Eater

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I wrote and narrated a brand new, fully-produced creepypasta called The Trade. On my members-only podcast, delete after reading over at eerie.fm. When a man discovers a tooth on his pillow, he remembers a deal he made with a disturbing voice under a house and payment has become due. Listen now. Go to eerie.fm and become a premium member to support me and save me from YouTube. Listen to The Trade on delete after reading and much more. That's eerie.fm. Thank you. Eater. A single word. No username to attribute. This story was emailed to me anonymously. It was titled Only That. Eater. So when I read it, I realized the name fit the story perfectly. This allegedly true tale will send a chill down your spine and force you to rethink all the unspoken rules of the forest as you know them. Because something out there is very, very hungry. And you wouldn't want to make it angry. My family lives in the southern part of Missouri on 22 acres. There are three houses on that property. My grandparents house, which sits at the front by the gravel road. My parents house, which is about a five-minute walk back into the trees, on a packed dirt path, which my dad maintains with a tractor. Then there's my uncle's house, another five minutes past mine on the same path, in a clearing my grandfather cut for him before I was born. Most of the rest of the acreage is woods, oak and hickory mostly, I think, and the back half of the property hits state forest. So once you go past my uncle's house, you're in trees for as far as you want to walk. I started going on these hikes back there alone the summer before high school. I wasn't really hiking, technically, since the trails were trails my dad and uncle had cut for hunting and our family had been walking them for 40 years. But it sort of felt like hiking whenever I went. I would put a water bottle and a notebook in my backpack, and walk out there for an hour or two with no particular plan. I'd wanted to be a rider since 5th grade, when I read Mistborn for the first time. And by freshman year I'd started a fantasy novel that I was sure was going to be the next Stormlight Archive. It was bad. I know it was bad now that I look back on it. But even then I probably subconsciously knew it was bad. I was working on some magic system where mage's drew power from the minerals in their own bones, and the more powerful the mage, the more bone mineral they had to grow. I'd spent most of the summer outlining this trilogy that I wanted to do. I had three books planned with a fourth that was going to surprise everybody. I even had a map I drew with colored pencils, and labeled with names I was sure sounded foreign and significant. I had three pages of glossary at the back of my notebook. My main character was a girl named Sarah who could draw iron out of her own marrow. At her older brother Rin had been killed before the book started, but kept showing up in flashbacks where he taught her how to steal. The flashbacks were the part I was most proud of. Since they let me write whole chapters where the main character wasn't doing anything action-related, and I'd figured out at some point that the parts I actually liked writing were not the action parts. But anyway I'm ranting here. So whenever I had a snag in my book or outlines, the woods were where I went to think about that kind of thing. On a weekend afternoon I found a new spot. The leaves had just started to turn, and it was warm enough that I could go out and just a t-shirt. I brought a hoodie just in case, but I ditched it by the time I got past my uncle's house. I'd been stuck for a week on this scene where Sarah was supposed to figure out a clue about Rin that didn't that up. But I thought that if I went somewhere that I'd never set before, the scene would unstick. I would get new ideas. That's how I thought Riders' block worked at 14. I walked past the spot I usually went to, which itself was a flat rock, about 30 minutes from my house, overlooking a dry creek bed. I kept on going from there. I followed a deer trail off the main path that I'd noticed before but had never taken, and I went maybe another 20 minutes back, climbing carefully up a ridge, until I got to a place where two oak trees had grown close together, the roots making a kind of seat between them. That seat faced out across a hollow. The hillside on the other side of the hollow was covered in trees, but not as densely as the one I was on, so you could see between the trunks farther down the slope. I sat with my back to one of the oaks and pulled out my notebook. I rode for a while. I'd brought a warm Pepsi I'd stolen from my dad's mini-fridge in the garage, and I drank it slowly, working on the clue scene. I gave up on the clue scene and started a flashback that I'd been wanting to write, where Rin was teaching Sarah how to read other people's faces. I had a whole speech she was going to give about how you could spot a person who was about to lie, since their eyebrows start to pull together a little before their mouth begins to move. I was very proud of the speech, not at all sure how to make it sound like a real teenage girl listening to her older brother, and not some teenagers writing. At some point I hit that mental wall again. I sat with my pen in my hand looking at what I'd written. I didn't like any of it. I closed the notebook and put it in my lap. I looked up across the hollow. On the opposite hillside, more or less directly, across from where I was sitting, there was a cave opening. I hadn't seen it before. The angle of the slope had been hiding it from me on the walk up. It was about halfway up the hill, tall and narrow, about 7 feet high and 3 feet across. The inside was very dark. But there was a man standing at the mouth of that cave. He was taller than my dad and extremely thin. His skin seemed pale enough, but I could see him clearly with that darkness of the cave behind him. I couldn't tell from that distance if he was wearing clothes, and I'm still not totally sure. He had a face. He wasn't some faceless thing. I just couldn't see what his face looked like from that distance. But I could tell he was looking at me. I knew he was. His head was angled toward me, and not anywhere else. He raised his right hand. He turned at once at the rest. A small, friendly looking wave. Like a neighbor across the road, but this was out in the middle of the woods. I was so confused, and honestly a bit creeped out, that I didn't wave back. I never even crossed my mind. I sat still with my notebook on my lap, pin in hand, wondering who he was. I watched him and waited, and I could tell he was waiting for me to do something. He stood there with his hand still up, for what felt like forever, but then he eventually lowered his hand. Then he turned and walked into the cave. The darkness inside that cave swallowed him whole. He didn't bend down to fit through the opening, even though the opening looked shorter than he was. He walked straight back in, and was gone. I sat there, for I don't know how long. I felt like I was waiting to see if he'd come back out. But I think I was actually waiting to see if my heart would ever slow down. He didn't come back out. After a while I started to feel like I was being looked at by something I couldn't see. So I picked up my notebook, and I stood up, and I began to walk back along the trail I'd come up. I took the long route back. I walked down to the dry creek, and I followed it for about 10 minutes before I cut up to my dad's path. The long route went through more open trees, and I was able to see farther in every direction, making me feel safer. During my walk I was coming up with explanations. He I'd run into some tall hunter and pale clothes, who was standing at a rock formation that looked like a cave at that distance. Maybe my eyes had been tired from writing for so long. Neither one felt true while I was telling it to myself. I knew I'd seen something. I just wanted to have seen something else. When I got home, my mom was on the phone in the kitchen, and my dad was watching a college football game in the living room. Never knew how he watched that stuff. Neither of them looked up when I came through the back door. I went to my room with a notebook, and I sat on my bed, writing down what I'd seen in the back of the notebook. In the section I used for ideas that I didn't want to forget, I wrote it in detail. I wanted to be able to read it later, and not to mix up or exaggerate anything while it was fresh on my mind. I thought about telling my parents about it. I knew exactly what would happen if I did, though. By the way, my mother would blame fantasy books, me reading them before bed, and my dad would say something about Mr. Velman down the road, sometimes hunting on our property. How he was going to talk to him about staying off of it. But that wasn't Mr. Velman. I wanted someone to take my story seriously if I was going to tell it. The only person I could think of was my cousin, Darryl. Darryl lived in my uncle's house, his father, his father's, and was three years older than me. We had a family bonfire coming up at the end of the week, and I decided I would try to tell him then. The bonfire came around a few nights later. We had bonfires most weekends in the fall. We had them in the clearing behind my parents' house, where my dad built a fire pit when I was little. My grandparents would walk down with their lawn chairs, my uncle and Darryl would come up from their house. Mom would put together hot dogs and chilly. It was the kind of family thing I grew up with, and I always assumed every family did stuff like that. Till I started high school and realized most of my friends only saw their cousins on holidays. I waited until everybody was settled with food, and most of the adults had a beer in their hand. Darryl had wandered to the edge of the fire light, where he liked to throw sticks into the dark whenever he got bored. I went over to him. "Hey, what's good? You done with that hot dog? Or are you just going to let it die in your hand?" "I'm eating it, man. Looks like you just hold it to me. Hey, sit down. He took my plate and stuck it on the log next to him. He pulled an extra coke out of the cooler at his feet, and pushed it toward me. "Mmm, your mom really outdid herself with this chilly. My grandma made that chilly this time. Mom did the hot dog stuff and the dessert. See, that's a good system we got going there. Two of them each doing their thing. You know, mom won't even come over here when grandma's cooking. She gets weird about it, like she thinks it's a competition. He cracked his coke open. "What's up with you? You're being quiet over there. Got a weird look on your face." "Well, I was just wanting to tell you something. You want to hear it?" "Okay. You can't laugh. Now I'm definitely going to laugh. You realize that, right? Dude, that's the worst opener you can possibly have. You just guarantee to laugh whether what you tell me is fun or not. And frankly, I find that offensive. You try to control my emotions. I'm serious, Darryl. I'm being completely serious right now. If you laugh, I'm walking back to the house and you can have the rest of my coke." "Okay, geez, dang, I'm done. I'm not laughing. So what's the deal? Is it about a girl? Tell me this is about a girl. She cute. She chubby?" "Darryl, it's not about a girl. All right then." So last weekend I went up the ridge, passed the dry creek. Really, real far past it. And I mean way past where Papas shot that buck two years ago. The big one. I found a new spot there that I'd never been to. There's these two oaks growing close together. And there's a place to sit between their roots. I was up there for a while, doing my writing. "All right, so far so good, I'm with you." And on the other side of the hollow, there's apparently a cave. "Come on, now there's no cave up there. I've been all over that ridge, there's no cave up there." "I know there is, I'm telling you. There's a cave on the opposite hillside, about halfway up the slope. And while I was sitting in my new spot, there was somebody standing in front of it. The stick he was holding stopped mid-turn. He looked up at me from under the brim of his hat. "Wait, standing in front of what? In front of the cave? Like an actual person standing there?" "Yeah, a tall, thin, pale person, standing in front of the cave, which I'd never seen before. On the other side of a hollow, I'd been hiking past since I was a kid. He was just standing there at the mouth of it, like he had stepped out of it to just check the weather. All right, then that's just a hunter. That's gotta be a hunter, dude. Somebody Mr. Vellman or one of those guys lit on the property and didn't tell us about. Bastards. I thought it was a hunter too for about three seconds. What do you mean? Was he wearing orange or camouflage or anything? Vellman always wears orange when he's out there. No, his clothes were pale. But this guy, he, he waived at me. He did that sideways look without turning his head. The look he used in middle school when he wanted me to know he knew I was being weird. He set the stick down across his knees. He waived at you? The pale guy at the cave waived at you across a hollow. Yeah, it was a normal looking wave, like real neighborly, you know? All right, then. So a weird guy, you don't know what some cave you've never seen before decides he's gonna waive at you from across the way. Is that right? Right. And what'd you do? I didn't waive back. Man, are you serious? You didn't waive back? You don't not waive back at a hunter, dude. That's the worst possible thing you can do. That's like a personal insult. Those guys take that real personal, too. They go out hunting all day and the only person they see in the woods doesn't even waive back at him. That's gonna stick in their head for a week. A terrible he wasn't a hunter. How do you know that? There's no way you can tell from across a hollow if a guy is or isn't a hunter. He literally just told me he thought he was a hunter for three seconds. That's because when I didn't waive back, he turned around and walked back into the cave. The opening of the cave was shorter than he was, but he didn't bend down to fit, if that makes sense. He didn't have to duck down. He just walked in straight up. And I'm not sure how that's possible. He turned the stick a few more times. He was looking at me instead of the fire now. Are you screwing with me right now? Like for real? I'm not. I'm being 100% with you. Man, I know I tease you about your fantasy book stuff, but if you're messing with me right now, you gotta tell me. Since I'm starting to actually believe you, and I don't want to be the dumb cousin who believed you, don't make me regret it. I'm not messing around. I wouldn't be making this up. I'm not gonna make something up to mess with my own cousin at his own family's bonfire about a cave. I mean, heck. I don't want to be telling you this right now, because nobody wants to see something weird in the woods. Depends on your definition of "weird." He nodded, and went quiet for a second. The fire popped then, startling me. If there was a small shower of orange sparks, Mom was telling my grandma something on the other side of the fire about a casserole she'd brought over earlier in the week. Well, I do believe you, but I don't know what to do with that fact. But I do believe you. Well, good, and thanks, I guess. He shrugged. These hills, man, I don't know how to explain it to you. I felt watched out here ever since I was a little kid. Anytime I go too far past the clearing, I feel it, even in the daytime. Even when I know there are people not that far behind me. There's this feeling that hits when I get past where Papal's old fence used to be. I figured everybody felt it, and that was just what hiking the back of the property was. And I never said nothing about it to my dad. He'd think I was being a big baby. So we think there's something off about this place? Based on what I felt, yeah, but I felt it for years. I mean, I felt something on the walk home from the ridge that day. Not before I saw the guy, but definitely after. The whole hike back, I had that feeling on me. You think it's the same thing? Couldn't tell you, man, not sure. I think the feeling came from seeing him. You see something creepy, you go home, and you feel creeped out, like watching a scary movie at the theater. So if you ask me personally, I think it was just a reaction to seeing something weird. Mmm-hmm. You don't agree? Well, I think you say the feeling doesn't mean anything is what people say when they don't want it to mean something. You said it yourself, you felt something after, but you didn't feel it before. But yeah. That's the point. It is the point. That's what I'm saying, man. He crossed his arms and nodded, like he had wanted to bait. The next two weeks were pretty normal. School was school. I worked on my book when I could, and I stopped going past my uncle's house when I went out walking. I'd been sleeping kind of bad since the ridge incident, with weird short dreams I couldn't remember, and a heavy feeling in my head all day that just wouldn't go away, even if I drank coffee. I figured I was getting sick. The night I'm about to write about happened later that month. I went to bed around 10, and I woke up at what my phone said was after 2am. I thought I'd heard something. I lay there for maybe 30 seconds without moving, but then I heard it again. This wet, slurping sound, with a ripping underneath it. It was coming from the front yard. My bedroom is at the front of the house. My window faces the front yard, and the gravel drive that runs along the side of the house. It turns into the dirt path back to my uncle's place. Our front yard isn't lit at night, except for whatever spillover comes off the porch light. But the street light at the end of our driveway by the gravel road does throw a little extra light onto the grass closer to the road. I got out of bed, and I went to my window, pulling the curtain back about 3 inches and looking out. There was something in the yard, about 20 feet from my window. This Monday.com ad was created by a team of people and AI agents. The agents wrote the copy and managed the timelines, while our human creative director made sure it all made sense. Easy, create your own AI agent today on Monday.com. Purchase new carpet from the Home Depot and get it installed for free right now. Shop the stylish choices and simple pricing of carpet from Home Decorator's collection, Traffic Master, or Life Proof with Pet Proof Technology, and see for yourself why nobody beats our prices. Enjoy new carpet with free installation right now at the Home Depot. Offer valid October 15th through November 1st, 2026, exclusions apply for licenses at Home Depot.com/licensenumbers. It was crouched on a torches with its head down over something on the ground. It was pale and thin. Its head moved and fast, jerky pulses, while it, while it ate. I couldn't see what it was eating, and the thing itself was hard to make out. The screen on my window had that fine mesh that makes everything beyond it real grainy looking, and the porch light wasn't lighting that spot well. I stood there with the curtain in my hand. I'm not going to pretend I had a brave reaction to it. I let go of the curtain and let it fall, and I went back to bed. I pulled my comforter up over my head, and I lay there listening to my own breathing. Trying to convince myself the thing in the yard was a coyote, and that if I went and looked again, I would see a coyote and feel stupid. But I did not go and look again. I woke up the next morning to my mom yelling, and she wasn't yelling at me. She was outside, and her yelling voice was traveling up to my window. I heard my dad's voice, too, lower, and another voice that sounded like my uncle. I got out of bed and went to my window again, and without thinking I pulled the curtain back. There they were, standing in the yard, all three of them, in the same spot that thing had been the night before. My uncle was holding something, and he seemed real mad. I put my pants on and a hoodie and went down. My mom looked over at me when I came out the front door, and started to say something that began with "Honey" and stopped. My dad shook his head at me without saying a word. My uncle wouldn't look at me at all. He was holding something familiar in his hand. A dog collar. Specifically, the collar that belonged to his Chihuahua, Cicifus. Cicifus was a rowdy, barking Chihuahua, and my uncle would let that thing out to do whatever at any time of the day, or night. I was confused as to why he was holding Cicifus's collar. But then I saw what he had in his other hand, and my stomach turned. It was the back half of Cicifus's head. The body was gone. When I looked down, there was a stain on the grass where the body probably had been, and some other stuff that I'm not going to list. The head and the collar were the only pieces accounted for. My uncle had this expression that probably meant, "If I find whoever did this, they're not going to have a face any longer." He kept going on about the freaking coyotes. He said it three or four times in a row, looking at the ground. He looked up at the trees after on the other side of the gravel drive, like he was about to walk right in there, and tear him apart with his bare hands. I saw something out here last night. My mom looked at me. I could tell she had been about to say something else and stopped. My uncle was desperate for information, and he stepped forward. What was it? Around two in the morning I woke up, and I heard something outside, so I went to the window and looked out. There was something right here at this exact spot. I pointed to the patch of grass my uncle was standing on. "Honey, why didn't you wake us up?" my mom asked. It was through the screen, and it was dark out. I thought it was a coyote, but I couldn't see very good, so it went back to bed. So it was a coyote. "I don't know what I saw. I told myself it was a coyote. Whatever it was was kneeling down and chewing on something. It looked pale and skinny. The Ted was moving fast, so you don't know. You couldn't see good." "No, I couldn't," Uncle Doug. "I'm sorry. The screen on my window has that mesh on it, and the porch light isn't very good out here. But I'm telling you I saw something. You saw a coyote eating my dog and went back to bed. I didn't know it was eating cissophists. I didn't know there was a dog out here. I thought it was a wild thing eating a wild thing. I'm sorry. I don't know what else to say." My uncle cursed at me then, and my dad put a hand on his shoulder to calm him down. Then my uncle shook the hand off and walked across the gravel drive. More like stormed off. He went into the trees. "Head back inside, honey. I think you've seen enough. Mom told me, and I went in. I could hear my mom say behind me to my dad. Why did you let him come over here? Do you think he needed to see that?" And my dad followed up with, "Dear, he's 14. He can handle it. And by then I was back at the front door." For the rest of the day, I sat at the kitchen table while everyone went in and out, and the conversation kept circling, but nobody had an answer. My uncle was sure it was coyotes. My grandfather brought up the mountain line. He was sure had been spotted two summers earlier. And my mom said it was probably a stray dog. The conversations were heated and dramatic for a few hours, but nobody came back to me. I thought I would be interrogated, but I wasn't. What I think happened, and I don't know this for sure, but I have thought a lot about it, is that everybody had picked a story, and my story didn't fit. The easy answer was just a wild animal. The solution to that would just be to hunt it, or call animal control. But if it was something else, something that had to kneel down to eat, like a person, it became a bit more complicated. By the next afternoon, my uncle had pulled his rifle out of the gunsafe at his house, and set it across his lap on the porch. And he sat there until dark. The night after that, he was out there again, and the night after that. Within a week he had set up a pop-up tent in the clearing behind his house, and was starting to sleep in it with the rifle next to him. My aunt would come over to my house and sit at the kitchen table with my mom, talking about how to get him to come back inside. She would cry sometimes, and my mom would put her hand on her sister's hand, and not have anything to say. I went back to school the day after the rest of the family found Cisophus. There was nobody at my school I could have explained any of this to. And I'd still been sleeping badly since the ridge. But after Cisophus, it got worse, and the worse it got, the less I trusted what I was seeing. After about a week I was tired enough, that I had an idea. After school, I texted Darryl. "Hey, you want to go take a look at that cave?" He didn't text back for almost an hour, but when he did, it said, "Okay, win. We picked the next weekend." When the next weekend came around, Darryl met me on the dirt path between our houses. around two in the afternoon. He had his backpack on, with what I figured was a water bottle in it, and probably a knife somewhere knowing him. He was wearing his cardinals cap backwards, and his beat-up car heart. I had my notebook in a flashlight, even though it was the middle of the day. Where's your dad at? Out at that dang tent. He was out there when I got up, like before sunrise. My mom said he came inside for 10 minutes around midnight for coffee and he didn't even sit down. He made it in the to-go cup and walked back out. Has he been talking about anything? All he talks about, Sisyphus, that's all. He keeps going back to him, like he's still figuring out what happened. He won't talk about going back to work. He's missed, I think, four days now, and my mom keeps telling him he can't sleep out there forever, and he just kind of looks at her and doesn't answer. It's freaking her out. It's freaking me out. I'm sorry about that, dude. That's not your fault. It's Sisyphus. He raised that dog from a puppy, my dad. He used to keep him in his hoodie pocket when he was tiny. He used to sneak him bits of ribeye under the table of things given. He took it personal that something got him, and now he's out there since he thinks if he doesn't kill whatever it was, he's letting Sisyphus down. Hell, I doubt he'd react like that if it was me that got killed. He punched me on the shoulder. We laughed. We walked out the path past my parents' house, and passed the old chicken coop my grandma had stopped using when I was 11. Once we were past my uncle's yard, we went into the trees. Daryl had been to the spot under the two oaks before. Back when we were younger and would build forts together, but he hadn't been past it in a while. You sure it was the ridge with the deer trail and not the one farther down? Yeah, the one you take off passed the dry creek, passed where the deer trail forks left, and there's that broken down fence post papal never moved. Right, right, okay, I think I know which one you're talking about. Man, I haven't been up that high in a while, not since we were like 10 or 11. Me neither. Well, until last weekend. We climbed slow and careful. Believes were brown and crunchy on the ground, and the air had that famous southern Missouri autumn bite. Daryl walked with his hands in his hoodie pocket, and I had mine in my jeans. About 10 minutes from my tree, a feeling hit me. It's hard to describe, but it was like someone standing too close behind you in the checkout line. When the back of your neck and the tops of your shoulders go hot with the awareness of someone next to you. This was that same pressure, but there was no one behind me, and yet it was on me from all sides at once. I stopped on the trail. Daryl was a few feet ahead, and he stopped a second after I did. He turned around. Tell me you feel that. I nodded. Yeah, I do. How long you've been feeling it yourself. Probably 10 minutes, maybe a little more. Started feeling it back where the trail bent past that big rock, the one shaped like a shoe. So you believe me now, that it's more than just being creeped out. Yeah, actually. I think there's something more to it. As we continued, the deer trails switched back twice, and we lost it once but found it again. I remembered the place where it forked off the main path, and I remembered the slope, and we found those two oaks where I'd left them. The seat between the roots was full of dry leaves now. The cave was on the other side of the hollow. We had to come down out of my tree, cross the bottom of the hollow on a slope of leaves and exposed limestone, and climb the other hill. It took us about 20 minutes from leaving my tree to standing on the opposite hillside, at another five for us to find the cave opening. Since coming up at it from below, it's a different angle than I'd been looking at it from across the hollow. The cave mouth was at the base of a limestone shelf that stuck out of the hillside about chest high above the slope. The shelf above it overhung by a foot or two, so you could see how the rain would have run off it and not down into the cave itself. The opening of the rock was clean of moss in a halo, where everywhere else on the limestone was green with it. There was a smell coming out of that cave. It wasn't terribly strong, just a low sour smell made me think of meat being left out. We could only really smell it when the wind was pushing out of the opening at us. It was kind of like the cave was breathing. We stood about 20 feet from the opening, and we didn't get closer than that. Dread had been building up between us since the watched feeling had hit, and I could definitely say it was at its full weight now. My stomach felt heavy, and my hands were cold inside my pockets. Daryl was breathing heavily through his nose. Both of us were looking at the cave. The first 10 or 12 feet of the cave floor got the afternoon sunlight, but past that, the sun stopped, and the dark started, with a sharp line between them. There was something on the floor of the cave in the strip of ground right at the line where the sun stopped. It was white, and it was bumpy, like somebody had spilled a bag of something onto the floor but never cleaned it up. It took us maybe 10 seconds to figure out we were looking at bones. Once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it. The white bumpy strip was bones, small ones at the edge of the light, curved fragments and joints. Past them, the bones got bigger and more numerous. A foot or two into the dark, the floor was just bones, as far as my eye could follow. And those bones went on until the cave bent, and I could no longer see. A sound came a few seconds after we figured out the bones. A wet sound, halfway between chewing and tearing. The cave walls bounced to the echo around, and made the source impossible to pen down. It was somewhere in there, could be a hundred feet away, could be twenty. There was that tearing underneath it, with a faint clicking sound, and the wet sound got stronger. I looked over at Darryl, and I found him already looking at me. I was sure we both had the same expression. We turned around at the same time, and we walked back down along the trail. We power-walked instead of running, and we didn't speak until we made it across the hollow, once we were on top of my ridge again past the two oaks. By then the cave was hidden behind the slope again, and we felt safer. We stopped then. Darryl sat down with his hands on his knees and his head down. I sat in the leaves a few feet away. What was that? I don't know, man. I'm being serious. What was that, dude? What did we just look at? What did we hear? I mean, you heard it, too. Right. I did, and I'm telling you I have no idea. You've been on this property your whole life. I'm just a freshman in high school who reads fantasy books. I don't know what's in caves. What did we just hear in there? Could that be a bear? Bears aren't pale. They're not thin. They don't stand at the mouth of caves like a person, and they don't wave at people. You're saying what was in there just now was the same thing you saw that day. That's what I'm saying. It gave off the same vibe. Well, I guess that makes sense. It's gotta be the same thing, right? You saw it go back in there that time. There's only one though, right? Not multiple. I really freaking hope there's only one. He pulled at the leaves at his feet. He picked up a curled brown one and crumbled it between his fingers. We can't tell my dad. I mean, he's already out there with a rifle. He's losing it, man. He's been gone for two days at a stretch eating jerky. He packed himself. Mom's been finding empty pringles cans in the laundry. He came home yesterday with a scratch on his arm, and he wouldn't say where it came from. He can't know about a cave full of full of bones, man. He'll go straight to it. He'll walk straight in there with a rifle thinking he's going to take care of the situation. Yep, we can't tell him. My lips are sealed. And we can't tell your parents either. Your dad would tell my dad. That's how those two are. They tell each other everything. Your dad will be on his porch with a chorus 30 seconds after you tell him. I'm not going to tell my parents anything. I promise. This is just between us. Good. My dad ain't ready to leave the woods. I can't make him leave the woods. I've been trying. My mom's been trying too. He just doesn't listen to us no more. Maybe I can talk him into going to town for a couple days. I don't know. I'll try something. But if I can't get him out of here, he's going to be back in there. He's going to find that cave eventually. At some point, we got up and walked back along my dad's path, and we came out at the clearing behind my house. From there, we split up. Darryl went towards his dad's house, And that's it. I went home to eat the dinner my mom had kept warm. The week after we went to the cave, that exhaustion I'd been dealing with, got worse, and it was starting to scare me. I'd been a good sleeper my whole life. The kind of kid who went to bed at 10 and would wake up at 7 feeling exactly right. But after the cave, that changed. I would lie in bed for hours without going to sleep. I'd feel myself drifting off almost getting there, but then snap back awake with my heart racing. Most of the night I just looked at the ceiling, ending up asleep for maybe an hour near morning, after I'd given up trying. That tiredness showed up during the day. I felt heavy and my mind was foggy, like I was wearing an invisible oversized, drenched coat. My grades started slipping by the third week, Mr. Casey my algebra teacher asked me after class one day if everything was okay at home, and I said things were fine. In fourth period English, we were reading the most dangerous game out loud, going around the room, a paragraph at a time. I hadn't been paying enough attention. I closed my eyes for what I thought was just a second, but when I opened them, Mrs. Parson was on the floor in front of her desk. She was on her back, and that pale thing from the cave was on top of her, crouched over her chest. Its head was down in her stomach, and that wet noise from the cave was now coming out of her, coming from that thing's mouth. Her shirt was open, and the front of her was open under the shirt. There was so much blood. Her hands were going up and down at her sides, and small panicked twitches, like she was trying to do something with them, but couldn't. I screamed and jumped up then. The desk falling over sideways in front of me. The whole class turned, and looked at me. Mrs. Parson was at the front of the room with her book open in her hands now, in one piece, perfectly okay. She looked at me worried, and asked if I was alright, and whether I needed to see the nurse. I said no. I sat down on my desk and apologized. My face felt really hot, partially from fear, and partially from embarrassment. The kid behind me, whose name was Caden, picked up my desk for me. I told everybody I'd had a bad dream and woke up wrong, and the reading kept going. I sat there the rest of that period with my hands flat on my desk, and my eyes on Mrs. Parson. She kept teaching. The bell rang, and we left. 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But when I opened them, that pale thing was crouched on a cafeteria table eight feet from me. A kid I knew named Wesley was on his back on the table. His arm pulled out of his shoulder. The thing had Wesley's arm in its mouth, and was chewing through muscle at the top of it. All the while, Wesley was making a high-pitched air sound that was not to scream, but desperately wanted to be one. I dropped my tray. The crash made the tables around me look up. When I looked back, Wesley was at his own table the next row over, eating tater tots, and the pale thing was gone. The other time was in the hallway before home room. The janitor was mopping the floor outside my locker. I had my locker open, and was looking at my books, and when I closed the locker door, the janitor was on his back on the wet floor, and that pale thing had its face in his neck. I dropped my backpack. When I looked again, the janitor was up the hallway, pushing his mop bucket, as though nothing had happened. I began having trouble looking at anything for too long. I would look up at the chalkboard and think, "If I look away for one second and look back, that pale thing is going to be there in front of me, eating Mrs. Parson again," and I was so scared that at some point I would look away and look back. Like nothing would change this time. It would still be there, eating. I even began to avoid eye contact in the hallway, taking longer routes between classes that kept me near big windows and out of dim places. I told my mom I might be coming down with something, so I wouldn't have to explain why I was so tired and acting so weird. I don't remember falling asleep that night, but I had a dream. I was standing at my bedroom window in the middle of the night, in the same position I'd been in when I saw that thing in the yard with Sisyphus. The window was open, and the screen was in. The yard was lit by the porch light and the street light by the road, brighter than it should be in real life. The pale thing was crouched in the same patch of grass it had been before, in the same posture with its head down. This time it had heard me, and it looked up. Its face was so black. Every feature you would expect, eyes, nose and mouth seemed instead to be black voids, and its skin was bone white, the mouth full of small black teeth, and it smiled at me. That's when it lifted up the thing it had been annoying on. It held it out toward me too, palms open wanting me to see. It was the top half of my dad's head. Everything else concave and hollowed out. I started trying to rip the screen out of the window, pulling at it with both hands and hitting it with my fists. The screen was old aluminum, I was screaming my dad's name. The pale thing was watching me try to get the screen out and it was still smiling, and I think it was waiting for me to come through. I woke up then. I was sitting in my bed, and I'd been screaming in real life. My mom was at the doorway with the hall light on behind her out of breath. "Honey, honey, I'm right here. It's okay. Look at me. You're okay. I'm right here." She sat as she sat down on the bed next to me and put her hand on my back. The other hand went to my forehead, reminding me of when I was little and sick. I sat there with my comforter bunched up in my fists, and I tried to slow my breathing. She rubbed circles on my back with her thumb. "You had a nightmare, honey. That's all. You're okay." "Where's Dad? Where's Dad? Is Dad okay?" "Yes, yes he is. I just left him in the bed. Are you. Are you okay?" "I don't know, mom. Is it the Sisyphus stuff, or maybe something going on at school? I don't know, mom. I just know I woke up screaming. I'm sorry I woke you up. Honey, don't apologize for that. You don't have to be sorry. You're allowed to have nightmares. It's okay. But are you having a lot of nightmares? Be honest with me. No. Are you sure? I've heard you up in the night a lot recently. Are you sleeping okay? "Yes, mom. Everything's fine. I promise." And it was just one nightmare. I don't even know what it was about. She looked at me for a long moment, then she said okay and came back. kissed my forehead. She got up and went back down the hall, bidding me good night. I know she didn't believe me, but I think she could also tell that pushing on it anymore wasn't going to get us anywhere. That weekend, my uncle came back from the woods. He had been spending most of his time out there since Cisophus, going further out each time. My aunt told my mom he had walked out to the back of the property with his rifle one morning at first light, but she had not seen him since. By the second day he had been gone almost 30 hours. My dad and grandpa were getting ready to go look for him when he just came out of the trees behind his house. He was alone, and he didn't have his rifle anymore. He was walking with both arms held tight against his chest. His hands tucked under the opposite armpits. It looked like he was freezing, and he was even shaking like he was. And he wasn't talking. My aunt got to him first, and put her hands on his face. "Doug? Doug, baby, look at me. Are you hurt? Did something happen out there? Doug, please look at me." She had her hands on his face, and he wouldn't focus on her. His eyes were going past her shoulder somewhere out into the trees behind the house. My grandfather and my dad came up after, and I came last. My dad spoke to him. "Doug, hey, look here, brother, talk to me. Tell me what happened." My dad got down lower, and tried to get under my uncle's line of sight. But my uncle's eyes kept sliding away. My grandfather walked around to my uncle's other side, putting a hand on the back of his neck. "Doug, was it an animal?" My grandpa asked. "Did something jump you out there? Just nod for me if it was an animal, son. You don't have to talk right now, just nod. But my uncle didn't nod. Doug, please, my father begged. We got him into a kitchen chair we pulled out onto the porch, and we all stood there around him. He was shivering still, keeping his hands under his armpits. He didn't seem injured anywhere that we could see. There was dirt at his hairline, and his clothes were filthy from a night outdoors, but that was it so far. When he sat down, he did so slowly, and after he was all the way down, he pulled his hands out from under his armpits, and he held them out for us to see. He was missing three fingers, two from his right hand, and one from his left. The stumps were short and clean, not jagged. Like whatever had taken them, had done so in a single swipe or bite. My aunt screamed. My dad got down on the porch and held my uncle's face, while my grandfather went into the house to dial 911. My aunt was on the floor crying into my uncle's shoulder, and he was looking at his hands, like they weren't even his. The ambulance arrived in about twenty minutes. The EMT's got my uncle into the back, and my aunt rode with him while my dad followed in his truck. Daryl and my grandparents and my mom and I stayed at the house. My grandmother made coffee. Daryl kept asking the adults if his dad was gonna be okay. I'd never seen him so scared. My uncle was admitted that night. They had no real explanation for him at the hospital. They cleaned the wounds and gave him fluids and antibiotics. They ran scans on his head. He still wouldn't talk to anybody. They kept him for two days for observation, and on the third day my aunt and Daryl checked into a hampton in near the hospital. My uncle finally said that he could not go home. The night after my aunt and Daryl left for the hampton in, I woke up. The clock on my dresser said 3.42 am. The lights in my room were off, except for the street light outside, coming in through the curtains. I hadn't closed them completely. My bedroom door was shut, and I could hear my mom and dad talking in their bedroom down the hall, low voices. I couldn't tell what they were saying, as I woke up. I felt it before I saw it. Something was in the corner of my room. The corner was the dark corner, where my dresser stood against the wall, and the streetlight didn't reach. Whatever was in that corner was crouched on the floor next to the dresser, with its head turned toward me. I couldn't see it well. The corner was dark, but I could make out a pale, crouched shape with the head pointed in my direction. I knew instantly. I knew before I even set up in bed. I was so very tired down to my bone, but I wasn't afraid. I was angry. I had nothing left in me to be afraid with. I set up and looked at it across the room, and it looked back at me. I couldn't see its eyes, but I could feel which direction its head was pointed. Why are you here? Why are you tormenting my family? I said, wanting to shout, but also not wanting my parents to come in here. But the entire time I thought it was another dream, another hallucination. The thing in the corner began to move. It moved its head, and then it spoke. The voice was higher pitched than a man's voice, and it said, "You never said hello." I sat there, the comforter at my waist, my hands on the edge of the mattress. It was just a dream, I thought, but it didn't feel like the usual dream. "Hello," I said. My voice came out shaky and weak. "Hello?" "I'm sorry, hello." In the corner, the shape moved again. From the little I could make out, I think it smiled. The smile was a small white bend in the dark. Then I watched it stand up. My room was about eight or nine feet at the ceiling, and as it stood, it had to lower its head. It walked over to my window. The window was open only about six inches, and the screen was still in. It pushed the screen out effortlessly, and it went headfirst through that tiny opening. The opening was too narrow for something the size of a person, but somehow it went through anyway. And then it was gone. I sat motionless in my bed. I knew then I was supposed to be very afraid, as I realized this was no dream. But even then, after that realization, I felt nothing but tired. Instead of trying to go to sleep just yet, I got out of bed, and I went to my window. I closed it, and locked it. I pulled the curtains closed, and I turned on every light in my room. Then I went back to the window and peered outside through the curtain. There was nothing there. It's been a year since all of this happened. My uncle eventually did come home, but he moved my aunt and Darryl out of our family acreage into some house on the other side of Springfield, and he doesn't come back to visit. Darryl does come back without him sometimes on holidays. My uncle has never told us what happened out there in the woods. And for us, nothing else has happened. I've slept fine since that night, but watched feeling has stopped. I've not gone walking past my uncle's old house since. But to this day, I wish I'd only waived back. I really enjoyed this story. Since the whole don't reply to voices in the woods thing, on its head. Apparently if you're simply too rude to those things from beyond, well, an uncle might end up losing a finger. Good night. Thank you all so much for tuning in to Unexplained Encounters. I've been your host, Darkness prevails. I wrote and narrated a brand new creepypasta that's been fully produced, over at eerie.fm. In my premium members only podcast, delete after reading. So if you can't wait for more scary stories narrated by me, go to eerie.fm. Sign up to be a premium member, and start listening now. And you'll be getting a lot more bonuses too. 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