I Loved This! Idk Why It Didn’t Get More Attention

The Whistle

It was 11:30 in the morning, and the school grounds were quieter than usual. Most students had already shuffled inside for class, but Sky and Talia lingered outside, taking their time with lazy footsteps and casual conversation.

“So that’s what happened yesterday,” Sky said, finishing her story with a sigh.

Talia snorted. “Sounds stupid.”

“That’s because it was stupid.”

A small hum escaped Talia’s throat in agreement. She let her arms swing at her sides, eyes drifting across the empty school yard. Then her expression shifted—just slightly—as something else came to mind.

“Oh, have you heard about that new creepypasta character?”

Sky raised an eyebrow. “Creepypasta? No. What character?”

“They call him The Mimic,” Talia said, eyes bright with the kind of curiosity that always danced around horror stories. “Apparently he can shape-shift. Like, into anything. People, objects, whatever.”

Sky tilted her head. “Okay, that’s actually kinda cool. How do people even know he exists?”

Talia looked around for a moment before answering, her voice dropping just a bit. “Some people said they saw him changing shape before they were attacked. But there’s something else—right before he strikes, they say you hear this weird, creepy whistling.”

They both stopped walking, instinctively scanning the area. The breeze blew gently across the field, ruffling leaves and whispering through the trees, but other than that, there was nothing unusual.

“Well,” Sky said, trying to shake off the chill that had snuck up her spine, “that’s cool, I guess.”

“Yeah,” Talia murmured, already turning toward the school. “We should head inside.”

Sky nodded and followed for a few steps—then cursed under her breath when she felt something loose. Her shoe was untied.

She crouched down to fix it, fingers fumbling with the laces. Just as she tightened the last knot, a soft, eerie whistling drifted through the air behind her.

Faint. Slow. Almost playful.

Sky froze.

She stood up slowly, heart thudding in her chest. “Talia?” she called, trying to laugh it off, her voice cracking just a little. “If that’s you messing with me, you’re not funny.”

She rounded the corner toward the front entrance of the school—then stopped dead in her tracks.

Talia was lying on the pavement. Her limbs were limp, her eyes open but unblinking. She didn’t move.

Sky staggered back a step, panic bubbling up in her throat. “Talia?”

Behind her, something creaked.

The bench she had passed moments ago began to shift, its shape warping in unnatural, sickening ways. Metal bent like clay. The wooden slats stretched and split, folding in on themselves.

And then the thing stood up.

No longer a bench. No longer anything human.

It grinned at her with too many teeth. And began to whistle.

Sky didn’t scream. She couldn’t. The sound stole the breath right from her lungs.

All she could do was run.

My take on 2 sentence horror:

I was spending some quality time with my loving wife and kids.

Lamp.

Childhood can be scary.

A collection of some of my hand-drawn horror looping animations!

The Devil's Wheel

The Devil’s Wheel

“If you say yes,” said the Devil, “a single man, somewhere in the world, will be killed on the spot. But three million dollars is nothing to sneeze at, missus.”

“What’s the catch?” You squint at him suspiciously over the red-and-black striped carnival booth. You’re smarter than he thinks you are– a devil deal always has a catch, and you’re determined to catch him before he catches you. 

“Well, the catch is that you’ll know you did it. And I’ll know, too. And the big man upstairs’ll know, I ‘spose. But what’s the chariot of salvation without a little sin to grease the wheels? You can repent from your mansion balcony, looking out at your waterfront views, sipping a bellini in your eighties. But hey, it’s up to you– take my deal or leave it.”

The Devil lights a cigar without a match, taking an inhale, and blowing out a cloud of deep, sweet-smelling tobacco laced faintly with something that reminds you of rotten eggs. If he does have horns, they’re hidden under his lemon yellow carnival barker hat. He wears a clean pinstripe suit and a red bowtie. No cloven hooves, no big pointy fork, but you know he’s the Devil without having to be told. Though he did introduce himself.

He’s been perfectly polite. 

You know you need the money. He knows it too, or he wouldn’t have brought you here, to this strange dark room, whisking you away from your new house in the suburbs as fast as a wish. Now you’re in some sort of warehouse, where all the windows seem to be blacked out– or, maybe, they simply look out into pitch darkness, though it is the middle of the day. A single white spotlight shines down on the two of you. 

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” you say. “I bet the man is someone I know, right? My husband?”

“Could be,” the Devil says with a pointed grin. “That’s for the wheel to decide.”

He steps back and raises his black-gloved hand as the tarp flies off of the large veiled object behind him. The light of the carnival wheel nearly blinds you. Blinking lights line the sides. Jingling music blares over speakers you can’t see. The flickering sign above it reads:

THE DEVIL’S WHEEL

“Step right up and claim your fortune,” the Devil barks. “Spin the wheel and pay the price! Or leave now, and a man keeps his life.”

You examine the wheel. 

The gambling addict

The doting boyfriend

The escaped convict

The dog dad

The secretive sadist

“These are all the possible men I can kill?” You ask, thumbing the side of the wheel. It rolls smoothly in your hand. Then you quickly stop, realizing that this might constitute a spin under the Devil’s rules. He flashes a smile at you, watching you halt its motion. 

“Addicts, convicts, murderers– plenty of terrible options for you to land on, missus!”

“Serial wife murderer?”

“Now who would miss a fellow like that? I can guarantee that the whole world would be better off without him in it, and that’s a fact.”

The hard worker

The compulsive liar

The animal torturer

The widower

The desperate businessman

The failed musician

The beloved son

“My husband is on here too,” you say. 

“Your husband Dave, yes. The wheel has to be fair, otherwise there’s simply no stakes.”

“I know what’s gonna happen,” you say, crossing your arms. “This wheel is rigged. I’m gonna spin it around, and it’ll go through all the killers and stuff, and then it’s gonna land on my husband no matter what.”

“Why, I would never disgrace the wheel that way,” the Devil says, wounded. “I swear on my own mother’s grave– may she never escape it. In fact, take one free spin, just to test it out! This one’s on me, no death, no dollars.”

You cautiously reach up to the top of the wheel and feel its heaviness in your hand. The weight of hundreds of lives. But also, millions of dollars. You pull the wheel down and let it go.

Clackity-clackity-clackity-clackity

Round and round it goes. 

The college graduate

The hockey fan

The Eagle Scout

The cold older brother

The charming younger brother

The two-faced middle child

The perfectionist

The slob 

Your husband Dave

Clackity-clackity-clackity.

Finally, the wheel lands on a name. A title, really.

The photographer

“Hmm, tough, missus, but that’s the way of the wheel. But hey, look! Your husband is allllll the way over here,” he points with his cane to the very bottom of the wheel, all the way on the other side from where the arrow landed. “As you can see, it’s not rigged. The wheel truly is random.”

“So… there really isn’t another catch?” You ask. 

“Isn’t it enough for you to end a man’s life? You need a steeper price? If you’re really such a glutton for punishment, I’ll gladly re-negotiate the terms.”

“No, no… wait.” You examine the wheel, glancing between it and the Devil.

You really could use that three million dollars. Newly married, new house, you and your husband’s combined debt– those student loans really follow you around. He’s quite a bit older than you, and even he hasn’t paid them off yet, to the point where the whole time you were dating you watched him stress out about money. You had to have a small, budget wedding, and a small, budget honeymoon. Three million dollars could be big for the two of you. You could re-do your honeymoon and go somewhere nice, like Hawaii, instead of just taking two weeks in Atlantic City. You deserve it. 

Even so, do you really want to kill an innocent photographer? Or an innocent seasonal allergy sufferer? Or an innocent blogger? Just because you don’t know or love these people doesn’t mean that someone doesn’t. 

The cancer survivor

The bereaved

The applicant

Some of these were so vague. They could be anyone, honestly. Your neighbors, your father, your friends…

The newlywed

The ex-gifted kid

The uncle

The Badgers fan

“My husband is a Badgers fan,” you say.

“How lovely,” the Devil says. 

Then it hits you.

Of course.

The weightlifter.

The careful driver.

The manager.

The claustrophobe.

Your husband Dave lifts weights at the gym twice a month. You wouldn’t call him a pro, but he does it. He also drives like he’s got a bowl of hot soup in his lap all the time, because he’s afraid of being pulled over. He just got promoted to management at his company, and he takes the stairs to his seventh-story office because he hates how small and cramped the elevator is.

“I get your game,” you announce. “You thought you could get me, but I figured you out, jackass!” “Oh really? What is my game, pray tell?” The Devil responds, leaning against his cane.

“All these different titles– they’re all just different ways to describe the same guy. My husband isn’t one notch on the wheel, he’s every notch. No matter what I land on, Dave dies. I’m wise to your tricks!” 

The Devil cackles. 

“You’re a clever one, that’s for sure. I thought you’d never figure it out.”

“Thanks but no thanks, man,” you say with a triumphant smirk. “I’m no rube. No deal. Take me back home.”

“As you wish, missus,” the Devil says. He snaps his fingers, and you’re gone, back to your brand-new house with your new husband. “Don’t say I never tried to help anyone.”

One of my favorite short stories ever is this Creepypasta called Shut that Damned Door by WriterJosh. Highly recommend you read (or listen) late at night in the dark when you’re super tired

Wasn’t expecting that fs but a good read c:

Condemned

Paul loved escape rooms. 

He just loved them. The lovingly-crafted set designs and props, the electric buzz that came from finding hidden items and putting together puzzle pieces, the euphoria of cracking a code, the adrenaline of the ticking clock, and most importantly, the thrill of the escape. 

His friends had long ago stopped accompanying him every week, sometimes more than once a week, to escape rooms in his area. Especially once he started driving hours out of town just to try new escape game centers for a fresh hit of that delicious escape puzzle challenge.

Paul now preferred to go alone anyway. People just bogged him down. He didn’t come to make friends, he came to win. 

Months of hot anticipation finally bore fruit when the “Great American Escape” opened its doors to him, at long last. Great American, according to the billboards and posters strewn around town, was the primary attraction of an entertainment mega-complex which took the place of a long-disused waterpark hotel. It would be huge, he knew. Not just physically. His great fear was that it would blow up on social media– maybe even on his feed– and then the solutions would be spoiled for him. So he had to be first.

Great American Escape was so new the day he strode in there that there were still “CONDEMNED” notices stuffed into the recycling bins and old lists of health & safety violations stuck in the vents. 

“One ticket for Mystery Escape,” Paul, slapped his money on the counter and smiled at the teen boy working behind it. He was a short, lithe, wide-eyed man in his thirties with dark greasy hair and one navy blue university sweater he’d kept in moderate repair for a decade and a half.

“No group?” The boy asked. When Paul confirmed this, the boy said, “You’ll have to wait until a group comes in. You need three people at least.”

“When is the next group coming?” Paul asked.

“We don’t have any groups booked today,” the boy replied.

“... So, you’re not gonna let me in?” 

“... Um… yeah. I can’t. Sorry.”

Paul put down another handful of bills. This wasn’t his first rodeo.

“I’ll buy three tickets,” he said. He made sure to draw the boy’s attention to the extra $20, a little tip for a helpful front deskman. 

The boy, who was thin and bored-looking with a patchy teen mustache and his elbow resting on top of a stack of I Escaped stickers, glanced at the security camera which flickered in the corner, its blinking red eye frosted over with a decade of dust. The boy took the $20 and shrugged. 

“You won’t be able to escape,” the boy said. “It’s impossible by yourself. But if you want to try… I guess you can try.”

The boy led Paul towards a set of slightly rusty elevator doors, past posters and cardboard cut-outs of characters from “Rattlesnake Gulch Treasure Hunt,” “Escape From Venus,” and “King’s Dungeon Jailbreak.” Paul planned to return to these, but he’d start by going straight for the crown jewel– Mystery Escape, which had been advertised exclusively with nothing but an open doorframe leading to darkness. 

The boy went over basic safety guidelines. The door wouldn’t really be locked, red things were real alarms, things that said “staff only” were really for staff only, etc., blah blah blah, boring stuff.  Paul listened impatiently, but carefully, only because knowing what was “real” (and therefore inconsequential) would give him a leg up in the game. 

“The game starts when the elevator door opens,” the boy finally said. “Floor 3. Good luck.”

The elevator bell dinged, and the doors slid open. The light flickered. Paul stepped inside. 

He waved to the boy as the doors shut. He pressed 3. 

The light above flickered. Paul could almost see his reflection in the red-rusted metal doors. 

The elevator began its ascent, and right away, Paul could tell something was strange. There was a creaking noise, like a train braking. The light flickered. The light sputtered out. 

The elevator stopped.

Paul was trapped. It was pitch black inside the tiny car, which made no sound or movement. 

The first thing Paul did in any escape room was to check around for hidden props. Keys, ciphers, and puzzle pieces were often hidden around a room for players to find, which would then give them a clue as to what to do next. Paul checked around the elevator car for hidden tools. He pulled up the mildewy carpet by its frayed edge– nothing under there but more mildew. But wait! On the bottom of the carpet there were numbers and letters: EL1. What could that possibly mean? 

The next thing Paul did in an escape room was to interact with anything interactable he could see. In front of him was a series of numbers, 1-5, a “door open” and “door close” button, and “emergency.” But “emergency” was red, and red things were inconsequential. 

Paul pushed all the buttons but the last. To his surprise, the door began to open slightly– then jammed. 

Paul mused about the possible meanings of “EL1.” E was the fifth letter, and there were five numbers… But L? 

Maybe it was a cipher. Paul thought on this. 

He started trying combinations of buttons. The cipher thing was the key somehow, he knew it. A cipher worked with a code. Where was the code? Maybe it had to do with the symbols, not the numbers…

Suddenly, it all made sense to him. He pressed a set of numbers and then hit the door open button.

To his delight and satisfaction, the elevator doors creaked open. And with them came light.

Paul could see well enough now to see that he faced a concrete wall, which took up the whole lower half of the exit. But above that half, Paul could see a hallway of a hotel, so tantalizingly close. 

Paul had beaten escape rooms that had physical components to them before, so this was cake. He gripped the edge of the concrete ledge in front of him and pulled himself up. He let out a grunt as his head and arms made it over the threshold. He just had to find something to grip so he could drag the rest of himself through the gap, and then it was on to the next puzzle.

The elevator lurched.

There was a sound. A scrape, a crash, a wet squelch, a snap. It all happened at once, and it was the loudest sound he ever heard.

When Paul finally sat up, he was somewhere completely different. It was dark here. Darker than the elevator car. The darkness of this place was crushing, like the depths of the deep ocean. There was a smell of meat all around. Paul quickly dismissed the idea of trying to adjust his eyes– he’d navigate by feel.

Paul reached out into the darkness and felt nothing. He stood. His hands pushed him up from a strangely soft, lumpy floor. He noticed something strange about the sound of his movements, and let out an inquisitive “Hey!” to check the echo. It did not bounce. He was… outside?

No– he must be in the disused waterpark proper. The building was huge. Paul was delighted by this thought. He’d chosen the right room.

Paul felt around for a wall, a light switch, a puzzle. Anything. 

“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” said a deep voice.

“Hello?” Paul said after a moment. 

“You lived a selfish life, Paul. You cared for nothing and no one but yourself and your own pleasure. You were an idolater, a heretic. You raised the Escape Game to the heights of a god. Pity that from this place, there is no escape.”

Paul listened carefully to the monologue. Selfish. Idolater. Raised. Heights. These things might be clues. 

“Paul,” said the deep voice, which seemed to come from above, below, and all around him, “You died a foolish death. Pity that you did not suffer. But now, you will suffer for eternity.”

Paul was already climbing up a staircase he’d found. It was the disused waterpark. Raise, he thought. Heights. The key was to go up. 

He found a craggy, warm wall. There was something under his hand– a button? He pushed it in, hard.

Under his hand, a huge glowing red eye flew open. 

“OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHH!” 

The eye blinked in pain and fury, welling up with tears. A thousand more eyes flew open along the wall before him, and Paul saw that it was not a wall at all, but some kind of enormous creature. It stirred, its red gaze illuminating the space around them.

“Stupid man. You woke something up.”

But now Paul could see the entire room– or space, or whatever it was. What he’d taken to be the “floor” was a mass of flesh– human hands, it looked like, reaching up stiffly. The hands started to stir as the creature woke from its slumber. What Paul had taken for a staircase was not that. 

Paul was making some real progress. As the hands clamored over each other, rising like tentacles from around the immense eyes, Paul hopped onto the face of the thing and started using the eyes as hand-and-footholds, which was their obvious use. Paul could spare no time on figuring out little things like that the honest way, he was on a clock. As he stepped on the creature’s eyes, it let out another unearthly roar and started to rise. 

There was a hole in the ceiling. Yes– this was meant to be a cave of some sort, and it had an exit. 

“You idiot,” the voice boomed. “You–”

Paul kicked the creature in the eye a few more times to make it rise faster. A tsunami of pale, writhing hands on wiggling stems shot up towards him to slap him away, but by the time they reached him, he was already through the hole. 

Paul scurried through the tunnel as fast as he could. If it was a three-person puzzle, you couldn’t waste any time.

He came to the next room, which was well-lit– a nice reprieve. In this room, a sweltering cave, some props department had gone all-out carving little demon faces that stuck out from the sides. These gargoyle-like stone structures leered at him and grinned in anticipation.

“The flametongue is coming, kindling,” the demon voices hissed. “Ready or not!” Paul heard a splashing, gurgling sound up ahead. He took quick note of some of the quirks of the gargoyle faces– most of them had black scorch marks on them, but some didn’t. That was a clue. The light from the other end of the tunnel grew brighter, as did the gurgling. Paul realized what he was meant to do, climbed up the protesting gargoyles, and found a set on the ceiling which had no scorching on them. Below, a wave of red-hot boiling sulferous-smelling magma flowed down, passing over the other gargoyles, who screeched and sputtered in it. Another puzzle solved. Paul dropped down once the stones cooled, and hurried up the tunnel– no time to spare. Only one more wave of “fire” passed before he solved the gargoyle pattern and pulled the right ones out of the wall in sequence to reveal a hidden exit.

This escape room was huge. He made his way through a room which featured a river of moving knives, which he was able to avoid by memorizing the timing and patterns, and climbed up into a room full of blistering ice and animatronic zombies which lurched toward him, their bodies crackling as they froze just as soon as they’d moved, their lips split by the cold. This puzzle was a simple matter of lining up the giant shards of ice in the room so that the light concentrated and blasted a hole through the glacial wall. 

Paul’s own body was profoundly frostbitten by this point, but he didn’t notice. He was on a timer. 

By the time Paul finally made it past the “three-headed-dog on a chain” puzzle, that subterranean voice from the first room had caught up with him.

“Paul,” the voice said. “There is no hope. There is no escape. Do you understand? You are dead, Paul–”

“Ssh,” Paul said, gazing at the puzzle before him. 

The door was immense. It seemed to stretch above him and beyond for miles. It was carved from stone older than the bedrock of earth, and above it, in an arch as large as the firmament, there was carved a phrase:

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

This was clearly important, because the deep voice had already voiced it earlier in the game. After checking the area for tools, Paul ran through anagrams. There were a lot of little props around the big door– lots of discarded holy texts, some bones, some strange bits of giant insectoid carapaces which Paul could not immediately identify. The bibles and such had bits burned and torn off of them in places. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. That was a ciper, maybe. He was sweating. He had to be at nearly an hour already. He started arranging the bones.

“What you are doing is futile nonsense,” the deep voice said.

Aha! By turning the phrase above the gate into numbers and then matching those numbers to the non-burned sections of each holy text, organized by the printing date, Paul had discovered an anagram which, when re-ordered, spelled out skeleton key prop, ds flo knemb yyuq. Paul had only bothered to spell out the first three words, however, due to the time crunch. That was all he needed to understand what to do, and he had done it: he had connected all the bones into one big key.

“I don’t think you understand, Paul. This is not a game. You cannot escape your fate. You cannot escape your death. You cannot escape damnation. You cannot escape from Hell.”

Paul slid the giant skeleton key into the lock. It took all of his strength to shove it to the back. Behind him, the host of hell scrambled over each other up the lip of the abyss– the thousand hands and eyes, the fire-spitting gargoyles, the lurching ice zombies, the great black dog, and many others, come to claim him for their own special torment.

Paul turned the key. There was a click. 

Well– more of a thunderous clunk.

The deep, gravelly noise of the stone door opening reverberated all throughout Hell.

“What the–”

“Hell yeah!” Paul shouted. He ducked through the door.

The red eye of the security camera caught it all. The man, crawling through the gap in the elevator. The lurch. The fall. The split.

The hopeless paramedics, the traumatized front desk boy, the shaking venue manager, the anxious lawyers, the dozens of police putting up brand-new yellow “do not cross” signage around the old hotel. 

The red eye of the security camera watched on as people in grim uniforms put the larger piece of what had been paul into a black bodybag and fetched the rest from the third story floor. 

“Used to love this waterpark when I was a little kid,” said one of the paramedics to another. “Now I hope they tear it down.”

“Wasn’t this place a lawsuit magnet back in the day?” said the other. “I remember a kid–”

The paramedics both noticed at the same moment that the body bag was moving. A lot. 

“Is he alive in there?” The first paramedic choked out, even though he understood that the answer had to be no. But then the zipper started sliding down. The bag was opening from the inside.

The headless body of Paul Gibson sat up. It reached out with its stumps of fingers, covered in cool dark blood, and rolled out onto the hotel lobby floor. Both paramedics screamed and leapt away as the decapitated Paul stumbled to its feet and lurched forward. It felt around without its fingers, leaving smears of blood on the front desk, the wall, the table, the “do not cross” tape, until it found the small white cooler on the floor. He pried it open with his mangled hands and lifted his own iced head out. 

Paul put his head on top of the gristle that was his neck. He had it the wrong way around, but his eyes opened and he smiled through bloody teeth. 

“I ss-ss-olved the b-a-ag puzzle,” the formerly dead man sputtered. “Did it a-all mys-self.”

He turned around to face both paramedics, so that his front side faced away. 

“Uh… congratulations,” the second paramedic said.

Paul choked up more blood and grinned wider. He stumbled toward the front desk, toward the paramedics. They backed away from him in horror as he reached out the wrong way and grabbed a commemorative I Escaped! sticker from the top of the pile.

“Th-a-ank you,” Paul said. “I’ll be su-ure to come back soon!”

"We're gonna eat peaches for dessert!" announced my mother cheerfully.

I always found my best friend's name completely ridiculous.

It’s Whatever by u/BusyBusyLizzy on r/scarystories

2 really good mystery thrillers about mother/daughter relationships that I really enjoyed. Happy Mother’s Day :>