The String Theory

 This one is really freaky. Also, I do not own it.


Have you ever had an experience that suggested someone else was in your house, and just thought “I don’t wanna know” and left it? Sometimes, fear of the unknown just seems like the preferable option than facing a real, concrete danger. Normally it’s nothing, though. One time, the beeper function of my wireless housephone went off, when I was the only one home. It could only be called from the living room. Another time, I swear someone took some change from my desk. They’re all probably just slightly disconcerting tricks of the memory.
But what would you do when something truly suggestive happens? Would you run, or just ignore it, like I did?
Last Monday was a normal day. I got up, brushed my teeth, changed into school clothes… All little parts of my morning ritual. It seemed like it would be another totally un-noteworthy day, until I saw the strings.
There were three or four thick twine strings in my room. They criss-crossed between the walls around my bed, one attached to the door. No way would I have missed them before; I should have tripped over them. They were tied to pins in the walls, which had also not existed before ten seconds ago.
Nobody could have been in my room while I was in it, let alone set this up. It was early, and my brain wasn’t processing correctly. I simply discredited the sight, untied the strings and left for school, leaving them balled up on my desk.
It didn’t get any better later. Outside my house there were hundreds of them, tied between houses, around cars, across streets… This had to be some super elaborate prank. One of those hidden camera shows, or a comedy improv blog. They had gotten everyone else to play along too; passer-bys were tangled in them, tying them to objects they were walking towards and away from, as if they had been and were continuing to follow the course laid out for them.
I nervously continued my journey to school. On the bus, every except me was tied to the door. At school, groups of friends were tied to each other; teachers were tied to their desks and boards. Oddly enough, at this point all I could wonder was why I had been left out.
When my friend Lucy sat beside me in first period, she simply plonked her bag down on my lap and rested her chin in her hand, looking right past me to the window outside.
“Hey Lucy.”
No response.
“Come on, I didn’t expect you to be in on this too. “
She sighed and started taking books from her bag. All the books were tied to her hands. I grinned, and yanked one of the strings off a book. She didn’t seem to notice, instead simply disregarding the book completely, letting it drop to the floor without a moment’s hesitation.
“Um.” I leaned down, picking up her book and placing it back on her desk. She took no notice.
“Well, if that’s how we’re gonna play it.” I smiled, trying to look playful, but really just trying to hide my nervousness. I bundled all the strings attached to her together with one hand, then pulled them all free.
She blinked, turning to stare at me.
“Holy crap, Martin. You’re like a ninja or something.”
“I’ve been sitting here for maybe ten minutes.” I smiled again, relieved my friend had finally “noticed” me.
“Where did all these strings come from??” She gasped, seemingly noticing for the first time.
“I assumed you were all fucking with me…”
She stood up, backing into a corner. No one else in the class noticed.
“They weren’t here just a minute ago! Do you see them too??” Her tone made it clear she was genuinely scared.
“No. Didn’t you-. “ I was interrupted by my teacher slamming the door behind her. Everyone except me and Lucy murmured a good morning, and still, no one seemed to pay either of us any notice.
“People have been ignoring me all day.” I said to Lucy, before turning to our teacher. “Hey! Dumb bitch! You can’t teach for shit!”
No reaction.
“I’m getting away from all this shit.” Lucy pulled a few strings aside and left the class. I followed, and surprise-surprise, no one else noticed.
We wandered the corridors, leaving and entering classes as we saw fit. Whenever we untied a chair or book from someone else, it was like it suddenly didn’t matter to them. It didn’t exist.

I showed her the street outside; there were more strings than when I came in this morning. Twice as many. We carefully picked our way through the tangle, making our way to a nearby coffee shop. Not particularly grand, I know. But what would you do in our situation? As I said, fear of the unknown sometimes seems like the safer option. On a few occasions, I suggested we untie a few more people. Lucy was opposed to it, remembering how terrified she’d been.
In the coffee shop, we grabbed a couple of sandwiches and drinks from the fridge. We found a table, untied all strings attached to the chairs, and sat down. We both ate in silence, both of us too scared, both of us distracting ourselves by watching the strangers in the shop, oblivious to the strings.
After twenty minutes, Lucy spoke up. “Now she’s gonna take that sandwich.” She said, pointing at a woman across the shop. Sure enough, she walked to the fridge and took the plastic wrapped sandwich she was tied to. “She pays for it and leaves.” She did so, according to the prophecies of the strings. “That guy doesn’t intend to pay.” I watched as a man took his coffee and ran out of the store, the two servers just looking too exasperated to go after him.
“This is horrible.” She whimpered. “Let’s go. Please.”
Outside wasn’t much better. Everyone just followed the strings’ instructions, going about their daily lives. Lucy announced she was going home to sleep this off, and I agreed to walk her home. She only lived ten minutes away.
Away from the busier part of town there were fewer strings. It was nicer; we could pretend it wasn’t happening.
When we turned onto Lucy’s street, she stopped, her mouth falling open.
“What now?” I broke the silence, my voice sounding surprisingly small.
”Look.” She pointed outside one of her neighbours houses.
I saw it clearly, and I’ll take my memory of that moment ‘til the day I die. A little dark imp, maybe three feet tall, walking along with its knuckles on the ground, almost like a monkey. It had two bulbous yellow eyes taking up about half its face, and no mouth or any other facial features. It was holding a hammer and a ball of twine, which it was letting out behind it.
It walked quickly and quietly from the front door of the house to the mailbox. It stopped, hammered a nail into the side of the box, and tied it’s string around it. It turned to face us, and stopped when it spotted us.
My bottom fell out even further than it had already been, but it just stared with a look of surprise and curiosity. You could almost say it was the more frightened one. Suddenly, it beckoned to us with its tiny hand.
I looked at Lucy, she hadn’t moved. I looked back at the imp, which stared at me.
I halved the distance between us, and then halved it again. This wasn’t fear of the unknown anymore; it was fear of this little guy. Didn’t seem like anything to be scared of. When I was a meter away from it, it extended its hand.
“Uh. Hi.” I shook it. It nodded in approval, blinking its massive yellow eyes up at me.
“So you’re the ones in charge of the strings?” It nodded eagerly. I called Lucy over, but she stayed where she was.
“There are more of you?” Another nod. I wanted to ask it so many questions, about what it was and where it came from, but it seemed for now I was stuck with only yes or no questions.
“Do we even have free will?”
It just looked at me, almost sadly. I immediately felt sick to my stomach, and couldn’t bear looking at the little monster anymore. I grabbed Lucy, who had been listening to our exchange, and now sat on the curb with her head in her hands.
“Come on.”
We entered her house, and I made her a cup of tea. When I found her in the living room, she had untied her dog and was curled up with it, crying. I set the tea down and sat beside her.
“I’m so scared.” She whispered after a good ten minutes of sobbing. I didn’t answer. I couldn’t.
“I’m going to sleep” She mumbled suddenly, and was under within the minute. Sleep was starting to sound pretty good all of a sudden, my eyelids suddenly felt like they were being weighed down.
I collapsed to the rug, and the last thing I heard before I fell asleep was the scurrying of several sets of little feet nearby.
I felt much better the next day, as if the whole affair had been a dream. I’d probably have believed that if I hadn’t been awoken by Lucy’s mother that morning, wondering what I was doing sleeping over without permission or something.
Over breakfast, Lucy asked me why I looked so pale and nervous. I turned to her and smiled, mumbling something to her about feeling sick.
But the truth was, I was scared because I couldn’t see any strings, and was wondering whether my actions were truly my own.

The Guests

I love how my Grandfather is always around to keep me company. On days that my Mom isn’t around, Grandpa is always nearby to comfort me. I sit on his lap, tell him stories about my day, and I never feel like I’m alone. Although our house is never empty even when Mom leaves for work, and I sit with Grandpa and read stories while he enjoys his chair, we always have guests in every room of our house.
There’s Edna and Elma the twins my Grandfather is friends with, they’re always sitting together in the kitchen with a teapot between just the two of them. There is also Joseph the plumber who went to school with Dad. Often seated with him in his study as dad is hunched over his desk, with a grin on his face, always looking at their High school yearbook while Joseph keeps him company as old friends should. Unless Mom needs to use a spare chair, then Joseph just stands next to Dad as he looks at his yearbook.
Then we have our younger guests like Beth and Tomas, who are around my age. Often upstairs when they aren’t playing with me. However I don’t really care if Tomas stays up there with his Mom and Dad, he never talks to me, and always makes a stupid face at me when I try and play with him. But Beth is really nice, she has pretty blonde curls in her hair, wears pretty perfumes and makeup, and sometimes Mom buys new dresses for her to wear. I’m sure she likes those, because she always has a smile on her face, even when I accidentally asked Mom how she got the ugly scar on her back. I felt bad when Mom told me that she had gotten the scar when she came here and was separated from her parents, who Mom says were very bad people. So I guess that makes her like the sister I never had, but I just like playing games with her when I’m bored. But Mom often scolds me if I get Beth’s dresses dirty, or accidentally knock her down.
Tonight my Mom says we’ll be having another guest, and a new friend for me to play with! Hopefully his family can come too! But Mom says that it’s hard to get an entire family like Tomas’ to come and stay in our home. So before she leaves for work, she tells me she’ll be home by Midnight. She gives me a kiss on the cheek, packs up her tools, and tells me to go make some space in Beth’s room for the new boy to stay. It’s the last time I talk to Mom before she leaves for work, and I go upstairs to get the bedroom ready. It takes me awhile, and by the time I’m done I don’t want to play with Beth like I usually do. So I grab a storybook from Beth’s shelf, and go downstairs to the living room. As always Grandpa is there, sitting in his rocking chair, waiting for me to come sit in his lap and tell him how my day went.
So I climb up into his lap, and snuggle against him as I tell him about our new guest. But I notice something’s wrong. His head is limp to one side, and his eye’s are closed. So I hop off his lap, and go into the kitchen as fast as I can. I run past Edna and Elma, and immediately go for the bottom drawer next to the silverware where we keep Grandfather’s emergency supplies. I go back into the living room, stopping at the doorway to remember my manners, and I say “Good evening” to Edna and Elma before I go back to Grandpa. Carrying the supplies in my arms, I drop them behind Grandpa’s chair and look up at his neck. “Grandpa, your stitches came out again! It’ll take me forever to fix your neck like last time!…hmph…if only Mom had sewn you shut with a machine and used beads to stuff you like she did to Beth, instead of that flimsy cotton. Then you wouldn’t be falling apart all the time!”.
But I’m not upset with him, it’s not his fault. Mommy was only learning when she first brought him over as a guest. We’d only just moved into the neighborhood, and she had wanted to make sure that we’d never have to be lonely ever again. But of course now our guests can sit straight and never fall over, and Mom says that someday she’ll be sitting next to Grandfather while I’m out bringing new guests to keep us company.

Chat

It was a regular Friday night and I was up late chatting to my friend Bradley on this virtual chat room we had found online. He told me and the other guys who we had just met, that he was able to stay up as late as he wanted, because his parents were away until the weekend and he had the house to himself. We stayed on there for a few hours having fun with these random people, and I noticed Bradley had taken a liking to one girl in particular. Soon enough, my mum began calling out for me to go to sleep. As I was about to log off, I asked Bradley what he was doing tomorrow, thinking he might want to stop by my place. He didn’t reply for a while, until:
“Bradley is typing a message.”
Then it went blank.
“Bradley is typing a message.”
Nothing again.
“Whatever man, I’m going to bed we’ll talk about it tomorrow.” I said. It was strange for him to just stop replying like that.
I didn’t hear from him again until the next day when I logged on to the chat site and he was on. He apologised for not replying last night and said he had just been busy. We had a brief exchange, and he said he would come over soon, saying it was urgent. That was fine, but queried him why he didn’t want to wait to see his parents first, who would be home any minute. He insisted there was no time because he had something really important to show me, and then logged straight off. I thought that was out of character for him, as he usually put his family before anything, and I grew curious at what he wanted to show me so badly.
I expected him to be over soon, as he only lived about twenty minutes away, when I received a disturbing phone call. It was Bradley’s parents, who had just come home and were sounding extremely worried. They asked if I knew anything on Bradley’s whereabouts, to which I told them not to worry, because he was in fact on his way over. The phone fell silent for a moment until I heard a deathly scream from the mother in the background on the other end of the line. The father drew a deep breath, and bravely strung together a sentence that I’ll never forget. “Get out of the house now. Bradley’s here… He’s dead.” They had found Bradley’s lifeless body hung up like a coat in the wardrobe. I ended the call in shock, as it became apparent why he had asked if I would be home alone, when suddenly I heard the back door creak open.
Instinctively, I did the first thing I could think of and quickly crawled under my bed to hide. I heard the sound of footsteps coming closer, ever so slowly. I dared not to open my eyes, but when I dreadfully peaked through my fingers, I saw these pale white, cold, bare feet coming in to my room, almost in slow motion. I would hate to see the person such feet belonged to. As they slowly approached the bed, you could hear the dampness of the footsteps peeling away from the floorboards; my heart was pounding in my mouth and I held my breath. Just when I couldn’t possibly get any more scared, my phone let off a loud beep to notify me that I had received a message. It was from Bradley’s phone and read: “Where are you?” as the feet stopped abruptly, dead in their tracks…

Laura

Laura looks at the clock on her dashboard which reads “5:43”. She curses herself for staying late at work, but there was just too much to do to justify leaving early. Being Valentines Day, she knows she should have made an effort to get home on time to be with her husband. They managed to somehow get the kids out of the house for the weekend and the thought of missing out on this opportunity for some alone time is nearly frightening.
Rolling into her driveway, she notices something posted on the door. The stack of papers on the passenger seat is stuffed into her bag as she exits her minivan and walks up to the door. Her eyes squint the whole way, trying to make something of this disconformity. It’s a note. She reads it and her heart sails.
“Meet me inside for some fun…”
Part of her feels her level of guilt double, being that he has put some real effort into this special day, but the other part can’t wait to see what her husband has cooked up. She turns around to see if anyone is watching, slightly embarrassed that perhaps someone has seen this sultry example of foreplay. No one. She tears off the note and dances inside, giddy with excitement.
The lights throughout the house are all turned down while candles burn, their dim ambiance casting soft rays of amber against the beige walls. She tosses her bag to the floor and starts searching. The second note is found in the kitchen, stuck to the side of a can of whipped cream.
“You’re almost there. Come to the bedroom and bring this with you.”
Her heart is pumping with anticipation as she grabs it and makes her way to the staircase. She grasps the banister with her free hand, arms shaking. Each step has a rose petal placed delicately on it and rich vanilla cascades from a candle perched somewhere in the dark abyss of the hallway. Reaching the top floor she sees another note on the door to the bedroom.
“Welcome.”
She quickly fluffs and fixes her hair before flinging the door open, standing in the threshold in her sexiest stance. The bed is made up with heart shaped pillows. A bottle of champagne is chilling in a bucket of ice. More candles fill the room with light and scent but something is wrong. Her husband is nowhere to be found. Confused, she looks around finding one final note across the room, stuck to her dresser.
“Your husband is dead. Perhaps you would like to join him in the closet?”

In The Mirror

Normally you sleep soundly, but the thunderstorm raging outside is stirring you from your sleep. You begin to doze, then another crash jolts you awake. The cycle lasts most of the night. So you lay there, eyes open and outward, looking at your room stretching out before you in oblong shadows. Your eyes move from nameless object, to object, until you reach your mirror, sitting adjacent to you across the room.
Suddenly a flash of lighting, and the mirror flickers in illumination. For a scant second the mirror revels to you dozens of faces, silhouettes within its frame, mouths open and eyes blackened. They stare out at you, their black pupils fixed upon your face.
Then it is done. Are you sure of what you have seen? Unsettled, you don’t sleep for the rest of the evening. The next morning you remove the mirror from your wall and toss it in the trash. It didn’t matter if the vision you had seen was of truth or falsehood, you wanted to be rid of that mirror. In fact, you scrap every mirror in your house.
Weeks pass and the event of that night falls into passive memory. You are spending the day at a friend’s house and it’s time to use the bathroom. While you are in there the faucet starts to run without you prompting it. Taken aback by this, you do not yet act, trying to reason with your paranoia in your mind. The water starts to steam and a skin of moisture covers the mirror up above. You’re watching intently as words form: “Please return the mirrors. We miss watching you sleep at night.”

The Corpse Bride

‘La Pascualita’, who first appeared in the window of a bridal boutique in Chihuahua, Mexico, in March of 1930, has become the subject of some spooky urban legends. These are all attributed to the striking realism of the figure, and the rumor that she isn’t just a mannequin: she’s supposedly the embalmed daughter of the former shopkeeper. Ever since she was first placed in the display window, many people have felt disturbed over the details on the figure, like her fingernails and facial features, and some noticed a similarity to the shop owner, Pascuala Esparza. She became known as ‘La Pascualita’, and despite published statements from the store owner’s family denying her origin, the name stuck. People have said that the figure will change positions at night, and many are creeped out by her gaze, which is said to be piercing and almost ‘alive’. Some of the current employees of the store refuse to change the clothes on the dummy, and many say that their hands break out into a sweat whenever they get near her. ”Her hands are very realistic and she even has varicose veins on her legs. I believe she’s a real person,” one employee was quoted as saying. Whether she is real or not, the display window that La Pascualita resides behind has become a popular place for Dia de Los Muertes altars and she has become a bit of a famous oddity with recent attentions devoted by Mexican celebrities

The Bunny Man

After the civil war Fairfax County, Virginia became more populated and eventually an insane asylum was built there. No one wanted to live near the asylum and because of the public outrage the institution was shut down.
The administration transferred the patients and in 1904 the process was completed. During the transfer, some of the patients escaped and hid in the surrounding woods and forest. These individuals were lost, delusional and dangerous. Most of them were found except Marcus Lawster and Douglas Griffen. The local authorities found a trail they believed belonged to them, littered with half eaten mutilated bunnies.
The trail led deep into the woods to a tunnel bridge crossing a wide creek. There they found Marcus hanging from the tunnel entrance. There was a note attached to his foot that said, “You’ll never find me no matter how hard you try! Signed, The Bunny Man.” That tunnel has been called Bunny Man Bridge ever since.
The legend says that if you walk all the way down the tunnel at around midnight the Bunny Man will grab you and hang you from the entrance of the bridge.
Strange deaths and phenomena has been connected with the Bunny Man Bridge. There was a young man from Clifton, Virginia who came upon the Bridge while traveling. Later, he killed his parents and dragged their bodies into the woods to hang them from the bridge and then killed himself. In 1943, three teenagers, two men and a young woman, were at the bunny man bridge for Halloween night. The three youths were found dead, hung from the bridge with their bodies slashed open. All with notes attached to their feet saying the same thing,” You’ll never catch the Bunny Man!”
In 2001, after hearing the tale, six local students and a guide searched the area. They found mutilated bunny parts during their search and left the forest after they heard noises and saw figures moving around in the woods