Read half of squidward's suicide

[Elliot]

And now I can't sleep. Gonna go read the other half now.

[Kain]

The story starts in late September, when my family went to go visit our relatives, who invited us up to celebrate one of them (Desiree) getting like 2,000 bucks in some scratch-off lottery thing. They live in this really fucking shitty part of Shanondale that people from Charles Town, Shepherdstown and Ranson (basically the least rednecky parts of WV) like to call "Squalor Holler". It's way up on the mountain, and exactly like how everyone pictures it when they hear about it - nothing but ramshackle shacks, rusty-ass rebuilt trailers, everything fucking covered in decades-old Christmas decorations because they're all too busy being smelly rednecks to ever clean up. Real Deliverance shit, just no rivers or canoes. The relatives we were visiting are absolutely confirmed inbreeders, all cousins fucking each other. We don't refer to them as aunt, uncle, whatever, just relatives. Not terrible people or anything, just absolutely cartoonish, depressing hillbilly stereotypes.

So anyway, we're up here in this godforsaken trailer, it sucks. There's like eight of them, plus me, my dad, my mom, and my sister. About two hours in, my mom takes my cell phone so that I can "focus on the family time together" (which is bullshit, all we did the whole time was eat TV dinners and be forced to watch Nascar and shit). After like 6 hours of this shit, about ten minutes before we're supposed to leave, it starts raining. We know how treacherous the roads can get up on the mountain, so we decide to wait for the rain to die down. Flash forward two hours later, it's fucking dark as hell, ten o'clock, and there's a flood warning for the area. I have my phone back by this time (no reception, though, of course), I'm playing Tetris and Texas Hold'Em and stuff, when suddenly I hear my dad start losing his shit in the next room.

I walk over, and it turns out that they let slip that they'd buried their kid, Thomas, outside, and apparently were afraid the rain would wash up his body or some other horseshit. The kid was like six, he was attacked by a dog, and they never told the cops. Just fucking buried him like he was a family pet. My dad's flipping his shit, and rightfully so, because, you know, we live in the 21st century and all. So our relatives all say they'll sort it all out in the morning. My parents tell me and my sister to stay in the same room as them during the night, and we do. None of us really suspected that they'd killed Thomas or anything, since they're really peaceful - they didn't even own any guns aside from this one old-timey double-barrel shotgun they had on a mantle. Nevertheless, we were creeped the fuck out, and intended to tell the cops in the morning once we got to town.

So, it was like 3 in the morning, I couldn't sleep. Power had gone out for the fifth time or so, and I'm not able to charge my dead phone. Worst part is, I could see Thomas's little grave right outside the window. Little cross on it and everything, and I assumed the kid couldn't have been buried deep at all since they were srried about him just washing up out of the grave. So I was just fixated on it, kept being draw to looking out the window. And then I saw the fucking worst thing in my life.

Something was creeping through the trees toward the house.

I stared at it for a while, but couldn't get a good look at it since it was raining and the brush was so thick.

For a few minutes I assumed it was two really pale horses, kind of ambling through the woods side-by-side. But then it walked into the moonlight, and I saw that it was all one thing, like a kind of human torso, but wider. It finally stepped into full view, and I saw it had something like six legs, kind of somewhere between a beetle's legs and a horse's legs. Two arms, right where someone would normally have them, but they were about a half a foot longer than any normal man's arms. It had a bald head, but the face looked like some sort of fucking bizarre masquerade ball kind of mask. This fucking clenched-up, furrowed forehead, and a nose that looked sort of like a crow's or a raven's beak. It didn't have eyes, either...just like the depressions where eyes would go. It looked like it had a human mouth, underneath its proboscis. What still strikes me to this day is that it seemed to have a penis, too, like right on the abdomen where a normal person's dick would be.

The thing moved sort of gracefully, and made these soft thump-thumping noises when it moved. It must've been like seven, eight feet tall, but sounded like it weighed maybe only 150 lbs at most. It starts walking towards Thomas's grave, and then I finally snap out of whatever trance I was in, and just scream. My mom is the first to wake up, and I tell her to look out the window. She rushes over, and doesn't really seem to understand what she's looking at. After a minute, though, the thing bends down and starts pawing at the grave with its hands. My dad and Jasper rush in, and Jasper just fucking loses his shit. Screams like a little girl, runs back out of the room, yelling for his father, yelling "It's outside, it came and it's outside!"

I look back and see the thing is digging furiously at the ground, kicking up huge mounds of dirt. I hear these sounds of feet running around the house, I think they were looking for the shotgun. The thing reaches into the hole and grabs up what I assume was Thomas's body by the leg in one hand. The thing kind of gallops back into the woods, snapping all these branches and shit, and then that's when we all hear it:

A kid crying. The sound of a child sobbing and crying, from the direction that the thing took off in.

We left as soon as the rain let up, at like 5 am. I don't even think we told anyone at the house. Drove straight back to Ranson, only stopping for gas. No one said a word to each other. My family refuses to speak about what happened; I tried to bring it up once, just to make sure it was real. My dad told me to shut the fuck up, so I did. I typed this up about three weeks after it happened, but just saved it to a notepad file and left it alone. Never mentioned it to any of my friends or anything, just tried to erase it from my mind by getting absolutely fucked-up drunk whenever my thoughts lingered on it. It mostly worked, up until yesterday.

See, I work at this gas station in Ranson, from 8 pm to 3 am. I work the register, keep the place clean, and take out the trash. Yesterday, when I was bringing the trash bags over to the back of the building for the dude in the morning to take care of, I heard what I had assumed to be some junkie fucking around in the dumpster. I yelled at whoever it was a couple of times to get the hell out before I called the cops. But as I walked towards the source of the noise, I suddenly heard those same footsteps. That soft thump-thump. Hooves or feet, or whatever the hell they were. I turned right around and went back into the store and hid behind the counter. I look over at the outside security monitor and see some kind of movement from just offscreen, something huge casting a shadow and moving.

[Elliot]

Some stuff he said was once here.

I win.