago, and we haven't been back in the woods since. Just knowing that those things are in the woods makes us not want to be there after dark. It's a shame because the woods were our spot, our sanctuary, and now it seems tainted. Brian doesn't even leave the house after sunset these days, and Justin looks at the sky when he's walking. Frank says he doesn't really want to talk about it, and I think he's stoned a lot of the time.
I dream about it sometimes, the way that one big red eye looked at me when I shone the flashlight on it, and I can't help but wonder what something that big eats?
I think it will be a good long time before I talk any of them back into the woods, and our camping days may be at an end.

It was just supposed to be another camping trip, like so many others we had gone on.
The town we live in isn't huge, but it does have a lot of woodland to explore. We live on the edge of what most people would call Appalachia and we’ve had more than one weird experience out there. Once, as my friends and I walked down the familiar trails, we smelled a strong and unpleasant scent. Brian thought it must have been a bear, but I’d smelled bear smells before. We’d had one winter under our back porch one year, and this was very different from the musty smell he had left when spring came.
Another time, while we were camping, we saw ghost lights in the woods. They were beautiful, red and blue and yellow and orange, and though Justin was afraid of them, I felt drawn to go to them and see them better. I knew better, though. Grandma had told all of us about the dangers of following the ghost lights and had assured us all that we wouldn’t like where they would take us.
“The lands of Fairy is beautiful, but also terrible for mortals to behold. They would make you young for the rest of your days, though that might not be as long as you might think.” She always said with an evil grin.
We’d heard whistling and strange growls, throaty yells, and strange birds, but none of it ever really scared me. The woods had always been a friendly place, a place of adventure, and I always looked forward to my time there. I never felt uneasy when I was within its borders, and as the four of us prepared to go back into the woods for another camping expedition, I was excited.
Brain’s brother had told him about an old trestle bridge deep in the woods and we all wanted to see it.
It was part of the old railroad, something that hadn’t run through the town in a long time. The tracks were still there, the old station too, but the trains had been mostly for passengers, and we had none these days. No one came in, no one left, and we had no industry for the trains to transport. All the wood we harvested went to the sawmill or the paper mill, and there was no need to transport it by rail. The trestle bridge hadn’t seen a train cross it in twenty years and spanned a small gorge in the middle of the forest. Brian said his brother claimed the bridge was where high school kids went to drink beer, and now that we were Freshmen, we should go out there too.
“He said it was a right of passage and that we should go see if the right had decided to leave us a gift out there.”
We didn’t know what sort of gift that would be, but we were all curious to see the bridge.
So, we told our parents we would be camping one weekend in April and took to the woods.
Brian and I were eager, talking about how cool it would be to see it, but Justin and Frank seemed hesitant. Well, that wasn’t quite true. Justin was hesitant, as he almost always was, and Frank was kind of ambivalent. We had met him last year at the start of ninth grade and he had made a pretty good addition to our trio. Frank wasn’t an avid hiker, but he liked to hang out in the woods and get a little high from time to time and that was good enough for us. He also brought outstanding camping snacks, so we were more than happy to hit the trails with him. I wasn’t certain there was a sleeping bag in that rucksack of his, but I could already hear the crinkle of chips and snack cakes within it.
“Any idea how far off this bridge is?” Justin asked, plodding along grumpily.
Justin didn’t mind hiking, but he wasn’t big on aimlessly wandering around in the woods. He had packed enough to make up for Frank’s lack of gear, and the tent poked up over his left shoulder. He was plodding along at the back of the group and I was sure we’d have to listen to a fair amount of complaining before we got there.
“My brother says it's about three miles into the woods, following the river until we come to the gorge. After that, it should be pretty easy to find.”
“And if your brother is playing a trick on us? If he’s just messing with us and we walk three hours into the woods for nothing?”
Brian rolled his eyes, “Then we have a fun little adventure to talk about when we go to college, don’t we?”
Justin grumbled about having to walk three miles into the woods, but we couldn’t have picked a better day for it. The weather was perfect, a slight breeze keeping the early summer heat at bay. The clouds overhead looked a little wet, but they were nowhere close. We’d have a nice camping trip this weekend, a nice little excuse to fish and relax and enjoy ourselves as we explored the old trestle. The woods around the town were full of things like that, and we’d explored old houses that had been retaken by the underbrush or abandoned vehicles that sagged amongst the leaves. When we were in seventh grade, we even found an old concrete culvert out there that led into an underground cave that looked a little spooky in the light of our flashlights.
The farther we walked, however, the less certain I was that the clouds wouldn’t be a problem. The deeper into the woods we went, the more the smell of rain surrounded us. Brian smelled it too, and our pace increased as we kept heading deeper into the forest. Maybe it was just a little rain, maybe it was just a short downpour, and maybe we could get past it before it soaked everything.
When the gorge came into view and I saw the rising, skeletal edifice of the trestle, I breathed a sigh of relief.
“There she is, boys,” Brian said, sounding surprised to have found it as well.
“Looks pretty wrecked,” Frank said, tossing the stub of a cigarette into the gorge, “We aren’t actually going up on that thing, are we?”
“Wel, ya,” Brian said, “That's kind of the whole reason we came, wasn’t it?”
“You might,” Frank said, “but I don’t care what kind of surprise is up there, I ain’t going.”
He had plenty of time to rethink his statement. Just because we had found the gully, didn’t mean we had made it to the trestle. The closer we got, the more I could see that, for its age, it really was in amazing shape. It was less skeletal than I had thought and looked more like a covered metal bridge. The underside of the trestle was a dark cave, the shadows thick and deep, and I really didn’t want to explore the underside unless we REALLY had to. Something about it made me uncomfortable, and as we got closer and closer to the base, the whole thing seemed to grow.
It was mid-afternoon when we finally made it, and Brian let his pack fall as he set about climbing at once.
“Uh, you don’t wanna set up camp first?” Justin asked, taking out his tent and tools for making a fire.
“I want to see the woods from up there,” Brian said, looking at me as if to ask if I was coming.
I let my own pack side off and we climbed the side of the trestle side by side. We were laughing as the ground got farther and farther away, the girders lifting us above the trees until we finally crested the top and came to the old tracks of the railroad. I was full of wonder as I looked out over the woods, the trestle spanning the entire gorge before slanting back down to the woods again. From up here, the clouds looked very dark, and I wondered if the tent would be enough to keep us from getting wet.
“Check this out,” Brian said, dangling his feet over the side as he looked down into the gorge.
Watching him made me slightly dizzy, and I didn’t dare join him on the precipice.
When he came back up, however, he had a rope with him and nodded me over to help him pull it up. It wasn’t really heavy, but we were careful not to get it stuck on anything. Brian left me to pull so he could look over the edge and reported that the rope was attached to an old, red cooler. As it came up and over the edge, I saw that the rope was attached to the handle and the whole thing was the red of a kid's wagon left out in the sun. The box was ancient, the bystander of a thousand summer outings, and there was something inside it.
Brian opened the lid and smiled as he pulled out a lukewarm six-pack of Natty Ice, a brand I was passing familiar with. Dad, a staunch Budweiser man, had always shook his head and called it “pisswater” when he saw it on sale, but I figured for a bunch of kids who were barely old enough to buy beer the price was probably right. I assumed Brian’s brother had put it there, he had told us where to find the trestle bridge, after all, and as Brian fished the note out from under them, my suspicions were confirmed.
“Brian, this is a place where high schoolers have come to drink and hang out for generations. Our own mom and dad sat on this bridge and drank when they were in High school, and now it’s your turn. I spotted you a sixer this time, but you’ll have to bring your own next time. If you ever have extra, leave them in this cooler and then tuck the cooler back under the trestle bridge. Also, don’t go under the bridge, we think there might be a bear under there. Kevin.”
The thought of a bear so close to our campsite kind of scared me, but Brian brushed it off.
“He’s probably just messing with us. Want one?” he asked, popping the top on one as he offered me another one.
I hesitated. I’d never drank before, but I figured just one wouldn’t kill me. It was warm and tasted terrible, but it wasn’t the worst thing I’d ever had. Brian drank his quick, laughing as he threw the can into the gorge far below. We watched it spiral down, spilling the last few remaining drops before it clinked weakly on the bottom.
As if in answer, there was a distant rumble of thunder, and from our vantage point we saw the lightning crack in the distance.
We were on a big metal structure with lightning coming in quick and rain already pattering lightly around us.
“We better go,” I said, Brian looking at the lightning as it rumbled again. He nodded and we decided to run down the tracks rather than try to scale back down. It would mean doubling back, but it wouldn’t be a long trip, and the thought of juggling the rest of the beers and trying to climb down sounded nuts. Brian was holding the four of them close as he ran, smiling to himself as he talked about showing them to the guys.
“Justin will flip!” Brian said with an evil laugh, “You know he still won’t even be around anyone who smokes because of that dumb DARE pledge?”
He was right too. Justin was furiously hammering in tent pegs when we arrived, looking up at the sky every time a drop hit him. He stopped, though, when he noticed us come back with cans that clearly weren’t soda. Frank must have recognized them because he laughed and commented that they had found a pretty cool surprise. Brian tossed him one, turning to Justin as he offered him one too.
Justin put his hands on his hips, looking like my mother when she was disappointed in me.
“Hell no, and you shouldn’t either. Why would you just drink something you found on a rickety bridge?
Brian blew out a long breath and popped open another one, “Because, spaz, my brother left them for us. There was a note and everything, so cool your jets.”
Justin went back to work, mumbling darkly about being reckless and drinking things that could be poisoned or drugged.
The tent came up, and not a moment too soon. The rain was really starting to come down, and it looked like there would be no fire tonight. We all headed into the tent, the wind picking up as it shoved at the tent and made the ropes and pegs groan. It was big enough to fit us all comfortably, and as the lamps came out, Brian held up the last two beers.
"Split the last two?" he asked, everyone but Justin agreeing. We poured them into our camp cups, starting to clink them together before Brian turned to Justin. He was pretending to busy himself with something in the corner, but it was pretty clear he didn't approve of what we were doing.
"Come on, Justin, it's not gonna hurt you. I tell you what, if we see you become an alcoholic after one sip, we'll push you into the gorge and save you the embarrassment."
"Not funny," Justin said, but we had clearly worn him down. After another half-hearted refusal, he finally held his cup out to Justin who grinned as he poured the last of the beer into it. Then we clinked our glasses together and drank, everyone pulling a face which we laughed at. As the storm raged outside we ate some MREs we had packed just in case of bad weather and started on ghost stories. Brian was just telling us about a man with a hungry ghost in his basement when a big gust of wind hit the tent hard enough to collapse the middle brace and send it crashing down on us.
We floundered for a minute, looking for the zipper as we tried to escape, and finally stepping out into the driving rain. It was still afternoon, the sun an angry line amidst the storm clouds, and I turned as I heard someone struggling with the tent. Justin was trying to pull it, the wind threatening to take it from him with every gust.
"Come on," he shouted, "Help me get it under the trestle. It should work as a windbreak."
I remembered the warning about a bear, but Brian just shouted back that it was either the bear or the rain.
"Besides," he said, "If we see one, we'll just run like hell."
It was hard to argue with him while the rain was coming down, so we all grabbed a tent post and moved it into the dry cave created by the trestle. Unlike a lot of train trestles I had seen in movies and TV shows, this one was enclosed. I'm still not sure why, but it worked out well for us that day. We knocked in the tent pegs and sat in the tent as we watched the rain come down in buckets outside. Our stuff had gotten a little wet, but we hadn't brought anything that couldn't take a little water. As the light gave way to dark, we started breaking out our lanterns and cards, settling in for the night as we listened to the rain.
As I lay there watching Justin and Brian play their fourth or fifth game of Magic the Gathering, I started hearing something besides the rain. It was a deep rumbling, like something snoring deep under the metal bridge. I thought again about Brian's brother telling us there was a bear under there. I didn't want to get eaten by a bear in my sleep, and if we were going to have to move again, it was better to know now.
I took out my flashlight and started looking into the shadowy depths of the trestle, but there was nothing to be seen. There was some very thick-looking mud under here, some of it having made little stalagmites on the ground, but I couldn't see anything sleeping under there. It wouldn't make a very good den, I reflected as I shone my light around. It was open on both sides with the gorge coming in about thirty feet from our tent. There was really nowhere for anything to live down here, but as I swung the light from right to left, I could still hear that weird breathing.
On a whim, I pointed it up and under the bridge, and that was when I saw it.
At first, I thought it was a bunch of bats clustered together, but when it flinched under the beam of my light, I knew it was just one big thing. It was a huge bat, maybe bigger than me, with its large, leathery wings pulled up tight around it. It was clinging to the bottom of the trestle bridge, and I imagine it had been a bad spot to hang when the trains still ran. I spotted a slight movement to its left and found a second one hanging not far from it. In total, there were four of them, and when one of them shifted its wings to look down at me with a red, unhappy eye, I turned off the flashlight and zipped up the tent.
The guys had some strong words when I started turning off the lanterns, but I told them to be quiet and get down.
"What?" Frank asked, "Did you see something out there?"
"Was it the bear?" Brian asked, keeping his voice low as we hunkered doen.
"What bear?" Justin asked, but I waved a hand at them, trying to get them to be quiet.
"It's not bear," I hissed, but about that time, there was a weird sound from outside.
It sounded like a high-pitched yawn as something came awake followed by the rustle of wings. The talk in the tent had ceased now, and you could have heard a mouse fart. In the dark of the undercroft, we heard something huge and leathery take flight, rustling the canvas of the tent as it left the darkness. A second took flight a moment after, and I heard water cascade down as it shook the top of the trees. We all lay on our stomachs, panting for breath as we listened for more.
I had seen four, and only two had left so far.
When something hit the ground about a foot from our tent, Justin had to slap a hand over his mouth to stop from screaming. The hushed remnants squeaked from between his fingers like a deflating balloon, but if the creature heard it, it never showed any sign. I could see the vague outline of it as it rose to its full height, and as it flapped its wings and took flight, the tent rustled like it had in the wind.
"Is that all of them?" Brian asked, three sets of eyes turning my way.
I started to tell them there had been a fourth, but that was when the fourth fell on top of the tent. We were very lucky, all things considered. It landed right in the middle of the tent, shattering the plastic pole and sending the plastic material down around us. The creature's toenails scrabbled across it noisily as it tried to find purchase, and when it took off I was afraid it would simply carry us off with it. Instead, it just ripped a hole in the top as it flew off, all of us still reeling as we lay under the canvas.
After a few minutes, it was decided that we would take our sleeping bags and our packs and leave the tent behind.
We spent a miserable night huddled under the biggest tree we could find. We probably looked like fat cata pillars as we hunkered against the roots of the big tree, but we were as dry as we could manage. We all kept looking towards the skies, afraid the giant bat things would come after us, but they never did. We didn't talk, we didn't dare, and when the sun came up, we made our way out of the woods. We arrived at my house cold, scared, and unwilling to talk about what we had seen. My parents probably thought we had run afoul of something like a bear or a cougar, but they had no idea.
That was about two weeks ago, and we haven't been back in the woods since. Just knowing that those things are in the woods makes us not want to be there after dark. It's a shame because the woods were our spot, our sanctuary, and now it seems tainted. Brian doesn't even leave the house after sunset these days, and Justin looks at the sky when he's walking. Frank says he doesn't really want to talk about it, and I think he's stoned a lot of the time.
I dream about it sometimes, the way that one big red eye looked at me when I shone the flashlight on it, and I can't help but wonder what something that big eats?
I think it will be a good long time before I talk any of them back into the woods, and our camping days may be at an end.

It was just supposed to be another camping trip, like so many others we had gone on.
The town we live in isn't huge, but it does have a lot of woodland to explore. We live on the edge of what most people would call Appalachia and we’ve had more than one weird experience out there. Once, as my friends and I walked down the familiar trails, we smelled a strong and unpleasant scent. Brian thought it must have been a bear, but I’d smelled bear smells before. We’d had one winter under our back porch one year, and this was very different from the musty smell he had left when spring came.
Another time, while we were camping, we saw ghost lights in the woods. They were beautiful, red and blue and yellow and orange, and though Justin was afraid of them, I felt drawn to go to them and see them better. I knew better, though. Grandma had told all of us about the dangers of following the ghost lights and had assured us all that we wouldn’t like where they would take us.
“The lands of Fairy is beautiful, but also terrible for mortals to behold. They would make you young for the rest of your days, though that might not be as long as you might think.” She always said with an evil grin.
We’d heard whistling and strange growls, throaty yells, and strange birds, but none of it ever really scared me. The woods had always been a friendly place, a place of adventure, and I always looked forward to my time there. I never felt uneasy when I was within its borders, and as the four of us prepared to go back into the woods for another camping expedition, I was excited.
Brain’s brother had told him about an old trestle bridge deep in the woods and we all wanted to see it.
It was part of the old railroad, something that hadn’t run through the town in a long time. The tracks were still there, the old station too, but the trains had been mostly for passengers, and we had none these days. No one came in, no one left, and we had no industry for the trains to transport. All the wood we harvested went to the sawmill or the paper mill, and there was no need to transport it by rail. The trestle bridge hadn’t seen a train cross it in twenty years and spanned a small gorge in the middle of the forest. Brian said his brother claimed the bridge was where high school kids went to drink beer, and now that we were Freshmen, we should go out there too.
“He said it was a right of passage and that we should go see if the right had decided to leave us a gift out there.”
We didn’t know what sort of gift that would be, but we were all curious to see the bridge.
So, we told our parents we would be camping one weekend in April and took to the woods.
Brian and I were eager, talking about how cool it would be to see it, but Justin and Frank seemed hesitant. Well, that wasn’t quite true. Justin was hesitant, as he almost always was, and Frank was kind of ambivalent. We had met him last year at the start of ninth grade and he had made a pretty good addition to our trio. Frank wasn’t an avid hiker, but he liked to hang out in the woods and get a little high from time to time and that was good enough for us. He also brought outstanding camping snacks, so we were more than happy to hit the trails with him. I wasn’t certain there was a sleeping bag in that rucksack of his, but I could already hear the crinkle of chips and snack cakes within it.
“Any idea how far off this bridge is?” Justin asked, plodding along grumpily.
Justin didn’t mind hiking, but he wasn’t big on aimlessly wandering around in the woods. He had packed enough to make up for Frank’s lack of gear, and the tent poked up over his left shoulder. He was plodding along at the back of the group and I was sure we’d have to listen to a fair amount of complaining before we got there.
“My brother says it's about three miles into the woods, following the river until we come to the gorge. After that, it should be pretty easy to find.”
“And if your brother is playing a trick on us? If he’s just messing with us and we walk three hours into the woods for nothing?”
Brian rolled his eyes, “Then we have a fun little adventure to talk about when we go to college, don’t we?”
Justin grumbled about having to walk three miles into the woods, but we couldn’t have picked a better day for it. The weather was perfect, a slight breeze keeping the early summer heat at bay. The clouds overhead looked a little wet, but they were nowhere close. We’d have a nice camping trip this weekend, a nice little excuse to fish and relax and enjoy ourselves as we explored the old trestle. The woods around the town were full of things like that, and we’d explored old houses that had been retaken by the underbrush or abandoned vehicles that sagged amongst the leaves. When we were in seventh grade, we even found an old concrete culvert out there that led into an underground cave that looked a little spooky in the light of our flashlights.
The farther we walked, however, the less certain I was that the clouds wouldn’t be a problem. The deeper into the woods we went, the more the smell of rain surrounded us. Brian smelled it too, and our pace increased as we kept heading deeper into the forest. Maybe it was just a little rain, maybe it was just a short downpour, and maybe we could get past it before it soaked everything.
When the gorge came into view and I saw the rising, skeletal edifice of the trestle, I breathed a sigh of relief.
“There she is, boys,” Brian said, sounding surprised to have found it as well.
“Looks pretty wrecked,” Frank said, tossing the stub of a cigarette into the gorge, “We aren’t actually going up on that thing, are we?”
“Wel, ya,” Brian said, “That's kind of the whole reason we came, wasn’t it?”
“You might,” Frank said, “but I don’t care what kind of surprise is up there, I ain’t going.”
He had plenty of time to rethink his statement. Just because we had found the gully, didn’t mean we had made it to the trestle. The closer we got, the more I could see that, for its age, it really was in amazing shape. It was less skeletal than I had thought and looked more like a covered metal bridge. The underside of the trestle was a dark cave, the shadows thick and deep, and I really didn’t want to explore the underside unless we REALLY had to. Something about it made me uncomfortable, and as we got closer and closer to the base, the whole thing seemed to grow.
It was mid-afternoon when we finally made it, and Brian let his pack fall as he set about climbing at once.
“Uh, you don’t wanna set up camp first?” Justin asked, taking out his tent and tools for making a fire.
“I want to see the woods from up there,” Brian said, looking at me as if to ask if I was coming.
I let my own pack side off and we climbed the side of the trestle side by side. We were laughing as the ground got farther and farther away, the girders lifting us above the trees until we finally crested the top and came to the old tracks of the railroad. I was full of wonder as I looked out over the woods, the trestle spanning the entire gorge before slanting back down to the woods again. From up here, the clouds looked very dark, and I wondered if the tent would be enough to keep us from getting wet.
“Check this out,” Brian said, dangling his feet over the side as he looked down into the gorge.
Watching him made me slightly dizzy, and I didn’t dare join him on the precipice.
When he came back up, however, he had a rope with him and nodded me over to help him pull it up. It wasn’t really heavy, but we were careful not to get it stuck on anything. Brian left me to pull so he could look over the edge and reported that the rope was attached to an old, red cooler. As it came up and over the edge, I saw that the rope was attached to the handle and the whole thing was the red of a kid's wagon left out in the sun. The box was ancient, the bystander of a thousand summer outings, and there was something inside it.
Brian opened the lid and smiled as he pulled out a lukewarm six-pack of Natty Ice, a brand I was passing familiar with. Dad, a staunch Budweiser man, had always shook his head and called it “pisswater” when he saw it on sale, but I figured for a bunch of kids who were barely old enough to buy beer the price was probably right. I assumed Brian’s brother had put it there, he had told us where to find the trestle bridge, after all, and as Brian fished the note out from under them, my suspicions were confirmed.
“Brian, this is a place where high schoolers have come to drink and hang out for generations. Our own mom and dad sat on this bridge and drank when they were in High school, and now it’s your turn. I spotted you a sixer this time, but you’ll have to bring your own next time. If you ever have extra, leave them in this cooler and then tuck the cooler back under the trestle bridge. Also, don’t go under the bridge, we think there might be a bear under there. Kevin.”
The thought of a bear so close to our campsite kind of scared me, but Brian brushed it off.
“He’s probably just messing with us. Want one?” he asked, popping the top on one as he offered me another one.
I hesitated. I’d never drank before, but I figured just one wouldn’t kill me. It was warm and tasted terrible, but it wasn’t the worst thing I’d ever had. Brian drank his quick, laughing as he threw the can into the gorge far below. We watched it spiral down, spilling the last few remaining drops before it clinked weakly on the bottom.
As if in answer, there was a distant rumble of thunder, and from our vantage point we saw the lightning crack in the distance.
We were on a big metal structure with lightning coming in quick and rain already pattering lightly around us.
“We better go,” I said, Brian looking at the lightning as it rumbled again. He nodded and we decided to run down the tracks rather than try to scale back down. It would mean doubling back, but it wouldn’t be a long trip, and the thought of juggling the rest of the beers and trying to climb down sounded nuts. Brian was holding the four of them close as he ran, smiling to himself as he talked about showing them to the guys.
“Justin will flip!” Brian said with an evil laugh, “You know he still won’t even be around anyone who smokes because of that dumb DARE pledge?”
He was right too. Justin was furiously hammering in tent pegs when we arrived, looking up at the sky every time a drop hit him. He stopped, though, when he noticed us come back with cans that clearly weren’t soda. Frank must have recognized them because he laughed and commented that they had found a pretty cool surprise. Brian tossed him one, turning to Justin as he offered him one too.
Justin put his hands on his hips, looking like my mother when she was disappointed in me.
“Hell no, and you shouldn’t either. Why would you just drink something you found on a rickety bridge?
Brian blew out a long breath and popped open another one, “Because, spaz, my brother left them for us. There was a note and everything, so cool your jets.”
Justin went back to work, mumbling darkly about being reckless and drinking things that could be poisoned or drugged.
The tent came up, and not a moment too soon. The rain was really starting to come down, and it looked like there would be no fire tonight. We all headed into the tent, the wind picking up as it shoved at the tent and made the ropes and pegs groan. It was big enough to fit us all comfortably, and as the lamps came out, Brian held up the last two beers.
"Split the last two?" he asked, everyone but Justin agreeing. We poured them into our camp cups, starting to clink them together before Brian turned to Justin. He was pretending to busy himself with something in the corner, but it was pretty clear he didn't approve of what we were doing.
"Come on, Justin, it's not gonna hurt you. I tell you what, if we see you become an alcoholic after one sip, we'll push you into the gorge and save you the embarrassment."
"Not funny," Justin said, but we had clearly worn him down. After another half-hearted refusal, he finally held his cup out to Justin who grinned as he poured the last of the beer into it. Then we clinked our glasses together and drank, everyone pulling a face which we laughed at. As the storm raged outside we ate some MREs we had packed just in case of bad weather and started on ghost stories. Brian was just telling us about a man with a hungry ghost in his basement when a big gust of wind hit the tent hard enough to collapse the middle brace and send it crashing down on us.
We floundered for a minute, looking for the zipper as we tried to escape, and finally stepping out into the driving rain. It was still afternoon, the sun an angry line amidst the storm clouds, and I turned as I heard someone struggling with the tent. Justin was trying to pull it, the wind threatening to take it from him with every gust.
"Come on," he shouted, "Help me get it under the trestle. It should work as a windbreak."
I remembered the warning about a bear, but Brian just shouted back that it was either the bear or the rain.
"Besides," he said, "If we see one, we'll just run like hell."
It was hard to argue with him while the rain was coming down, so we all grabbed a tent post and moved it into the dry cave created by the trestle. Unlike a lot of train trestles I had seen in movies and TV shows, this one was enclosed. I'm still not sure why, but it worked out well for us that day. We knocked in the tent pegs and sat in the tent as we watched the rain come down in buckets outside. Our stuff had gotten a little wet, but we hadn't brought anything that couldn't take a little water. As the light gave way to dark, we started breaking out our lanterns and cards, settling in for the night as we listened to the rain.
As I lay there watching Justin and Brian play their fourth or fifth game of Magic the Gathering, I started hearing something besides the rain. It was a deep rumbling, like something snoring deep under the metal bridge. I thought again about Brian's brother telling us there was a bear under there. I didn't want to get eaten by a bear in my sleep, and if we were going to have to move again, it was better to know now.
I took out my flashlight and started looking into the shadowy depths of the trestle, but there was nothing to be seen. There was some very thick-looking mud under here, some of it having made little stalagmites on the ground, but I couldn't see anything sleeping under there. It wouldn't make a very good den, I reflected as I shone my light around. It was open on both sides with the gorge coming in about thirty feet from our tent. There was really nowhere for anything to live down here, but as I swung the light from right to left, I could still hear that weird breathing.
On a whim, I pointed it up and under the bridge, and that was when I saw it.
At first, I thought it was a bunch of bats clustered together, but when it flinched under the beam of my light, I knew it was just one big thing. It was a huge bat, maybe bigger than me, with its large, leathery wings pulled up tight around it. It was clinging to the bottom of the trestle bridge, and I imagine it had been a bad spot to hang when the trains still ran. I spotted a slight movement to its left and found a second one hanging not far from it. In total, there were four of them, and when one of them shifted its wings to look down at me with a red, unhappy eye, I turned off the flashlight and zipped up the tent.
The guys had some strong words when I started turning off the lanterns, but I told them to be quiet and get down.
"What?" Frank asked, "Did you see something out there?"
"Was it the bear?" Brian asked, keeping his voice low as we hunkered doen.
"What bear?" Justin asked, but I waved a hand at them, trying to get them to be quiet.
"It's not bear," I hissed, but about that time, there was a weird sound from outside.
It sounded like a high-pitched yawn as something came awake followed by the rustle of wings. The talk in the tent had ceased now, and you could have heard a mouse fart. In the dark of the undercroft, we heard something huge and leathery take flight, rustling the canvas of the tent as it left the darkness. A second took flight a moment after, and I heard water cascade down as it shook the top of the trees. We all lay on our stomachs, panting for breath as we listened for more.
I had seen four, and only two had left so far.
When something hit the ground about a foot from our tent, Justin had to slap a hand over his mouth to stop from screaming. The hushed remnants squeaked from between his fingers like a deflating balloon, but if the creature heard it, it never showed any sign. I could see the vague outline of it as it rose to its full height, and as it flapped its wings and took flight, the tent rustled like it had in the wind.
"Is that all of them?" Brian asked, three sets of eyes turning my way.
I started to tell them there had been a fourth, but that was when the fourth fell on top of the tent. We were very lucky, all things considered. It landed right in the middle of the tent, shattering the plastic pole and sending the plastic material down around us. The creature's toenails scrabbled across it noisily as it tried to find purchase, and when it took off I was afraid it would simply carry us off with it. Instead, it just ripped a hole in the top as it flew off, all of us still reeling as we lay under the canvas.
After a few minutes, it was decided that we would take our sleeping bags and our packs and leave the tent behind.
We spent a miserable night huddled under the biggest tree we could find. We probably looked like fat cata pillars as we hunkered against the roots of the big tree, but we were as dry as we could manage. We all kept looking towards the skies, afraid the giant bat things would come after us, but they never did. We didn't talk, we didn't dare, and when the sun came up, we made our way out of the woods. We arrived at my house cold, scared, and unwilling to talk about what we had seen. My parents probably thought we had run afoul of something like a bear or a cougar, but they had no idea.
That was about two weeks ago, and we haven't been back in the woods since. Just knowing that those things are in the woods makes us not want to be there after dark. It's a shame because the woods were our spot, our sanctuary, and now it seems tainted. Brian doesn't even leave the house after sunset these days, and Justin looks at the sky when he's walking. Frank says he doesn't really want to talk about it, and I think he's stoned a lot of the time.
I dream about it sometimes, the way that one big red eye looked at me when I shone the flashlight on it, and I can't help but wonder what something that big eats?
I think it will be a good long time before I talk any of them back into the woods, and our camping days may be at an end.

It was just supposed to be another camping trip, like so many others we had gone on.
The town we live in isn't huge, but it does have a lot of woodland to explore. We live on the edge of what most people would call Appalachia and we’ve had more than one weird experience out there. Once, as my friends and I walked down the familiar trails, we smelled a strong and unpleasant scent. Brian thought it must have been a bear, but I’d smelled bear smells before. We’d had one winter under our back porch one year, and this was very different from the musty smell he had left when spring came.
Another time, while we were camping, we saw ghost lights in the woods. They were beautiful, red and blue and yellow and orange, and though Justin was afraid of them, I felt drawn to go to them and see them better. I knew better, though. Grandma had told all of us about the dangers of following the ghost lights and had assured us all that we wouldn’t like where they would take us.
“The lands of Fairy is beautiful, but also terrible for mortals to behold. They would make you young for the rest of your days, though that might not be as long as you might think.” She always said with an evil grin.
We’d heard whistling and strange growls, throaty yells, and strange birds, but none of it ever really scared me. The woods had always been a friendly place, a place of adventure, and I always looked forward to my time there. I never felt uneasy when I was within its borders, and as the four of us prepared to go back into the woods for another camping expedition, I was excited.
Brain’s brother had told him about an old trestle bridge deep in the woods and we all wanted to see it.
It was part of the old railroad, something that hadn’t run through the town in a long time. The tracks were still there, the old station too, but the trains had been mostly for passengers, and we had none these days. No one came in, no one left, and we had no industry for the trains to transport. All the wood we harvested went to the sawmill or the paper mill, and there was no need to transport it by rail. The trestle bridge hadn’t seen a train cross it in twenty years and spanned a small gorge in the middle of the forest. Brian said his brother claimed the bridge was where high school kids went to drink beer, and now that we were Freshmen, we should go out there too.
“He said it was a right of passage and that we should go see if the right had decided to leave us a gift out there.”
We didn’t know what sort of gift that would be, but we were all curious to see the bridge.
So, we told our parents we would be camping one weekend in April and took to the woods.
Brian and I were eager, talking about how cool it would be to see it, but Justin and Frank seemed hesitant. Well, that wasn’t quite true. Justin was hesitant, as he almost always was, and Frank was kind of ambivalent. We had met him last year at the start of ninth grade and he had made a pretty good addition to our trio. Frank wasn’t an avid hiker, but he liked to hang out in the woods and get a little high from time to time and that was good enough for us. He also brought outstanding camping snacks, so we were more than happy to hit the trails with him. I wasn’t certain there was a sleeping bag in that rucksack of his, but I could already hear the crinkle of chips and snack cakes within it.
“Any idea how far off this bridge is?” Justin asked, plodding along grumpily.
Justin didn’t mind hiking, but he wasn’t big on aimlessly wandering around in the woods. He had packed enough to make up for Frank’s lack of gear, and the tent poked up over his left shoulder. He was plodding along at the back of the group and I was sure we’d have to listen to a fair amount of complaining before we got there.
“My brother says it's about three miles into the woods, following the river until we come to the gorge. After that, it should be pretty easy to find.”
“And if your brother is playing a trick on us? If he’s just messing with us and we walk three hours into the woods for nothing?”
Brian rolled his eyes, “Then we have a fun little adventure to talk about when we go to college, don’t we?”
Justin grumbled about having to walk three miles into the woods, but we couldn’t have picked a better day for it. The weather was perfect, a slight breeze keeping the early summer heat at bay. The clouds overhead looked a little wet, but they were nowhere close. We’d have a nice camping trip this weekend, a nice little excuse to fish and relax and enjoy ourselves as we explored the old trestle. The woods around the town were full of things like that, and we’d explored old houses that had been retaken by the underbrush or abandoned vehicles that sagged amongst the leaves. When we were in seventh grade, we even found an old concrete culvert out there that led into an underground cave that looked a little spooky in the light of our flashlights.
The farther we walked, however, the less certain I was that the clouds wouldn’t be a problem. The deeper into the woods we went, the more the smell of rain surrounded us. Brian smelled it too, and our pace increased as we kept heading deeper into the forest. Maybe it was just a little rain, maybe it was just a short downpour, and maybe we could get past it before it soaked everything.
When the gorge came into view and I saw the rising, skeletal edifice of the trestle, I breathed a sigh of relief.
“There she is, boys,” Brian said, sounding surprised to have found it as well.
“Looks pretty wrecked,” Frank said, tossing the stub of a cigarette into the gorge, “We aren’t actually going up on that thing, are we?”
“Wel, ya,” Brian said, “That's kind of the whole reason we came, wasn’t it?”
“You might,” Frank said, “but I don’t care what kind of surprise is up there, I ain’t going.”
He had plenty of time to rethink his statement. Just because we had found the gully, didn’t mean we had made it to the trestle. The closer we got, the more I could see that, for its age, it really was in amazing shape. It was less skeletal than I had thought and looked more like a covered metal bridge. The underside of the trestle was a dark cave, the shadows thick and deep, and I really didn’t want to explore the underside unless we REALLY had to. Something about it made me uncomfortable, and as we got closer and closer to the base, the whole thing seemed to grow.
It was mid-afternoon when we finally made it, and Brian let his pack fall as he set about climbing at once.
“Uh, you don’t wanna set up camp first?” Justin asked, taking out his tent and tools for making a fire.
“I want to see the woods from up there,” Brian said, looking at me as if to ask if I was coming.
I let my own pack side off and we climbed the side of the trestle side by side. We were laughing as the ground got farther and farther away, the girders lifting us above the trees until we finally crested the top and came to the old tracks of the railroad. I was full of wonder as I looked out over the woods, the trestle spanning the entire gorge before slanting back down to the woods again. From up here, the clouds looked very dark, and I wondered if the tent would be enough to keep us from getting wet.
“Check this out,” Brian said, dangling his feet over the side as he looked down into the gorge.
Watching him made me slightly dizzy, and I didn’t dare join him on the precipice.
When he came back up, however, he had a rope with him and nodded me over to help him pull it up. It wasn’t really heavy, but we were careful not to get it stuck on anything. Brian left me to pull so he could look over the edge and reported that the rope was attached to an old, red cooler. As it came up and over the edge, I saw that the rope was attached to the handle and the whole thing was the red of a kid's wagon left out in the sun. The box was ancient, the bystander of a thousand summer outings, and there was something inside it.
Brian opened the lid and smiled as he pulled out a lukewarm six-pack of Natty Ice, a brand I was passing familiar with. Dad, a staunch Budweiser man, had always shook his head and called it “pisswater” when he saw it on sale, but I figured for a bunch of kids who were barely old enough to buy beer the price was probably right. I assumed Brian’s brother had put it there, he had told us where to find the trestle bridge, after all, and as Brian fished the note out from under them, my suspicions were confirmed.
“Brian, this is a place where high schoolers have come to drink and hang out for generations. Our own mom and dad sat on this bridge and drank when they were in High school, and now it’s your turn. I spotted you a sixer this time, but you’ll have to bring your own next time. If you ever have extra, leave them in this cooler and then tuck the cooler back under the trestle bridge. Also, don’t go under the bridge, we think there might be a bear under there. Kevin.”
The thought of a bear so close to our campsite kind of scared me, but Brian brushed it off.
“He’s probably just messing with us. Want one?” he asked, popping the top on one as he offered me another one.
I hesitated. I’d never drank before, but I figured just one wouldn’t kill me. It was warm and tasted terrible, but it wasn’t the worst thing I’d ever had. Brian drank his quick, laughing as he threw the can into the gorge far below. We watched it spiral down, spilling the last few remaining drops before it clinked weakly on the bottom.
As if in answer, there was a distant rumble of thunder, and from our vantage point we saw the lightning crack in the distance.
We were on a big metal structure with lightning coming in quick and rain already pattering lightly around us.
“We better go,” I said, Brian looking at the lightning as it rumbled again. He nodded and we decided to run down the tracks rather than try to scale back down. It would mean doubling back, but it wouldn’t be a long trip, and the thought of juggling the rest of the beers and trying to climb down sounded nuts. Brian was holding the four of them close as he ran, smiling to himself as he talked about showing them to the guys.
“Justin will flip!” Brian said with an evil laugh, “You know he still won’t even be around anyone who smokes because of that dumb DARE pledge?”
He was right too. Justin was furiously hammering in tent pegs when we arrived, looking up at the sky every time a drop hit him. He stopped, though, when he noticed us come back with cans that clearly weren’t soda. Frank must have recognized them because he laughed and commented that they had found a pretty cool surprise. Brian tossed him one, turning to Justin as he offered him one too.
Justin put his hands on his hips, looking like my mother when she was disappointed in me.
“Hell no, and you shouldn’t either. Why would you just drink something you found on a rickety bridge?
Brian blew out a long breath and popped open another one, “Because, spaz, my brother left them for us. There was a note and everything, so cool your jets.”
Justin went back to work, mumbling darkly about being reckless and drinking things that could be poisoned or drugged.
The tent came up, and not a moment too soon. The rain was really starting to come down, and it looked like there would be no fire tonight. We all headed into the tent, the wind picking up as it shoved at the tent and made the ropes and pegs groan. It was big enough to fit us all comfortably, and as the lamps came out, Brian held up the last two beers.
"Split the last two?" he asked, everyone but Justin agreeing. We poured them into our camp cups, starting to clink them together before Brian turned to Justin. He was pretending to busy himself with something in the corner, but it was pretty clear he didn't approve of what we were doing.
"Come on, Justin, it's not gonna hurt you. I tell you what, if we see you become an alcoholic after one sip, we'll push you into the gorge and save you the embarrassment."
"Not funny," Justin said, but we had clearly worn him down. After another half-hearted refusal, he finally held his cup out to Justin who grinned as he poured the last of the beer into it. Then we clinked our glasses together and drank, everyone pulling a face which we laughed at. As the storm raged outside we ate some MREs we had packed just in case of bad weather and started on ghost stories. Brian was just telling us about a man with a hungry ghost in his basement when a big gust of wind hit the tent hard enough to collapse the middle brace and send it crashing down on us.
We floundered for a minute, looking for the zipper as we tried to escape, and finally stepping out into the driving rain. It was still afternoon, the sun an angry line amidst the storm clouds, and I turned as I heard someone struggling with the tent. Justin was trying to pull it, the wind threatening to take it from him with every gust.
"Come on," he shouted, "Help me get it under the trestle. It should work as a windbreak."
I remembered the warning about a bear, but Brian just shouted back that it was either the bear or the rain.
"Besides," he said, "If we see one, we'll just run like hell."
It was hard to argue with him while the rain was coming down, so we all grabbed a tent post and moved it into the dry cave created by the trestle. Unlike a lot of train trestles I had seen in movies and TV shows, this one was enclosed. I'm still not sure why, but it worked out well for us that day. We knocked in the tent pegs and sat in the tent as we watched the rain come down in buckets outside. Our stuff had gotten a little wet, but we hadn't brought anything that couldn't take a little water. As the light gave way to dark, we started breaking out our lanterns and cards, settling in for the night as we listened to the rain.
As I lay there watching Justin and Brian play their fourth or fifth game of Magic the Gathering, I started hearing something besides the rain. It was a deep rumbling, like something snoring deep under the metal bridge. I thought again about Brian's brother telling us there was a bear under there. I didn't want to get eaten by a bear in my sleep, and if we were going to have to move again, it was better to know now.
I took out my flashlight and started looking into the shadowy depths of the trestle, but there was nothing to be seen. There was some very thick-looking mud under here, some of it having made little stalagmites on the ground, but I couldn't see anything sleeping under there. It wouldn't make a very good den, I reflected as I shone my light around. It was open on both sides with the gorge coming in about thirty feet from our tent. There was really nowhere for anything to live down here, but as I swung the light from right to left, I could still hear that weird breathing.
On a whim, I pointed it up and under the bridge, and that was when I saw it.
At first, I thought it was a bunch of bats clustered together, but when it flinched under the beam of my light, I knew it was just one big thing. It was a huge bat, maybe bigger than me, with its large, leathery wings pulled up tight around it. It was clinging to the bottom of the trestle bridge, and I imagine it had been a bad spot to hang when the trains still ran. I spotted a slight movement to its left and found a second one hanging not far from it. In total, there were four of them, and when one of them shifted its wings to look down at me with a red, unhappy eye, I turned off the flashlight and zipped up the tent.
The guys had some strong words when I started turning off the lanterns, but I told them to be quiet and get down.
"What?" Frank asked, "Did you see something out there?"
"Was it the bear?" Brian asked, keeping his voice low as we hunkered doen.
"What bear?" Justin asked, but I waved a hand at them, trying to get them to be quiet.
"It's not bear," I hissed, but about that time, there was a weird sound from outside.
It sounded like a high-pitched yawn as something came awake followed by the rustle of wings. The talk in the tent had ceased now, and you could have heard a mouse fart. In the dark of the undercroft, we heard something huge and leathery take flight, rustling the canvas of the tent as it left the darkness. A second took flight a moment after, and I heard water cascade down as it shook the top of the trees. We all lay on our stomachs, panting for breath as we listened for more.
I had seen four, and only two had left so far.
When something hit the ground about a foot from our tent, Justin had to slap a hand over his mouth to stop from screaming. The hushed remnants squeaked from between his fingers like a deflating balloon, but if the creature heard it, it never showed any sign. I could see the vague outline of it as it rose to its full height, and as it flapped its wings and took flight, the tent rustled like it had in the wind.
"Is that all of them?" Brian asked, three sets of eyes turning my way.
I started to tell them there had been a fourth, but that was when the fourth fell on top of the tent. We were very lucky, all things considered. It landed right in the middle of the tent, shattering the plastic pole and sending the plastic material down around us. The creature's toenails scrabbled across it noisily as it tried to find purchase, and when it took off I was afraid it would simply carry us off with it. Instead, it just ripped a hole in the top as it flew off, all of us still reeling as we lay under the canvas.
After a few minutes, it was decided that we would take our sleeping bags and our packs and leave the tent behind.
We spent a miserable night huddled under the biggest tree we could find. We probably looked like fat cata pillars as we hunkered against the roots of the big tree, but we were as dry as we could manage. We all kept looking towards the skies, afraid the giant bat things would come after us, but they never did. We didn't talk, we didn't dare, and when the sun came up, we made our way out of the woods. We arrived at my house cold, scared, and unwilling to talk about what we had seen. My parents probably thought we had run afoul of something like a bear or a cougar, but they had no idea.
That was about two weeks ago, and we haven't been back in the woods since. Just knowing that those things are in the woods makes us not want to be there after dark. It's a shame because the woods were our spot, our sanctuary, and now it seems tainted. Brian doesn't even leave the house after sunset these days, and Justin looks at the sky when he's walking. Frank says he doesn't really want to talk about it, and I think he's stoned a lot of the time.
I dream about it sometimes, the way that one big red eye looked at me when I shone the flashlight on it, and I can't help but wonder what something that big eats?
I think it will be a good long time before I talk any of them back into the woods, and our camping days may be at an end.