[#035] Insert Coin to Continue

Neon runlights drew me through the crowd of flashing screens and glassy-eyed prisoners. A synthetic siren song cried out across the darkness, tugging my heart through the beaded curtain at the rear. All those years have passed and still no force on Earth had managed to destroy the thing. All I had left was a prayer and a dream.

All I had left was a quarter.

Golden pillars flanked the cabinet seated like a throne at the far end of a dark red carpet. A full moon crossed with a human face beamed at me from the baby blue sides, wreathed in the chirping birds and spitting octopi that composed the game's enemies. It's charming artwork mocked the building panic in my heart as I watched the looping demo video.

A small ship swept into the sky, weaving through a maze of asteroids and fireballs while shooting down the cutesey fleet.

It would pick up powers, blasting lasers and shotgun pellets, and the automatic hero would fight its way nearly to the end of the level, where the boss's barest edge would manifest itself before a stray bullet doomed my avatar with a grating, digitized laugh that shattered on my brain like a glass full of razor wire. Every forty-five seconds that little hero would swoop out again, only to meet their doom.
My son had loved this game so much. I couldn't count the times I'd lost him in the mall and tracked him here, transmuting his entire week's allowance into a cosmic adventure. And never once had it seemed strange to me that only one lone game stood in this sequestered room. I could see no other outlets, no tracks on the floor where other cabinets might have stood...

It was not until the burial that I came to see this place as It's Lair. This was where It hungered. This was where It fed.

This was where I found him heaped up and leaking out onto the carpet while the moon with a man's face watched and laughed.

I fled from myself after that. I left home and crumbled in the alleys of the night, waiting for an answer I thought would fall from the heavens. But every year since, on the anniversary of his last day, I come back here to try again.

The quarter was my key. I took a deep breath, placed my key in the lock, and opened the door.

And in the brief fanfare the creature buzzed as the token slid through its mechanism, I swore I heard his voice...

[#034] My Theater

The key turns itself with an audible click, locking the only exit as I watch.

Time slows down as I remember. In a second, a bottomless chuckle will ring out from the empty theater down the hall, where my favorite film is playing every day. Before the laughter ends, the lights will snap back on, a dozen discordant strings of music and explosions will sound as the arcade machines awaken in the corner, and the popcorn cart, already cleaned and absolutely guaranteed clear of any food or oil, will spill over with a flood of endless, buttery treats.

No more guests will pound the counter. No more angry parents who lost their children's tickets or took them to the wrong show. No more supervisors breathing down my neck to upsell overpriced sodas and snacks.

Just like my dream...

I remember as I glance down at the hole in my chest. I remember the shadows stirring in the parking lot. Do I know you? I'd asked. And then I saw the gun.

Before I hit the pavement I felt the theater rushing up around me, swallowing me through the door and funneling me into the darkened lobby.

It was my favorite place in the world. The lights, the scents, all of it I loved. And it loved me.

And now it was mine.

I glanced out the glass doors. I thought I could just see the swirling red and blue lights in the distance as help arrived too late. Then the glass frosted over, as though the snow piled up outside and my little theater was the sole oasis of warmth in a wasteland.

I knew somehow that I could unlock the door and step outside. But I could come back in after?

Maybe I'll find out...

After the matinee.

[#033] Rise Again

The heavy stone wall smashed into the ground behind me with a thunderous explosion of dust, obscuring my view of the figures looming ahead. I step out onto the narrow bridge, two feet wide with no rails, and I windmilled my arms for balance as I staggered away from the door already buckling beneath the weight of my pursuer.

I floated forward on momentum alone as the fog lifts, unveiling the towering obsidian faces all around me. Horns and hooked beaks seemed to scream into the bottomless void. Stone guardians of indescribable form watched over the Temple of the First, but the only power they held was the paralyzing fear of their alien biology.

I bore their gaze because I dared not stop. I would have blinded myself that moment if I could, but then the struggle of thousands would have come to naught. So I stared at the sliver of rock beneath my boots for a moment to stabilize my brain. When I glanced back up, I found myself only yards away from the single, massive eyelid ahead of the bridge, stretching as far as I could see in every direction.

It shrugged open as my feet met the platform before it.

The door far behind me smashed apart, and at last my pursuer roiled into the chamber on divine winds. I thought nothing could slow its progress, but it halted itself when it caught sight of me clapping the Amulet down on the alter and smudging the sign drawn across it in centuries-old blood.

The cavern began to shake as I sang out the Sleeper's name. The floating horror who had sought my blood turned tail and shot back through the corridors, no doubt to warn the Empress.

They may send their armies, but they will arrive too late.

Humanity will rise again, and we will turn their own greatest weapon against them.

[#032] Incoming Transmission

I cross my arms and shiver as I watch the stars streak past the viewport ever faster, running down the canvas of space while my ship hurtles towards the hole at the center of the galaxy.

The Well has swallowed up another cluster every year, tearing through space with a hunger none of us could understand. We don't know how it started or where it will end. All we know is that it will reach the furthest tips of our galaxy within the next century, and we have no idea how to stop it.

They couldn't risk leaks, so they had to keep a small operation. They couldn't wait for an unmanned probe, so they had to send a person.

And they sent me.

My eyes sweep over the photographs pinned to the framework around the viewport. They offer me less strength every day, less hope as I have stared out the plasma window for weeks watching the Well creep ever closer. I could have altered the course of my craft and attempted the journey home, but I knew the effort was pointless the second I saw It.

It defies perception as much as explanation. The Well does not grow so much as unhinge, loosing like the jaw of a snake to devour larger prey. We could have been that prey were It smaller, but I suspect in truth we are only seasoning. The Well stretches out in all directions, and from all directions my cameras see a single flat visage of a maw, indescribable in size and growing ever larger.

Even if I reversed the engines, the Well would overtake me before I crossed half of space.

And so I journey on towards the End of Always, grateful they didn't warn the public. Let them carry on their lives knowing not what waits for them, the endless hunger reaching through the stars for all creation. They will scream and beg the day the Well shines in the sky above, but, until that day, their lives will march on in peaceful ignorance.

Unless this message reaches them first.

Godspeed.

--Intercepted radio transmission, translated from Russian at Hoover Listening Station on Mt. Harlan, NE, 1991.

[#031] The Funnyman Show

The two boys strummed their guitars as the shadows shifted behind them, the palpable blacker-than-darkness lurching closer until a single leg broke into the circle of light, not descending in a step but drifting in on spindly, arching extremities more like spiders than feet. One boy glanced over his shoulder and screamed, and there the video stopped.

I blinked. Are you kidding me?

"No wonder it only had a hundred-some views," I whined to myself as I sank into the crook of my arm.

We've all been there before, right? Sitting up late at night, alone, scrolling through endless spooky stories and videos trolling for that little jolt of fear we crave. Some folks get it from jumping off buildings or out of planes. Others dive into the ocean with a fragile tank of air on their back, or explore derelict buildings that could house the unstable homeless and worse.

Me, I just watch Youtube.

And I mean Youtube. I'm not looking for the gory, putrid death videos some sites collect. I'm all about the calm before the storm, the building tension while the killer strolls across the background out of focus. I like mysteries without answers, voices calling your name from the kitchen of an empty house, and strange foot prints through the snow leading right up to your door. I like stories about the weird of the world intruding on everyday life, the kind of danger I could fantasize about meeting even as I shudder at the thought.

And if you're here reading this, I'm willing to bet you crave that fear, too. We've all been there before.
This probably seems like a tangent, but I need you to understand where I'm coming from.
I need you to understand why I couldn't just stop watching the Funnyman Show, even after all it did to me.

The clock read just past 3AM when I first watched, reclining in my cheap office chair and clicking idly as I bathed in the pale blue light of the monitor. I was revisiting some of the classics, beginning my evening with a bacon pizza, a six-pack, and a playlist of old Fewdio shorts. My night soon descended into surreal videos of dancing clowns and warped animation, singing mannequins and alleged Japanese McDonald's commercials.

Before long, I found my fingers drumming impatiently on the greasy cardboard surface of the pizza box as I skipped to the end of another video. As much as I loved this traveling museum of the bizarre, the limited flow of new content was miserable. Fear might be the hardest feeling to recapture when you're watching reruns most of the time, so it was kind of a big deal to me when I caught glimpse of an unfamiliar thumbnail in the sidebar.

The image showed a single, glassy eye of pitch black, set into a ghostly white face covering half the screen in an extreme close-up. I couldn't make out much of the background except a pair of hands raised back to back in some kind of binding. The title was a simple smiley face emoticon. You know what I mean. :)

My curiosity was piqued out to high heaven, and the cursor clicked on the image before I could register a conscious thought.

And what I saw next ruined my life in the best possible way.

It began with a few short clips shot from low hiding places. The first minute or so exhibited a wide open parking lot sometime just before dusk, pink-orange streaks already shooting through the sky as the glowing sign above the grocery store burst to life. The camera sat less than a foot off the ground, and I could imagine it perched on the curb if it didn't waver in an unsteady hand. The "observer" must have been laying down or something, just peeking around the side of a dumpster that obscured about a quarter of the screen. The whole scene was filthy, the pavement showered in sticky brown soda and wrappers, and I could almost smell the rotten food piling up inside the trash.

But I had very little time to study the sights before the glass doors slid open in the background and a young man emerged from the store carrying two large paper bags stuffed near to bursting with groceries. He stepped around the handful of cars parked near the exit and strode all the way up to the single coupe in the corner closest to the camera. He struggled a moment, balancing one bag on his knee as he wrenched a set of keys from his pocket and popped the trunk.

Then the scene shifted, and suddenly my view sat nestled between a coat and a basket of laundry in the dirtiest car I've ever seen. A country song lulled quietly in the air, overshadowed by the clicking of turn signals and the smooth, satisfying roll of the tires. I could just see the back of the driver's head and their right arm, but I soon realized it was the same person from the grocery store parking lot.
I have to admit my mind was a little blown at this point. Maybe I was overthinking this, but even if I took this video as a proper short film, was I really meant to believe the observer had snuck into the back of this dude's car without their notice? The camera-person wasn't just an incidental presence, judging from the way they pulled the coat over themselves to keep hidden when the driver glanced back through a rear side window.

The scene shifted again, this time to a view through the crack in a door as the same man stood inside a shabby kitchen, pulling his groceries from the paper bags on the counter and loading them into a fridge or something just out of view.

From here, the observer grew only bolder.

In the fourth scene, the camera rested on the back of a couch just over the man's shoulder as he watched a football game. He cracked open a beer, only to spill it on himself when he leapt off the couch and shouted at the TV. This was the first time the observer made any actual noise, sliding to the ground and scuttling away a sound like plastic cutlery tapping on a counter top. Whoever held the camera trilled with barely stifled giggling hidden beneath the grown man's anger as they ran off, still no more than knee-height off the floor.

The man was brushing his teeth in the fifth scene, and somehow the observer had crawled into the bathtub to gaze at him through a small gap in the shower curtain. The camera shook a lot more now, and a gasp of sinister laughter nearly betrayed it when the man ran the faucet to rinse. This time the subject suspected something, because his eyes snapped to the tub and nearly met the camera before the observer sidled away and hunched over in the corner.

Apparently nothing came of that, because the scene changed again. A door swung open before the camera to reveal a darkened house, moonlight streaming through the windows as the observer crawled through the kitchen far too quickly for someone on their hands and knees. I couldn't even imagine how short they had to be as they dragged a cheap, plastic folding chair from the table to reach the another door halfway down the hallway. The hand that reached out to turn the knob was so tiny, as though the observer were only a child far too young to be sneaking into someone's home and stalking them all night.

The room beyond the door was lit only by a street lamp peering through the open window, a gentle breeze fluttering the ratty drapes as the man I'd been following for the entire video tossed and turned in his bed. The observer crept up and climbed slowly up the comforter, coming to a rest above the loudly snoring head and just... Watching.

That was all I saw for a moment. Then that same tiny hand reached out from the edge of the screen and gently, oh so gently, caressed the man's cheek. Another hand drifted from the other side, the point of a large kitchen knife gleaming in the darkness.

And that was it.

The video ended.

I sat in silence for what felt like hours before I remembered how to breathe. I glanced down at the video details to find no description, no comments, and just thirteen views. The uploader's name was "theFunnymanShow." I clicked it, and I discovered there were dozens of other videos like it on the channel. Dozens.

And I watched them all. I watched them with such a hunger that I still wasn't satisfied when I finished hours later, after the sun had risen and not long before I had to leave for work.

So I called off, and I watched them all again.

I couldn't help myself. I felt like I finally had a mystery on my hands with no real end, an unsettling puzzle that ran back years waiting to be unfolded right there on one of the most popular websites in the world. My curiosity was overwhelming me, even as some voice deep inside my head screamed that this wasn't right, that this wasn't just some series of short films. Why keep devoting so much time and energy to making them for a dozen views each? There had to be more to it, be it some weirdo who got his kicks off making faux-almost-snuff films on the internet or...

Or whatever. I didn't know. I couldn't know what the Funnyman Show really was. And that was what drove me to keep watching and re-watching those videos all day. It's what made me go back through years of episodes and click the little thumbs-up for each one. It's what made me eventually type up a message to send to that freaking uploader, a message that took me an hour to compose and another hour to actually send.

It's what drove me to open the reply I received less than fifteen minutes later, inviting me to "host" the next Funnyman Show.

It's what drove me to say...

"Yes."

A package appeared in front of my door the next day. It wasn't a shipping box. It was a battered wooden chest about a foot tall, two feet wide, and two feet deep. One of the hinges barely hung on. It looked like someone threw it off a balcony, and it was covered in muddy brown handprints. A combination lock was looped around the clasp.

The combination was in a message I received later that day.

Even then, I still held out hope this was all a game. I thought it might be one of those ARGs I read about, but ran by some crazy rich sociopath who could keep that plate spinning for years with very little attention. Even so, my instincts told me it was dangerous. I sat and stared in silence at the box, at my invitation to join the Funnyman Show, for hours on end.

But my curiosity eventually overwhelmed me.

The lock clicked loudly with ever number spun into it, as though it begged to be opened. When I pulled the lock off and lifted the lid, the whole top of the chest snapped right off. There was literally no way to put the cat back in the bag, as it were.

A piece of bright yellow construction paper rested on top of the contents, with a message scribbled across it in green crayon and sprawling, sloppy letters. I read a username ("theFunnymanShow") and a password I won't repeat. Beneath that it said, "HE WON'T DO ANYTHING YOU DON'T WANT HIM TO."

And, beneath that, lay the Funnyman himself.

A brown suitcoat with tweed elbow patches wrapped around his little body, and a porkpie hat crowned his mat of filthy, black nylon hair. White greasepaint and rouge caked his face, completing the illusion of a cartoon clown dressed as a hobo. Without a screen between us I could just make out the lens of a small camera hidden behind one of the frigid black crystals of his eyes, and I realized this was how the Funnyman was able to film the final clips of his videos with either hand... Preoccupied.

But the real kicker came when I lifted the tiny thing from the box and noticed the long strings trailing off behind him. I reached down and pulled out a set of crossed sticks with levers and hooks for the strings, and that was when I realized the truth.

I thought of all those videos I'd seen of the Funnyman stalking lonely people, sometimes lingering for hours in their homes without their knowledge, and then descending on them in the darkness of the night.

The Funnyman doesn't do anything you don't want him to. That's because he isn't a possessed dummy, or a ghost or a monster. He isn't even really a doll.

He's a marionette.

And in every single one of those videos I watched, another person just like you or me was pulling his strings.

Now the Funnyman and his show belong to me. And the show must go on.

I'm not a bad person. I just like a good mystery, and I want to live in a weird and mysterious universe. Now I have the chance to offer that universe to others. Maybe even to you. And how can I pass up an opportunity to stir up a little wonder in the world?

I mean, we've all been there, right?