Post by Admin on Sept 3, 2015 0:43:28 GMT
I will not continue on Mute until there is something worth posting. For now, here is a scary story to tell in the dark. Elements taken from Forbidden Siren, Silent Hill, Resident Evil:Revelations 2. Setting based on Sky Valley, North Georgia Mountains. Anyways, the result of time over the summer vacation:
Second Wacky Wednesday is Vagility Valley (which is supposed to have a lot more characters and components, but that's besides the point of this post).
Vagility Valley
It was at 8 o’clock pm, on July 17th that sanity was erased away from Vagility Valley. As if an impossibly gigantic broom had decided to sweep out the valley, effectively ridding the entire region of any and all humanity it contained. A mass purge of thought and rationality.
The peaceful town (if you could even call it a town, hence its one restaurant, handful of streets and buildings, and rundown lodge/city hall) sat situated within a cradle of rising earth, protectively sealing away all its inhabitants from the world. And it had begun and stayed this way ever since Vagility’s official founding in the late 19th century. Today was like every other in this way. Quiet, serene. Uninterrupted by tourists and needless things of the outside world.
Besides, only those who wished to find it did.
Mute River proceeded with its endless flow of mountain spring water through the center of the community, splitting it apart like a vital blood vessel and lit blood red in the summer sunset. Avid fishermen on its banks were ready as always to snatch away cod. The stream passively gurgled past McLone Chapel, led down away from the valley’s houses and roads, and eventually disappeared under the ground once more, where the constant current continued far, far away from the valley and the dark fate that would soon ensue upon its residents.
Then of course, 8 o’clock arrived on the mountains, an even more relentless force than the river current itself. Time and twilight.
The chapel bells. The sound of the old, melodic church bells wafted from the chapel right at the base of the mountains. If the valley was a theatre, the lonely church would be the stage for the bells that sang once on the hour, every hour, of every day in Vagility Valley. It began to list the hours to all who heard and accepted its simply lovely tune. However, something was different tonight. All who heard it immediately knew it.
One chime…two…
Voiceless Valley’s sunlight was all but gone, and now, with the sound of the beloved bells, the sun finally decided to dip behind the encroaching walls of rock and rising clouds. Suddenly, the sky deepened and reddened into a shadowy hue with each strike of the bell. The river darkened into an even murkier and darker shade.
Three…four…
The pitch of each chime’s note slowly deepening into indistinct dark rumbles. The active crickets of the forests slowly ceased chirping. A deadening blanket fell over the air. Cars and people on the street halted in their tracks and looked to the center stage of the valley. The chapel. Just stood there, dumbfounded by the sudden change to everything around them.
Five…six…
It was then that every listening inhabitant of Voiceless Valley began to shake. Twitch and spasm in a crescendo of convulsions until an uncontrollable force bent their very body and will. Caused them to claw at their face, their ears, their eyes. Each hearing individual screamed in a deep, wild pain, trying, trying to escape the unseen puppeteer that broke them apart.
Seven…eight…
With the change complete, the screams and chants of those afflicted and those left behind filled the valley.
8 o’clock.
June 17 20:57:54 Chase Williams
Chase’s eyes struggled to make out anything beyond the dirty and snow layered window in the near pitch darkness and drew a shaky breath. Not a soul existed out there, even if the sounds of ceaseless chanting seemed to drone ever closer and closer to them. At the top of a mountain and I can barely see a thing…
Lori, where are you? What happened to James? And what the hell happened to everyone else?
He noticed that Shiva’s sobs had subsided to a gentle, quiet cry and that his own shock from the whole situation still hadn’t quite worn off. Thanks to a strange feeling of lingering numbness, Chris realized that the full impact of the hellish transformations to the valley below them had been prevented from interrupting his semi-rational thought. He couldn’t afford to break down. He wouldn’t go insane from the sheer anxiety of waiting in here. Not now.
“Chase?” Shiva’s tiny voice pierced the dark silence right beside him, raw with fear.
“Yeah?” Chase responded without letting his own muted fear bleed into the single word.
“…Do you see Lori out there? Or-or James? What happened to them?” she said, literally mirroring Chase’s own thoughts. Chase could feel her shiver and cling even closer to him as she spoke words that conveyed such vulnerability, such pure confusion and childlike need to feel safe.
Chase and Shiva’s only two guardians were nowhere to be found. Absolutely nothing on them. No food. No flashlight. No way to call for help. Nothing to comfort Shiva but the suddenly sacred words of her brother.
“No, Shiva, I still don’t see them. Just keep quiet like you have been. Keep being brave. You’re doing good, sis,” he faked. In truth, Shiva had done nothing but curl up in a ball next to Chase and cry quietly. He briefly imagined her tears washing away all the dirt and mud sprayed across the room’s floor if they stayed in here much longer. But if her endless supply of tears was the key to keeping her quiet, then let her cry all night.
“But where did they go? Why are we still hiding in here? We should go back to the camp. M-maybe they’re waiting for us to come back,” she hurriedly persisted with her irrational kid notions.
“Shh, don’t worry about it. Lori and James will come and get us when they…when they-“
“When they what?”
“I don’t know, Shiva,” Chase finally snapped. He had no answers! But Shiva couldn’t know that. She’d lose any sense of control, so he immediately tried again. “They just went off to get help when everything got dark. We just have to wait here in the, erm, cozy ski control room until they return.”
Although Chase’s explanation bore no convincing answers, even to his gullible sister, a fresh silence ensued upon the room in which the two children hid under the wraparound windows, safely tucked in the shadowed corner.
In his head, Chase went over the whole scenario for possibly the 20th time. Shiva and I were sitting in our tent with Lori. It had been a cloudless day of hiking off the beaten path and we were getting ready for nightfall. James… James was out getting some more sunset shots with his camera on the ridge. Then… the bells in the valley church rang. Strange, melodic ringing. Lori suddenly told us to cover our ears. And everything went crazy. The sky turned deep red and that out of place snow fell. Strange, horrific sounds and voices from the valley. To hell with horror movies, this is way worse.
We heard James in the distance, coming back to camp. He sounded drunk or crazy or something. Yelling and talking gibberish, getting closer. Lori told us to go to the abandoned ski lift house nearby and hide. We ran. And now we’ve been waiting in this tiny room since. How long has it even been? An hour? I can’t even see my watch in this darkness.
Looking around the long forgotten ski lift control room, Chase couldn’t help but feel weak and alone in an utterly evil and completely unknown environment. The cobwebbed controls and levers on the opposite side of the room loomed like hostile, skinny silhouettes against the near pitch black/red background of the sky. A sagging, motionless cable extended from the far right side of the small structure, down and away from the stained windows. Leading down into the valley to pick up its long gone skiers. Even here, at the top of the mountain, the peak of this lonely world, he could hear it. The echoing sounds of that endless Satanic shit.
It seems crazy, but somehow those church bells in the valley have something to do with all this… the disappearances and the chanting… the red blanket covering the sky…
“Chase?” she checked again to see if the bundle of clothes she huddled next to had a Chase inside them.
“Yeah, Shiva?”
Suddenly speaking in a voice much softer than ever before so that Chase had to listen hard to hear in the dense air, Shiva whispered, “I can see them…”
Struck by a disturbed feeling, Chase slowly asked, “Who… who can you see?”
Although he couldn’t see her well, he could sense her deep concentration. She had stopped sobbing a while ago and now she spoke in a very clear, very strange tone, “A Protector. A Sprite. A Son. A Sufferer. A Stranger. A Strayer. A Kith. A Pure-“
“Shiva, what are you talking about?” Chase said in surprise at her creepy outburst.
But she reached out and gripped his arm almost painfully tight and whispered, “Cover your ears.”
Suddenly, the echoes of an all too clear bell rang out through the valley and straight into the surrounding mountains. Ringing its deep, melodic song of the new hour.
June 17 20:06:03 Lori River
With each step Lori took, she felt herself slipping further and further into a sleepless dream. There was no sound that reached her ears now save the crackling of leaves and forest ground under her slowly strolling feet. Red sky and red snow fell all around her in a sluggish ballad. A quiet darkness stood right beside her.
A sleepless dream…
Of course, this has to be a dream, right? No way… these woods… and the bells.
James…
With a quick thought, Lori let the thing slip out of her fingers and fall to the forest floor as she walked. Her crimson streaked, wooden board. There would be no more need for that anymore.
As she mindlessly stepped through the brush and darkened mountain slope, she realized she was following a trail. A small and lightly used trail. When or how she came to this trail, she didn’t know, but she did know that it would lead her to somewhere. Where? Somewhere. Some kind of where. Something else. Some kind of thing.
Flashes of James in the trees. Fragments of Chase and Shiva’s faces in the bark. A part of her wanted to go back. A piece of her mind tugged away from the path ahead and screamed at her useless self to return to the camp where Chase and Shiva were hiding - as she had told them to do. But she couldn’t go back. She wouldn’t dare.
And now, a small house appeared through the brush. Up ahead. She approached a cabin in the woods, a place she could rest or…
Stepping up the back porch steps, creaking every step, she briefly considered the idea that more crazy people inhabited this house, but quickly dismissed it. They chant and yell constantly, make noise. I could hear them a mile away. Even so, if there were one of them in this place, what would be the point in stopping it from killing me?
Finally coming up to the glass door, she peered in at a completely red living room. Bodies littered the carpet inside like bulky rugs. Sprawled in any manner of positions, holes sent through their clothing and flesh, red still seeping slowly out onto the ground. But it didn’t affect Lori much at all. What she saw was the cloaked man standing in the center of it all, looking back at her with a shotgun slung over his back.
With eyes like cold mirrors, the man watched as the woman realized his existence. And he smiled.
Second Wacky Wednesday is Vagility Valley (which is supposed to have a lot more characters and components, but that's besides the point of this post).
Vagility Valley
It was at 8 o’clock pm, on July 17th that sanity was erased away from Vagility Valley. As if an impossibly gigantic broom had decided to sweep out the valley, effectively ridding the entire region of any and all humanity it contained. A mass purge of thought and rationality.
The peaceful town (if you could even call it a town, hence its one restaurant, handful of streets and buildings, and rundown lodge/city hall) sat situated within a cradle of rising earth, protectively sealing away all its inhabitants from the world. And it had begun and stayed this way ever since Vagility’s official founding in the late 19th century. Today was like every other in this way. Quiet, serene. Uninterrupted by tourists and needless things of the outside world.
Besides, only those who wished to find it did.
Mute River proceeded with its endless flow of mountain spring water through the center of the community, splitting it apart like a vital blood vessel and lit blood red in the summer sunset. Avid fishermen on its banks were ready as always to snatch away cod. The stream passively gurgled past McLone Chapel, led down away from the valley’s houses and roads, and eventually disappeared under the ground once more, where the constant current continued far, far away from the valley and the dark fate that would soon ensue upon its residents.
Then of course, 8 o’clock arrived on the mountains, an even more relentless force than the river current itself. Time and twilight.
The chapel bells. The sound of the old, melodic church bells wafted from the chapel right at the base of the mountains. If the valley was a theatre, the lonely church would be the stage for the bells that sang once on the hour, every hour, of every day in Vagility Valley. It began to list the hours to all who heard and accepted its simply lovely tune. However, something was different tonight. All who heard it immediately knew it.
One chime…two…
Voiceless Valley’s sunlight was all but gone, and now, with the sound of the beloved bells, the sun finally decided to dip behind the encroaching walls of rock and rising clouds. Suddenly, the sky deepened and reddened into a shadowy hue with each strike of the bell. The river darkened into an even murkier and darker shade.
Three…four…
The pitch of each chime’s note slowly deepening into indistinct dark rumbles. The active crickets of the forests slowly ceased chirping. A deadening blanket fell over the air. Cars and people on the street halted in their tracks and looked to the center stage of the valley. The chapel. Just stood there, dumbfounded by the sudden change to everything around them.
Five…six…
It was then that every listening inhabitant of Voiceless Valley began to shake. Twitch and spasm in a crescendo of convulsions until an uncontrollable force bent their very body and will. Caused them to claw at their face, their ears, their eyes. Each hearing individual screamed in a deep, wild pain, trying, trying to escape the unseen puppeteer that broke them apart.
Seven…eight…
With the change complete, the screams and chants of those afflicted and those left behind filled the valley.
8 o’clock.
June 17 20:57:54 Chase Williams
Chase’s eyes struggled to make out anything beyond the dirty and snow layered window in the near pitch darkness and drew a shaky breath. Not a soul existed out there, even if the sounds of ceaseless chanting seemed to drone ever closer and closer to them. At the top of a mountain and I can barely see a thing…
Lori, where are you? What happened to James? And what the hell happened to everyone else?
He noticed that Shiva’s sobs had subsided to a gentle, quiet cry and that his own shock from the whole situation still hadn’t quite worn off. Thanks to a strange feeling of lingering numbness, Chris realized that the full impact of the hellish transformations to the valley below them had been prevented from interrupting his semi-rational thought. He couldn’t afford to break down. He wouldn’t go insane from the sheer anxiety of waiting in here. Not now.
“Chase?” Shiva’s tiny voice pierced the dark silence right beside him, raw with fear.
“Yeah?” Chase responded without letting his own muted fear bleed into the single word.
“…Do you see Lori out there? Or-or James? What happened to them?” she said, literally mirroring Chase’s own thoughts. Chase could feel her shiver and cling even closer to him as she spoke words that conveyed such vulnerability, such pure confusion and childlike need to feel safe.
Chase and Shiva’s only two guardians were nowhere to be found. Absolutely nothing on them. No food. No flashlight. No way to call for help. Nothing to comfort Shiva but the suddenly sacred words of her brother.
“No, Shiva, I still don’t see them. Just keep quiet like you have been. Keep being brave. You’re doing good, sis,” he faked. In truth, Shiva had done nothing but curl up in a ball next to Chase and cry quietly. He briefly imagined her tears washing away all the dirt and mud sprayed across the room’s floor if they stayed in here much longer. But if her endless supply of tears was the key to keeping her quiet, then let her cry all night.
“But where did they go? Why are we still hiding in here? We should go back to the camp. M-maybe they’re waiting for us to come back,” she hurriedly persisted with her irrational kid notions.
“Shh, don’t worry about it. Lori and James will come and get us when they…when they-“
“When they what?”
“I don’t know, Shiva,” Chase finally snapped. He had no answers! But Shiva couldn’t know that. She’d lose any sense of control, so he immediately tried again. “They just went off to get help when everything got dark. We just have to wait here in the, erm, cozy ski control room until they return.”
Although Chase’s explanation bore no convincing answers, even to his gullible sister, a fresh silence ensued upon the room in which the two children hid under the wraparound windows, safely tucked in the shadowed corner.
In his head, Chase went over the whole scenario for possibly the 20th time. Shiva and I were sitting in our tent with Lori. It had been a cloudless day of hiking off the beaten path and we were getting ready for nightfall. James… James was out getting some more sunset shots with his camera on the ridge. Then… the bells in the valley church rang. Strange, melodic ringing. Lori suddenly told us to cover our ears. And everything went crazy. The sky turned deep red and that out of place snow fell. Strange, horrific sounds and voices from the valley. To hell with horror movies, this is way worse.
We heard James in the distance, coming back to camp. He sounded drunk or crazy or something. Yelling and talking gibberish, getting closer. Lori told us to go to the abandoned ski lift house nearby and hide. We ran. And now we’ve been waiting in this tiny room since. How long has it even been? An hour? I can’t even see my watch in this darkness.
Looking around the long forgotten ski lift control room, Chase couldn’t help but feel weak and alone in an utterly evil and completely unknown environment. The cobwebbed controls and levers on the opposite side of the room loomed like hostile, skinny silhouettes against the near pitch black/red background of the sky. A sagging, motionless cable extended from the far right side of the small structure, down and away from the stained windows. Leading down into the valley to pick up its long gone skiers. Even here, at the top of the mountain, the peak of this lonely world, he could hear it. The echoing sounds of that endless Satanic shit.
It seems crazy, but somehow those church bells in the valley have something to do with all this… the disappearances and the chanting… the red blanket covering the sky…
“Chase?” she checked again to see if the bundle of clothes she huddled next to had a Chase inside them.
“Yeah, Shiva?”
Suddenly speaking in a voice much softer than ever before so that Chase had to listen hard to hear in the dense air, Shiva whispered, “I can see them…”
Struck by a disturbed feeling, Chase slowly asked, “Who… who can you see?”
Although he couldn’t see her well, he could sense her deep concentration. She had stopped sobbing a while ago and now she spoke in a very clear, very strange tone, “A Protector. A Sprite. A Son. A Sufferer. A Stranger. A Strayer. A Kith. A Pure-“
“Shiva, what are you talking about?” Chase said in surprise at her creepy outburst.
But she reached out and gripped his arm almost painfully tight and whispered, “Cover your ears.”
Suddenly, the echoes of an all too clear bell rang out through the valley and straight into the surrounding mountains. Ringing its deep, melodic song of the new hour.
June 17 20:06:03 Lori River
With each step Lori took, she felt herself slipping further and further into a sleepless dream. There was no sound that reached her ears now save the crackling of leaves and forest ground under her slowly strolling feet. Red sky and red snow fell all around her in a sluggish ballad. A quiet darkness stood right beside her.
A sleepless dream…
Of course, this has to be a dream, right? No way… these woods… and the bells.
James…
With a quick thought, Lori let the thing slip out of her fingers and fall to the forest floor as she walked. Her crimson streaked, wooden board. There would be no more need for that anymore.
As she mindlessly stepped through the brush and darkened mountain slope, she realized she was following a trail. A small and lightly used trail. When or how she came to this trail, she didn’t know, but she did know that it would lead her to somewhere. Where? Somewhere. Some kind of where. Something else. Some kind of thing.
Flashes of James in the trees. Fragments of Chase and Shiva’s faces in the bark. A part of her wanted to go back. A piece of her mind tugged away from the path ahead and screamed at her useless self to return to the camp where Chase and Shiva were hiding - as she had told them to do. But she couldn’t go back. She wouldn’t dare.
And now, a small house appeared through the brush. Up ahead. She approached a cabin in the woods, a place she could rest or…
Stepping up the back porch steps, creaking every step, she briefly considered the idea that more crazy people inhabited this house, but quickly dismissed it. They chant and yell constantly, make noise. I could hear them a mile away. Even so, if there were one of them in this place, what would be the point in stopping it from killing me?
Finally coming up to the glass door, she peered in at a completely red living room. Bodies littered the carpet inside like bulky rugs. Sprawled in any manner of positions, holes sent through their clothing and flesh, red still seeping slowly out onto the ground. But it didn’t affect Lori much at all. What she saw was the cloaked man standing in the center of it all, looking back at her with a shotgun slung over his back.
With eyes like cold mirrors, the man watched as the woman realized his existence. And he smiled.