SPOOKTOBER STORY #16:

Ok. Hear me out on this one. So this Spooktober Story is about bowling. I'm not very good at bowling, and I really don't know a lot about it, but we're doing sort of a Faustian thing here, and that's a pretty simple framework to lay out any sort of story, as long as you use google to figure out the relevant words to plop in the template. This time we're doing bowling.

Still with me? Good. So in this story a bowler guy gets really good at bowling, but hey, there's still this thing that nags at him, aw, jeez, he can never pick up a 7-10 split. (I know that the 7-10 isn't the hardest split, I can google too, but 7-10 splits are a lot more well known than like a Greek Church or whatever.)

Anyway, so then this, uh, I guess it would be like a bowling-related guy. This is the devil, or Mephistopheles, or, you know, some being with a lot of power. Supernatural power in this instance. I think you can do non-supernaturally powered Mephistopheleses, but it takes some fancy footwork to give it consistent internal logic and I don't really think it adds to the story in this case. And the Mephistopheles in this case is a guy named Gerald The Arcade Machine Repairman.

Long story short: Gerald The Arcade Machine Repairman is repairing Dig Dug, and the bowler guy, whose name is, like, Ne...r...p....... Nerp, his name is Nerp, Brian Nerp, is cheesed off about not being able to pick up a 7-10 split, and Gerald is like "hey son if you want to pick up a 7-10 split, I can give you this magic-" actually maybe he wouldn't say magic, that's a little on the nose, so maybe it's like "I'll teach you a technique in exchange for something from you, but I can't tell you what that is now because of so-and-so-and-so" and Nerp's like "yeah whatever old man sure why not."

Anyway so later Nerp is like "dang I really can hit a 7-10 split consistently now," but the thing Gerald The Arcade Machine Repairman took from him is his ability to roll anything *but* a 7-10 split. So like no more strikes, just spares forever.

And Nerp goes "aaaaaa" about it and that's where it ends, because you can end horror stories on just an implication of unimaginable future and get away with it. It's better sometimes if you don't resolve things. Like you wouldn't want to end a horror story with a Stand By Me ending that tied everything up all nice and neat. I don't know, maybe you could do that. I guess it could be fun.

Whatever.

SPOOKTOBER STORY #15:

There: hollow socket sunkin moonpale anatomika, twimping armbends, thighknobs, chaatterclax aspeed afar barren toothy sandplane. Klikaklakaklak neath deathshroud orb. Seekly. Unfilled. Hollow sockets scour, or wash, sandplane for swallowmatter.

Ye (thee) scapper, ye ot ot glanced moonpale anatomika ti yet afar. Swallowmatter thee be. Clambor aweeh.

Alas, too slugly. Anatomika embraceland, ajaw, gulp gulp! Swallowmatter swallowed true.

Better luck next time, cowpoke!

SPOOKTOBER STORY #14:

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Claude Debussy - "Un désir désespéré d'oubli"

SPOOKTOBER STORY #13:

“Don’t talk to mommy before mommy’s had her mommy juice!” she exclaims.

“Ha ha, oh Jean,” you chuckle, up to your elbows in suds. “It’s a little early for wine for me, but you do you.”

“You’re right, Danielle. It’s too early for wine.”

You realize you can no longer hear the sound of Ana and Hunter playing in the other room. 

“Don’t talk to mommy before mommy’s had her mommy juice,” Jean repeats, quietly, and you finally notice the 16 gauge stainless steel hypodermic needle she’s trying to conceal behind her palm, the rubber tubing running up the sleeve of her blouse, the hunger in her eyes

Spooktober story xx:

Jon Phillips tears into an elk tenderloin with his genetically altered front teeth. After the jungle gym accident he’d undergone an experimental procedure to splice his dental genes with that of the common rodent. Lifelong regeneration.

As blood from the recently-severed muscle drips from his chin he tucks his necklace into his shirt as to not stain the reminder of their purple morbidity. His white button-up can be bleached, but the teeth can’t stand an endless routine of erosion.

His new teeth are getting long; longer than he’s had the chance to notice. The first bite of tenderloin is deep and juicy, but the second has painful results. He clips the gums in front of his bottom incisors and slices a small gash through his lower lip. With ravenous hunger and no distinction between his own blood and that of the slaughtered elk he continues his feast, unaware or willfully ignorant of his automutilated wound. His lust for soft meat has done nothing to dull the ever-lengthening teeth in the front of his mouth. A knife will not dull quickly by cutting through butter.

The small gash becomes an infected hole, with raw meat constantly being pushed through. The hole gets bigger, and the teeth get longer. Jon’s next meal, a rabbit, again does nothing to grind his ever-growing incisors. Blood drips from the pierced loin, and he hides his toothy necklace behind the buttons of his now oft-bleached white shirt. The first bite doesn’t quite penetrate both sides of the meat, but the second impales clean through. Teeth through the rabbit, and the hole in his lip, and the already bloodsoaked flesh of his chin. He winces at the pain of teeth meeting his own jawbone, but he’s gotta eat. Another bite, and a deeper chip into his chin. By the time the rabbit is fully consumed, Jon’s jaw is obliterated by his own chewing.

His next hunt, while successful in killing the prey, is a difficult cut to swallow. Even as he begins to use his molars to crush the soft innards he cannot avoid the annihilation of his lower jaw. Before the magpie is even halfway eaten the pain is too much. Gangrene has set in his lower lip and fatigue is beginning to take hold. Curled beside the magpie nest Jon realizes his fatal flaw.

“I should have just gotten dentures,” he thinks.

“I should have included dental in my health insurance plan.”

SPOOKTOBER STORY #12:

sexy ghost
want get naughty
but sexy ghost
got no body

SPOOKTOBER STORY #11:

[This Spooktober Story is a Facebook face filter, made with the built in Spark AR Studio. It looks like this:

]

SPOOKTOBER STORY #10:

There's a clown in this movie. You keep expecting its jaw to unhinge so it can swallow a schoolbus, or for it to hack a friendly horse apart at the joints, or at least for it to shoot a service industry worker, but no. It just does funny clown jokes for an audience that genuinely seems to be enjoying them. You leave the theater confused and deeply disturbed by what you've seen.

SPOOKTOBER STORY #9:

A guy bites a dog, and so now every time there is a full moon, the dog turns into a tiny, angry, naked little man who's super toxic in public discord servers

SPOOKTOBER STORY #8:

horror as a genre is often lauded for being a format which can safely examine and dissect the broad cultural anxieties of the day. however, as cultural anxieties are often rooted in bigotry and focused on the 'other' and traditionally marginalized groups (people of color, the lgbtq+ community, immigrants, etc.), horror properties created by those outside of these groups which seek to exploit the common fears of the time can be, even if produced with the best of intentions, just another tool used to further suppress marginalized peoples.

The Thread In The Ground

Part One:

Scraping dirt away from sides of the hole to widen it, Claude's shovel glances off something, taut and tough, about three feet down, which in the darkness he assumes is a branch root from an aspen. A grove of the ancient trees tower around him, blocking out what little light leaks from the waning moon, so it's not until he shines his flashlight on the hole that he sees that the thread is too pale to be a root, too smooth, and glistening with something thicker than water, drooling listlessly into the soil and clay below.

Sunrise and any risk of discovery are hours away, so Claude feels comfortable temporarily halting his dig to investigate the thread more closely. The way it reacts with the flashlight beam is wrong, somehow, and reminds him of a hospital, or his Nana's nursing home... like slick, translucent flesh, like an IV line pumping gruel. Or an exposed tendon.

He wraps his dirt-covered fingers around it, and pulls. He expects resistence, but it slides easily from the surrounding soil, lubricated by whatever thick, clear liquid now drools between his fingers and around his knuckles. Now standing, holding the thread pulled up from the forest floor about four feet to each side of his fist. Claude leans down, sniffs it, and finds it odorless, but his mind is suddenly flooded with associative memories: a different night, another forest, a campfire, a tent, a hollow wind, and in the center, something black and ugly and cruel, a missing act, a violent absence.

Something's wrong. These aren't his memories. Something's wrong.

Compelled, Claude pulls more of the thread up from the earth. He knows he should finish digging the hole, that it's very important (why is it important, again? he can't remember), but the promise of the thread has taken that from him (find what's missing, find the ending), and he follows it out of the grove, towards his truck, parked a few dozen meters away.

By the time he reaches the truck, he no longer needs to pull the thread up out of the ground. It's already there, at height, drawing him forward. He assumes it's leading him to the vehicle, but it passes (impossibly, impossibly) through a fender, emerging at an angle through the driver's side door on the other side like the trajectory of a bullet bouncing off bone, and continues.

The thread leads on, into the darkness of the forest. Claude follows, losing something of himself with every step.

SPOOKTOBER STORY #6:

ok so this spooktober story is that some rowdy teens drive up to a guy just minding his own business and say to him like "check this out" and then moon him and they think it's really funny but the moon turns him into a werewolf and just friggin yeets the whole car into the lake

SPOOKTOBER STORY #5:

There's some schmutz on your windshield so you try to spray some windshield washer fluid on it, but instead of windshield washer fluid: it sprays blood, human blood! All over your windshield! This is really inconvenient, since it doesn't clean the schmutz off really, and actually makes the windshield harder to see through than before.

SPOOKTOBER STORY #4:

On the morning of April 08, 2020, Lisa Graham tripped over her shoelaces, but was relatively graceful in her fall, landing on her right forearm and scraping up her wrist only a little. "Yowch!" she exclaimed, but it hadn't really hurt. No real damage, not even a torn sleeve. She was embarrassed, collecting things back into her purse before looking up, which she only did to locate the source of the screams that began to fill the morning air.

Lisa's individual tumble was graceful, but not everyone was so lucky. The "Great Trip," as it came to be called, caused serious and lasting injury to 1/5 of the human race, and counting industrial, vehicular, and other accidents, over three hundred million people worldwide died on the day of the Great Trip.

"It was as if some malevolent force had pressed 'pause', tracked down every human being on Earth, no matter how remote, tied all our shoelaces together, then unpaused and just watched the resultant chaos," summarizes Dr. John Illnich, a historian and collector of Great Trip stories. "Those who were barefoot or wearing only socks at the time found themselves suddenly wearing shoes appropriated from who knows where. Those wearing laceless shoes had them replaced with laced ones."

Not even those without feet were spared. Dr. Illnich's own mother, confined to a wheelchair after her left foot was amputated from diabetes complications, had a sized prosthesis, later determined to be missing from a research laboratory almost 2,000 miles away, attached to her stump, dressed with a pair of Nike Zoom Freak 1s, and tied together in a Yosemite bowline knot. Thankfully, as she was sitting in her wheelchair at the time, she didn't trip, as so many others did that fateful day.

After Lisa Graham untied her laces, stood, and retreated from danger, she phoned her family, which is when she learned the grisly truth: her husband Angel and two daughters, Maria and Penelope were dead, having tripped down a flight of stairs, fallen out of a tree, and been crushed by the car of a retired policeman swerving out of the way of a fallen dog walker and her dogs (also wearing compromised shoes), respectively.

Since that incredible tragedy, Lisa has dedicated her life to finding out the cause of the Great Trip, and making sure it doesn't happen again.

What will she do, if she finds the event was caused by a single "trickster," as Dr. Illnich proposes?

"I've got shoes of all sizes," she tells our reporter. "And industrial strength laces. And a working knowledge of all the most dangerous, steepest, deadliest staircases in every major city on Earth. If I ever find this son of a [expletive], it's [expletive] payback time."

SPOOKTOBER STORY #3:

The year is 2004, and someone puts on Bowling For Soup, intentionally. "If you liked 'Girl All The Bad Guys Want,' you're going to *love* '1985,'" they tell you. This is great. You're loving this. Nobody stops you from listening to Bowling For Soup, because it's 2004. Pretty soon you will go to the movie theater and watch Meet The Fockers, like 44 million other Americans this year. That's not even counting DVD and VHS sales. It's the 7th highest grossing film in 2004. The 6th is The Day After Tomorrow, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Dennis Quaid. On February 4, 2004, Mark Zuckerberg will invent Facebook. The tenth most popular album in 2004 will be "Now That's What I Call Music! 16."

SPOOKTOBER STORY #2:

My sister, the stupid idiot and general all around dum-dum, got herself trapped in a time loop a couple of hours ago by messing around with a haunted clock or something. Every time I see her she is a lot older than the last time I saw her, which doesn’t seem to be how a time loop should work, but I don’t know what to tell you. I’m not a time-loop-ologist. Anyway she looks older than our mom now, who is 65, so she must have been trapped in this time loop for at least like 50 years. Ugh!

“Hey dum-dum,” I tell her. She mouths the words I am about to say along with me, which I used to find pretty disconcerting for the first hour or two, but now it is funny and I try to see what I can make her say. “My name is Patricia” (that’s my sister’s name) “and I’m the world’s biggest idiot, and I loooove being stuck in this time loop.”

She mouths the words along with me and it makes me laugh, although it’s kind of sad that she no longer tries to interact with the world in any other way. At least she isn’t asking me to kill her any more. What a dum-dum ha ha. I’m going to miss her

SPOOKTOBER STORY #1:

“He’s been doing this for five years. He just told me.”

“Five years!?”

“I know, it’s really sad, I don’t even like him and I’m really sad for him. Five years of Spooktober Stories, Jesus Christ. It’s pathetic.”

“Pathetic. What is he hoping to accomplish?”

“Oh my god, he just texted again.”

“Should I look? I don’t want to look.”

“It’s a link.”

“To what?”

“Oh no.”

“What? What is it? Show me.”

“You don’t want to know.”

“I want to know!”

“It’s a link… to all the Spooktober Stories. On his personal website. He archived them.”

“Oh my god. Oh my god.”

“They’re not even searchable. It’s just a list of dates.”

“This is a nightmare. I want to wake up.”

“You can’t wake up. This is all there is. An endless nightmare. Direction has no meaning. There is no up, there is no uʍop, there is only…

https://www.32radians.com/spooktober-stories-archive

…ʎluo sᴉ ǝɹǝɥʇ 'down ou sᴉ ǝɹǝɥʇ 'dn ou sᴉ ǝɹǝɥ┴ ˙ƃuᴉuɐǝɯ ou sɐɥ uoᴉʇɔǝɹᴉp ˙ǝɹɐɯʇɥƃᴉu ssǝlpuǝ u∀ ˙sᴉ ǝɹǝɥʇ llɐ sᴉ sᴉɥ┴ ˙dn ǝʞɐʍ ʇ’uɐɔ no⅄“

”˙dn ǝʞɐʍ oʇ ʇuɐʍ I ˙ǝɹɐɯʇɥƃᴉu ɐ sᴉ sᴉɥ┴“

”˙sǝʇɐp ɟo ʇsᴉl ɐ ʇsnɾ s’ʇI ˙ǝlqɐɥɔɹɐǝs uǝʌǝ ʇou ǝɹ’ʎǝɥ┴“

”˙poƃ ʎɯ ɥO ˙poƃ ʎɯ ɥO“

”˙ɯǝɥʇ pǝʌᴉɥɔɹɐ ǝH ˙ǝʇᴉsqǝʍ lɐuosɹǝd sᴉɥ uO ˙sǝᴉɹoʇS ɹǝqoʇʞoodS ǝɥʇ llɐ oʇ …ʞuᴉl ɐ s’ʇI“

”¡ʍouʞ oʇ ʇuɐʍ I“

”˙ʍouʞ oʇ ʇuɐʍ ʇ’uop no⅄“

”˙ǝɯ ʍoɥS ¿ʇᴉ sᴉ ʇɐɥM ¿ʇɐɥM“

”˙ou ɥO“

”¿ʇɐɥʍ o┴“

”˙ʞuᴉl ɐ s’ʇI“

”˙ʞool oʇ ʇuɐʍ ʇ’uop I ¿ʞool I plnoɥS“

”˙uᴉɐƃɐ pǝʇxǝʇ ʇsnɾ ǝɥ 'poƃ ʎɯ ɥO“

”¿ɥsᴉldɯoɔɔɐ oʇ ƃuᴉdoɥ ǝɥ sᴉ ʇɐɥM ˙ɔᴉʇǝɥʇɐԀ“

”˙ɔᴉʇǝɥʇɐd s’ʇI ˙ʇsᴉɹɥƆ snsǝſ 'sǝᴉɹoʇS ɹǝqoʇʞoodS ɟo sɹɐǝʎ ǝʌᴉℲ ˙ɯᴉɥ ɹoɟ pɐs ʎllɐǝɹ ɯ’I puɐ ɯᴉɥ ǝʞᴉl uǝʌǝ ʇ’uop I 'pɐs ʎllɐǝɹ s’ʇᴉ 'ʍouʞ I“

”¿¡sɹɐǝʎ ǝʌᴉℲ“

”˙ǝɯ ploʇ ʇsnɾ ǝH ˙sɹɐǝʎ ǝʌᴉɟ ɹoɟ sᴉɥʇ ƃuᴉop uǝǝq s’ǝH“

:Ɩ# ⅄ɹO┴S ɹƎqO┴ʞOOԀS