These are my 9 favourite pieces from The Shortest Story so far. I’m so, so proud of what I’ve built with this project. It’s made me love writing fiction again.
13 stories narrated by Cecil Baldwin, voice of Welcome to Night Vale, who narrated the trailer
Incredible guest authors, including Robert Shearman (Doctor Who), Helen Marshall (Hair Side, Flesh Side) and Shawn Coss (Any Means Necessary, Cyanide and Happiness)
I’d love if you could check out the book or boost this post. You can also read an album of my 30 best stories on Imgur right now, including unreleased material! Thanks so, so much.
NORMALIZE the thing that looks like an old man living in your basement
DESTIGMATIZE the act of closing your vent to stop his dry whispering– which you cannot tell whether it is random or directed at you– from reaching you
ROMANTICIZE the idea of counting the number of stairs he climbs each night and praying he never makes it to the top
GUYS THIS IS SO IMPORTANT
we HAVE to let people know its okay to experience:
being repulsed by the putrid smell of his bile
feeling sick when seeing your grandparents because of the thing in your basement
locking your bedroom door even though you know it wouldnt be enough to stop him
letting your faucets run for a few seconds every morning because ever since he arrived more and more of your tap water had come out black as ink
knowing exactly what he looks like even though the only time you ever saw him was your first encounter with him at your uncle’s funeral when you were 6
questioning why youre the only one who remembers your dog
why cant anyone else remember your dog
what happened to your dog
oh my god i can still hear him whimpering downstairs some nights
i dont know if its actually him or just that thing taunting me
That I was out playing pokemon go, and people all over the world had started seeing this new pokemon popping up. Like out of nowhere this little thing started appearing occasionally. No word from Nyantic or The Pokemon Company about when or why they had released it. The pokemon was called “sleepytired” and it looked like this.
And you couldn’t catch it, the ball would just go straight through it. People were data mining and shit trying to figure out how to catch this thing but they couldn’t. Eventually they would just have to give up and leave the encounter.
After a few weeks of people reporting sightings of it, and no word from Nyantic, some creepy shit started happening…
What started happening was, if you entered an encounter with a “sleepytired” with the AR on it would manifest in the real world. But it wouldn’t do anything. It would just float there, watching.
So people being curious started doing this whenever they could, and these things would just manifest and stay there. Obviously this was causing problems because these things would just be floating menacingly in local parks and in the local McDonald. And they couldn’t be moved, because anyone who tried to move them or touch them would be struck by sudden, intense, chronic fatigue that seemingly had no cure.
The last part of the dream I remember was watching a news broadcast telling people that pokemon go was now illegal, and to avoid touching or disturbing the creepy little things that are now just about everywhere.
The Evil Within’s Shade easter egg is amazing. Skip to 0:45 seconds if you want the payoff.
edit: To get this to work you gotta hit the vending machine about 15 times then run over to the poster and it will fall to the ground revealing the peep hole. Chapter 3 of The Consequence DLC.
Pass Through Fire 