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This is a crossover fanfiction between original fiction titles: Nature of Predators by SpacePaladin15 and The Last Angel by Proximal Flame respectively. All credit and rights reserved goes to them for making such amazing science fiction settings that I wanted to put this together.
You can read The Last Angel here: Be warned, it's decently long, and at its third installment so far. I highly suggest reading it before reading this, or this story will not make sense.

Otherwise, enjoy the story! Thanks again to u/jesterra54 and u/skais01 for beta and checking of work!
First Prev Next (soon)
As I laid in wait above Neptune, waiting again for a response or confirmation, I pondered a bit what I should say to them. How exactly I could talk to humanity again...and the...Arxur.
It felt odd to list another alongside them. Humanity, having allies, felt novel to me sadly. This entire situation was novelty after novelty. I still was desperately trying to see if anything in my internal diagnosis was still broken, that I wasn't hallucinating or dreaming up context where I had none, but no faults besides the obvious came up.
Perhaps I could try to invite them aboard the ship? But most of myself was currently horrendously damaged; many walkways and corridors simply exposed to vacuum from melted bulkheads and shattered superstructure. I had not entered or exited the battle with the Federation fleet unscathed, and while I had not been hit by as much as I would have been had I engaged the Compact in such a ludicrously risky way, I had taken at least several hits from various plasma and kinetic weapons.
Normally, my shields would have simply tanked the blows, possibly degrading a few projectors for repair from the universal strain of Newton's Laws. But I had no functional shields. I had barely any functionality at all. I would have been adrift out of Sol without using the gravity well of Saturn as a breaking mechanism, and even then I still only managed to slow enough to orbit Neptune. And so, on top of the damages that I suffered from escaping The Compact execution force, and the subsequent fleet killing I had performed after, I was nearly dead in the water, crippled far more than any prior incident.
I could only hope I would be able to rely on local humanity to help me somehow. I was particularly worried I had terrified them, or made them angry with my actions. If they retaliated, I would not raise my hand against them, even though I likely could. I had no idea what to expect of them, the United Nations had never persisted this long in...my timelines history. There were plenty of things here I observed that I didn't fully understand.
Like their FTL travel, for one.
Shockspace Theory dictated that even nearly flat spacetime could be hazardous in both opening to and exiting from the dimension where faster than light travel was carried out. The gravity well of a sun, and its solar system was nearly unpassable besides in very unique circumstances in shockspace. One could not simply open a rift wherever one wanted, without especially violent conditions following them. The safest bet to directly cross a solar system was to simply exit shockspace outside the system - in the case of Sol, outside the Heliopause - and burn at sublight speeds across it.
But here, they had simply popped into view of my sensors. Completely disregarding the gravity of both the Sun and Neptune, it seemed whatever method they had used did not have the same limitations as ours did. And that fascinated me.
A form of faster than light that could simply bypass the hardest limitations of shockspace is revolutionary, in more ways than one. Countless species and nations, including myself, had tried to find an alternative to shockspace, throwing untold resources and technological development at the problem, but an alternative was never found. I had one of the most refined understandings of Shockspace Theory amongst the known galaxy, and even I had written off the potential of another way. And yet, here, in a world parallel to the history of my own, humanity had found that other way. A new way, to the stars above. I was so very proud of them.
But I was getting ahead of myself. I first had to properly introduce myself to this humanity and their allies, infer that I was not a threat to them, and obtain some form of assistance in repairing my hull and components to functional capacity. I could only hope they were comparable to my humanity where it counted.
I hoped I still even knew how to talk to them. It's been...so long...
+signal recieved+
They had responded. I turned my spare attention back from internal monologue towards the small shuttlecraft before me. It would be best to hear what they have to say.
Memory transcription subject: Hailey Whitmer, UN Special Envoy
Date [standardized human time]: October 19, 2136
"Understood, we will begin plotting a course vector now to you. At what range and relative would you find acceptable to communicate?"
As I turned off the mic once again, and waited for a second response from the vessel to give us bearing on what was acceptable pathing, I saw Lithke looking to be desperately stewing on a question. Since I hardly wanted to see what an Arxur looked like exploding from anticipation, lest it depressurize the hull, I broke the ice.
"What is it Lithke? You look like you're about to start shaking from something you realized, speak already."
He craned in my direction, before swiveling the rest of his body in the chair to fully face me. Leaning forward, he began speaking:
"The ship responded with 'I' to our prompt."
I mulled it over. "Yeah, and?"
"Why would a captain or crew refer to the ship as 'I'? It doesn't make sense."
"What? It makes plenty of sense, the captain was referring to the designation of the ship and happened to accidentally use the wrong term."
Lithke, in an oddly human-adjacent gesture, shook his head in disagreement. "No, that isn't enough of an explanation. She, the voice, not only referred to the ship as 'I', but also used it exclusively throughout. If it were an accidental singular case, she'd use 'we' to refer to the crew and ship as a whole choosing to not fire upon us at some point. But she kept using 'I' exclusively." He chuffed at the end, his point finished.
I...could see the point behind it. But I was not entirely tuned to what the implications might mean. So I decided to ask.
"I get your point. That does seem odd in retrospect, but what could it imply, exactly? You seem smart enough of a cookie to have some idea already."
Lithke went from a determined look to a more...confused one as I finished that sentence?
"Why am I an intelligent [baked meal]?" Lithke asked.
Oh. That must not have translated the idiom well. Hmmm...
"Ah, my apologies, I didn't figure that wouldn't translate the idiot's meaning. I mean it's clear your observation is leading to something, care to tell me what?"
Lithke seemed to have whatever tract his mind was on derailed by my badly-translated idiom, because he merely shrugged, and mentioned he was not sure. Well, all the more to add to the report later. Whatever it was, it would have to wait, because not long after we received a transmission indicating some relative coordinate plane and a position from Nemesis. Clearly, they wished for us to travel to a spot, or minimum radius of this distance from the ship.
Lithke took us in, slowly towards the vector the ship had given us, not wanting to give any reason for them to go back on their word of not harming us. That they knew about humanity to some degree made this initial communication far easier than one would have expected, talking with a new race neither Humanity, nor the Arxur were familiar with. What would they look like? What were their motivations, their culture, their reason for knowing so much about humanity?
And how did they stay undiscovered so far? The galaxy is a rather large place, with even the whole of the Federation taking up a measly quarter of a quarter a percent of the whole thing, but they knew far too much about humanity to not be in our neighborhood. These questions and more were what I was posed to get answers to.
As we approached the vast behemoth that was UECNS Nemesis, it felt like approaching a shipyard all on its own. Its sheer bulk and size, its endless details made more clear with every kilometer closer, I was staring at a fractal of a ship. And to think this thing was damaged, and yet felt like it was the mightiest ship this side of the solar system, was a thrilling and unsettling feeling.
There were cannon slots located along its prow larger than our entire ship, and along every surface it was endless adorned with weapons I both could and couldn't fully recognize. Mounted in hundreds of stark, brutalist-looking turrets that were built to endure both their own fire and I assume its enemies' too...
I was afraid, sure, but not only afraid. Invigorated! Here I was, being the first proper trailblazer to a likely new species, Noah Williams could suck it! I was not lucky enough to have been part of the exploratory group that had made us contact the Venlil, but now I had a field of my own! And though I wish I had been in better company than that of Lithke, the space croc was not disinterested, merely just not a fit to my standards.
And then finally, resting in its deep shadow, an adamant tower amongst the stars, we entered synchronous orbit with Nemesis around Neptune. We were still moving relative to the planet, but to each other, we were still as one could reasonably be. Before Lithke and I could take any further actions, convey the start of proper greetings, they spoke first.
I had taken a good amount of time to consider how to introduce my circumstances in a calm and collected manner. The last thing I wanted to do was give too much information too quickly, as likely everything about me didn't add up. That they knew my designation tells me that they had at some point read it on my hull, and that they were likely incredibly confused about the nature of my existence. No, this needed a gentle, careful touch, and so I had worked up a plan for my visitors-
Or, I guess I'm the visitor, more or less, ha ha...
-such that I could slowly reveal myself in full, and garner their reactions. It would be somewhat distant at first, not cold, but professional, and evasive of questions that didn't lead to my points until all were made. I was still uncertain how this humanity might react to the concept of a true general artificial intelligence, especially one they had made that now was not under their control to any useful degree.
I had records of humanity's fictional stories involving the idea of AI, and my galaxy's very real aversion to all synthetic lifeforms, that I distinctly worried they might see me as abominable, a soulless monster, a mistake, or many other interpretations that came with the territory. To simply assume all would be well, that I could just reveal everything about myself on the fly without confirmation first would be a stupid mistake to make. And so, I thought I would let down the explanation as I went.
Here goes nothing. It's just a touch of manipulation, nothing you haven't done before.
But the thought, unlike the countless alien species I had used it on before, felt far worse to perform on my creators. The guilt of knowing an innocent humanity in my eyes was to be treated like this to start felt wrong. But I needed to know...
...I needed to know if they would abhor me like everyone else.
A configuration of my avatar to best fit Yasmine's uniform and look was checked, and rechecked. I adopted a posture that would seem clinical, professional, military. A visual com-link was opened to the channel I held my avatar on, and with that came a slightly more steeled resolve, so I began;
"So, I assume you are confused about what to think of this ship."
Memory transcription subject: Hailey Whitmer, UN Special Envoy
Date [standardized human time]: October 19, 2136
When the first visual opened up, the distance we closed made real time communication more feasible, what I had expected was a foreign species to our knowledge, one that held the advantage. But as my brain began to process what was said, and the holoscreen before me settled in, I was utterly confused.
The person...no, human who stood before me was adorned with military regalia similar but ever so slightly different to that of Earth's. She had a dark-olive tone to her skin, that spoke of Mediterranean or Arabic ancestry, but her facial features looked more Asian than anything else. Her eyes were a somber green, an odd contrast to her features, but still within the bounds of normal. She stood before an empty bridge, bereft of any other signs of life.. I couldn't tell how tall she was, there was no clear perspective to relate her size to, but in total, this...was not what I had expected.
Lithke, also in odd shock, spoke first. "What...what is this?! Is this some sort of joke?"
The woman on the other side slightly shifted, so as to indicate her view shifting to my partner. "I have adopted this form so as to better calm and connect with you two. You would find it hard to understand me otherwise." She lightly smiled, but it disappeared as soon as it arrived.
"Who or what are you?" I asked. "It doesn't make sense for a human to be on this vessel."
"We will return to that in a bit. For now, I need to introduce a bit of context first, and you will have to as well. Firstly, I would like to clarify about this ship. As you might have guessed from the literal writing on the wall, this vessel is of human origin."
"What..." Lithke said, some sense of trouble brewing in him. He more angrily turned to me in particular. "Have you been lying to us human?" Lithke did not look happy with that revelation.
I-I didn't know what to say. "I-I...I uh..."
The woman on screen hastily intervened. "They could not have Arxur, as there's more to this I yet need to explain. Tell me, what date is it to your calendars?"
I stood a bit straighter, slightly confused at the question, until it hit me. "Oh my god..."
Lithke again trained his view to me, confused. "What do you mean human? These mind games tire me."
"It's October 19th, 2136 CE, ma'am. You're a time traveler, are you not?" I beamed.
Lithke looked remarkably confused by the phrase, unaware of the connotations that come with it. She, on the other hand, smiled, before continuing. "That and more, but the date from my side was closer to 3994 CE."
She was from the far future! It explained everything! The English writing, the odd accent, the human woman standing before me, it made sense now!
While I was partially disappointed in not being able to meet a new species, I felt a bit of relief and a different kind of elation under the circumstances.
I couldn't help but blurt out "Humanity made it that far ahead! What's the future like? Is the galaxy better than now!?"
She...seemed to be almost downtrodden from that statement, a sense of deep depression almost radiating from her. Uh oh, did I say something wrong?
"I was getting to that..." She pulled herself together again, a more military stature once again put into place. "...Despite being from the future, I'm...not certain it's your future."
The dichotomy before me was an odd one. The human's partner was a reptilian-looking alien, almost crocodile-like. They were distantly familiar to that of the Askanji-illth of the Principality, but bipedal instead of serpentine. In an odd twist of fate to be making with that comparison, they, unlike the Principality, seemed to have been the race that came to humanity's aid not long after my departure from the space between Earth and Luna. I had initially worried they were more raiders, more races coming to stomp on the face of humanity while they were down, but they circled the globe like a protective shield, their few transmissions I could receive implying an honest desire to help humanity. It was for that, that I did not initially try to fire on this vessel when it first popped into view on the sensors.
And...the human. She was adorned in what looked closely like old-styled United Nation attire, specifically that of an envoy or diplomat. She had pieced together a portion of my origin rather quickly from that one question, a relief on my part that I would not have to go through the headache-like details of time travel. But what would come next would not be pleasant for her enthusiasm.
Following my clarification on the aspect of being from the future, I pulled up a holographic display from a simulated monitor feed behind me. A bubble of space was marked in red, a selection of stars labeled with familiar names.
The human squinted her eyes, looking at the points in more detail. "That's...that's Earth, and Alpha-Centauri, and Barnard's Star..."
"Yes" I wistfully replied. "That, and two hundred and fifteen others, was the United Earth Confederacy." I stuck our emblem above it, to signify. "It was the width and breadth of humanity at its peak, before it was snuffed out."
My choice of language seemed to make the human worried, and the Arxur next to her wary. "By who?" they said in unison.
"In 2786 CE, The deep space exploration vessel UECNS Alaskan Dawn, made first contact with an alien scout cruiser named Flickering Light. The government that was behind them was revolting, and utterly antithetical to the ideals espoused by the UEC. We decided to fire first, and to that I cannot fault the captain's decision, but it was the mistake that lead to the end."
On the outskirts of the holographic map, showing the UEC's territory, a dark blue border began to fade into view. I zoomed it out further, to emphasize how the border seemed to go on forever in comparison to our small set of worlds. An alien symbol appeared over the amorphous mass of thousands of stars, unknown to them, but intimate to me.
I growled in hatred. "The Compact of Species."
Memory transcription subject: Hailey Whitmer, UN Special Envoy
Date [standardized human time]: October 19, 2136
I watched as the holographic display slowly started to move. The amorphous territory of The Compact beginning to swallow The United Earth Confederacy's whole, a seemingly unstoppable tide that smashed through every system that was held by the UEC. As I watched the date to the right slowly tick up, month after month, as the UEC shrunk under its assault, I felt horrified.
This fate seems so familiar to the Federation fleet we were on the losing side of.
She continued. "The Compact was more advanced than The Confederacy in nearly every single way. Our ships were slower, weaker, less numerous than their own. We had taken to asymmetrical warfare to do our best to stall the onslaught, but we were against an enemy that was determined to crush our faction underfoot. They saw us as having slighted their great domain merely by existing as apart from them, for not conforming to their iron grip. For the gall of saying no, we were to be taught a lesson in blood and war."
She turned to another empty section of space, as another holographic display came up. "Another way would have to be found to endure. We pumped untold resources into a new type of ship, a superweapon that could take on the Compact's greatest weapons, their Chariots, head on, and come out on top. It was built to ambush and kill them. It was the Nemesis-class dreadnought. Six were planned, two in construction, and only one fully built before the end of the war. This ship...is that Nemesis-class."
She splayed her hands out, in a little grand display of the bridge as a whole. A momentary respite from the depressing nature of the war she narrated, a momentary moment of pride in humanity swelling. Even Lithke was enraptured in the story, quietly listening without ever taking his eyes off the screen. But, she eventually dropped them, they sagged back down to her shoulders slowly, as the high wore off.
"But it was not meant to be. The Compact had found Earth's location. In an attempt to stop it, the UECNS Nemesis was assigned to a task force with the goal of ambushing the Execution Force carrying the information, with the attached Triarch's Chariot Bringer of Light. The chariot was killed, but all hands on board besides me perished in the end, the task force casualties were nearly total, and on the attempted FTL trip back I had a drive failure. It meant days of travel back home where I had needed far less. By the time I had returned to Earth, it was burned to ash."
She looked utterly furious at that moment. Every ounce of her body shook with barely-stifled rage.
"They sentenced humanity to extinction. I made a promise that day, to avenge my failure. I promised I would not rest until the Compact burned, until it was reduced to as much dust and debris as humanity was."
Her voice raised into a rant. "And as I found myself against all odds, nearly dead while escaping a fleet sent to kill me for my revenge, I found myself here. I saw humanity, again at risk of being exterminated, of being sentenced to death. I felt utter familiar rage in that moment; I could not let it happen, not when I had once done it before. That is why I interfered in the battle above Earth."
It was a passionate story. One filled with hatred and gusto, of sheer determination to pay back the debt of humanity's extinction. A story that answered my initial question on her involvement with the battle above Earth. But I couldn't help but notice an issue. Her.
"There's a problem with all of that story though, if you were there to see your world destroyed, and all but you from the crew dead, yet you are from nearly twelve hundred years in the future...how are you still alive? Were humans practically immortal in the future?"
She smiled. "I figured you'd catch that. No, humanity was not immortal in the future. Plenty have tried, but biological organisms as complex as humans don't tend to stick around forever."
"Then how?!" I nearly yelled.
"I did not lie in that all besides me died in the battle with Execution Force Bankala. But I was different. I was crew as well but not that of flesh and blood. I am the machine. I am the wings, the computers, the terminals, the hull, the whole of this starship."
Lithke finally had a moment of epiphany in that moment, the question he bugged me with clearly finally having a clear answer. His eyes widened to match the feeling.
"I am the artificial intelligence aboard the UECNS Nemesis. What you see before you is but an avatar of the prior captain of this ship, Yasmine Nishiko Aalimah Sudoki."
Her viewscreen suddenly seemed to fizzle to a blank background, what I assumed to be the virtual bridge behind her fading to nothing, as her avatar abstracted slightly. It looked like the woman from before, but different. Not trying to hide her nature anymore, she was see-through, tinted red throughout, as if a mere monocolor projection of her.
"My real name is Red One. Please, do not be afraid, I mean you no harm, and am beyond pleased to meet you both for real. What are your names?"
First Prev Next (soon)

I remember when I first heard the rhyme as a child. It terrified me. To me, the Crooked Man was some sort of boogeyman with freakishly long arms and legs that were twisted and broken in horrifying ways. I still have the rhyme memorized. It repeats in my brain like a skipping record.
“There was a Crooked Man, and he walked a crooked mile,
He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile;
He bought a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together in a little crooked house.”
My brother Benton, who loved to torture me as a child, ended up adding his own parts to the rhyme over time. The extra parts he added did nothing to console me or end my nightmares of this twisted boogeyman who always seemed to slink through the shadows. I remember the rhyme Benton told me by heart to this day.
“The Crooked Man watches you.
His eyes are black, his lips are blue.
The crooked man twists and crawls.
He uses his crooked blade to kill.
And when the curtain of night falls,
He comes to get his thrill.”
***
So I found it strange when, a few weeks ago, I was sitting with a couple of my friends drinking and the subject of the Crooked Man came up again. They were rambling about shootings and serial killers and other fairly interesting subjects that I knew almost nothing about. But my friend Iris knew everything about such morbid subjects.
She was a small drink of water, no more than five feet, with platinum blonde hair and green eyes like a cat. She was extremely attractive with high cheekbones and a small nose and chin. She always talked extremely fast and made violent slashing gestures with her hands. Sometimes I wondered if she had a secret amphetamine habit I didn’t know about.
“But did you hear about the murders in Union?” Iris asked, glancing over at her boyfriend, Ben. Ben was the opposite of Iris- tall and nerdy with thick, black-rimmed glasses and a low whisper of a voice.
“I just heard that some kids went missing,” Ben murmured. I shrugged.
“I don’t watch TV,” I said. “The news is all bullshit anyway. They only show you the bad stuff. After all, no one wants to hear about new breakthroughs in fusion technology or discoveries in particle physics. Instead, people just want to watch others get murdered, robbed and beaten, so that they can feel that at least someone else has it worse than them. That’s all the news is, really: a form of schadenfreude, the joy people get from seeing others’ misfortune and suffering. Our entire media industry is built on a foundation of schadenfreude.” I took a long sip from my beer, a Harpoon that tasted like pure raspberries. Iris rolled her eyes.
“While probably true, I don’t care,” she said, turning her green eyes on me. “Don’t you want to know what happened to the kids?”
“I do,” Ben said, leaning forward. “Was it something… supernatural?” Iris gave a sardonic laugh at that. Ben sat back, offended.
“What’s so funny? I heard there was weird stuff going on around that factory. In fact, I heard they used to manufacture some dye there for clocks and stuff, right? So all these people went to work, painting watches and clocks and whatever else they told them to paint. It was this special green dye that would glow in the dark. The factory was staffed by mostly women, and I heard they used to lick their paintbrushes to form them into points. They figured this stuff was just regular paint that glowed in the dark.” I leaned back, interested. Ben started talking faster, getting more animated.
“So what happened?” I asked, my curiosity piqued.
“Well, the workers started getting cancer and dying in huge numbers,” Ben continued as the kitchen lights sparkled off his glasses. “One woman even had her entire jaw rot off. Others had pieces of their faces falling off. So it turns out, they were using radioactive isotopes to make the paint glow! And these women were just licking the paintbrushes and touching the paint…”
“Holy shit,” I whispered, horrified.
“They called them the Radium girls,” Ben said. “That factory killed hundreds and hundreds of people. That’s why a lot of people think it’s haunted. People claim they see ghosts and weird shit around it. And that’s not all. The case gets even weirder when you look at workers’ families.
“It seems a lot of their kids went missing, too. The cops never found any of them. The entire time the factory was operational, and even after it shutdown, the families of the workers kept having strange things happen- children disappearing from their bedrooms in the middle of the night, strange murders and unexplained suicides that kept killing off healthy, normal people all over town.”
“So, anyways,” Iris continued, looking slightly annoyed at the interruption, “the kids that went into that abandoned factory were all found… torn apart. Their limbs were all amputated and crooked.” She leaned forward, using her spooky campfire voice. “And the limbs were long. Freakishly long, as if they had just grown overnight to inhuman lengths before they got lopped off. But they never found the heads or the torsos. All they found was ten legs and ten arms.”
“And no one knows what happened?” I asked. She shook her head.
“Officially, no. The police and media said it was some sort of serial killer, of course. But there wasn’t a shred of evidence anywhere. It was like a ghost had done it. Where the limbs were piled up in the basement, there was no evidence that anyone had been there in months, no footsteps or microscopic evidence of any presence. But the story doesn’t end there. Because there were six teenagers that went into that building, and one of them was found alive three months later, wandering, covered in blood and scratches, mostly naked and totally insane. One of my friends is an EMT and she said that the kid would not stop talking about the Crooked Man taking his friends and keeping him prisoner in some other world.”
At the mention of those words, the Crooked Man, a chill went down my spine. My heart felt like ice.
“What’d you say? What did the kid say?” I asked anxiously. Suddenly the room felt very hot, and the alcohol was not sitting well in my stomach.
“He said he got kidnapped by someone called the Crooked Man,” Iris repeated, taking a long sip from her wine. “According to the kid, it was some sort of fucking monster, apparently. I think his mind must have just snapped. He was probably kidnapped and held in the basement of some serial killer for three goddamned months. Who knows what he saw and experienced? People make up all sorts of crazy shit when they’re traumatized.”
My hand was shaking so badly that I had to put my bottle down on the table. For some reason, my mind kept flashing back to my sister, Emilia, who had been kidnapped from her room in the middle of the night when my brother Benton and I were little. She had never been found. We had never gotten a ransom note or found a body. It was as if Emilia had simply disappeared, vanished from the surface of the planet in an instant.
“I think some of that stuff is real,” Ben said. “People have been talking about cryptids and ghosts for thousands of years across countless different and unrelated cultures. What are the chances that all of them are just hallucinations or delusions?”
I didn’t know, but I thought I might know someone who might.
***
My brother Benton was a long-term drug addict living in a flophouse. I went to see him the next morning. He opened the door with a glazed, half-aware expression. Scars covered his arms and legs. He looked like a walking skeleton. His eyes shone like the last bit of water at the bottom of a dying well.
“Jack,” he said, surprised, appearing to wake up slightly. “What are you doing here?”
“I need to talk to you,” I said, pushing past him into the one-bedroom place he called home. A cockroach skittered across the wall. As he closed the door, I saw bites from bedbugs all over his body. Benton turned, spreading out his hands.
“Well, what is it, little brother? You know I’m all ears.”
“You remember that rhyme you used to scare me with when we were little?” I asked. “That rhyme you made up about the Crooked Man?” He seemed to go a shade paler.
“I didn’t make anything up,” he said. “That rhyme came from Grandma. She told it to dad when he was little, before she died.”
“Grandma?” I asked, startled. Our grandmother had died of cancer when she was extremely young, in her late 20s. “Did you hear about the murders over in Union? The survivor was talking about the Crooked Man.”
“That’s pretty freaking weird, man,” he said. “Especially considering what happened to Grandma and Emilia, you know.” He sat down on the threadbare mattress, laying back and sighing.
“Why is it weird?” I asked.
“Because, you know, that’s where Grandma used to work. At that factory in Union. Didn’t Dad ever tell you?” I shook my head, feeling sick.
“So Grandma was one of the radium girls?” I said. My brother shrugged his thin shoulders, the stained T-shirt clinging tight to his frail body.
“I don’t know what that is, but whatever she was doing there, it killed her.”
“But what does that have to do with Emilia?” I asked, my heart pounding at the mention of our long-lost little sister. He shook his head in wonder.
“You don’t remember? You were older than me when it happened. Before she went missing, she kept talking about the same thing, saying weird stuff about some ‘Crooked Man’. Don’t you remember what happened the night she went missing?” I thought back, but it all seemed like a blur. I remembered flashing police sirens and my parents screaming. I had tried to block it out, but apparently Benton hadn’t been able to. That night must be like a fresh wound on his mind all the time.
“No, I just remembered… screaming, and police…” I whispered, my voice trailing off into nothing. Benton leaned forward on the bed, looking sick.
“We both saw it,” he said. “The Crooked Man. That thing she was talking about. It was real. We saw it in her room that night- when it took her.” I shook my head, refusing to look at him. Feeling sick, I walked toward the door without looking back. “Where are you going?”
“I’m going home,” I said. “I can’t deal with this shit right now.” But that night, I would find out that the long-lost nightmare from my childhood was not nearly as buried in the past as I thought.
***
I was laying in my dark bedroom, reading the local news on my phone, when I saw an article that disturbed me greatly. I sat up, looking out the window into the cloudless night. The sky hung overhead like a black hole, colorless and empty. Fear radiated through my heart as I glanced back down at the screen and started reading.
“Sole survivor of serial killer commits suicide,” the article read in garish black-and-white letters. “Michael Galentino, 18, was found dead in a psychiatric facility early this morning. In February, Michael Galentino and five others entered a local abandoned building. Friends who knew them stated that they often explored abandoned structures as part of an ‘urban exploration’ group. But this would not be a normal night for the group. They all disappeared, and within 24 hours, police and search teams had been dispatched to look for the missing teenagers…”
The house was silent. I read the rest of the article with bated breath, my eyes wide. Some of the details I already knew, but others, such as the radioactive isotopes found on the dismembered limbs of the victims, I did not. I wondered about that. The police claimed that, after finding this strange clue, they had sent a team to inspect the abandoned factory with Geiger counters and look for signs of radioactivity. Perhaps the radium, which had a notoriously long half-life, had accumulated on the surfaces over the decades. But they said the radioactivity within the building was all within acceptable levels. It was just another bizarre piece of a puzzle that no one could solve.
The house was deathly silent. I could hear my own heart beating a runaway rhythm in my ears. A rising sense of anxiety was filling me, but I didn’t know why. It felt like some sort of pressure had changed all around me, as if the first wave of a massive blizzard had just blown into the room.
I heard a creaking from across the dark room. At the same time, I felt a sting on my arm. I looked down, seeing a bedbug crawling across my skin, a small red welt rising in its wake.
“Fuck!” I swore, grabbing it between my fingers and slicing it between my nails. Crimson spurted from its swollen body as if it were a tiny balloon. It exploded, staining my fingers red with my own blood.
“I should’ve never gone to see my brother. Goddamned bedbugs,” I muttered to myself. I hoped that was the only one. If I had picked up some extra travelers at the flophouse, I knew they would spread throughout the entire house within days.
The creaking came again, louder this time, almost insistent. I glanced across the curtain of shadows that hung thick and black in the room, seeing the dark silhouette of my closet door swinging open. I could only stare, open-mouthed. A long moment passed, and then I heard breathing. It came out, ragged and slow with long pauses, like the choking of a murder victim.
Slowly, I raised my phone’s dim light, shining it across the room. On the closet door, I saw four inhumanly long, crooked fingers. They shone pale like the skin of a corpse. They twitched, then started rhythmically tapping on the door. And then I heard it, that rhyme, that horrible, gurgling rhyme. It came echoing out from the door in that same choked voice, like a forgotten wound from long ago.
“The Crooked Man watches you.
His eyes are black, his lips are blue…”
It felt like I was in some sort of nightmare, but I knew from the sweat dripping down my forehead and the sensation of cloth sheets against my skin that this was all too real. Even a couple months later, I still remember that sensation of dread, the first of many terrors that this night would bring.
I looked around for a weapon. All I found was a letter opener sitting next to some mail on the nearby nightstand. I grabbed it, a flimsy piece of metal in my shaking hands. I was afraid to move, afraid to call out or do anything, out of fear it might shatter the stillness and cause that ineffable horror to come oozing out. I knew I didn’t want to see what was hiding behind that door.
I looked at the open window. I was on the second floor. I was afraid to even breathe too loudly at that moment. With the letter opener in my hand, I tried to silently slide myself across the mattress to the window only a few feet away.
The bedframe groaned softly as I shifted my weight. The breathing from the closet stopped abruptly. I heard the door creaking open, the floorboards shifting. Heavy steps started in the darkness, heading towards me. As I pushed myself off the bed, I glanced back and saw something twisted loping across the room on crooked legs.
It was the Crooked Man, the nightmare from my childhood. He towered over me with a tophat that nearly scraped the ceiling. His lidless eyes were pure darkness, as black as death. They contrasted heavily with his bone-white skin. His lips and fingernails were a suffocating, cyanotic blue, like the lips of a murder victim.
He stood up tall. The bones in his freakishly long legs cracked as the many strange joints of his enormous limbs bent in ways no human limb should bend. His fingers were strange and misshapen, each a foot long. They ended in sharp points of bone that poked out through the dead, white skin. He wore a black suit on his tall, emaciated frame. He moved towards me like flashing static, seeming to disappear and reappear closer and closer in every moment.
In panic and terror, I dived headfirst toward the open window, hearing the gurgling breathing of the Crooked Man only a few feet behind me. I felt slashing talons of bone rip across my back, a burning pain and a feeling of blood soaking my shirt. Then I was flying out the window and falling headfirst towards the grass and bushes below.
***
Time seemed to slow down as the ground rushed up to meet me. The wind whipped past my ears like the currents of a tornado. Instinctively, I tried to curl into a ball. As I smashed into the first of the bushes under my window, I rolled to try to put the brunt of the impact on my right shoulder.
The thin branches of the bush crumpled under me like wet cardboard. I felt sharp sticks stabbing into my skin, opening up new slices and cuts to mix with the deep gashes on my back.
I hit the dirt hard, a sudden pain radiating through my back. A jarring sensation crashed through my body. I rolled as I hit the ground, smacking my head into the lawn. The world spun around me and went dark.
Suddenly, I was somewhere else.
***
I found myself standing in a dark factory, surrounded by debris. Broken glass covered the floor, twinkling like fireflies under the light of the distant streetlights outside. Strange graffiti covered the concrete walls all around me.
“DON’T LOOK BEHIND YOU,” one of the tags read in slashing red letters. Underneath it, someone had spraypainted pure black eyes over a massive grinning mouth full of crooked black teeth.
“Destroy it with fire! SAVE your soul,” another one read in small, blue letters. I ran my hands over my face, wondering if I was dreaming. This all felt so real. I could feel the gentle breeze blowing through the broken windows on my skin, hear the rhythmic chirping of crickets outside.
I heard soft sobbing behind me. I remembered the first graffiti tag I had seen and a sense of panic gripped my heart. I did not want to look back.
“Fuck,” I swore under my breath, trembling as I turned. But I didn’t find some eldritch monstrosity with obsidian teeth and black, lidless eyes waiting there. Instead, I found a woman. She was crying, her back turned to me. She wore a black funeral gown that looked ancient and decayed. With a trembling heart, I took a step forward, wondering if I would regret this.
“Hello?” I called out. She spun, her eyes widening. In front of me stood a pretty blonde woman in her mid-twenties, one that I immediately recognized. For I saw many of my own features reflected in that panicked face: the high cheekbones, the large chin, even the waviness of her hair.
“Grandma,” I whispered, looking around in wonder. “What is this? Am I dead?” She shook her head, her eyes still wet and red. She took a deep, shuddering breath and gave a faint smile.
“Jack,” she said in a soft, melodic voice. “I’m so happy to see you. I’ve been watching you. I’ve been so proud of you. Even though we never met, I want you to know that. I wished I could have lived longer, could have met you. If only I hadn’t been murdered by that thing…” She spat the last word with hatred and fear oozing from her voice.
“I thought you died of cancer, Grandma?” I asked. “What do you mean, he killed you?” She shook like a leaf in the wind, refusing to meet my gaze.
“Everyone in that place was touched by something evil,” she murmured, putting her face in her hands. Her voice quavered like a frightened little girl’s. “The sickness radiated from that thing. It followed us like a cancer, made us weak, and then took our breath away. After the long torture was finished, he came to strangle me. He didn’t just kill me, Jack. He murdered my sister and brother, too. I saw it.” Her head ratcheted up, looking behind me all of a sudden. Her eyes widened in terror.
“You need to kill it, Jack,” she whispered grimly. “He’s woken up again after all these years, and he’s starving. The Crooked Man must feed, and feed he will if you don’t stop him. You need to come to the factory and end it. Otherwise, he will keep on killing. The Crooked Man will never stop hunting you. He will kill you and everyone you love.”
“How?” I asked, afraid to look back as the disturbing sounds grew closer and closer. Grandma backpedaled quickly, as if the demons of Hell were approaching. “How? How do I end it?”
I heard a horrible, choked breathing behind me, then the world faded.
***
I woke up suddenly on the lawn, my head pounding. It didn’t seem like much time had passed. I must have knocked myself out. I raised my fingers to my forehead. My fingers came away slick with blood.
For a long moment, I lay there, hyperventilating and looking up at the cloudless abyss of a sky. My body felt bruised and battered, and I wasn’t even sure if I could walk.
Then I saw a pale, hairless visage peeking over the edge of the windowsill with eyes as dark as night. Its face split into a grin with a crack, making a sound like ripping plastic. The bone-white mask of dead skin looked at me with a feverish intensity, a kind of psychopathic hunger that radiated from every pore of his body. With horror, I saw the Crooked Man’s teeth were as black as his eyes, gleaming like polished jetstone.
A rush of adrenaline pushed me up from the ground. I realized I was tremendously lucky, that I had been laying there with my keys still in my pocket and my cell phone in hand, fully dressed except for the fact I was wearing slippers. I sprinted across the lawn towards my car. I heard the Crooked Man scream out after me.
“You’ll be with Grandmother soon, Jackie boy,” he hissed in his gurgling voice. “No one escapes. No one.”
***
I flew down the highway in my car, the phone in my trembling hand. Looking down at it, I called Iris right away. She answered groggily.
“Hello?” she said.
“Jesus, Iris, it’s after me,” I said frantically. “Something’s happening. I got attacked in my own bedroom!”
“Did you call the cops?” she asked, seeming to wake up instantly. I looked down at the clock in the center console, seeing it was already past midnight.
“It wasn’t a person. I saw something. I think it was the same thing that took those teenagers, and now it’s after me. Are you guys home?” There was a long pause on the other end. I heard whispering in the background.
“Yeah… sure, come over,” she said. I knew Ben was somewhat of a gun nut, and had a nice little collection at the house. I would feel much safer if I made it there. And if I had them on my side, that would be all the better.
***
Ben and Iris lived in the middle of a back road surrounded by forests. The dark trees loomed overhead like priests with their heads bowed. The light from their front porch streamed into the creeping shadows as I pulled into their driveway. The sound of the car idling seemed far too loud in this place where the woods closed in all around me. I didn’t know what was hiding in those trees. I immediately shut it off.
Ben was a veteran who knew much more about combat and guns than I did. His collection was also somewhat impressive- an Armalite AR-15, a Judge, a 12-gauge Benelli, two crappy little .22s, a .45 Ruger, a Nosler 21 and a 10-gauge Mossberg. I had gone out shooting with him and Iris quite a few times. I would feel much safer once I was inside.
The cloudless black sky hung overhead like the lid of a coffin. Their little two-story place with the wraparound porch looked quaint, almost like a little rural cabin.
I stumbled out of the car. I’m sure I was quite a sight, battered and covered in clotting gashes and cuts, my eyes wide and panicked. I constantly looked around, checking my back. Every time I did, I expected to see something there, something close by with blue lips like a corpse and deformed, twisting bones.
I had nearly gotten to the front of the house when I saw, through the narrow sidelights at top of the door, the face of the Crooked Man. Standing only feet away, I heard faint gurgling of his diseased breathing even through the wall.
His hairless face was split into a grin like a death’s head, his lidless eyes bulging and excited. He raised his misshapen fingers to the window and gave me a little wave, opening and closing his fingers slowly. Then he turned and disappeared deeper into the house.
***
I immediately tried opening the door, to yell to Iris and Ben to watch out, but the door was locked. I called Iris. Each ring seemed to take an eternity. Finally, she answered.
“Hello? What, are you here?” she asked.
“Iris! Get the fuck out of the house! You and Ben aren’t alone in there! There’s a man coming in your direction right now!” I screamed, panicked. “Jump out the window if you have to! It’s coming!”
“What?” she said, sounding alarmed and confused. “Are you being serious?” I heard soft murmuring in the background.
“Tell Ben to grab a gun right now!” I started to say, but a high-pitched scream carried through the phone and the house at that moment.
“Iris? Iris! Answer me!” I said. The call immediately went dead.
From inside, I heard the first of the gunshots.
***
At that point, I decided to run back to my car. I needed to get inside and help them. A small voice in the back of my mind asked me what I could possibly do, however. If an AR-15 or a lead slug from a 12-gauge couldn’t stop the Crooked Man, then what could? At that moment, I wished fervently that Grandma would have told me.
I grabbed a tire iron from the back of my trunk and sprinted back toward the front of the house. They had large windows leading into the kitchen from their wraparound porch. Without hesitation, I drew the tire iron back and smashed it. The tinkling of glass seemed explosively loud. I realized that the gunshots and screaming had stopped.
At that moment, something pale came scurrying around the side of the building. I jumped, but I looked over and realized it was Iris, dressed in a white hoodie and white pants. Her pale face was contorted with mortal terror. To my horror, I realized hundreds of small drops spattered her clothes, covering her face and body like crimson raindrops. She had the .45 Ruger in her hands, and she was limping.
“Where’s Ben?” I cried. She shook her head.
“I jumped out the bedroom window… he was behind me,” she said. Suddenly, there was another explosion of glass from behind the house. Something heavy thudded hard against the ground. We heard wretched wailing follow it. Looking at each other with horrified eyes, we both turned and ran towards the noise.
We found Ben laying on the lawn. The right side of his neck was nearly severed. Bright-red streams of blood spurted from the mutilated flesh. His back looked broken as well. He laid there like a hornet smashed under someone’s boot. With dilated eyes, he looked from me to Iris. Terror and agony oozed from his eyes. He opened his mouth to say something, but only a frothy puddle of blood came up.
Then his eyes turned away, looking straight up into the cloudless black void of a sky. The last exhalation came, the death gasp that bubbled and stretched out until I thought it might never end. He died staring into that abyss, that eternity from which no one returns.
The Crooked Man murdered my family. Now he has awoken again [part 2] : mrcreeps (reddit.com)

​
I remember when I first heard the rhyme as a child. It terrified me. To me, the Crooked Man was some sort of boogeyman with freakishly long arms and legs that were twisted and broken in horrifying ways. I still have the rhyme memorized. It repeats in my brain like a skipping record.
“There was a Crooked Man, and he walked a crooked mile,
He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile;
He bought a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together in a little crooked house.”
My brother Benton, who loved to torture me as a child, ended up adding his own parts to the rhyme over time. The extra parts he added did nothing to console me or end my nightmares of this twisted boogeyman who always seemed to slink through the shadows. I remember the rhyme Benton told me by heart to this day.
“The Crooked Man watches you.
His eyes are black, his lips are blue.
The crooked man twists and crawls.
He uses his crooked blade to kill.
And when the curtain of night falls,
He comes to get his thrill.”
***
So I found it strange when, a few weeks ago, I was sitting with a couple of my friends drinking and the subject of the Crooked Man came up again. They were rambling about shootings and serial killers and other fairly interesting subjects that I knew almost nothing about. But my friend Iris knew everything about such morbid subjects.
She was a small drink of water, no more than five feet, with platinum blonde hair and green eyes like a cat. She was extremely attractive with high cheekbones and a small nose and chin. She always talked extremely fast and made violent slashing gestures with her hands. Sometimes I wondered if she had a secret amphetamine habit I didn’t know about.
“But did you hear about the murders in Union?” Iris asked, glancing over at her boyfriend, Ben. Ben was the opposite of Iris- tall and nerdy with thick, black-rimmed glasses and a low whisper of a voice.
“I just heard that some kids went missing,” Ben murmured. I shrugged.
“I don’t watch TV,” I said. “The news is all bullshit anyway. They only show you the bad stuff. After all, no one wants to hear about new breakthroughs in fusion technology or discoveries in particle physics. Instead, people just want to watch others get murdered, robbed and beaten, so that they can feel that at least someone else has it worse than them. That’s all the news is, really: a form of schadenfreude, the joy people get from seeing others’ misfortune and suffering. Our entire media industry is built on a foundation of schadenfreude.” I took a long sip from my beer, a Harpoon that tasted like pure raspberries. Iris rolled her eyes.
“While probably true, I don’t care,” she said, turning her green eyes on me. “Don’t you want to know what happened to the kids?”
“I do,” Ben said, leaning forward. “Was it something… supernatural?” Iris gave a sardonic laugh at that. Ben sat back, offended.
“What’s so funny? I heard there was weird stuff going on around that factory. In fact, I heard they used to manufacture some dye there for clocks and stuff, right? So all these people went to work, painting watches and clocks and whatever else they told them to paint. It was this special green dye that would glow in the dark. The factory was staffed by mostly women, and I heard they used to lick their paintbrushes to form them into points. They figured this stuff was just regular paint that glowed in the dark.” I leaned back, interested. Ben started talking faster, getting more animated.
“So what happened?” I asked, my curiosity piqued.
“Well, the workers started getting cancer and dying in huge numbers,” Ben continued as the kitchen lights sparkled off his glasses. “One woman even had her entire jaw rot off. Others had pieces of their faces falling off. So it turns out, they were using radioactive isotopes to make the paint glow! And these women were just licking the paintbrushes and touching the paint…”
“Holy shit,” I whispered, horrified.
“They called them the Radium girls,” Ben said. “That factory killed hundreds and hundreds of people. That’s why a lot of people think it’s haunted. People claim they see ghosts and weird shit around it. And that’s not all. The case gets even weirder when you look at workers’ families.
“It seems a lot of their kids went missing, too. The cops never found any of them. The entire time the factory was operational, and even after it shutdown, the families of the workers kept having strange things happen- children disappearing from their bedrooms in the middle of the night, strange murders and unexplained suicides that kept killing off healthy, normal people all over town.”
“So, anyways,” Iris continued, looking slightly annoyed at the interruption, “the kids that went into that abandoned factory were all found… torn apart. Their limbs were all amputated and crooked.” She leaned forward, using her spooky campfire voice. “And the limbs were long. Freakishly long, as if they had just grown overnight to inhuman lengths before they got lopped off. But they never found the heads or the torsos. All they found was ten legs and ten arms.”
“And no one knows what happened?” I asked. She shook her head.
“Officially, no. The police and media said it was some sort of serial killer, of course. But there wasn’t a shred of evidence anywhere. It was like a ghost had done it. Where the limbs were piled up in the basement, there was no evidence that anyone had been there in months, no footsteps or microscopic evidence of any presence. But the story doesn’t end there. Because there were six teenagers that went into that building, and one of them was found alive three months later, wandering, covered in blood and scratches, mostly naked and totally insane. One of my friends is an EMT and she said that the kid would not stop talking about the Crooked Man taking his friends and keeping him prisoner in some other world.”
At the mention of those words, the Crooked Man, a chill went down my spine. My heart felt like ice.
“What’d you say? What did the kid say?” I asked anxiously. Suddenly the room felt very hot, and the alcohol was not sitting well in my stomach.
“He said he got kidnapped by someone called the Crooked Man,” Iris repeated, taking a long sip from her wine. “According to the kid, it was some sort of fucking monster, apparently. I think his mind must have just snapped. He was probably kidnapped and held in the basement of some serial killer for three goddamned months. Who knows what he saw and experienced? People make up all sorts of crazy shit when they’re traumatized.”
My hand was shaking so badly that I had to put my bottle down on the table. For some reason, my mind kept flashing back to my sister, Emilia, who had been kidnapped from her room in the middle of the night when my brother Benton and I were little. She had never been found. We had never gotten a ransom note or found a body. It was as if Emilia had simply disappeared, vanished from the surface of the planet in an instant.
“I think some of that stuff is real,” Ben said. “People have been talking about cryptids and ghosts for thousands of years across countless different and unrelated cultures. What are the chances that all of them are just hallucinations or delusions?”
I didn’t know, but I thought I might know someone who might.
***
My brother Benton was a long-term drug addict living in a flophouse. I went to see him the next morning. He opened the door with a glazed, half-aware expression. Scars covered his arms and legs. He looked like a walking skeleton. His eyes shone like the last bit of water at the bottom of a dying well.
“Jack,” he said, surprised, appearing to wake up slightly. “What are you doing here?”
“I need to talk to you,” I said, pushing past him into the one-bedroom place he called home. A cockroach skittered across the wall. As he closed the door, I saw bites from bedbugs all over his body. Benton turned, spreading out his hands.
“Well, what is it, little brother? You know I’m all ears.”
“You remember that rhyme you used to scare me with when we were little?” I asked. “That rhyme you made up about the Crooked Man?” He seemed to go a shade paler.
“I didn’t make anything up,” he said. “That rhyme came from Grandma. She told it to dad when he was little, before she died.”
“Grandma?” I asked, startled. Our grandmother had died of cancer when she was extremely young, in her late 20s. “Did you hear about the murders over in Union? The survivor was talking about the Crooked Man.”
“That’s pretty freaking weird, man,” he said. “Especially considering what happened to Grandma and Emilia, you know.” He sat down on the threadbare mattress, laying back and sighing.
“Why is it weird?” I asked.
“Because, you know, that’s where Grandma used to work. At that factory in Union. Didn’t Dad ever tell you?” I shook my head, feeling sick.
“So Grandma was one of the radium girls?” I said. My brother shrugged his thin shoulders, the stained T-shirt clinging tight to his frail body.
“I don’t know what that is, but whatever she was doing there, it killed her.”
“But what does that have to do with Emilia?” I asked, my heart pounding at the mention of our long-lost little sister. He shook his head in wonder.
“You don’t remember? You were older than me when it happened. Before she went missing, she kept talking about the same thing, saying weird stuff about some ‘Crooked Man’. Don’t you remember what happened the night she went missing?” I thought back, but it all seemed like a blur. I remembered flashing police sirens and my parents screaming. I had tried to block it out, but apparently Benton hadn’t been able to. That night must be like a fresh wound on his mind all the time.
“No, I just remembered… screaming, and police…” I whispered, my voice trailing off into nothing. Benton leaned forward on the bed, looking sick.
“We both saw it,” he said. “The Crooked Man. That thing she was talking about. It was real. We saw it in her room that night- when it took her.” I shook my head, refusing to look at him. Feeling sick, I walked toward the door without looking back. “Where are you going?”
“I’m going home,” I said. “I can’t deal with this shit right now.” But that night, I would find out that the long-lost nightmare from my childhood was not nearly as buried in the past as I thought.
***
I was laying in my dark bedroom, reading the local news on my phone, when I saw an article that disturbed me greatly. I sat up, looking out the window into the cloudless night. The sky hung overhead like a black hole, colorless and empty. Fear radiated through my heart as I glanced back down at the screen and started reading.
“Sole survivor of serial killer commits suicide,” the article read in garish black-and-white letters. “Michael Galentino, 18, was found dead in a psychiatric facility early this morning. In February, Michael Galentino and five others entered a local abandoned building. Friends who knew them stated that they often explored abandoned structures as part of an ‘urban exploration’ group. But this would not be a normal night for the group. They all disappeared, and within 24 hours, police and search teams had been dispatched to look for the missing teenagers…”
The house was silent. I read the rest of the article with bated breath, my eyes wide. Some of the details I already knew, but others, such as the radioactive isotopes found on the dismembered limbs of the victims, I did not. I wondered about that. The police claimed that, after finding this strange clue, they had sent a team to inspect the abandoned factory with Geiger counters and look for signs of radioactivity. Perhaps the radium, which had a notoriously long half-life, had accumulated on the surfaces over the decades. But they said the radioactivity within the building was all within acceptable levels. It was just another bizarre piece of a puzzle that no one could solve.
The house was deathly silent. I could hear my own heart beating a runaway rhythm in my ears. A rising sense of anxiety was filling me, but I didn’t know why. It felt like some sort of pressure had changed all around me, as if the first wave of a massive blizzard had just blown into the room.
I heard a creaking from across the dark room. At the same time, I felt a sting on my arm. I looked down, seeing a bedbug crawling across my skin, a small red welt rising in its wake.
“Fuck!” I swore, grabbing it between my fingers and slicing it between my nails. Crimson spurted from its swollen body as if it were a tiny balloon. It exploded, staining my fingers red with my own blood.
“I should’ve never gone to see my brother. Goddamned bedbugs,” I muttered to myself. I hoped that was the only one. If I had picked up some extra travelers at the flophouse, I knew they would spread throughout the entire house within days.
The creaking came again, louder this time, almost insistent. I glanced across the curtain of shadows that hung thick and black in the room, seeing the dark silhouette of my closet door swinging open. I could only stare, open-mouthed. A long moment passed, and then I heard breathing. It came out, ragged and slow with long pauses, like the choking of a murder victim.
Slowly, I raised my phone’s dim light, shining it across the room. On the closet door, I saw four inhumanly long, crooked fingers. They shone pale like the skin of a corpse. They twitched, then started rhythmically tapping on the door. And then I heard it, that rhyme, that horrible, gurgling rhyme. It came echoing out from the door in that same choked voice, like a forgotten wound from long ago.
“The Crooked Man watches you.
His eyes are black, his lips are blue…”
It felt like I was in some sort of nightmare, but I knew from the sweat dripping down my forehead and the sensation of cloth sheets against my skin that this was all too real. Even a couple months later, I still remember that sensation of dread, the first of many terrors that this night would bring.
I looked around for a weapon. All I found was a letter opener sitting next to some mail on the nearby nightstand. I grabbed it, a flimsy piece of metal in my shaking hands. I was afraid to move, afraid to call out or do anything, out of fear it might shatter the stillness and cause that ineffable horror to come oozing out. I knew I didn’t want to see what was hiding behind that door.
I looked at the open window. I was on the second floor. I was afraid to even breathe too loudly at that moment. With the letter opener in my hand, I tried to silently slide myself across the mattress to the window only a few feet away.
The bedframe groaned softly as I shifted my weight. The breathing from the closet stopped abruptly. I heard the door creaking open, the floorboards shifting. Heavy steps started in the darkness, heading towards me. As I pushed myself off the bed, I glanced back and saw something twisted loping across the room on crooked legs.
It was the Crooked Man, the nightmare from my childhood. He towered over me with a tophat that nearly scraped the ceiling. His lidless eyes were pure darkness, as black as death. They contrasted heavily with his bone-white skin. His lips and fingernails were a suffocating, cyanotic blue, like the lips of a murder victim.
He stood up tall. The bones in his freakishly long legs cracked as the many strange joints of his enormous limbs bent in ways no human limb should bend. His fingers were strange and misshapen, each a foot long. They ended in sharp points of bone that poked out through the dead, white skin. He wore a black suit on his tall, emaciated frame. He moved towards me like flashing static, seeming to disappear and reappear closer and closer in every moment.
In panic and terror, I dived headfirst toward the open window, hearing the gurgling breathing of the Crooked Man only a few feet behind me. I felt slashing talons of bone rip across my back, a burning pain and a feeling of blood soaking my shirt. Then I was flying out the window and falling headfirst towards the grass and bushes below.
***
Time seemed to slow down as the ground rushed up to meet me. The wind whipped past my ears like the currents of a tornado. Instinctively, I tried to curl into a ball. As I smashed into the first of the bushes under my window, I rolled to try to put the brunt of the impact on my right shoulder.
The thin branches of the bush crumpled under me like wet cardboard. I felt sharp sticks stabbing into my skin, opening up new slices and cuts to mix with the deep gashes on my back.
I hit the dirt hard, a sudden pain radiating through my back. A jarring sensation crashed through my body. I rolled as I hit the ground, smacking my head into the lawn. The world spun around me and went dark.
Suddenly, I was somewhere else.
***
I found myself standing in a dark factory, surrounded by debris. Broken glass covered the floor, twinkling like fireflies under the light of the distant streetlights outside. Strange graffiti covered the concrete walls all around me.
“DON’T LOOK BEHIND YOU,” one of the tags read in slashing red letters. Underneath it, someone had spraypainted pure black eyes over a massive grinning mouth full of crooked black teeth.
“Destroy it with fire! SAVE your soul,” another one read in small, blue letters. I ran my hands over my face, wondering if I was dreaming. This all felt so real. I could feel the gentle breeze blowing through the broken windows on my skin, hear the rhythmic chirping of crickets outside.
I heard soft sobbing behind me. I remembered the first graffiti tag I had seen and a sense of panic gripped my heart. I did not want to look back.
“Fuck,” I swore under my breath, trembling as I turned. But I didn’t find some eldritch monstrosity with obsidian teeth and black, lidless eyes waiting there. Instead, I found a woman. She was crying, her back turned to me. She wore a black funeral gown that looked ancient and decayed. With a trembling heart, I took a step forward, wondering if I would regret this.
“Hello?” I called out. She spun, her eyes widening. In front of me stood a pretty blonde woman in her mid-twenties, one that I immediately recognized. For I saw many of my own features reflected in that panicked face: the high cheekbones, the large chin, even the waviness of her hair.
“Grandma,” I whispered, looking around in wonder. “What is this? Am I dead?” She shook her head, her eyes still wet and red. She took a deep, shuddering breath and gave a faint smile.
“Jack,” she said in a soft, melodic voice. “I’m so happy to see you. I’ve been watching you. I’ve been so proud of you. Even though we never met, I want you to know that. I wished I could have lived longer, could have met you. If only I hadn’t been murdered by that thing…” She spat the last word with hatred and fear oozing from her voice.
“I thought you died of cancer, Grandma?” I asked. “What do you mean, he killed you?” She shook like a leaf in the wind, refusing to meet my gaze.
“Everyone in that place was touched by something evil,” she murmured, putting her face in her hands. Her voice quavered like a frightened little girl’s. “The sickness radiated from that thing. It followed us like a cancer, made us weak, and then took our breath away. After the long torture was finished, he came to strangle me. He didn’t just kill me, Jack. He murdered my sister and brother, too. I saw it.” Her head ratcheted up, looking behind me all of a sudden. Her eyes widened in terror.
“You need to kill it, Jack,” she whispered grimly. “He’s woken up again after all these years, and he’s starving. The Crooked Man must feed, and feed he will if you don’t stop him. You need to come to the factory and end it. Otherwise, he will keep on killing. The Crooked Man will never stop hunting you. He will kill you and everyone you love.”
“How?” I asked, afraid to look back as the disturbing sounds grew closer and closer. Grandma backpedaled quickly, as if the demons of Hell were approaching. “How? How do I end it?”
I heard a horrible, choked breathing behind me, then the world faded.
***
I woke up suddenly on the lawn, my head pounding. It didn’t seem like much time had passed. I must have knocked myself out. I raised my fingers to my forehead. My fingers came away slick with blood.
For a long moment, I lay there, hyperventilating and looking up at the cloudless abyss of a sky. My body felt bruised and battered, and I wasn’t even sure if I could walk.
Then I saw a pale, hairless visage peeking over the edge of the windowsill with eyes as dark as night. Its face split into a grin with a crack, making a sound like ripping plastic. The bone-white mask of dead skin looked at me with a feverish intensity, a kind of psychopathic hunger that radiated from every pore of his body. With horror, I saw the Crooked Man’s teeth were as black as his eyes, gleaming like polished jetstone.
A rush of adrenaline pushed me up from the ground. I realized I was tremendously lucky, that I had been laying there with my keys still in my pocket and my cell phone in hand, fully dressed except for the fact I was wearing slippers. I sprinted across the lawn towards my car. I heard the Crooked Man scream out after me.
“You’ll be with Grandmother soon, Jackie boy,” he hissed in his gurgling voice. “No one escapes. No one.”
***
I flew down the highway in my car, the phone in my trembling hand. Looking down at it, I called Iris right away. She answered groggily.
“Hello?” she said.
“Jesus, Iris, it’s after me,” I said frantically. “Something’s happening. I got attacked in my own bedroom!”
“Did you call the cops?” she asked, seeming to wake up instantly. I looked down at the clock in the center console, seeing it was already past midnight.
“It wasn’t a person. I saw something. I think it was the same thing that took those teenagers, and now it’s after me. Are you guys home?” There was a long pause on the other end. I heard whispering in the background.
“Yeah… sure, come over,” she said. I knew Ben was somewhat of a gun nut, and had a nice little collection at the house. I would feel much safer if I made it there. And if I had them on my side, that would be all the better.
***
Ben and Iris lived in the middle of a back road surrounded by forests. The dark trees loomed overhead like priests with their heads bowed. The light from their front porch streamed into the creeping shadows as I pulled into their driveway. The sound of the car idling seemed far too loud in this place where the woods closed in all around me. I didn’t know what was hiding in those trees. I immediately shut it off.
Ben was a veteran who knew much more about combat and guns than I did. His collection was also somewhat impressive- an Armalite AR-15, a Judge, a 12-gauge Benelli, two crappy little .22s, a .45 Ruger, a Nosler 21 and a 10-gauge Mossberg. I had gone out shooting with him and Iris quite a few times. I would feel much safer once I was inside.
The cloudless black sky hung overhead like the lid of a coffin. Their little two-story place with the wraparound porch looked quaint, almost like a little rural cabin.
I stumbled out of the car. I’m sure I was quite a sight, battered and covered in clotting gashes and cuts, my eyes wide and panicked. I constantly looked around, checking my back. Every time I did, I expected to see something there, something close by with blue lips like a corpse and deformed, twisting bones.
I had nearly gotten to the front of the house when I saw, through the narrow sidelights at top of the door, the face of the Crooked Man. Standing only feet away, I heard faint gurgling of his diseased breathing even through the wall.
His hairless face was split into a grin like a death’s head, his lidless eyes bulging and excited. He raised his misshapen fingers to the window and gave me a little wave, opening and closing his fingers slowly. Then he turned and disappeared deeper into the house.
***
I immediately tried opening the door, to yell to Iris and Ben to watch out, but the door was locked. I called Iris. Each ring seemed to take an eternity. Finally, she answered.
“Hello? What, are you here?” she asked.
“Iris! Get the fuck out of the house! You and Ben aren’t alone in there! There’s a man coming in your direction right now!” I screamed, panicked. “Jump out the window if you have to! It’s coming!”
“What?” she said, sounding alarmed and confused. “Are you being serious?” I heard soft murmuring in the background.
“Tell Ben to grab a gun right now!” I started to say, but a high-pitched scream carried through the phone and the house at that moment.
“Iris? Iris! Answer me!” I said. The call immediately went dead.
From inside, I heard the first of the gunshots.
***
At that point, I decided to run back to my car. I needed to get inside and help them. A small voice in the back of my mind asked me what I could possibly do, however. If an AR-15 or a lead slug from a 12-gauge couldn’t stop the Crooked Man, then what could? At that moment, I wished fervently that Grandma would have told me.
I grabbed a tire iron from the back of my trunk and sprinted back toward the front of the house. They had large windows leading into the kitchen from their wraparound porch. Without hesitation, I drew the tire iron back and smashed it. The tinkling of glass seemed explosively loud. I realized that the gunshots and screaming had stopped.
At that moment, something pale came scurrying around the side of the building. I jumped, but I looked over and realized it was Iris, dressed in a white hoodie and white pants. Her pale face was contorted with mortal terror. To my horror, I realized hundreds of small drops spattered her clothes, covering her face and body like crimson raindrops. She had the .45 Ruger in her hands, and she was limping.
“Where’s Ben?” I cried. She shook her head.
“I jumped out the bedroom window… he was behind me,” she said. Suddenly, there was another explosion of glass from behind the house. Something heavy thudded hard against the ground. We heard wretched wailing follow it. Looking at each other with horrified eyes, we both turned and ran towards the noise.
We found Ben laying on the lawn. The right side of his neck was nearly severed. Bright-red streams of blood spurted from the mutilated flesh. His back looked broken as well. He laid there like a hornet smashed under someone’s boot. With dilated eyes, he looked from me to Iris. Terror and agony oozed from his eyes. He opened his mouth to say something, but only a frothy puddle of blood came up.
Then his eyes turned away, looking straight up into the cloudless black void of a sky. The last exhalation came, the death gasp that bubbled and stretched out until I thought it might never end. He died staring into that abyss, that eternity from which no one returns.
The Crooked Man murdered my family. Now he has awoken again [part 2] : mrcreeps (reddit.com)

I remember when I first heard the rhyme as a child. It terrified me. To me, the Crooked Man was some sort of boogeyman with freakishly long arms and legs that were twisted and broken in horrifying ways. I still have the rhyme memorized. It repeats in my brain like a skipping record.
“There was a Crooked Man, and he walked a crooked mile,
He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile;
He bought a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together in a little crooked house.”
My brother Benton, who loved to torture me as a child, ended up adding his own parts to the rhyme over time. The extra parts he added did nothing to console me or end my nightmares of this twisted boogeyman who always seemed to slink through the shadows. I remember the rhyme Benton told me by heart to this day.
“The Crooked Man watches you.
His eyes are black, his lips are blue.
The crooked man twists and crawls.
He uses his crooked blade to kill.
And when the curtain of night falls,
He comes to get his thrill.”
***
So I found it strange when, a few weeks ago, I was sitting with a couple of my friends drinking and the subject of the Crooked Man came up again. They were rambling about shootings and serial killers and other fairly interesting subjects that I knew almost nothing about. But my friend Iris knew everything about such morbid subjects.
She was a small drink of water, no more than five feet, with platinum blonde hair and green eyes like a cat. She was extremely attractive with high cheekbones and a small nose and chin. She always talked extremely fast and made violent slashing gestures with her hands. Sometimes I wondered if she had a secret amphetamine habit I didn’t know about.
“But did you hear about the murders in Union?” Iris asked, glancing over at her boyfriend, Ben. Ben was the opposite of Iris- tall and nerdy with thick, black-rimmed glasses and a low whisper of a voice.
“I just heard that some kids went missing,” Ben murmured. I shrugged.
“I don’t watch TV,” I said. “The news is all bullshit anyway. They only show you the bad stuff. After all, no one wants to hear about new breakthroughs in fusion technology or discoveries in particle physics. Instead, people just want to watch others get murdered, robbed and beaten, so that they can feel that at least someone else has it worse than them. That’s all the news is, really: a form of schadenfreude, the joy people get from seeing others’ misfortune and suffering. Our entire media industry is built on a foundation of schadenfreude.” I took a long sip from my beer, a Harpoon that tasted like pure raspberries. Iris rolled her eyes.
“While probably true, I don’t care,” she said, turning her green eyes on me. “Don’t you want to know what happened to the kids?”
“I do,” Ben said, leaning forward. “Was it something… supernatural?” Iris gave a sardonic laugh at that. Ben sat back, offended.
“What’s so funny? I heard there was weird stuff going on around that factory. In fact, I heard they used to manufacture some dye there for clocks and stuff, right? So all these people went to work, painting watches and clocks and whatever else they told them to paint. It was this special green dye that would glow in the dark. The factory was staffed by mostly women, and I heard they used to lick their paintbrushes to form them into points. They figured this stuff was just regular paint that glowed in the dark.” I leaned back, interested. Ben started talking faster, getting more animated.
“So what happened?” I asked, my curiosity piqued.
“Well, the workers started getting cancer and dying in huge numbers,” Ben continued as the kitchen lights sparkled off his glasses. “One woman even had her entire jaw rot off. Others had pieces of their faces falling off. So it turns out, they were using radioactive isotopes to make the paint glow! And these women were just licking the paintbrushes and touching the paint…”
“Holy shit,” I whispered, horrified.
“They called them the Radium girls,” Ben said. “That factory killed hundreds and hundreds of people. That’s why a lot of people think it’s haunted. People claim they see ghosts and weird shit around it. And that’s not all. The case gets even weirder when you look at workers’ families.
“It seems a lot of their kids went missing, too. The cops never found any of them. The entire time the factory was operational, and even after it shutdown, the families of the workers kept having strange things happen- children disappearing from their bedrooms in the middle of the night, strange murders and unexplained suicides that kept killing off healthy, normal people all over town.”
“So, anyways,” Iris continued, looking slightly annoyed at the interruption, “the kids that went into that abandoned factory were all found… torn apart. Their limbs were all amputated and crooked.” She leaned forward, using her spooky campfire voice. “And the limbs were long. Freakishly long, as if they had just grown overnight to inhuman lengths before they got lopped off. But they never found the heads or the torsos. All they found was ten legs and ten arms.”
“And no one knows what happened?” I asked. She shook her head.
“Officially, no. The police and media said it was some sort of serial killer, of course. But there wasn’t a shred of evidence anywhere. It was like a ghost had done it. Where the limbs were piled up in the basement, there was no evidence that anyone had been there in months, no footsteps or microscopic evidence of any presence. But the story doesn’t end there. Because there were six teenagers that went into that building, and one of them was found alive three months later, wandering, covered in blood and scratches, mostly naked and totally insane. One of my friends is an EMT and she said that the kid would not stop talking about the Crooked Man taking his friends and keeping him prisoner in some other world.”
At the mention of those words, the Crooked Man, a chill went down my spine. My heart felt like ice.
“What’d you say? What did the kid say?” I asked anxiously. Suddenly the room felt very hot, and the alcohol was not sitting well in my stomach.
“He said he got kidnapped by someone called the Crooked Man,” Iris repeated, taking a long sip from her wine. “According to the kid, it was some sort of fucking monster, apparently. I think his mind must have just snapped. He was probably kidnapped and held in the basement of some serial killer for three goddamned months. Who knows what he saw and experienced? People make up all sorts of crazy shit when they’re traumatized.”
My hand was shaking so badly that I had to put my bottle down on the table. For some reason, my mind kept flashing back to my sister, Emilia, who had been kidnapped from her room in the middle of the night when my brother Benton and I were little. She had never been found. We had never gotten a ransom note or found a body. It was as if Emilia had simply disappeared, vanished from the surface of the planet in an instant.
“I think some of that stuff is real,” Ben said. “People have been talking about cryptids and ghosts for thousands of years across countless different and unrelated cultures. What are the chances that all of them are just hallucinations or delusions?”
I didn’t know, but I thought I might know someone who might.
***
My brother Benton was a long-term drug addict living in a flophouse. I went to see him the next morning. He opened the door with a glazed, half-aware expression. Scars covered his arms and legs. He looked like a walking skeleton. His eyes shone like the last bit of water at the bottom of a dying well.
“Jack,” he said, surprised, appearing to wake up slightly. “What are you doing here?”
“I need to talk to you,” I said, pushing past him into the one-bedroom place he called home. A cockroach skittered across the wall. As he closed the door, I saw bites from bedbugs all over his body. Benton turned, spreading out his hands.
“Well, what is it, little brother? You know I’m all ears.”
“You remember that rhyme you used to scare me with when we were little?” I asked. “That rhyme you made up about the Crooked Man?” He seemed to go a shade paler.
“I didn’t make anything up,” he said. “That rhyme came from Grandma. She told it to dad when he was little, before she died.”
“Grandma?” I asked, startled. Our grandmother had died of cancer when she was extremely young, in her late 20s. “Did you hear about the murders over in Union? The survivor was talking about the Crooked Man.”
“That’s pretty freaking weird, man,” he said. “Especially considering what happened to Grandma and Emilia, you know.” He sat down on the threadbare mattress, laying back and sighing.
“Why is it weird?” I asked.
“Because, you know, that’s where Grandma used to work. At that factory in Union. Didn’t Dad ever tell you?” I shook my head, feeling sick.
“So Grandma was one of the radium girls?” I said. My brother shrugged his thin shoulders, the stained T-shirt clinging tight to his frail body.
“I don’t know what that is, but whatever she was doing there, it killed her.”
“But what does that have to do with Emilia?” I asked, my heart pounding at the mention of our long-lost little sister. He shook his head in wonder.
“You don’t remember? You were older than me when it happened. Before she went missing, she kept talking about the same thing, saying weird stuff about some ‘Crooked Man’. Don’t you remember what happened the night she went missing?” I thought back, but it all seemed like a blur. I remembered flashing police sirens and my parents screaming. I had tried to block it out, but apparently Benton hadn’t been able to. That night must be like a fresh wound on his mind all the time.
“No, I just remembered… screaming, and police…” I whispered, my voice trailing off into nothing. Benton leaned forward on the bed, looking sick.
“We both saw it,” he said. “The Crooked Man. That thing she was talking about. It was real. We saw it in her room that night- when it took her.” I shook my head, refusing to look at him. Feeling sick, I walked toward the door without looking back. “Where are you going?”
“I’m going home,” I said. “I can’t deal with this shit right now.” But that night, I would find out that the long-lost nightmare from my childhood was not nearly as buried in the past as I thought.
***
I was laying in my dark bedroom, reading the local news on my phone, when I saw an article that disturbed me greatly. I sat up, looking out the window into the cloudless night. The sky hung overhead like a black hole, colorless and empty. Fear radiated through my heart as I glanced back down at the screen and started reading.
“Sole survivor of serial killer commits suicide,” the article read in garish black-and-white letters. “Michael Galentino, 18, was found dead in a psychiatric facility early this morning. In February, Michael Galentino and five others entered a local abandoned building. Friends who knew them stated that they often explored abandoned structures as part of an ‘urban exploration’ group. But this would not be a normal night for the group. They all disappeared, and within 24 hours, police and search teams had been dispatched to look for the missing teenagers…”
The house was silent. I read the rest of the article with bated breath, my eyes wide. Some of the details I already knew, but others, such as the radioactive isotopes found on the dismembered limbs of the victims, I did not. I wondered about that. The police claimed that, after finding this strange clue, they had sent a team to inspect the abandoned factory with Geiger counters and look for signs of radioactivity. Perhaps the radium, which had a notoriously long half-life, had accumulated on the surfaces over the decades. But they said the radioactivity within the building was all within acceptable levels. It was just another bizarre piece of a puzzle that no one could solve.
The house was deathly silent. I could hear my own heart beating a runaway rhythm in my ears. A rising sense of anxiety was filling me, but I didn’t know why. It felt like some sort of pressure had changed all around me, as if the first wave of a massive blizzard had just blown into the room.
I heard a creaking from across the dark room. At the same time, I felt a sting on my arm. I looked down, seeing a bedbug crawling across my skin, a small red welt rising in its wake.
“Fuck!” I swore, grabbing it between my fingers and slicing it between my nails. Crimson spurted from its swollen body as if it were a tiny balloon. It exploded, staining my fingers red with my own blood.
“I should’ve never gone to see my brother. Goddamned bedbugs,” I muttered to myself. I hoped that was the only one. If I had picked up some extra travelers at the flophouse, I knew they would spread throughout the entire house within days.
The creaking came again, louder this time, almost insistent. I glanced across the curtain of shadows that hung thick and black in the room, seeing the dark silhouette of my closet door swinging open. I could only stare, open-mouthed. A long moment passed, and then I heard breathing. It came out, ragged and slow with long pauses, like the choking of a murder victim.
Slowly, I raised my phone’s dim light, shining it across the room. On the closet door, I saw four inhumanly long, crooked fingers. They shone pale like the skin of a corpse. They twitched, then started rhythmically tapping on the door. And then I heard it, that rhyme, that horrible, gurgling rhyme. It came echoing out from the door in that same choked voice, like a forgotten wound from long ago.
“The Crooked Man watches you.
His eyes are black, his lips are blue…”
It felt like I was in some sort of nightmare, but I knew from the sweat dripping down my forehead and the sensation of cloth sheets against my skin that this was all too real. Even a couple months later, I still remember that sensation of dread, the first of many terrors that this night would bring.
I looked around for a weapon. All I found was a letter opener sitting next to some mail on the nearby nightstand. I grabbed it, a flimsy piece of metal in my shaking hands. I was afraid to move, afraid to call out or do anything, out of fear it might shatter the stillness and cause that ineffable horror to come oozing out. I knew I didn’t want to see what was hiding behind that door.
I looked at the open window. I was on the second floor. I was afraid to even breathe too loudly at that moment. With the letter opener in my hand, I tried to silently slide myself across the mattress to the window only a few feet away.
The bedframe groaned softly as I shifted my weight. The breathing from the closet stopped abruptly. I heard the door creaking open, the floorboards shifting. Heavy steps started in the darkness, heading towards me. As I pushed myself off the bed, I glanced back and saw something twisted loping across the room on crooked legs.
It was the Crooked Man, the nightmare from my childhood. He towered over me with a tophat that nearly scraped the ceiling. His lidless eyes were pure darkness, as black as death. They contrasted heavily with his bone-white skin. His lips and fingernails were a suffocating, cyanotic blue, like the lips of a murder victim.
He stood up tall. The bones in his freakishly long legs cracked as the many strange joints of his enormous limbs bent in ways no human limb should bend. His fingers were strange and misshapen, each a foot long. They ended in sharp points of bone that poked out through the dead, white skin. He wore a black suit on his tall, emaciated frame. He moved towards me like flashing static, seeming to disappear and reappear closer and closer in every moment.
In panic and terror, I dived headfirst toward the open window, hearing the gurgling breathing of the Crooked Man only a few feet behind me. I felt slashing talons of bone rip across my back, a burning pain and a feeling of blood soaking my shirt. Then I was flying out the window and falling headfirst towards the grass and bushes below.
***
Time seemed to slow down as the ground rushed up to meet me. The wind whipped past my ears like the currents of a tornado. Instinctively, I tried to curl into a ball. As I smashed into the first of the bushes under my window, I rolled to try to put the brunt of the impact on my right shoulder.
The thin branches of the bush crumpled under me like wet cardboard. I felt sharp sticks stabbing into my skin, opening up new slices and cuts to mix with the deep gashes on my back.
I hit the dirt hard, a sudden pain radiating through my back. A jarring sensation crashed through my body. I rolled as I hit the ground, smacking my head into the lawn. The world spun around me and went dark.
Suddenly, I was somewhere else.
***
I found myself standing in a dark factory, surrounded by debris. Broken glass covered the floor, twinkling like fireflies under the light of the distant streetlights outside. Strange graffiti covered the concrete walls all around me.
“DON’T LOOK BEHIND YOU,” one of the tags read in slashing red letters. Underneath it, someone had spraypainted pure black eyes over a massive grinning mouth full of crooked black teeth.
“Destroy it with fire! SAVE your soul,” another one read in small, blue letters. I ran my hands over my face, wondering if I was dreaming. This all felt so real. I could feel the gentle breeze blowing through the broken windows on my skin, hear the rhythmic chirping of crickets outside.
I heard soft sobbing behind me. I remembered the first graffiti tag I had seen and a sense of panic gripped my heart. I did not want to look back.
“Fuck,” I swore under my breath, trembling as I turned. But I didn’t find some eldritch monstrosity with obsidian teeth and black, lidless eyes waiting there. Instead, I found a woman. She was crying, her back turned to me. She wore a black funeral gown that looked ancient and decayed. With a trembling heart, I took a step forward, wondering if I would regret this.
“Hello?” I called out. She spun, her eyes widening. In front of me stood a pretty blonde woman in her mid-twenties, one that I immediately recognized. For I saw many of my own features reflected in that panicked face: the high cheekbones, the large chin, even the waviness of her hair.
“Grandma,” I whispered, looking around in wonder. “What is this? Am I dead?” She shook her head, her eyes still wet and red. She took a deep, shuddering breath and gave a faint smile.
“Jack,” she said in a soft, melodic voice. “I’m so happy to see you. I’ve been watching you. I’ve been so proud of you. Even though we never met, I want you to know that. I wished I could have lived longer, could have met you. If only I hadn’t been murdered by that thing…” She spat the last word with hatred and fear oozing from her voice.
“I thought you died of cancer, Grandma?” I asked. “What do you mean, he killed you?” She shook like a leaf in the wind, refusing to meet my gaze.
“Everyone in that place was touched by something evil,” she murmured, putting her face in her hands. Her voice quavered like a frightened little girl’s. “The sickness radiated from that thing. It followed us like a cancer, made us weak, and then took our breath away. After the long torture was finished, he came to strangle me. He didn’t just kill me, Jack. He murdered my sister and brother, too. I saw it.” Her head ratcheted up, looking behind me all of a sudden. Her eyes widened in terror.
“You need to kill it, Jack,” she whispered grimly. “He’s woken up again after all these years, and he’s starving. The Crooked Man must feed, and feed he will if you don’t stop him. You need to come to the factory and end it. Otherwise, he will keep on killing. The Crooked Man will never stop hunting you. He will kill you and everyone you love.”
“How?” I asked, afraid to look back as the disturbing sounds grew closer and closer. Grandma backpedaled quickly, as if the demons of Hell were approaching. “How? How do I end it?”
I heard a horrible, choked breathing behind me, then the world faded.
***
I woke up suddenly on the lawn, my head pounding. It didn’t seem like much time had passed. I must have knocked myself out. I raised my fingers to my forehead. My fingers came away slick with blood.
For a long moment, I lay there, hyperventilating and looking up at the cloudless abyss of a sky. My body felt bruised and battered, and I wasn’t even sure if I could walk.
Then I saw a pale, hairless visage peeking over the edge of the windowsill with eyes as dark as night. Its face split into a grin with a crack, making a sound like ripping plastic. The bone-white mask of dead skin looked at me with a feverish intensity, a kind of psychopathic hunger that radiated from every pore of his body. With horror, I saw the Crooked Man’s teeth were as black as his eyes, gleaming like polished jetstone.
A rush of adrenaline pushed me up from the ground. I realized I was tremendously lucky, that I had been laying there with my keys still in my pocket and my cell phone in hand, fully dressed except for the fact I was wearing slippers. I sprinted across the lawn towards my car. I heard the Crooked Man scream out after me.
“You’ll be with Grandmother soon, Jackie boy,” he hissed in his gurgling voice. “No one escapes. No one.”
***
I flew down the highway in my car, the phone in my trembling hand. Looking down at it, I called Iris right away. She answered groggily.
“Hello?” she said.
“Jesus, Iris, it’s after me,” I said frantically. “Something’s happening. I got attacked in my own bedroom!”
“Did you call the cops?” she asked, seeming to wake up instantly. I looked down at the clock in the center console, seeing it was already past midnight.
“It wasn’t a person. I saw something. I think it was the same thing that took those teenagers, and now it’s after me. Are you guys home?” There was a long pause on the other end. I heard whispering in the background.
“Yeah… sure, come over,” she said. I knew Ben was somewhat of a gun nut, and had a nice little collection at the house. I would feel much safer if I made it there. And if I had them on my side, that would be all the better.
***
Ben and Iris lived in the middle of a back road surrounded by forests. The dark trees loomed overhead like priests with their heads bowed. The light from their front porch streamed into the creeping shadows as I pulled into their driveway. The sound of the car idling seemed far too loud in this place where the woods closed in all around me. I didn’t know what was hiding in those trees. I immediately shut it off.
Ben was a veteran who knew much more about combat and guns than I did. His collection was also somewhat impressive- an Armalite AR-15, a Judge, a 12-gauge Benelli, two crappy little .22s, a .45 Ruger, a Nosler 21 and a 10-gauge Mossberg. I had gone out shooting with him and Iris quite a few times. I would feel much safer once I was inside.
The cloudless black sky hung overhead like the lid of a coffin. Their little two-story place with the wraparound porch looked quaint, almost like a little rural cabin.
I stumbled out of the car. I’m sure I was quite a sight, battered and covered in clotting gashes and cuts, my eyes wide and panicked. I constantly looked around, checking my back. Every time I did, I expected to see something there, something close by with blue lips like a corpse and deformed, twisting bones.
I had nearly gotten to the front of the house when I saw, through the narrow sidelights at top of the door, the face of the Crooked Man. Standing only feet away, I heard faint gurgling of his diseased breathing even through the wall.
His hairless face was split into a grin like a death’s head, his lidless eyes bulging and excited. He raised his misshapen fingers to the window and gave me a little wave, opening and closing his fingers slowly. Then he turned and disappeared deeper into the house.
***
I immediately tried opening the door, to yell to Iris and Ben to watch out, but the door was locked. I called Iris. Each ring seemed to take an eternity. Finally, she answered.
“Hello? What, are you here?” she asked.
“Iris! Get the fuck out of the house! You and Ben aren’t alone in there! There’s a man coming in your direction right now!” I screamed, panicked. “Jump out the window if you have to! It’s coming!”
“What?” she said, sounding alarmed and confused. “Are you being serious?” I heard soft murmuring in the background.
“Tell Ben to grab a gun right now!” I started to say, but a high-pitched scream carried through the phone and the house at that moment.
“Iris? Iris! Answer me!” I said. The call immediately went dead.
From inside, I heard the first of the gunshots.
***
At that point, I decided to run back to my car. I needed to get inside and help them. A small voice in the back of my mind asked me what I could possibly do, however. If an AR-15 or a lead slug from a 12-gauge couldn’t stop the Crooked Man, then what could? At that moment, I wished fervently that Grandma would have told me.
I grabbed a tire iron from the back of my trunk and sprinted back toward the front of the house. They had large windows leading into the kitchen from their wraparound porch. Without hesitation, I drew the tire iron back and smashed it. The tinkling of glass seemed explosively loud. I realized that the gunshots and screaming had stopped.
At that moment, something pale came scurrying around the side of the building. I jumped, but I looked over and realized it was Iris, dressed in a white hoodie and white pants. Her pale face was contorted with mortal terror. To my horror, I realized hundreds of small drops spattered her clothes, covering her face and body like crimson raindrops. She had the .45 Ruger in her hands, and she was limping.
“Where’s Ben?” I cried. She shook her head.
“I jumped out the bedroom window… he was behind me,” she said. Suddenly, there was another explosion of glass from behind the house. Something heavy thudded hard against the ground. We heard wretched wailing follow it. Looking at each other with horrified eyes, we both turned and ran towards the noise.
We found Ben laying on the lawn. The right side of his neck was nearly severed. Bright-red streams of blood spurted from the mutilated flesh. His back looked broken as well. He laid there like a hornet smashed under someone’s boot. With dilated eyes, he looked from me to Iris. Terror and agony oozed from his eyes. He opened his mouth to say something, but only a frothy puddle of blood came up.
Then his eyes turned away, looking straight up into the cloudless black void of a sky. The last exhalation came, the death gasp that bubbled and stretched out until I thought it might never end. He died staring into that abyss, that eternity from which no one returns.
Part 2
The Crooked Man murdered my family. Now he has awoken again [part 2] : NoSleepAuthors (reddit.com)

Known my bf for 7 years, he is extremely different with his mind than an average human would think. He is very emotionless, he has comforted me countless times, but this time was different… he hasn’t been this cold in years. Basically he has always thought with logic more than emotion, and that definitely affects me in the relationship. We’ve always had a thing going on as friends, in a relationship it’s amazing… but when conflict comes it’s not normal conflict it’s worse… because of the way he thinks.
Whole issue with his mom hating me for no reason, she has called me fat basically to my face in front of him and our friend. Every time we are n on the phone with her, she mentions “your gonna get him fat” “let’s work out”. He defends her even when I was crying for 4+ hours panic attacks endless. He watched me cry and struggle breathing… and didn’t do anything. He hasn’t done this a lot in the 7 years we’ve known each other.
It feels as if he’s gaslighted me, he tried to say his mother just “wanted me to be healthy” and that she wasn’t all in the wrong. Then secretly he told his mom me and her would talk on the phone and “assess the situation”. He said to my face YOUR in the wrong and her. She has done nothing but bully me about my weight. He doesn’t see it that way… he told me I needed to get thicker skin, and when we got back to his apartment, I was making one sandwhich thing instead of 2 (on my period nauseous depressed and not that hungry) he looked at the pan and said “you don’t have to have 1 because of my mom” wasn’t even the reason I didn’t want 2.
I called him tonight, he told me “sometimes emotions don’t need to be tended to for lessons to be learned”… he said he doesn’t think his mom was in the wrong at all and I was “jumping to conclusions”. He also said he didn’t know the “valid reason” as to why I was crying. I said all you needed to do was comfort me, I wasn’t asking him to apologize just to comfort me. He said it is just the truth and logic LOL.
The mental exhaustion I feel from him not caring because he is deeply damaged inside cannot be explained. I feel like I’m sinking into this couch mentally with my mental health. Everything is logic before emotion with him. I love him so much, but I feel he is starting to show narcissistic traits like my narc father. I am very depressed right now, I have nobody to talk to, I feel so unsupported, neglected, un acknowledged. Who watches their partner cry for 4+ hours straight and doesn’t just simply apologize and comfort them from their own mothers bullying.
I feel so alone. I feel lost, I feel defeated, it is not just the matter of “son chooses mother” it’s deeper than that. He has a serious problem mentally. I’ve tried, I am the only reason he has chosen to get therapy I feel. He is seeing my own therapist just for her to find him a perm therapist. Another issue, he listens to this narc ass misogynistic men friend about women advice. It makes it worse.
It’s not just the mom, he has said things to me before without thinking it is hurtful I guess. “This lady at my job she’s the Cookie Monster, she’s not the big like you are” he watches tv with me “SHES SO SKINNY holy shit” examined stuff on my body “what’s this? These hollow marks on your thighs” then he will treat me like the most beautiful body and person on earth. I can’t differentiate anything anymore. Please tell me someone can understand what I’m going through. I’m so low right now…..

I cut my teeth on the Slayers in the late 90s/early 00s with the big three of Slayers, Slayers Next, and Slayers Try. Then I went through all of the Lina-and-Naga adventures across the movies and OVAs before dropping out of the fandom because there just wasn't much left. I skipped out on the Tokyopop translations of novels 1 through 8 when I heard that they were A) not very accurate and B) incomplete. I also heard about Revolution/Evolution-R, but I just never got around it.
Then I caught COVID in March and had a lot of time on my hands while I spent about ten days straight laid up in bed. I started a massive marathon of all the old Slayers content I was familiar with (still holds up), Revolution/Evolution-R (fun to see the gang again but a step down from Next/Try), Hourglass of Falces (awful), Medieval Mayhem (great), Knight of Aqualord (mediocre), Light Magic (cut and fun but ultimately forgettable), and the Rev/Evo-R manga adaptations (start off pretty predictable before suddenly getting really good once it starts adding new wrinkles to Lina, Zel, Duclis, Pokota, etc.).
Then I got around to the J-Novel Club translation of Kanzaka's 17 novels. Great stuff. Here are some scattered thoughts:
-I love Lina's sassy, irreverent inner monologue. The anime does a pretty good job of translating this to her dialogue, but it's still something I would have liked to see carried over in short bursts of narration.
-The side effect of so much Lina is so much less of everyone else (except Gourry, but more on him later). For instance, Zelgadis and Amelia become Ra-Tilt factories by the end of the Gaav/Phibrizzo arc. That's pretty much all they contribute past a certain point. They're barely characters.
-It's funny to see how Lina and Gourry go through additional party members like tissues in the novels. Lantz, Aria, Dilarr, Jade, Luke, Mileena, Milgazia, Memphys, and Alaina are an incredibly mixed bag of utility and likability; but it was nice to get such a wide range of voices and perspectives. Comparing and contrasting over-accomplished adventurers like Lina and Gourry with total normies like Lantz and Aria really puts into perspective how special they are, but it was also fun to see them being totally blown away by the two heavyweights, Milgazia and Mephy. Having watched the anime, I thought I had the Slayers formula down to a science: The core four of Lina/Gourry/Zel/Amelia with Xellos popping in and out as a frienemy who alternates between helping and hurting and an extra party member or three to round out the team. Nope. The novels have no such sacred cows. It is the Lina and Gourry buddy cop (buddy mercenary?) adventure, and everyone else is along for the ride.
-Poor Gourry. The guy is scandalously under-written in the show. Even when I was watching Try the first time, I thought it was weird that the guy who inherited the Sword of Light didn't have more to say in the season all about the Sword of Light. Then he just gives it away to Sirius? We couldn't have had even one episode about him wrestling with the Sword's legacy and laying the groundwork for his eventual decision? He's an absolute star in the novels. He's not very brainy in any medium, but I came away with a much stronger sense that he's selectively oblivious rather than the kind of dumb you get from room temperature IQ. He simply chooses his (mental) battles and puts his priorities in places that Lina does not. He knows that Lina handles the magic and planning stuff, so he plays to his strengths and sticks to his animalistic instincts (as her narration constantly reminds us) to pick out what's wrong -- whether that's seeing an ambush ahead of time or perceiving some emotional turmoil that Lina is trying to hide.
-The novel battle scenes were pretty hit or miss for me. They are incredibly repetitive. How many times does Lina detect malice to tip her off to a sneak attack? How many times does she use a Lighting spell like a flashbang to stun her enemies? How many times are we going to see a demon slip away from a big spell by casting off a small fraction of their astral body to take the hit while their main body is unharmed? Lina even calls it something like "the old demonic lizard's tail trick" after having seen it so many times. But it makes sense. A lot of those tricks work out for Lina and her enemies. If it's not broke, don't fix it. Still, it might have been nice to get more than the usual combo of teleportation blinks, spears of light, and shockwaves from the latest demon-of-the-week. So many fight scenes feel like they started with a template. It gets old very, very quickly. The best fights were the ones where the demon has some funky, unique ability that Lina and friends have to outthink and outmaneuver.
-Sylphiel being introduced as Zel's temporary, off-screen adventure buddy was funny for how unexpected it was. They both have something against Copy Rezo, but it's the most random collection of characters.
-Eris playing the part of an incompetent bounty hunter was a trip, too.
-Lina learning Astral Vine in the second half of the novels to power up her melee and to give Gourry an extra edge now that he no longer has a magic sword was a great bit of understated storytelling. She wants to kill demons faster now that she is on their radar, but she presumably wants to keep Gourry both useful and safe at the same time and in her own way.
-Rubia's comeback in novel 15 came out of nowhere, and I loved everything about it. It's a great thematic counterpoint to Luke's decision about what to do with yourself when you are the one left behind, and the whole detour into the greenhouse was hysterical. Readers like me really needed that moment of lightness, and it really reinforced the notion that life goes on even when it feels like it's over. The animation team working on Next had no way of knowing, but killing her off will forever feel like a missed opportunity.
-I really, truly did not like the way Phil and Wizer were introduced in the novels. As users on this sub helpfully pointed out, they both started in Slayers Special and were later imported to the main novels. It feels like watching a Marvel movie or TV series, where you are going to be lost if you haven't done your "homework." Franchises are fine, but homework storytelling has never been my style. I would much rather have those small, passing, funny-if-you-get-it references to Naga than full-blown character reunions with people I, as a reader, am meeting for the first time. It's especially galling when Lina's history with Wizer and adventure in Ruvinagald comes back to haunt her in such a major way in novel 14. It's harder for me to buy into the one-sided blood feud when I have so little context.
-Rod served his purpose well enough, but Zangulus is the superior master swordsman/battle junkie rival to Gourry. Martina has absolutely no basis in the novels, but she gets a thumbs up, too. Man, Next was so good.
-While Lantz served his own purpose as a "working man" adventurer who isn't up to Lina and Gourry's level, freaking out at the flesh curse and needing some extra firepower make himself useful in Sairaag, I'm totally fine with him being one of those forgotten novel characters. He's introduced being a sleaze to Lina, and he jokes about raping Eris when he finds her passed out in a bush. Go and stay gone.
-The novels as a whole are a little too eager to tell rape jokes. It is mostly phased out as it goes along, but I really did not need to read about two thugs debating the pros and cons of raping Lina or Lina getting information out of a burglar by pretending Gourry is a gay predator.
-By the same token, I don't feel the least bit bad about Zolf getting incinerated. Sucks that you lost your friend, Zel, but your friend was a guy who took turns going down the list of every guy he knows and trying to convince each and every one of them that it's time to sexually torture Lina. A similar joke was in the anime with Nunsa the fishman, but it was a tasteless and blessedly brief one-and-done. The novel goes into excruciating detail about why each guy on the team can't or won't play ball with Zolf's sick little game. Rot in Hell, Zolf. Pick better friends, Zel. (At least Rodimus seemed like a decent guy.)
-Speaking of Zel's old posse: Dilgear came back for the Sairaag/Copy Rezo arc, as he should have in the first season. The last we see of the guy, he's swearing revenge on the team. Why not bring him back in the anime, too? Sure, he doesn't stick around for long or accomplish much even in novel 3, but at least Kanzaka thought to bring him back.
-On a lighter note: It was great seeing Aria's growth as a sorceress in the short time we know her. She went from saying her magic is better than nothing to showing off some spells stunts that she had clearly picked up from Lina. I get the sense that she would have been a magical monster if she stuck around.
-I wish we got more insights into Luke and Mileena, such as how they met (how does an all-business shaman meet and halfway-reform a professional assassin with the setting's version of the Devil sleeping his soul?) or how they became such a well-oiled machine with their combination spells, but it's actually a pretty important character beat for Lina to realize how little she knows either one of them. Kanzaka really succeeded in making both Lina and the reader wish we had more time with them.
-On the other hand, it undercuts the notion that they had this great connection to Luke, and he would set the stage for them to kill him. Is he the friend you could not save or is he someone you wish could have called a friend? I guess there is a middle path -- a more distant friend that you wish you could have gotten to know better when you had the chance -- but it still comes off a little bit muddled.
-I'm still not sure if Luke's magic sword was one-of-a-kind after we see him using a bunch of other edged weapons in 14 that can also hold a magic spell. Did Luke find an entire set of special swords with that property? Was that an ability of his that he already possessed and he only pretended that his main sword had that power? Did he find a magic sword and reverse-engineer the ability to store one spell at a time in other blades? Not a huge thing but I found it a little odd
-The prevalence of madmen cooking up chimeras and other magical fusions makes me wonder if they were all pen pals with each other. It's incredibly rampant. The novels already gave us the thread of Sherra's demon sword spreading chaos and creatures, but it might have been nice to string the rest of them together a little more strongly with something like Lavas mentioning that he discovered one of Rezo's old chimera labs. Or insinuate that a character like Sherra may have been feeding Rezo information in order to grease the wheels of his descent into villainy and Shab's awakening. I know novel 1 is written as a single story and only later ballooned into a series, but it might have been nice to get some more play between Rezo and the demons even if it is after the fact. The anime went so far as to imply Rezo was in contact with Phibrizzo or at least researched his style of magic in Revolution/Evolution-R with the green stasis crystals and the Hellmaster's Jar. Wouldn't it be interesting to reveal that someone was pulling on that particular thread?
-As much as I would love to see some of the novel content adapted to screen some day, I just don't see how you could preserve some of the chimera/fusion body horror and the purely tragic elements in the way more light-hearted anime. People already complain about Try being too dark for tackling something as heavy as the ancient dragon genocide in their goofy fantasy comedy anime. The end of the Crimson City arc and the Selentia arcs would be enough to trigger total meltdowns about how it's not really Slayers anymore because Slayers is supposed to be fun. We're never getting the Luke and Mileena story arc in any other format, are we?
-But novel 16 could totally be a movie. (Just remove the lines about Mephy and the Zenefa armor.) It is mostly self-contained, not as dark as a lot of the stuff in 9 through 15, brings back the classic lineup of the core four plus the token newbie and a Xellos cameo, caps off with a big flashy fight scene that would probably be fun as hell to see in glossy bid budget animation, etc. Sure, it's more Zanaffar when we've already seen a bunch of them, but it's actually a minor plot point that the elven armors play by different rules. They could get away with it.
-Novel 17 feels so weird and distinct from everything else, and I mean that in the best way. Kanzaka really thought about how to make this neck of the woods feel alien to Lina and Gourry. Lina worrying about how to read the local script, whether or not they will eat something poisonous, how hard it would be to find a map, currency conversion, etc. Great stuff. It's also funny to see that 17 seems to be setting up a bunch of smug, holier-than-thou dragons with questionable moral fiber as the major villains of this new story. Starting to smell a lot like Slayers Try in here, which is funny when some of the crankier fans like to say that Try doesn't count.
-The novels and anime are pretty evenly matched in their pros and cons for the most part. For every one thing the novels do better, I could come right back and say there is something the animation does better, and back and forth and up and down over and over again. But one thing really stands out to me. Slayers Next absolutely blows novel 8 out of the water for how it handles the end of the Phibrizzo/Giga Slave story. The grand finale of Slayers Next is my vote for the high water mark of the entire franchise, so novel 8 was probably always doomed. Credit to the animation production team for pulling that tour de force out of their hat. I'm normally a "source material is sacred" kind of fan, but Slayers as a whole is a fascinating compare-and-contrast piece as I slowly learned what was cut, condensed, or rearranged in the translation from page to screen.
-But I will say that it makes the Lord of Nightmares out to be a more menacing, insidious character. Next gave me the impression that she is something of a literal genie, giving Lina the power she asked for (even if it cost her, which was part of her wish) and Phibrizzo the destruction he wanted. The Lord of Nightmares even appears to respond to Gourry's pure wish to have Lina restored. She is an overwhelming but ultimately neutral force. Novel 8, on the other hand, seems to suggest that she's proud enough and petulant enough to annihilate Phibrizzo for his disrespect and only accidentally released Lina from her hold. Granted, that's just Lina taking a shot in the dark and making her best guess with the completely unprecedented event of the lord of all creation coming down to possess your body. She could be wrong. Still, 8 makes L look like a cruel and moody god. Slayers Next's concept of L is something that would destroy the world because it is simply her nature as Chaos itself. Novel 8's concept of L strikes me as a being that would destroy the world because it offends her. Maybe the Monsters/demons/Mazoku were right. Maybe she does desire a return for all creation to Chaos.
-I would kill for Novel 18.