Our Dairy Farm Still Prints Photos Of Missing Children On All Our Milk Cartons.

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!”

"would you still love me if I was a worm?"

she said, as she reached for the zipper of her human suit.

this is an edit I made back in 2015, which I can’t believe was 10 years ago.

This is a veryyyy short story I wrote probably a decade ago that might’ve been a good contender for r/shortscarystories if it was any good.

A Ticket

When John called me in this morning, I already knew why. A new case. That's what detective's do. They solve cases. Non-detectives can't even go near the crime scene.

It was a murder case. For the average person, this is some scary stuff. But with years of experience, you get used to it.

Everybody knows what a detective gets to do. It's like owning a ticket to investigate a crimes scene. Of course, it's all for work, and no play. But there is another advantage.

No one suspects the detective.

(here is another story I wrote a long time ago)

~~~

Imagine this: You’re just a normal, average guy, right? You take a few college classes here and there, you work a part time job—nothing special.

You work at an old convenience store late at night. It’s usually really slow at that time, so you spend your time reading superhero comic books. Every now and then, a customer might walk in and buy a pack of gum or bandaids or something.

So one night, your shift is nearing an end, and you’re almost done with your comic. You’re slumped back in your chair, feeling groggy.

You hear someone wall in thanks to the soft ring of the bell hanging over the door.

“Welcome,” you call out, eyes still glued to your book.

The stranger doesn’t respond, but many don’t, so you don’t think much of it.

Five minutes pass when the lights shut off. You curse under your breath as you set down your comic on the counter. It’s only when you look up, you realize it.

The stranger is standing right in front of you, right at the counter. How long was he there?

It’s impossible to see him clearly in the dark, even with the streetlights shining in from outside. He seems to be wrapped in a long, black trench coat, and his head is covered in a hoodie coming from under it. You can’t see his face, except for his eyes. You don’t know if you’re imagining it, but they appear to glow a sickly yellow and are lined with dark red veins.

You’re frozen. Your heart’s racing, but you can’t move. It felt like time itself had stopped.

Finally, logic enters your brain, and you jump from your chair. Stop looking at me like that! You don’t actually say it, but you almost do.

“I’m so sorry, it’s just a power outage, I’ll call someone. Sir? Are you okay?” you ask.

He doesn’t reply. You fumble for a flashlight.

So you continue. “I’m sorry about all this. This has never happened before, really. Can I borrow your phone?”

The lights flicker back on. You blink, struggling to adjust for a moment, when you realize it.

The man is gone.

Over the next few weeks, you keep seeing figures out in public that you swear is him. You catch him on a bridge up ahead, or disappearing behind a building at the corner of your eye.

You must have been tired that night, you need to keep telling yourself. So why do I keep seeing him?

You try to ignore the lingering figure. You pretend you don’t see it. But it’s getting harder and harder.

And he’s getting closer, and closer.

You become more terrified as time oasses. You scroll through the internet for hours, and flip through dozens of books. No answers..

You sleep with all the light on and a baseball bat under your bed—if you can even sleep at all.

He’s like a disease eating you. You begin to get weaker and weaker, and soon, you fall ill.

The thought of being stuck in bed scares you. You can’t run. And he knows this.

You ignore the doctor’s order to stay in bed, and one day, you pass out. You wake up in a hospital. You’re relieved to be surrounded by nurses and doctors.

You’re eating dinner one night when the power shuts off.

You press the button to call the nurse, but nothing happens. No lights, no sound, no nurse.

The room is getting colder and colder. You scream for a nurse. The feeling of alone-ness increases.

You’re relieved to head the door open. You say “Nurse! Thank you! There’s been a power outa-“

Glowing, yellow eyes.

He’s watching you, right at the foot of the bed. Towering over you.

“Who are you?l you scream. “Leave me alone!”

The figure doesn’t move. The room is getting colder, and it feels like your fingers are going to fall off. You scramble to get up out of bed, to run. Instead, you pummel right onto the ground.

The figure kneels in front of you, and you let out another blood-curdling scream. He takes off his hoodie.

And you see your own, smiling face staring right back at you.

~~~

Other stories by me:

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

My take on 2 sentence horror:

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

Lamp.

Fantastic ending but Jesus did it catch me off guard.

Karen’s Diner

Karen’s Diner: Where our burgers are mean and our staff are meaner!

“Are you fuckin morons gonna stand there gawking at our sign all day?!”

The young couple, having just wandered into the near-empty diner from the highway outside, flinch at my rude outburst—before descending into giggles.

“See, Sarah, I told you we should eat here!” says the man excitedly to his partner. “This waiter is hilarious!”

“Oi, dickhead!” I bark, thrusting menus into his chest. “Go sit in that booth and shut the fuck up.”

Exchanging amused looks, the pair take a seat at said booth while other waiters flip them off from across the diner. I take the opportunity to eavesdrop by aggressively wiping the table beside them.

“So, the whole gimmick is that the staff are nasty to us?” asks the woman sceptically. “How dumb, Chris. And what’s a ‘Karen’?”

“You know—abrasive, selfish, entitled assholes. Karens. Anyway, novelty aside, the menu looks great! All our favourite meals are on it.”

“Gonna order something, dipshits?” interrupts a scowling waitress with a notepad.

Thirty minutes later, we bring their food out. Setting the plates on their table, I elbow a soda glass straight into the woman’s lap. She yelps as freezing ice drenches her clothes.

“Oops, clumsy me” I sneer, eating a fry off her club sandwich.

“Hey! What the hell?!” the man shouts, flabbergasted.

“So soweee” mocks the waitress, spitting in his spaghetti.

“Okay, this is going too far…” the woman murmurs. But it’s far too late for them to stop it.

At once, the waitstaff begin pelting the couple with glassware. Terrified, the pair’s complaints become shrieks as sharp projectiles lacerate their skin.

“Help! I want the manager!” screams the bleeding man, attempting to leave the booth. In response, I slam his head into his plate, splitting open his cheek.

Joining in the carnage, my fellow waitress uses a steak knife to slash chunks of hair from the screaming woman’s scalp.

“You can’t treat us like this!” they sob defeatedly. “We’re patrons!”

Us “waiters” just turn to each other and laugh.

That’s where they’re wrong. They’re no customers.

They’re death row inmates.

Back in the dark days, every prisoner was entitled to a last meal of their choosing—no matter how undeserving. Meanwhile, the cost of executing killers kept going up. Eventually, government officials had an idea.

Why not kill two birds with one stone?

Grab death row inmates, wipe their memories, drop them at a diner across from the prison, serve them their last meals, have the victims’ family members perform as malicious servers and…execute monsters.

And so Karen’s Diner was born—named after the last child to be savaged by criminals before society stepped up its justice system.

“This is for my daughter” I seethe, inching towards the maimed, memory-wiped convicts in the booth. ”The girl you killed.”

“This is for Karen.”

Link

It’s giving horror story dad joke edition