Mostrando las entradas con la etiqueta sounds. Mostrar todas las entradas
Mostrando las entradas con la etiqueta sounds. Mostrar todas las entradas

domingo, 10 de enero de 2016

Creatures of the lighthouse

   Jane took off her socks and put them on top of the heating. She had no idea the lighthouse had radiators in all its rooms but it really came in handy that that was the case. She also took off her pants and shirt and decided to stay only in her underwear, lying on top of her jacket. The storm outside did not seem to subside, if anything it was getting worse by the minute. The rain was so strong that almost nothing could be seen, except when the light from the tower passed over it and revealed. But even then, it was just the pissed off sea and the razor sharp rocks that had been the whole reason to built a lighthouse there.

 For many years, the tower had been managed by a human, a man that stayed there several months and then was replaced and had to come back again later on that year and so on. But rather recently, that had ended with the modernization of the tower and the installation of an automated system. That was the reason why Jane had been forced to kick the door several times until the old cement caved in to her efforts and the door flung open.

 The machines and computers that controlled the tower now occupied most of the space but there were still spaces to be used by people, possibly for tourism or by the person that had to come and fix the system in the case of any failure or something like that. It all looked so new and clean, except for the ground level that was slowly flooding due to the storm. Jane had found an old folding chair and had used it to prevent the door from opening as she had broken it when entering.

 She had been walking for days along the national park that surrounded the lighthouse so Jane knew exactly where she was or at least she had realized it when she found the tower when the rain started to get really dangerous. All the time she had been walking in that place, she had thought that animals were the ones to be careful about but it wasn’t the case. The storm had scared them all off and she was the only living being stupid enough not to take shelter when in had been obvious for many hours than the storm was going to arrive to the coast.

 Deciding to check for food, Jane realized she didn’t really have much food on her backpack. At first, she had a lot of provisions she had brought from home like dried fruit and things like that but now her rations were very low and had nothing to calm her stomach, which was growling like a wounded wolf. She decided to go down to the middle level of the tower and check out a kind of deposit there was there. No idea why, but the door was opened so she had free reign to check everything out. There were cleaning products, paper, some tools to fix things, a big bag of sand (for some reason) and, finally, a survival kit that she opened in haste.

 The kit was a very complete and Jane made a mental note to thank the people that managed the lighthouses when arriving to society. It had flares, a flashlight, more tools but also some beef jerky and juices in bags and candy. It wasn’t the most nutritious meal ever but Jane guessed it had been put there in the case of an accident or something. It wasn’t really to survive on for more than a week so Jane knew it was perfect for her as she believed she was only staying for one night.

 She went back to the top floor with the whole kit and started to eat as she sat down again on her jacket. But realizing the floor was too cold, she decided to stand by the heating and look outside, in order no to get bored and maybe getting sleepy. She ate the beef jerky slowly: it was very hard to chew on it and had to yank pieces of one by one, so it took time to finish a single portion, which was good in order no to ran out of it.

 Then she gasped and almost dropped her meal. She raised her head and looked outside, sure she had seen something when the light of the tower had hit it. But there was nothing, only water falling from the sky and the water from the ocean that was very violent. Aside from that, only the rocks and none of them had the shape of what she had seen.

 Jane sat down again and realized it was impossible that a person would be outside the tower as the storm was very violent. And who she had seen did not seem like a normal person, it was like a very pale person, almost like the way people have painted ghosts over the centuries. The more she analyzed it all; she realized it was really silly. She had been silly to think about someone been out there and it had possibly being the light playing ticks on her tired mind.

 She decided to look in the kit again and she found one of those blankets that keeps you warm without electricity (the one use by paramedics). She just used that as her blanket lying on her jacket and used her hands as a pillow. Before that, she had turned off the light on the top floor of the tower and everything was now in darkness.

 Her eyes closed and then open and then closed only to open again a few seconds later. The light of the tower annoyed her but that really wasn’t the reason why she couldn’t sleep. Jane was, for the first time since she had begun her adventure, very scared. She didn’t mind the heat outside or sleeping in a tent or even the bugs. But there was something deep inside her telling her than there was something weird about that tower and, furthermore, that what she saw had not been an optical illusion of some kind.

 Then, she heard knocking. The sound was weak but it was clear it was coming from below. Jane’s mind raced, thinking if maybe there really was someone in need out there or if there was really such a thing as ghosts or spirits. But for that last one, she had to punish herself in her mind: it was ridiculous that a grown woman than had learned a few things in life was now thinking there could be a ghost outside her door. It was preposterous and simply stupid.

 So she closed her eyes but the sound coming from the ground floor didn’t really help her relax in order to sleep. Trying to be logical, she concluded that the sound had to be because she hadn’t put the chair in the perfect angle to really close the door. So the wind was banging on it and everything was shaky and moving. So she decided to stand up and go down the stairs in the dark, with the flashlight, in order to fix that sound that could make her crazy if she didn’t do something about it.

 Barefoot as she was, she realized the ground floor was flood when she put her feet on the cold water. It reached ankles. She walked to the door and realized she had been correct in her conclusion. The door kept getting opened and closed and it was all because the fair was not good enough to keep it shut and the water out. So she tried to find something she could put on the handle of the door in order to close it for good.

 She had started walking towards the stairs in order to go up again and look for something or at least some told to help her, when the door flung open and the wind entered messing her hair and everything. Water also came in, making her fall to the ground, hurting her knee. She reached for the door and tried to close it but the door wouldn’t move and the wind was too strong for her. She pushed and pulled and did everything she could, but everything coming in from the storm was making her weaker and weaker by the second.

 It was then when, once again, she saw it outside. But this time she was sure she had seen it because it hadn’t been for a fraction of a second. This time, she had felt time get frozen and her eyes been able to detail every single part of the creature’s complexion. It was taller than her, very pale and with a larger mouth than any human she knew. Its feet and hands were very large and it watched her, very attentively. She noticed it had no pupils and that its eyes were very white too.

 But that lasted a minute or so. In the next moment, the wind subsided for a second, which Jane used to push harder and close the door with a loud sound. There was no need to look for something to lock it with because the door had closed so violently it had become jammed in its place. Nevertheless, Jane stayed there for a long while, only breathing.

 The next day, the storm disappeared. The weather outside was perfect, with bird singing and everything. After the door had closed, she had remained there for a while but she eventually found her way to the top and had some sleep. It took her a long while to open the door again and she did it fell of its hinges and into the flooded floor. Jane just went out and started walking along the coast, looking at the sea and how the storm was now there, again.


 And she thought of the creature but even now she doubted its existence. Maybe the monster was inside her and she had just seen it in a dire moment.

martes, 8 de diciembre de 2015

Today I'm sick

   Today I am sick. Today I feel awful and my environment is not helping at all. The guys I live with only know how to be gross and loud and that has always annoyed me. I mean, what has always annoyed me has been the fact that people are so oblivious of what they do and not do. People are sometimes disgusting but they don’t even realize it and me, as a person who claims to be clean and neat in general, I really don’t like it.

 Every single day those conversations in Arabic. Every fucking day. I don’t care where people are from; I couldn’t care less to be honest. But destiny had to put a person that talks in one of the most aggressive languages in the world just a window away from me. And, apparently, he speaks to every member of his family every single day of the year. That’s nice but couldn’t he do it in a lower volume and just type once in a while?

 Of course, people don’t have to live by what I feel or think but sometimes I know I’m right and I don’t need to test my theories because I simply know how to be a decent person. Other people are used to screaming, yelling whatever it is they want to communicate. I don’t. The only time I yell is when I’m desperate and I always do it with people I feel I know, not with a bunch of people I don’t really know nothing about.

 The same thing happens when I have to hear that same guy masturbate or do I don’t really know what. He’s apparently oblivious to the fact that he is really loud and that he has his window open every fucking day at every hour. The climate now is colder than some months ago. What is he thinking?

 I am sick but as in ill. My head hurts a lot, as if my brain had detached from the cranium and now it just moves around in there. My jaw also seems to pulsate with pain, my cheekbones and my throat. Passing saliva hurts a lot and I just want this to go away.

 I know this is my fault, I made it happen. I was silly enough to sleep one night with no socks or a t-shirt and that is suicide when temperatures can get very low at night. I assume all responsibility for getting this virus but I want to get rid of it too, I want to make it go away and feel good again. I hate to be sick and feel defenseless and confused.

 It hurts even more because I’m alone. There’s no one here to help, there’s no one who can even care about how I feel. I don’t have the things I need close to me because I am always distracted and never focused on what I should be focused. I miss them now, as I miss them very single day of my life. I miss my bed.

Damn it… My belly hurts now and I don’t even remember what I ate yesterday. Nothing “dangerous”, that I now off. But it hurts a lot and also does my back and my chest and, again, my throat. I think I just want to lay here in my bed for the rest of the day but I have a problem with that and it is the fact that I need to get out and by some medicine so this can go away quicker.

 Sadly, I don’t live in a normal place when pharmacies have delivery to your home or even online service. No, apparently the XXIst century hasn’t reached this so-called “first world country”. Which, in many aspects, it’s a shame.

Again, loud noises. Again, doors are being slammed and steps been walked with those shoes that looked donated from a war. Yes, I am the kind of person that just people for how they look in general. Call me an awful human being then and move along.

 It hurts too much and I have no idea why I decided to write something today. Maybe it’s guilt that I didn’t write last Sunday or maybe it’s because I feel I need to prove myself to people I don’t even know every single day of the year. But not today, not anymore.


 I don’t feel good so let’s leave it here, half the normal size. We will see each other tomorrow, I hope.

domingo, 30 de agosto de 2015

The mansion by the woods

   The mansion had been deserted for years. No one had seen what was inside, not even the children that crossed under the broken fence and used the front gardens as a place to play the sport of their preference. They had even broken some of the remaining windows, which were not many, but never dared to enter the building to grab their belongings. They knew that the place was haunted or something worse. When they played, they could sometimes hear someone slamming the windows and punching the walls or something like that. It was very scary and they always left when that happened. For them, it meant that the spirits had been having an especially awful day and they didn’t want to have anything to do with that. They just left and wouldn’t go in for a few days.

 Curious people had also come around but never past the fence that still went all around the property. Somehow, adults felt something else than the children or were frightened easier. The thing was that every adult that came in contact with the fence started screaming and left in a huff. The truth was they instantly saw the way they would die in the future. No one knew if it was an accurate prediction but no one really wanted to find out anything about that. They just felt they had to leave urgently after seeing that and just did. Even the children saw and heard more. Adults just wanted to get the hell out before something scarier presented itself or something like that. With time, no inhabitant of the nearby town would go near the mansion, only crazies from other towns.

 Despite its fame, the mansion was not in such a horrible state, not as one would imagine. The place was falling apart in some areas but the rest looked as beautiful as always, with a mixture of different tones of marble that looked beautiful, especially in the summer. The gardens were, of course, all dead because no one was taking care of them but one could see the past beauty just by taking a stroll. Well, if anyone took a stroll around the place. The place did not looked like the typical dark haunted house. It was a very beautiful place that had fallen into disgrace and no one really knew why. Very few people remain that remember what had happened there.

 The people of the town had always been very apprehensive to anyone that wanted to live in the woods or too far from the main municipality. The mansion was constructed over a hundred years ago and even then people watched it, from afar, with disdain. They thought that only crazy people that shouldn’t be trusted would decide to live in such a place. After all, the mansion was in the margin of the forest. No one lived there and the people of the town even tried to stop the construction arguing that it was a national park. But the forest wasn’t so the mansion was built there without any modifications to its initial design.

 Things were strange even from the start. Not only many workers left the building site because they had claimed they had seen creatures coming in from the forest, but also the place remained empty for at least ten years before a family finally came in to live there. People were very displeased by this and agreed in a town meeting that no one would ever help those people, not by selling food or supplies or helping them out of the region. But that meeting proved useless because the people of the mansion would ever come to them. The only time they would come in contact with those people would be when their cars crossed the small town to go from or into the mansion. Everyone fell silent when that happened, as if a hearse had just passed before them.

 The family that lived in the mansion was said to be one of the richest in the country They owned various oil fields and mines all over the country. And somehow, they had chosen such a lost region to come and live. No one knew if that arrangement would be permanent or only through the summer but asking would mean that they cared for them and that wasn’t what they had agreed on. The family did not even realize of the antagonist reaction of the people on town. The truth was that, for them, the mansion was a small piece of paradise that was only for them. They could have built it anywhere else in the country but the grandfather of the lady of the house had loved this region when young so they went for it.

 There was a father, a mother, two little girls and the youngest, which was a strange little boy. Even people in town knew he was strange because some of the people that worked in the house would often come into town and as they had never promised to deny them any service, they would talk to them even if they were there for only a few minutes. The one who talked the most was the gardener and it was them who had told the people about the youngest boy who would never leave the house and was always in a room for only their parents to see him. The girls had a nanny and they would often spend time with the cook but the boy would never join them. They believed him to be around five years old.

 The family came and went all summers, even staying a little bit more some years. They would never get any visitors but would rather stay inside much of the time. The girls would play a lot around the gardens and where the only members of the family that had an actual exchange with the rest of the staff. The two girls were eight and twelve years old and they would always play together. They would hold hands and skip around the gardens in order to smell the flowers or follow insects or just play around. They were cheerful children and, according to the people that worked in the mansion, no one else but them actually smiled. The father was absent and the mother was always melancholic.

 Then, they stopped coming for some years and returned three years later. It was the last time people saw the girls, who were already grown up. They were very beautiful ladies and it was said that the eldest was about to marry to a well renowned banker. It was on their last visit that they decided to visit the town and greet many of its inhabitants. No one asked anything, of course, but they were all mesmerized when seeing the two women. They had nothing uncommon physically or anything but they just felt strange, like something was off about them but no one really knew what it was. After that visit, they would never come back to town or to the mansion. Only her mother would come and her father, but only some times.

 It was obvious that the man of the house had never liked the mansion or whatever it meant for him. Since the beginning, he would come and go so many times that people ignored his car after a while. People thought it was because of work but the truth was, according to the gardener that the man couldn’t stand to be in that mansion or in the presence of his wife. Somehow, and all staff agreed on this, he hated his wife and couldn’t even look at her. No one had ever seen them being nice to each other, not holding hands or sharing a nice moment. No, the woman was always crying or pacing around the house and the man would just leave and escape everything that tied him there.

 Then, one particularly hot summer, there was an explosion in the mansion that could be heard for many kilometers. Apparently it had been originated in the kitchen. The only casualty was the lady of the house. Every person in the vicinity was shocked to hear this but no one was able to go to her funeral. She was buried over night behind the house and that event marked the time when everyone left the mansion and its slow decay began. Some children now say that the tombstone in honor of the woman can still be seen but no adult had ever come that close to check by themselves. Everything had happened so fast that only years later people would start to remember and question: And the boy?


 Where was the little boy that the staff had sworn had always been kept in his room, only contacted by his parents? When the family left the mansion, no one ever saw a child with them and the gardener remembered clearly he only saw the girls and their father leave. So naturally, many people assumed the kid was still in the mansion. People would come to “rescue” him but then the visions started and no adult ever returned to the mansion. Only children that claim that the sounds where sometimes too much to bear. Some even confessed to have seen a face in the windows. But they didn’t saw a child, rather something much stranger and scarier. Something like the devil himself, they said.

martes, 26 de mayo de 2015

The Donner mansion

   For the last hundred years, people had stated that the Donner mansion was haunted. People claimed ghost lived there and that’s why people never went there anymore. Professor Marcus Stevens and his assistant Vanessa arrived in town just to check out the mansion, in order to put to rest the legend of the so-called ghosts. Professor Stevens was not a believer of the supernatural and was decided, in his spare time; to debunk any silly beliefs people might still have around the globe. He had chosen the Donner mansion because it was a very well known place, not only in the region but nationwide. People talked about how real the experiences there were and the professor wanted to end all of that.

 To be honest, he had personal reasons. Silly beliefs had left his grandfather helpless. When he was younger, his grandpa was suffering from a strange disease. He asked his mother and practically everyone in the family to take him to the hospital but they wouldn’t, saying it was the will of God and that if He intended grandpa to be cured, it would be done that way.  Even as a child, Marcus was restless, even trying to sneak into the house a doctor he had picked up from the phone book. But to no avail, as his parents forbid it and his grandpa died days later.

 When he grew up, he decided to study science and prove everything, make the world a more realistic place, getting rid of all the magical creatures, the folk tales and the silly beliefs that took lives like his grandfather’s every single day around the world. Since he was eighteen, he had left home and didn’t talk to any family member but he soon made lots of friends in the scientific circles, so there was no sadness or longing for the past. He hated his pasts, his family’s beliefs and all that had to do with that. He decided he could live very well without his parents or anyone else from his family close to him.

 The first thing they did was travelling to the town of Rensal, where the mansion was locate, and talk to many people there. The idea was to make something like a survey, in order to better understand the phenomenon that people claimed happened often in and around the mansion. They set up their headquarters in a small hotel room and they would interview people in the lobby. It was an old town in the mountains and now it was a ski paradise in the winter but it was not yet that season so there were not many people around.

 Many told them that the mansion got “more active” during the summer, when less people were visiting. This was odd as, in many other towns, the occurrences happened always in the months when tourists were in larger numbers. Anyway, that didn’t mean it wasn’t a hoax, it just meant people in this town were probably not manipulating the events occurring in the house, or at least not in a large scale. In one week, they had already interviewed more than one hundred people and that was more than enough to make a survey that showed which were the most frequent activities inside.

 Apparently, people saw lights inside the house despite the manor being disconnected from the power grid, many people also testified seen people there wearing old clothes and ignoring them and the small group of people that had entered the house told him that the walls were covered in some strange goo, yellow in color and with a terrible smell. Besides that there was the usual: voices, lights that went in and out, strange sounds, the feeling of being touched… Marcus and Vanessa knew them all from their other experiences and were ready to debunk the tales of Donner mansion.

 The following week was used to enter the house. The plan was to go into the mansion every afternoon, three whole hours. They would carry special equipment to detect metals, radioactivity and other events that may seem strange but were very normal in a old house. They had done it a million times. The first day, on Monday, they entered the house with care as the front porch seemed to be damped and the wood that formed it seemed to be in the verge of breaking into several pieces. They went along with Xavier, an old friend of Marcus who loved the whole hunted house experience. He wasn’t a scientist but gladly helped as he thought it was a very cool thing to do.

 The first thing they felt was cold. Despite very warm temperatures on the outside, the house remained as cold as in the winter. They measured the temperature, noted it down, and proceeded to another room, crossing a large hall with care. The place was not dark as the afternoon light entered the house through the high windows all around the hall but it was very strange as the glass was not transparent but had various colors. It was like walking around a circus fair ride.

 The first room they entered after that happened to be the kitchen. It smelled awful, as if someone had left food to rot there. But that didn’t make sense as no one had lived there for the last hundred years. Vanessa put on some gloves and took out the food that was rotting in the fridge. There was a moldy cheese, meat and a chicken breast, all covered in green and smelling awful. However, Vanessa was able to recover a plastic covering from behind the food and put that in one of their own plastic bags.

 Vanessa had been with Marcus for a long time. She started as a student of his in a physics class back in the university but they had formed a nice friendship that had consolidated just after she had graduated. In the blink of an eye, Marcus had hired her to be his assistant in the university and proposed her to be his assistant in these trips too. Vanessa did not hesitate, as she thought it was a very cool thing to do and she confessed that she had always been bored out of her mind when friends started talking about the possibilities of life after death, ghosts and all that supernatural crap. She even had proven to them how the Ouija board was all about conditioned thinking, a fake in simple terms.

 After finding the rotten food, Xavier stepped on a weak part of the kitchen and the floor broke beneath his feet. He twisted his ankle and both Marcus and Vanessa had to help him out of the mansion and to the medical center down in town. It was good that Marcus had asked a local to be there with a car in case they needed help, so he took Xavier away and they had to cancel the rest of the exploration for that day. They spent the night in the hospital waiting for the doctor to tell them about their friend. He was ok but he was going to have a cast and crutches. So there was no way for him to join them anymore.

 The rest of the week, Marcus and Vanessa would go into the mansion and test every single apparatus they had inside. They used the electromagnetic device to prove that the house was actually not fully disconnected from the power grid and just walking around they found thousands of small gaps and holes, which were used by the wind to enter and make strange noises. All very natural.  The cold feeling inside the hosue was explained because of the location of the house, just in the way a small air current that went down the mountain, covered in snow all year, towards the valley were the town was located.

 The only thing that hadn’t been able to prove wrong was the presence of unknown people inside the house; even some wearing old robes, from the times when the mansion was built. They decided to plant several cameras all around the house and stay one more week. Marcus wanted to go away as soon as possible because, although he found it all to be very interesting and even funny, he also wanted to properly rest this summer before the classes began again. He didn’t have much time to spare and this time he wanted to think more about himself than about work or others.

 However, the cameras didn’t show anything. She stayed in front of the monitors for hours, even falling asleep in front of them but they had not picked up anything, not a real person, not a floating person, nothing. On the last day, the moment they were packing, something happened. One of the cameras picked up kind of a shade crossing the front side of the house, apparently entering the mansion. Back in his home, Marcus checked the video various times. He could explain the shadow; it was probably the sun and the surrounding trees. But there was a moment when a face seemed to appear and the door opened a bit, and it was a heavy wooden door.

 For the first time ever, Marcus decided he didn’t care. He didn’t believe he was a ghost and he knew there was an explanation to everything that happened in that place and in places like that all over the world. But the truth was he was tired, growing fed up with filling his life with meaningless things. He had to admit he still resented their family but that, however, he was in need of someone to hug and that feeling appeared to him, like a ghost, every single morning.


 There was nothing supernatural in Donner mansion but there was something missing, something rather natural, from Marcus’s life and he didn’t know exactly what it was or how to get it.