Kangaroos are animals that seem like they should be cryptids but it’s an entire species.
A kangaroo standing straight up is so deeply unsettling. It’s like you’re a furry who wished for anthropomorphic animals to be real and then it happened and you’re like NO DO NOT LIKE.
Kangaroos are dumb cause females only breed with the ones with the most muscles/testosterone so the entire species is roid raging itself to extinction
cut to me, playing my horror instrument at 4 am; my downstairs neighbors bang relentlessly at their ceiling with a broom stick, trying to stop me from summoning witches
This literally sounds like every 20th century avant garde “fuck a key signature” piece.
I love that a dude spent time making this cumbersome hunk of metal that is in no way easy to play and woukd be nigh impossible to ever get a clean recording of, just to replicate a couple layers of filtering and instrument manipulation
today, friday 13th, i had two things scheduled to happen. 1 was taking my drivers test (not really relevant to the purgatory thing but i feel the need to include it on the basis of friday 13th fuckery), 2 was picking up my diploma. as it turns out, somewhere between home and the dmv a taillight went out, so the administrator wouldnt let me take the test, and rescheduled me to NOVEMBER. so thats how my 9am went.
with that under our hats, me and my mom went to find my diploma.
it started bad. google maps did not recognize the address as existing. it took us several tries to convince it there was a west school avenue in anywhere but california, and when we finally did, the street names didn’t match. some of them just didn’t match the physical signs, but others changed or disappeared in the map itself. and as we approached, we discovered that the facility we were looking for was not only off the road, but the only way to get to it was through a backwoods neighborhood, inhabited EXCLUSIVELY by hicks sitting on their porches and judging us for some unknown sin.
finally, google says we’ve arrived. surely not, we whisper. please no. jesus christ. we’re faced with what appears to be a small penitentiary, the front of which is plain white with massive blinded windows, and the only parking in sight is through a gigantic chain-link fence. there is no signage anywhere whatsoever to indicate whether we’re allowed in, but there’s nowhere else to stop without blocking the teeny little road, so we pull in. the energy of this place is absolutely befuckened. we’re talking deserted. the parking lot is jam-packed, but there’s not a human in sight. it’s not a closed building either, more like a campus, with dozens of doors opening onto little courtyard areas. the doors are all either unmarked or covered in seemingly arbitrary words and numbers. some of them have strangely large locks and no knobs. some of them have keypads.
well by now we’re both thoroughly fuckin spooked, so my mom calls my dad to explain we were gonna be a little uh late and i go to find. something. anything. civilization, perhaps. i find a little hallway to the front of the building, where i can now see a gigantic sign declaring the name of the facility. the letters are two feet tall, but the exact same color as the roofing behind them. they are not faded. they were painted that way. beneath them is an easily 4-meter-tall arched metal gate, which is the only opening on the entire front of the otherwise clean building, and, therefore, logically represents the main entrance.
directly inside and left of the gate is a door with a cartoonishly large keypad lock and a sign which reads ‘NOT AN ENTRANCE.’ there are no arrows and no directions.
i turn around and head the opposite direction, down a long hall. at the end of it is a set of double doors which are shrouded in darkness. i’m about 30 feet away when there’s a flicker of movement behind the doors. then, out of the shadows, steps an old hick. “you look lost.” he says. “y-eAh” i reply. he enquires what i’m there for, and i explain my diploma. he directs me to a door next to a blue car. there is no logical way for the car to be inside the buildings courtyard, but it is no less next to a door. as i turn to see where i’m being directed, a young woman seemingly materializes in the middle of the hallway perpendicular to us, walking briskly. without slowing she turns to me, says “she’s making a pb&j sandwich,” and carries on her way. when i turn around the man is gone. when i turn back, she’s gone too. i run for my mom.
ngl at this point im dead fucking sure she wont be where i left her and when i find her the car will be gone and we’ll be trapped in this hellhole if we don’t get out before sunset, but she’s there, and we go and enter the door. inside we can hear idle chatter from an adjacent office. after a few seconds a woman comes out. she does not ask who we are. she asks whose diploma we want. we tell her mine. she pulls it out of a stack of loose paper, hands it to us without another solitary word, and bids us farewell.
mom drove outta there about 70mph and tbh i wouldve done the same that was an evil place and i do not plan on returning
Of course, I was six pages deep in a tax audit at the time. Chewing a pen when a rash of mothers with broken backs were rushed to the hospital, courteousy of uncareful feet smashing on cracks. Doctors, unsure at the time, blamed osteoporosis.
It was watched pots that remained cool. Or salt thrown over a shoulder that – for a second – showed a devil’s eye. Or it was the alligators. Don’t get me started on the alligators.
But something was the first whisper of what we’d woken up. Nobody wanted to say it out loud, because it sounded so ridiculous. It was a secret that swelled in our cheeks. Phrases we had always said that went silent.
All the hauntings came true. We had photograpic evidence of spirits. That’s probably what started the mass hysteria.
Some things took longer. Rubbing a statue for luck or breaking a mirror. Delayed response. One bad day turns into a bad month. Then you’re at the local witch place begging for a respite – seven years of bad luck?! – and she’s shaking her head. Nothing to be done.
Oh, the witches. The funny thing is that when people have always called you a witch, they’re surprisingly needy when you turn out to be one. When the world shifted, little towns who avoided one woman for her witchiness were now flocking to her because their legend had made her become one.
Pens mightier than swords. Avoiding groups of certain numbers. When a knife drops, we all hold our breath for the fight. A fork means company will show up, confused how they arrived.
It got better for a moment, for a breath, while we figured out the rules of it. What was a legend and what was myth. What kind of faith was big enough and what was too big. Some legends only effected certain areas. Some only certain people. We sunk money into infrastructure for once to clear up cracks. Stepped over salt in every building. Sold amulets like trinkets. For a second, we almost got our feet under us.
And then it got worse. Sometimes the company you invited was strange, unhuman. You had to wear iron. We had loved our cryptids until they came down from the mountains, worse than we could have predicted. Bowls of milk were on every window sill but most of them rotted.
In the books, we had all read about the end of the old ones. The unspeakable ones, who went off into the hills one day. Who we cannot say the name of. Who did not exist in the land of buses or planes. Who can steal you if they know your name, who can never lie but do a good job of it anyway.
We were not ready. The Folk showed up through the thin veil, and they were already laughing.
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