sleep is overrated anyways, fuck life and it’s bullshit at this point

I’ve been up all night, now the question is what to do with this day.

When I was young my friends and I would stay up off Mountain Dew all night, now that I’m older my friends and I stay up off adderall all night.

I’m still awake

I think I’m developing a fucking drug addiction ah FUK

My neighbor has been mowing his lawn for 12 hours straight

u/nslewis • Jul 14, 2019

Part 1:

It started at 4:43am. The noise jolted me awake. It sounded like there was a giant truck revving its engine right there in our bedroom. Exhaust fumes wafted in through the open window. It was a bad way to start the day.

“What is that?” moaned my wife. We’d both slept poorly, because our daughter had crawled into our bed at 1am and kept kicking us in the face until we were both half-hanging off the bed while she snored away.

“Start of the apocalypse,” I groaned. “Go back to sleep.”

“No way can I sleep through that racket,” said Vanessa. She rolled out of bed and shut the window. That helped a little, but it still sounded like war out there. She pulled the curtains back and looked through the window. “It’s the fucking neighbor. Mowing his lawn. Before the sun is up. We need to have a heart-to-heart with him. Let him know that’s not okay.”

Keagan, our daughter, woke up crying.

“Guess that’s that,” I muttered, getting out of bed myself. “I’ll go talk to him after some coffee.”

“Bring me some too,” said Vanessa.

“Papa, bring me some Smarties,” said Keagan.

“No. No Smarties for breakfast. Banana. Or toast. But not Smarties.”

“Fine,” huffed Keagan. “Toast. Cut into shapes.”

I sighed. This was really the last thing I wanted to be doing at 4:45 on a Saturday morning. Making coffee and cutting toast into animal shapes instead of drooling in my sleep and dreaming of a gentler world.

I went into the kitchen and started the coffee and toast, and then looked out the living room window. Sure enough, there was Mr. Limsky, mowing his damn lawn, in his damn bathrobe no less. That was another thing that I had no desire to do: get into it with him about this, or really talk to him about anything ever beyond a friendly wave and a “Howdy, neighbor.”

By the time I was awake enough to form a coherent thought, it was almost 6:00, and I had consumed four cups of coffee. Mr. Limsky was still at it, which was strange, because his yard isn’t very big at all. It shouldn’t take more than a 40 minute mow job. But here it was, an hour and fifteen minutes later, and he was still at it.

I got semi-dressed and stumbled outside. I walked across my own yard, which, I noted, needed mowing itself. Maybe I’ll tell him that if he mows my lawn and promises to never start so early again, I’ll let it go. But I knew that I wouldn’t do that. I was a coward.

As I got closer, I observed with some confusion that his lawn was already mowed. He was going over it a second time now. I walked up to our property line, denoted by the contrast between mowed and unmowed grass, and started waving my hands in the air, waiting for Mr. Limsky to notice me.

He never did. He just stared straight ahead and kept pushing the mower.

“HEY!” I shouted. But it was no good. I could barely hear myself, and so I knew that he wouldn’t be able to hear me from across the lawn, right behind the lawnmower.

Goddammit.

I walked across his yard until I was right behind him. “HEY!” Nothing. I tapped on his shoulder. Nothing. He just kept pushing the lawnmower onward over the already mowed lawn. I didn’t know what to do.

I’ll catch him after he finishes, I guess. He’s in the Zone.

I shrugged and was getting ready to turn back to my house when I saw a trickle of what was presumably urine run down his bare leg.

Jesus.

I went back to my house and opened the door. Vanessa was reading a book to Keagan. She stopped when I came in and looked up. “Well?”

“I, uh… he couldn’t hear me. I’ll go over there once he stops. He’s got to stop some time, right? And, uh… well, I’m a little worried about him honestly. I saw him, you know, wet himself.”

“Mr. Limsky peed his pants?!” asked Keagan. She started laughing.

“Well, that sometimes happens, kiddo,” I said. “You used to do that. We do that a lot when we’re kids and then we don’t do it for a while and then when we get older we sometimes do it again.”

That gave her something to think about anyway.

“Huh,” said Vanessa.

“There’s more,” I said. “He’s already done with the lawn. He’s just going over it a second time.”

“Maybe he missed a few spots?”

“Nope. It’s perfect. Not a blade of grass higher than any other blade of grass.”

“Hmm,” said Vanessa. “That is strange. Do you think he’s okay? Should we call somebody?”

I shrugged. “Who are we going to call? The police? Tell them that our retired neighbor is mowing his lawn twice while pis… while peeing himself? What will they say to that?”

*

By 8:00, I was done cooking the bacon and Mr. Limsky was still at it, mowing his lawn for what must have been the fifth time. I tried not to think about it, but it was hard.

“After breakfast, we should go somewhere,” I said. “It’s a beautiful day. No sense staying cooped up all day.”

“Why does Mr. Limsky keep mowing his lawn?” asked Keagan.

“I don’t know, kiddo,” I muttered. “I don’t know. You want to go to the playground or something?”

“Yay!”

“I’m going to stay here and try to go back to sleep if that’s okay,” said Vanessa.

“Of course,” I said. I felt like going back to sleep myself, even after all that coffee, but the desire to get far away from the sound of the lawnmower outweighed my tiredness.

We ate, then Keagan and I headed to the playground.

At 9:00, I got a text from Vanessa: “Can’t sleep. He’s still mowing.”

9:30: “I’m really starting to get worried. This isn’t normal.”

10:00: “I went over there and tried to talk to him, but it’s like he’s in a trance. Please come home.”

I sighed, but complied. I rounded up the kid and drove home. I felt a deep sense of unease, that grew more intense the closer I got to home.

You’re afraid of an old man mowing the lawn? I chided myself. It didn’t work, because my instinctive answer was: Yes.

I turned onto my street and prayed that Mr. Limsky would be done mowing the lawn by now. He’d tell us it was just a practical joke and we’d all have a good laugh over it. But soon enough, I saw that wasn’t going to happen. As I pulled into my driveway, I saw that he was still out there. I thought I saw a streak of brown running down his leg, but it was hard to tell for sure because he was going around under the shade of his ancient apple tree.

I walked inside and Vanessa was at the kitchen table with bags under her eyes and a glass of wine in front of her. “Please make it stop,” she said.

“I don’t know how to do that,” I said, suddenly feeling very tired and in need of a drink myself.

“Call the police,” she said.

“Why don’t you?” I asked.

“Fine,” she said. “It’s just that I do everything else around here so I thought maybe you could help this one time.”

I held my tongue. I did plenty around there, but I knew that now wasn’t the time to point that out. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll call the police. How has he not run out of gas by now, anyway?”

“I’ve been watching him,” said Vanessa. “He’s got a can of gas in his driveway. Sometimes he grabs it when he passes by and gasses up while still pushing the mower. It’s crazy. Please call the police.”

“Alright, alright,” I said. I looked up the number and proceeded to have one of the most awkward phone conversations of my life. It was ten minutes with the receptionist, and then another ten minutes with an officer. Finally, they agreed to come over and check it out.

*

Fifteen minutes later, I watched out the window as the cop car pulled into Mr. Limsky’s driveway. A single cop got out and walked over to Mr. Limsky.

The cop was waving his hands and shouting, but it was no good. Then the cop grabbed Mr. Limsky’s shoulder and spun him around forcefully. This caused Mr. Limsky to finally let go of the throttle, and for the first time all day, the lawnmower stopped moving. It was still running though, because he had taped its safety shut-off down.

I held my breath as I waited to see what would happen next.

Mr. Limsky opened his mouth, and something emerged from it. It looked like a long, thin tentacle. The tentacle wrapped itself around the cop’s neck, and lifted him up into the air. Then a second tentacle emerged from Mr. Limsky’s mouth, and made its way down the cop’s throat.

I slammed the curtains shut and noticed that I too, like Mr. Limsky earlier, had wet myself.

“What’s going on out there?” asked Vanessa from the kitchen. “Did the police arrive?”

I didn’t have a good answer, so I didn’t say anything.

“Honey?” said Vanessa, walking over. “Are you okay?”

From outside, we heard the whine of a new machine join in with the lawnmower. Vanessa opened the curtain, and I turned slowly to look out.

The cop was out there going around the old apple tree with a weed whacker while Mr. Limsky was back pushing the lawnmower around again.

*

It’s 5pm. Besides Mr. Limsky, there are now four cops in his yard doing various tasks. One is still at it with the weed whacker. Another has been going at the shrubs with a pair of clippers for hours now. But the one who concerns me the most is the one who is going around spraying the ground from a bottle full of neon blue liquid that Mr. Limsky at one point puked out of his mouth.

I personally am petitioning the family to pack up the car and start driving to Florida where Vanessa’s mother lives. I have no idea what is going on, but it doesn’t look good.

Let him in…

r/nosleep - [NSFW] Third Parent

r/nosleep - [NSFW] His Name Was Tommy Taffy

r/nosleep - [NSFW] Tommy Taffy’s Twins

r/nosleep - [NSFW] The Night I Met Tommy Taffy

rejoiceandregret:

“You were up there, weren’t you?” He asked.

“No. I was not,” I replied.

He looked me up and down and with a quiet grimace, continued, “I told you never to go near that house. You understand me, boy? You tell me you understand.”

“But I wasn’t,” I lied.

“I can see it. I know you did because I can see it in your eyes. I can still see that fucking house glowing in your eyes—glowing white,” he sneered. “You tell me, boy—you tell me you won’t evergo near that house again.”

We all knew about the house. We walked by it every afternoon on the way home from school. There were leaves, vines and shrubs that had overthrown the façade of the house. The vines and weeds had strangled the wooden frame of the front porch. Leaves had settled over the path that led up to it from the street, like pale-brown blankets of snow that were cruel and fragile like fragments of skulls. The old, frosted window panes hid what was inside. The broken windows on the second floor felt like gaping maws trying to swallow us into its darkness. Even on the sunniest summer days, no light seemed to make it inside those windows. Just beyond the window-frame, you could see the faintest hint of that old, sagging custard-colored wallpaper with its playful little ship’s anchor-pattern across it. But beyond that—darkness.

We’d been told that the house had been empty for years, too—empty since before any of us had been born. But it never felt empty to any of us. I we knew that when our parents had told us it was empty, that they did not believe this, either.

That was why we shuddered every time we walked past it. There was not a single time that we ever saw the house which we didn’t swear we’d heard it calling soft and innocent from the earth. And we did. Every single one of us heard it bellow our names.

Trevor heard it whisper ‘Trev, don’t go.’ Garrett heard its broken voice slide out from the cracked basement window and call out, like a crone siren, ‘Garrett, please.’

And I had heard it call my name, too. Every single time. ‘Laney… Laaaannneeeyyy.’

We were all told never to go into the yard. And heaven help our hides if our parents ever found out that we’d gone any closer to the house than the sidewalk. Nobody in the town trusted the house. But nobody was willing to do anything about it, either. Everybody claimed it was ‘cursed,’ but nobody knew that. There were a few skeptics who believed it was nothing more than superstition and childish myth. But the skeptics never did say this with a weak shake in their voice. They’d stood outside the house, looked up on that hill and refused to go into the yard. 

Still, everybody told us the house was empty. Had been for years. That he must’ve died some time ago, because, when theyhad been children he was old and ragged.

And everybody told us that the boy had drowned in the river or been eaten by the wolves in the woods or simply run away from his carless parents. 

But then, where did he go? Why had nobody ever found him?

Why did we hear him crying from the basement, begging one of us to come save him? Begging us and chilling our spines because we would have put our lives on it that we were hearing him calling to us.

We would tell our parents and sometimes, they would even stand outside and listen. And when he would call, they would turn away and insist they heard nothing. They would hide their fear from shame. 

But we knew better.

My father was not a stupid man. But I, like every child, thought I could fool him—thought I could sneak around his law. And on a dare, I’d stepped into the yard. I lowered the toe of my sneaker into the yard, shaking in my bones as if it were a lake and a crocodile had been primed to leap out and devour me.

But the house would never be so merciful to kill quick like a crocodile. It would stalk you and watch you like a snake or a crow, waiting and patient enough to wait however long it takes. It would echo in your mind until your thoughts turned rotten like the apple tree in its front yard, where the birds and squirrels and even foxes refused to venture near its easy fruits.

And my father knew. He’d seen the house in my eyes, like a daguerreotype of the structure etched into my cold irises. He’d seen it and he knew. He knew about the sailor who’d lived there when he was a child. He remembered when the police came out and questioned the old man. And he remembered when, not long after, the police went missing- just like the boy had. 

He remembered when people started to put their nose down and try to ignore it—ignore the fact that the old man was still there and was watching them from his porch and grinning with decaying teeth that he’d sharpened with old, broken seashells until they were long and pointy like shark’s teeth.

“That boy did it to himself—shouldn’t steal from old men like that,” they would say to one another as they walked by the house, as if hoping the old sailor would overhear them and spare theirchildren.

And a few more disappeared. Some right out of their bedrooms without a scream or cry. No bodies. No witnesses. No nothing, really. But soon enough they would start to call from that house. They would take their turns crying and begging from the basement window.

I had never seen my father scared, before. He’d fought in the war, and I still had never seen him scared. Only when he warned me about that house, did he seem petrified—like he knew he had no control over this world and he was just a glass bottle floating in an ocean of darkness. War had not put this in his mind, but that house and that old sailor had. Those shark teeth had. 

He’d been a child and he’d seen with his own eyes the old sailor watch him and smile at him with those jagged, disgusting teeth–smile at him like a beast growing hungry and reveling in its swelling appetite because it knew when it finally diddevour, it would be all the more satisfying. The old man had stayed in the long shadows of the porch, so that even in the brightest afternoon day, nobody could see anything but his crooked clown smile and his eyes—eyes that everybody will tell you glowed like beads of pale fire in the darkness.

“He’s in my mind. He’s in my fuckingmind and those eyes are always glowing,” I had heard my father say to my mother once, weeping and trembling in his throat.

He’d seen the pig corpses hanging from the apple tree branches. He’d seen the plumes of smoke that crawled into the sky from the cellar doors, sifting through the cracked wood like the bony arms of creatures reaching aimless and desperate for the light just outside. And he’d seen the mason jars that were filled with bloodied teeth, sitting inside one of the windows. He’d heard the crunching bones, the machine screams and whirring blades echo up and out of it. 

He knew I’d been to the house because he saw in my eyes the same thing he saw in his own every time he looked in the mirror.

And the next time I walked by the house I saw the rotten apples on the dead leaves. I saw the scraggly mess skeletal bushes and twigs that climb up along the side of the house, reaching up to the second story where the paint had completely stripped from the siding and left the bloated, warped pieces of wood peeling from the house’s frame. I saw under the grey clouds, the upstairs window cracked open and I heard him calling to me through it—begging me to help him.

“There’s no way,” I whispered to myself. “It’s been too long.”

I saw the ivy that draped over the porch—forest green and lush like it had a pact with the death that haunted the place—like it could flourish on the corpse of a house, so long as it grew into a trap to help lure us inside and tangle us in a slick web of green glossy leaves and stems.

I heard him calling me over and over. “Laney… be a good girl… come and get me. Laney…” And I know—I just know—on that final call, he was watching me through that blanket of ivy. I swear to this day that I saw those pale fire eyes.

“There’s no way,” I whispered to myself one more time. “It’s been too long,” I said.

I stuck my hands in my pockets and started down the sidewalk.

Look, some “creepypasta monsters” really don’t deserve the mockery they have gotten in later years as generic and juvenile, especially things like Slender Man, Momo and Siren Head whose origins are all infinitely interesting rabbit holes just based on subtle horror art from simple, everday artists who rarely are even mentioned as the original creators of these massive media phenomenon adaptations. The looming eerieness and vagueness of the original creators’ work that beckons and forces people to create elaborate backstories as a means to comfortably process and understand their own feelings of dread when seeing it, it’s genious and monumental, and reducing it to something that glue eaters snort-laugh at Youtubers and peers getting low-effort-jumpscared by is such a shame.

…

anyways, I’ll take the chicken quesadilla and a Sprite, please

Me, brushing my teeth for the first time in several days, at 4.33 AM, glaring at myself in the mirror through tears of frustration:

The local W*ndigo peering through my window: