Reddit Collection (Fresh-Short #9), DeYtH Banger [best novels to read for beginners TXT] 📗

everywhere. It was how they were stood that got to me. And by stood, I mean stood. All of them, on their hind legs, blankly staring towards Ethel's room, their front paws limply hanging at their sides.

 

The landlord and I didn’t want to go inside, but we had to. We had to find Ethel, confirm our suspicions if you will.

 

Walking through her lounge and down the long, narrow hall was the most awful yet fascinating minute of my life.

We found her as we knew we would.

 

Not willing to spend anymore time with corpse we exited the apartment and called the police. I remember when I locked the door, they finally moved.

 

 

They turned, slowly, to look at me. Unblinking, dazed, they stood and stared. I closed the door as firmly as I could without making a sound. Somehow I knew they wouldn’t like that.

When the police arrived all of the cats were gone. They must have slipped out of a window or something. I gave my statement but for some reason left out the part about the cats. The whole thing felt so surreal, even though I was certain it happened, I knew they wouldn’t believe me.

 

 

 

The officer in charge of the case was perplexed as to how her body came to be in her bedroom, and questioned myself and my landlord as to whether we had moved her. I think when he saw the genuine shock on both our faces he realized we didn’t know.

 

 

 

All evidence indicated she fell in the kitchen and broke her hip, accidentally impaling herself with a small kitchen knife when she did so. She died on that linoleum floor, so how she wound up in the bedroom remains a mystery. To some at least.

After this incident I decided to move back in with my mom,and honestly I don’t think I ever would have written this if it hadn’t happened.

Yesterday was when my cat started standing.

Reality is Creepier than Fiction

 by WontThinkStraight

 

 

Reality can be creepier than fiction. What’s truly terrifying aren’t the things that go bump in the night, but the macabre twists of fate in life. Especially when they get more horrifying the deeper you pry into them.

Such as the story of old Aunt Mary.

 

 

Mary wasn’t my aunt, but a friend of mine’s. He’s told me this story since I’ve shared my own childhood tale of Gurgles & Bugman. As it’s a very personal family matter, the names have been changed to protect their privacy.

Old Aunt Mary was the eldest of four children. She was unmarried for the first 40-odd years of her life, so she was always spoiling her nieces and nephews with indulgent gifts. She was everyone’s favorite aunt.

However, deep down, she was very lonely.

 

 

Always being the spinster whilst everyone around her got married with children took a mental toll on her. When both her parents eventually died, they left a sprawling house for her inheritance. But the void in her life became as cavernous as the empty rooms of her mansion.

 

 

Shortly after her 46th birthday, she surprised everyone by announcing her sudden wedding to Stanley, a man she’d known for only two months.

 

It was clear though, they were deeply in love with each other. He was only slightly younger – 39 years old – but as charming, fit and generous a soul as Mary was. Whilst no one knew much about Stanley, they all loved and welcomed him to the family. They were also secretly relieved that Mary had found happiness after all those years of solitude.

 

A month after the wedding, they took a honeymoon of a lifetime, spending a year to travel across the world. Every few weeks a postcard would arrive from various exotic locations exclaiming how much fun they were having.

Everything seemed perfect until the couple returned from their trip. Living together at the mansion, Mary started to change. She stopped sleeping in the same bed as Stanley, then insisted that they have separate rooms. Before long, she was claiming to hear strange noises throughout the house: her name being called out during the night, furious scratching sounds echoing in the hallways, or mournful wails that seemed to come from the walls themselves.

 

The more Stanley tried to comfort her, the more terrified she became. She would yell and scream at him to stay away, and to not touch her. She would spend days barricading herself up in a room crying and babbling, slowly going insane from the filth that would accumulate and the mental isolation.

 

Eventually, the family got her to a psychiatrist, who diagnosed her with a type of paranoid schizophrenia known as Capgras Syndrome. It's a rare condition where the victim believes that someone close has been replaced with an identical imposter. She claimed that Stanley was not her husband – but something that looked, acted and pretended to be Stanley.

 

Her family was faced with the difficult choice of either committing Mary to a mental institution to get the care she needed, or have her sedated and looked after at home. They chose to keep her sedated.

Throughout all this time, Stanley was clearly distraught, but still loved Mary with all his heart. He never wavered in caring for her at the bedside, feeding her and talking to her as a loving husband. Over the following year the family spent a lot of time getting to know Stanley better as they took turns caring for Mary, and felt incredibly fortunate that he was around.

 

So it was a total shock when they arrived at the house one day to be greeted by a squad of police cars. The front door was plastered with police tape, and they weren’t allowed to enter. After proving that they were related to the occupants, the officer in charge relayed what happened.

 

That morning, Aunt Mary’s body was found at the base of an ocean cliff about a half hour’s drive away. A passing jogger had seen her car drive right up to the edge of the cliff, and a woman pulling a body from the back of the car. After calling the police, he then witnessed Mary stabbing a male body several times with a large kitchen knife. She then rolled the body off the cliff into the waters below, and started to laugh uncontrollably for minutes on end.

 

When the police arrived, she had simply turned and smiled, then jumped off the cliff to her death. They managed to recover her body, but no trace of Stanley’s was found. In all likelihood it was already washed out to sea. The licence plate of the car led them back to the house, where the investigation was now focused. They found some spat-out medication near Mary’s bed, and a broken lamp on the floor with blood splatter on the walls.

Aunt Mary had pretended to take her pills, then knocked Stanley out with the bedside lamp while his head was turned. She then had dragged the unconscious and bleeding body to the kitchen where she stabbed Stanley with a knife, before dragging him to the car and driving to the cliff.

 

However, it was what they found next that puts a chill through my bones.

 

In searching the house that day, the police uncovered a secret cellar under a large rug. Upon opening it, they were greeted with the anguished face of a desiccated corpse on the steps, clawing at the cellar door.

The room was covered in the stench of dried human waste, and deep gouges in the woodwork where someone had desperately tried to scratch their way out of this prison. When the DNA analysis and dental records came back, the corpse was a 99% match with Stanley.

 

He’d been dead for months, most likely of starvation. His long fingernails were broken and scratched from clawing in his futile attempts to get out. Stanley was the thing that went bump in the night; it was his pleas and desperate attempts to escape that echoed through the halls of the mansion at night.

But solving that mystery only created a deeper one.

 

Who then, was that person caring for Mary, spending time with her family - and whom ultimately was murdered and thrown off a cliff - if Stanley was already dead?

 

Was it a twin brother? A Doppelgänger?

Whatever it was, Aunt Mary took that secret with her to the grave.

What haunts me most though is the thought that maybe she was perfectly sane throughout it all, and it was the world itself that was truly crazy.

Reality is indeed creepier than fiction.

Jack's Back

 by  littlepangolin

 

 

I first got in contact with Jack, my former landlord, a little over a year ago when I answered his newspaper ad. I was in a rush to move out as I had just broken up with my significant other, whom I shared an apartment with, and Jack was renting out the furnished basement of his house. The location was good and the price was a steal, and I moved in with a few boxes of personal items four days later.

The house was old and the floors were creaky – Jack was the eternal bachelor, interested in nothing but cars, certainly not interior decorating or hardly even basic upkeep for that matter – and when he got up to go to work at 5 A.M. he would often wake me up, since I am a very light sleeper. However, as the months passed by I got accustomed to waking up early.

I cannot tell you the exact moment I realized that something wasn't right.

Over a number of days, a thought slowly crept into my conscious mind and settled; I hadn't heard very much noise from upstairs lately. There was the occasional creak or bang, like in all older houses, but the heavy footsteps that I woke up to and sometimes heard during the evening had seemed to disappear completely. Perhaps Jack was sick, I thought. Perhaps he hadn't worked in a few days, perhaps he worked different hours. The man was a real loner and kept to himself, so it honestly didn't seem strange to me. I only really talked to him when I went upstairs to give him his rent money on the first of every month. He was never unfriendly or rude, but short with me, didn't have much to say.

I looked out the window and saw that the light was on in the garage. The blinds were closed, but someone was moving around in there. Jack must be working on his car. I felt relieved. His car was his baby – a powerhouse customized from scratch in the body of a 1930's Ford. He'd shown it to