Its late at night, and you go to let the dog in at the usual time. In he comes, floppy eared and head down, snuffling around for crumbs on the floor. Just finishing the dishes after dinner, you sit down to watch the TV for a little while, with Digger at your feet, before turning in.

About to go up the stairs, you hear a dog barking in the back yard; it sounds very like Digger, who should be asleep in the dining room. Half turning, you see that your dog is now standing in the dining room doorway looking at you with his soulful liquid brown eyes, while the barking continues just outside.

The hair stands up on the back of your neck for no good reason, and you quickly look away. Acting on some odd, half submerged instinct, trying to keep your breathing calm, you start to go up the stairs to your child's room, to check on him. Behind you the dog's paws clatter on the stairs, very close behind you, and getting closer, as the barking outside becomes more frantic...

[no explanations needed, or provide stats and background in your system of choice if preferred]

It's a long, dull rainy afternoon.  The kids are out of school and the wife is off with her mother in law.  Everyone at home has cabin fever.  The kids ask you to come play hide and seek with them.  You pick your favorite spot, the hall closet, opposite the stairs down into the basement.

The oldest find the younger two, laughing and giggling as they hunt for you in ridiculous places - the fridge, under the couch curtains.  Finally you hear their feet pounding down the hall...and the oldest shrieks "Found you!"

Except the closet door doesn't open.

You hear your own voice laughing right along with the kids, suggesting a new game you can all play together but everyone must go into the basement, everyone must go below.

You try with all of your might to open the door, efforts turning into frantic pounding but it might as well be stone instead of the cheap laminate you know it's made out of, as tough and immovable as it is now.  Maybe if you can get down and shake the door in it's frame; there's an inch or two of space underneath where the carpet has worn down...

You cram yourself into the space on the floor, looking underneath, trying to shake the door, to pry it loose, to get them to hear you as you yell...and as you peer through the gap, you see them disappearing down the stairs in front of you, but not you.  It pauses when it head reaches floor height on the stairs, and the thing turns and stares straight into your eyes.

It smiles -

and closes the basement door...

There are place in this world you really shouldn't go.

That's what we keep tellin em anyway, hikers on the trail. Boggy ground, deadfalls, sudden drops, there ain't no ambulances in the forest neither, heh. There's a lot worse places, but we still lose one every couple of years.

Course that's only part of what I'm talkin about.

Sometimes, out there, when the waters move in a way they shouldn't, or the bushes get still in a breeze, thats when you know its time to get real quiet and make yourself small, small like a mouse, small as ever you can, and its time to go back the way you came steppin in your own tracks.

Every wild place has its back alleys, just like every city. Just ask ol Norton over there, he'll tell you all about it. Maybe not though, he ain't been right since about 98. He didn't tell many people what he saw, and he won't tell you, but he told me.

We were helping a search party look for a missing German couple, real outdoor types it seems, and Norton went deep into the woods, got seperated himself. Stupid thing to do but easy if you're not thinkin. Well he found her alright, come round a stand of old willows and there she was lookin right back at him, glassy eyed like that fine eighteen pointer over the bar there.

Norton he swore to me that there wasn't much else of her, and her face to the cheek was mounted on a tree, but old, older than she should be. Struck dumb, he reached up and touched her, then she came alive, started screamin, weeping in German, some English, about the roots inside her, and Norton he swore that the old monster creaked and swallowed the rest of her on the spot. He could still hear the muffled shrieks as he hightailed it out like his ass was on fire.

Thanks for the drink, kid, enjoy yer hike tomorrow!

The wife puts on her brave face and dutifully counts out the meds.  One for sleeping.  Two for the headaches that one causes.  A fourth for the incipient damage to the kidneys those three in combination do.

Doctors at the VA said this was the best treatment, and temporary only.  To stop the screaming, the moaning, the waking up at 3:15 every morning groping for an M240 that isn't there, isn't next to me with a belt of AP-T rounds.

Everyone treats me like I'm a UXB.  Because I am.  Because of what I saw.  At first everyone was like, welcome home hero, welcome home.  They wanted to play that Lee Greenwood song at me, buy me beers.  The fuck they know.

Every night I go back to the FOB, every night I look down the slope of that hill, in that valley, jammed between rocks older than God somewhere between the Pakistani border and nowhere, and I see it walking straight through our minefield, stepping over and under tripwires that should be blasting out illum flares all over the place, passing through the fields I know motion sensors have covered because I set them and watched them being set myself, that thing just glides forward.  Face like an Arab, and I don't mean that in the racist sense, no, this guy might look like all the rest to the rest of the team but I know the difference.  His face is Semitic, old, older than Afghanistan, older than Saudi Arabia, Iran, older than History, and he is just gliding over our perimeter like the best soon-to-be-left-behind-and-turned-into-IEDs your tax dollars can buy aren't even there.

And I can't squeeze the spade grips on the .50 to chop him into sliced pastrami.  My hands won't work, my voice is stuck in my throat.

Then it's in.  Its, because that smiling, devil face with the nib and depthless black eyes is gone, replaced by something I can't and won't describe.

The sound of 23 men dying.  Have you ever heard a living human being pulled apart?  Do you know what it sounds like?  Get a watermelon, cut a gash in one side, put your hands in and pull it open.  Something like that.

The next morning I've pissed myself, my legs are cramped and numb because I haven't left my fighting position and a Blackhawk comes in and I don't remember anything else except six weeks at Wiesbaden punctuated by screaming and attacking doctors and family members and a few nightmares, few because there wasn't much sleep.  They tsk-tsk'ed and talked in hushed tones about survivor's guilt and mortar rounds and expunging my record and giving me a bronze star and disability pay...but what do they know.

So a person that wears my face and skin moves around my house in a pattern, taking out garbage, mowing the lawn, in a numb haze.  Some nights when I'm outside, drinking a beer, across the highway in the tree-line, I see a tall, straight-backed figure, stepping from the silhouette of one tree to the next, straying ever closer to the edge of visibility in the moonlight.

I see Him.  And  I know one night He will come to finish what His work is.

(Are we still doing this?  We need to keep doing this.)

Help me.  Please, if you find this, help me.

I'm the summer "intern" who came to work in the warehouse.  You have to have noticed I didn't clock out today, or yesterday or whenever it is.  I think it's been three days, maybe?  I've slept a few times, but maybe it was only minutes or whatever.  My phone is in my locker, and I don't wear a watch.

I came back here to shift boxes around, the foreman told me to come back here.  I moved stuff around with the pallet jack and when I turned around it's all different.  Just endless rows of boxes.  I thought I'd boxed my self in HA HA and now I can't get out.  I yelled, I tried to move stacks with the jack and it's just more and more boxes.  It's a maze of boxes.  

yesterday (?) I tried to climb a stack to look over, and I couldn't get to the top.  I got my toes in and climbed up just fine that was easy enough but the top was always two or three boxes away.  I finally looked STRAIGHT UP and climbed the last three boxes but the second I blinked it was three more boxes higher...and I could barely see the floor.

I have tried marking the floor with this sharpie, I have tried making a path on the boxes but when I turn around it's worn off or the boxes have moved.

something else, too...the box labels don't make sense any more.  The place where I was they were all bar-coded and arranged like the foreman said to, by sku, then destination, and so on but now it's just gibberish and the barcode reader just shows ERROR when I try any of the codes.

I tried cutting a box open with my knife but it was like the cardboard just resisted the damn blade, I swapped out the blade with the other three in the handle and it's like trying to cut through rock that feels like cardboard.  Same with the tape on top of them.

I'm so thirsty and so tired...I think this sharpie is running out of ink, I threw the other one towards what I think was the front of the ware house but I didn't hear nothing if it hit or landed somewhere I don't know.

------------

that was ystrday

climed box to top, made it to top to see, no blink

boxes go evrywhere, cant see front back side nothing no path just endless

so thirsty

help me

Knock knock! Who's there?
A friend my friend, don't be scared
Come let me in, I am tall and thin
And if I had a face it would wear a grin

I'll make you smile as I tickle your ribs
Oh how I love the ones in cribs!
We'll play and play all day long
And who can say that is wrong?

Although my words may make no sound
I have things to show that will astound
Come now child, don't you fear
Let me in, the Slender Man is here.

"Daddy, I had a bad dream."

You blink your eyes and pull up on your elbows. Your clock glows red in the darkness—it's 3:32. "Do you want to climb into bed and tell me about it?"

"No, Daddy."

The oddness of the situation wakes you up more fully. You can barely make out your daughter's pale form in the darkness of your room. "Why not, sweetie?"

"Because in my dream, when I told you about the dream, the thing wearing Mommy's skin sat up."

For a moment, you feel paralyzed; you can't take your eyes off of your daughter. The covers behind you begin to shift.





Creepypasta, but a good one. (from the creepypasta wiki and from who knows where before that)

Quote from: Nazgul;555175Creepypasta, but a good one. (from the creepypasta wiki and from who knows where before that)

Oh yeah there's some great stuff out there, this has a good list

http://thekingofwolves.webs.com/index.htm

and of course here

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Creepypasta

Times are hard, so winning the holiday was wonderful.

An all expenses paid one week holiday for two in Paris, with a trip to Euro Disney thrown in. Flights, accommodation and breakfasts paid for - even some spending money as well. On your last full day you and your [wife/husband/significant other/child] go on a tour of the Paris catacombs. They say your companion wandered off – but you saw the thing take them!

You left the party and ran off in pursuit, but there was more than one and you got slugged from behind and awoke to find the guide leaning over you. A search has been made, but no trace has been found of your loved one. The police don't believe your story of the things you half-saw down there – in fact they have started to ask you about the state of your relationship...perhaps your partner just decided to leave? There are, they say, weirdo freaks – drug addicts and others - who use the catacombs for raves and parties, so perhaps they might turn up something by talking to their snitches...try to be patient.

Now you sit with the tour guide in a cafe. He has searched you out. He has also seen the creatures! He describes the smell of them, they way they chatter in whispers, the glaring eyes that seem to glow. He has a cousin – ex-French Foreign Legion Paras – bored as hell since he left – he might help. The little man looks at his cup, embarrassed, as he says that the flics are just going to bury this case – they don't want to accept that there is something down there. His offer is your only way to find your loved one.

You have to leave the nice hotel tomorrow. The money has nearly run out and there's not that much in the bank account back home. The embassy staff are useless, and keep suggesting you should see a doctor...a psychiatrist. Tomorrow you were both supposed to fly home.

And one guilty question haunts you – why didn't the things take you as well? Why were you left behind?

[Up till now the contributions seem to suggest one-player games – this is a party: puny but knowledgeable guide, ex-military muscle, and traumatised foreign everyman/woman.]

And yes...this is exactly the sort of thing we should be doing.