Oxenfree

A Castle Under Siege.

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I took a peek outside my apartment today. It wasn’t a long one, I just stepped out onto my balcony for a moment, to take in the view. I saw the couple across the street arguing more fiercely than yesterday, and I wondered how long it would take them to finally be done. I saw the old veteran polishing one of his many medals with a dour look on his face, and I saw the sad old crone turn on her television and resume wasting away. And then, I caught a glimpse of something else, out of the corner of my eye. In one of the long uninhabited apartments of their building, a light I hadn’t seen turn on in years had apparently flickered to life of its own volition. I thought this was peculiar, so I took a closer look.

I took my binoculars and I zoomed in on the room. There was a figure inside, but it didn’t look like a person. It had too many legs, too many arms, and its skin was a sickly green color, but the biggest giveaway was that it was standing completely, unshakably still, gazing off into the distance as I was. As I zoomed in, I saw that it didn’t just have too many limbs; it had four eyes and a far-too-large smile, as well. I was just beginning to take in the complete image of the thing when it abruptly turned its head to look directly into my eyes. In a moment of panic my binoculars clattered to the floor, and when I looked again the thing was gone. Did it leave because it saw me?

I performed my nightly ritual and went to bed, but I couldn’t shake the unsettling thoughts that the thing’s image instilled, and sleep did not come easy. I woke up in the middle in the night and saw that there was a large shadow cast on my wall from the balcony. I couldn’t bring myself to look at what was casting the shadow, because I knew what it was. The shape was already burned into my memory. I prayed that it would be gone in the morning and went to sleep. It wasn’t.

Days passed, one after another after another and I never left my apartment because it was still out there, waiting for me to no longer be shielded by glass, or maybe it just wanted me to acknowledge it was there once more, but I couldn’t. Some days it sat on my balcony window for eight hours, completely unflinching, other days it crawled by so fast that I could barely see the shadows move, but it always gave me a sign that it was still there, waiting. I called the police, and they told me to seek a therapist. I told them that it was right outside my window, and if they came they could see it themselves, but they told me I was a liar, because the neighbors would have said something.

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Last night I woke up at 3 AM, to the sound of chittering. It wasn’t an altogether unpleasant noise—not nearly as gut wrenching as a chalkboard or record being scratched, at least—but it wasn’t exactly comforting, either. I was only eleven years old at the time, so I went to go wake up my mom. She didn’t wake up—not at all unusual for her, she was hardly a night owl—so I gripped my father’s wrist and shook it until his eyes opened.

A few nights prior, my father’s face had been that of a monster; a single large mouth running vertically down his face with black eyes on either side, and his neck contorted unnaturally to look at me even though I was lying behind him. He didn’t look like that tonight, thankfully.

He crawled out of bed, with a bit of lethargy. I never got the sense that my dad liked being woken up, but that didn’t stop me from begging to sleep with him, so that I could pretend not to notice as his face contorted and stretched and gazed into my soul.

Enough about his face, what was I saying? Yes, he crawled out of bed, and led me into our indoor garden—a garden which hadn’t been there in the daylight—to show me that it was all okay. Inside were several six-foot-long pink spiders with gnashing mandibles. I understand that might sound silly to those of you who aren’t afraid of spiders, but I must note that they were a color that no prey animal would dare take on in the wild.

The spiders were all facing away from us, preoccupied with devouring something, but I couldn’t quite see what it was, and I had left my sense of smell back in the bathroom along with an old horror game called Paranoiac. I had watched some YouTuber or another play it a few nights ago, probably when I was seven or eight. The monster of the game was a rather generic zombie, but it had stuck with me far too long on account of its rank smell, like that of rotting meat, or perhaps the contents of that rotting meat’s trousers.

The point is, my dad—or was it my mother? Come to think of it, I think I had gone to wake up my grandmother instead, so terrified I was of the face my father occasionally made—my grandmother led me deeper into the garden, the smell of that decaying zombie’s flesh so vivid in my sinuses that I figure the spiders must have been devouring it.

Eventually we made a noise—perhaps we stepped on a twig, it doesn’t really matter—and the pink spiders turned to face us. They snarled with their mandibles and spit through their skin. My father—or perhaps my grandmother—was dead before I knew what was happening, and so I ran. The horn of a beleaguered train chased me up and down and in a loop around my house until I returned to my bedroom, with pink spiders hot on my heels.

There were more of them, now. Hundreds of pink spiders, surging into my bedroom. At times like this I would have liked the cold blue glow of my television to scare them away, but I had thrown it out when I saw glimpses of the fire of Alexandria within the cathodes. Instead, I hid under my thin blanket, hoping that it would protect me from the witches and spiders that roamed my house every night. Before long their pincers pierced my pointless shield, and the night ended the way all of my nights end. With a proverbial slap on the wrist, and a swan dive off a cliff.

Don’t listen to the mean internet people. Fawn over that smoking hot emo cosplayer! Nobody on the internet genuinely cares who you simp for, all they want is your reaction or to feel smug in the knowledge that they’re always right.

Do not offer prayers to uncaring, unfeeling gods. They do not deserve your attention.

Him <333

I have nothing meaningful to add to this.

So I’ll just use it as a testing post!

G’day, Mates~!

Smell you laterrrr!