Haunted MTL Original – Truly A Monster – Rachel Cubbage
“Truly A Monster” by Rachel Cubbage
Yikes! That fire spell missed your head by no less than an inch. You knew you shouldn’t have snuck into this witch’s house, but your friend was in there. However, you knew you couldn’t leave him behind to go get help, so you decided to do this by yourself and rescue him, even if your friend was an idiot.
“How did we ever get into this situation?” you thought as you dashed behind a wall just barely missing another fireball that hit the wall in front of you.
Scenes flashed into your mind as you began to see where it all started when you and Mark walked by a shoddy, broken up house or so it seemed from far away. Mark dared you to go investigate the house. You were someone who could never pass up a dare, so off you went to the front door of the horrible, disgusting house. As you opened the rotten wood door, it fell off its hinges and landed with a crash. Mark yelled to see if you were okay, but when there was no response, he went into the house after you. “At least, he was trying to be somewhat heroic,” you thought to yourself.
Meanwhile, you decided you were going to scare him by standing behind the wall beside the doorway that was hidden enough from the outside that you couldn’t be seen. Five… ten… fifteen minutes went by and he hadn’t shown up to the door you were at. “That’s odd,” you said aloud briefly as you poked head out of the doorway to look for him. Before in your nook, you could see him from where he was waiting for you, but now, he wasn’t anywhere to be seen.
All of a sudden, the old run-down house you were in transformed into a colossal mansion with three floors and at least twenty rooms on each floor with twice as many windows. Then you heard a horrid, screechy voice that seemed like it was getting closer to you say, “Look at what we have here, sisters! Some poor lost boy decided to come in and have a look at our lovely house. Hmm, shall we show him around our beautiful creation, sisters?”
Then you heard loud footstep noises that sounded like they were going downstairs dragging an unwilling captive thrashing at every single step further and further down into the abyss of the basement. You looked around you for somewhere a stairway could be, but unfortunately, you couldn’t see any stairwells around you. This meant that you have to now move from where you were well hidden to deeper inside the not-so-disgusting looking house to search for Mark and, hopefully, not run into those horrid, female sounding beings.
A door slammed shut close by you and out stepped this beautiful woman who had a crooked grin across her face as it seemed to peer right at you. “This isn’t right, as there is no way this woman sounded like that voice did,” you thought to yourself, but what you couldn’t help prevent was the gasp that escaped from your lips. Thankfully, the woman was too distracted by Mark, or you at least hoped it was Mark, to notice your gasp.
You glanced up at the woman as slowly it turned into this awful looking creature with skin full of blemishes and a long pointy nose. This confirmed one thing that unfortunately for you: you were in the presence of the worst kind of witches in the world. This creature wasn’t those like witch costumes at Halloween that wore a pointy black hat while riding a broomstick across the sky, but these were truly the worst type of witches as they craved for human flesh to consume and were able to perform the most powerful black magic that truly held limits to it. These witches had no name beside The Witches of No Return because no one had ever lived to tell about them before. Everyone knew the tales of these witches as they claimed many lives each year. You can vividly remember several recent reports of individuals who disappeared for days on end until they were discovered months later as bare bones with not a single piece of tissue left on it and bite marks carved directly into it. People always claimed that witches caused these disappearances, but no one knew for sure, so everyone began referring to them as The Witches of No Return.
“Mark, why did you have to dare me to investigate this house?” you accidentally mumbled just a little too loud. Just then the witch heard her and immediately turned toward you. As soon as your eyes met, you knew that you would soon join Mark wherever he was.
“Ahh another one?! Wow, sisters aren’t we so lucky today. We can have twice the fun now as we consume your flesh while your male companion watches as you squirm in agony!” she crackled.
In a flash, two other sisters appeared beside the ringleader you just met. Now was the moment that you realized you are completely screwed as you have no back-up, no hope of escaping, and no weapons. This was the moment that your mind returned you to as the ringleader cast a fireball right at your head.
You have two options now. You can escape through the door that you entered originally, or you can go try to find the basement deeper in the house.
Option 1: Escape Through the Door
As much as you care for Mark, you care for your own life more than him. “It was his fault that you got into this whole mess, so if you leave, then won’t affect you if he dies in this house, right?” your mind tried to reason with your guilt of leaving him behind. You decided that the option to escape through the door was much more important than saving Mark because all he has ever done was to get you into trouble.
It truly wasn’t your fault that Mark came into the house, right?
Right?
Right?
It was too late for him now.
It is too late for you as well because as your mind let you disregard the danger you were in by attempting to reason with yourself to leave him behind, the ringleader released another larger fireball that there was no possibility of dodging. As soon as you saw the fireball fly from the witch’s hand, your mind snapped yourself back to the present moment rather than your subconscious. You can feel the heat of the fireball as it grows closer to your face. Instead of rescuing your friend, you are left to sizzle, to cook, and to burn inside your own skin that you can barely even feel anymore. It doesn’t matter anymore because you were a selfish monster who deserved to die if you didn’t even want to rescue your friend who was captured because of your childish prank that failed miserably.
You have died due to a fireball to your face and whole body. Congratulations for being a monster. You thought that you could escape being a monster yourself, but you imagined this entire circumstance up. It was you who was holding the burning knife that melted Mark’s face to appear like The Witches you had heard about. He considered you a friend and thought nothing of how you invited him into your house despite it looking rickety and destroyed. You killed him with your bare hands and blamed it on The Witches, but truly it was you who was the monster.
The police showed you the video of the awful things you did to Mark as he screamed at you to stop and told you multiple times that he thought YOU were his friend. The police informed you that his name wasn’t even Mark. It wasn’t even a him either. It was a she. She was Samantha. You turned a blind eye to her screams and imagined it was just some monster that killed her, but it was you the entire time. You even had the audacity to record yourself doing everything to her and set it loose on the internet to run free throughout every single continent of the world.
It.
Was.
Your.
Fault.
Option 2: Find Mark Deeper in the House
Knowing how much Mark means to you, you decide brave forward into the house in hopes of losing the witches. You take one last look at the door you could have left through before turning in the opposite direction which leads you deeper into the house. You could still hear the footsteps of multiple beings following close behind you, so you kept going farther down the hallway. The hallway you run down seems like it is repeating itself every few doors you pass. At first, your mind doesn’t process it as the noises seem to be gaining on you like they could reach you at any second, but considering how large this house is, you know you shouldn’t be able to see repeating objects like a vase of flowers on a small, normal table. However, on the fourth time you keep passing the vase filled with flowers, you notice the flowers aren’t flowers at all, but each one is a carved skull intricately designed to form complex petals. You could have sworn those were flowers the first time you had seen them.
As you continue through the house, you begin to notice small inconsistencies like carpet where the ceiling should be, a familiar lamp you own, and even a pet you owned as a child. You found it weird, but seeing as the witches were right behind you, you didn’t have too much time to really concentrate on those discrepancies right now. The thudding steps behind you that you could have sworn you had been hearing suddenly vanished as if they had never been there at all.
Then you heard it. A scream. A single scream that pierced complete silence. A scream that could only belong to your friend, Mark. That’s when the lights around you flashed bright white for what felt like forever before it dimmed so dark that you could barely see your hands in front of you. You covered your eyes with your hands to prevent the bright lights from blinding you, but now you could only feel was liquid drizzling down your face. As your hands moved down to where the mysterious liquid was flowing, you begin to see one single color. The color was a deep crimson red, but as soon as you saw it, the lights turned back on and everything seemed to be back to normal.
A thought began to form, but it stopped halfway through as if you truly didn’t belong where you were. An object behind you shattered as if it had been deliberately used to distract you from any thought you could form. You know what you saw before, yet your mind can’t quite place what it would be. This color was familiar to you, yet you can’t even begin to think of how.
You looked behind you where the noise came from, but you saw nothing. No hallway with the lamp you thought you had seen before. No flower vase on the simple table. No witches following behind you. You saw nothing at all except small cracks if you squinted to see farther in the white abyss.
When you looked forward, you could see one door open in the distance from the hallway you knew you were in. The hallway contained several doors, a dark table with a vase full of flowers, and something at the very end of it which was forming in front of you. As soon as you blinked, the hallway contained a single door at the end with “Help me” on it written in a crimson liquid which had multiple drips coming from each letter. You heard another scream. This time it lingered in the air but slowly faded out into silence once again. You dashed towards the door at the end of the hall knowing that this had to be the door that would lead you to Mark.
This had to be it.
It had to be.
It must be, right?
You were going to open it and take it wherever it leads you, even if there was a small chance Mark would be at the bottom of it. You were going to save him. You had to because you would never want to hurt a friend.
As soon as you grasped the doorknob preparing to open it wide, you realized what you had done. Your eyes flashed open within a second as you tried to take in everything that had happened. You stood there wringing someone’s neck with your hands as they tried to call out to you. Their last words to you were, “Stop. Please. Help. Me.” Each word came at a cost of a breath that they said to save themselves, yet instead you grasped harder until you could feel their warm blood turn cold.
You looked as the person whose throat you held slowly opens as they release their last dying breath. You thought you were rescuing someone yet instead you took the life of someone you held close to you. Mark wasn’t even her real name. She was your friend who came to you for help, and yet here you are with her dead in your arms.
Why would you kill someone you loved?
Did they deserve this death caused by you?
Why would a monster like you do something like this?
With more questions rising and populating your thoughts, you take one last look at your hands and feel appalled with what you had done. You can’t even bare to look at them anymore as you slowly fade out of the real world and go back into your subconscious fantasy of you rescuing Mark from monsters you created. You were going to be the hero who was incapable of injuring another human being you care for, or at least that’s what your mind decided as the world around you faded out into nothingness.
Rachel Cubbage comes from a small town in Stanley, Virginia. Rachel graduated from her high school after she graduated from Lord Fairfax Community College with an Associate’s Degree specialized in English. She is currently going to Bridgewater College with a double major in Professional Writing and Computer Science. She has always been interested in writing Fantasy, Fiction, and Horror.
What if ours weren’t the only reality? What if the past paths converged, if those moments that led to our current circumstances got tangled together with their alternates and we found ourselves caught up in the threads?
Marla returned home after the funeral and wake. She drew the key in the lock and opened the door slowly, the looming dread of coming back to an empty house finally sinking in. Everyone else had gone home with their loved ones. They had all said, “goodbye,” and moved along.
Her daughter Misty and son-in-law Joel had caught a flight to Springfield so he could be at work the next day for the big meeting. Her brother Darcy was on his way back to Montreal. Emmett and Ruth were at home next door, probably washing dishes from the big meal they had helped to provide afterward, seeing as their kitchen light was on. Marla remembered there being food but couldn’t recall what exactly as she hadn’t felt like eating. Sandwiches probably… she’d have to thank them later.
Marla had felt supported up until she turned the key in the lock after the services, but then the realization sank deep in her throat like acid reflux, hanging heavy on her heart – everyone else had other lives to return to except for her. She sighed and stepped through the threshold onto the outdated beige linoleum tile and the braided rag rug that stretched across it. She closed the door behind herself and sighed again. She wiped her shoes reflexively on the mat before just kicking them off to land in a haphazard heap in the entryway.
The still silence of the house enveloped her, its oppressive emptiness palpable – she could feel it on her skin, taste it on her tongue. It was bitter. She sighed and walked purposefully to the living room, the large rust-orange sofa waiting to greet her. She flopped into its empty embrace, dropping her purse at her side as she did so.
A familiar, husky voice greeted her from deeper within the large, empty house. “Where have you been?”
Marla looked up and glanced around. Her husband Frank was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, drying a bowl. Marla gasped, her hand shooting to her mouth. Her clutched appendage took on a life of its own, slowly relinquishing itself of her gaping jaw and extending a first finger to point at the specter.
“Frank?” she spoke hesitantly.
“Yeah,” the man replied, holding the now-dry bowl nestled in the faded blue-and-white-checkered kitchen towel in both hands. “Who else would you expect?”
“But you’re dead,” Marla spat, the words falling limply from her mouth of their own accord.
The 66-year old man looked around confusedly and turned to face Marla, his silver hair sparkling in the light from the kitchen, illuminated from behind like a halo. “What are you talking about? I’m just here washing up after lunch. You were gone so I made myself some soup. Where have you been?”
“No, I just got home from your funeral,” Marla spoke quietly. “You are dead. After the boating accident… You drowned. I went along to the hospital – they pronounced you dead on arrival.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Frank said. “What boating accident?”
“The sailboat… You were going to take me out,” Marla coughed, her brown eyes glossed over with tears.
“We don’t own a sailboat,” Frank said bluntly. “Sure, I’d thought about it – it seems like a cool retirement hobby – but it’s just too expensive. We’ve talked about this, we can’t afford it.”
Marla glanced out the bay window towards the driveway where the small sailboat sat on its trailer, its orange hull reminiscent of the Florida citrus industry, and also of the life jacket Frank should have been wearing when he’d been pulled under. Marla cringed and turned back toward the kitchen. She sighed and spoke again, “But the boat’s out front. The guys at the marina helped to bring it back… after you… drowned.”
Frank had retreated to the kitchen to put away the bowl. Marla followed. She stood in the doorway and studied the man intently. He was unmistakably her husband, there was no denying it even despite her having just witnessed his waxen lifeless body in the coffin at the wake before the burial, though this Frank was a slight bit more overweight than she remembered.
“Well, that’s not possible. Because I’m still here,” Frank grumbled. He turned to face her, his blue eyes edged with worry. “There now, it was probably just a dream. You knew I wanted a boat and your anxiety just formulated the worst-case scenario…”
“See for yourself,” Marla said, her voice lilting with every syllable.
Frank strode into the living room and stared out the bay window. The driveway was vacant save for some bits of Spanish moss strewn over the concrete from the neighboring live oak tree. He turned towards his wife.
“But there’s no boat,” he sighed. “You must have had a bad dream. Did you fall asleep in the car in the garage again?” Concern was written all over his face, deepening every crease and wrinkle. “Is that where you were? The garage?”
Marla glanced again at the boat, plain as day, and turned to face Frank. Her voice grew stubborn. “It’s right here. How can you miss it?” she said, pointing at the orange behemoth.
“Honey, there’s nothing there,” Frank exclaimed, exasperation creeping into his voice.
Marla huffed and strode to the entryway, gathering her shoes from where they waited in their haphazard heap alongside the braided rag run on the worn linoleum floor. She marched out the door as Frank took vigil in its open frame, still staring at her. She stomped out to the boat and slapped her hand on the fiberglass surface with a resounding smack. The boat was warm to the touch, having baked in the Florida sun. She turned back towards the front door.
“See!” she bellowed.
The door stood open, empty. No one was there, watching. Marla sighed again and walked back inside. The vacant house once again enveloped her in its oppressive emptiness. Frank was nowhere to be found.
So I guess it’s goodbye for now. Feel free to check out more of Jennifer Weigel’s work here on Haunted MTL or here on her website.
Today on Nightmarish Nature we’re gonna revisit The Blob and jiggle our way to terror. Why? ‘Cause we’re just jellies – looking at those gelatinous denizens of the deep, as well as some snot-like land-bound monstrosities, and wishing we could ooze on down for some snoozy booze schmoozing action. Or something.
Honestly, I don’t know what exactly it is that jellyfish and slime molds do but whatever it is they do it well, which is why they’re still around despite being among the more ancient organism templates still in common use.
Jellyfish are on the rise.
Yeah, yeah, some species like moon jellies will hang out in huge blooms near the surface feeding, but that’s not what I meant. Jellyfish populations are up. They’re honing in on the open over-fished ocean and making themselves at home. Again.
And, although this makes the sea turtles happy since jellies are a favorite food staple of theirs, not much else is excited about the development. Except for those fish that like to hide out inside of their bells, assuming they don’t accidentally get eaten hanging out in there. But that’s a risk you gotta take when you’re trying to escape predation by surrounding yourself in a bubble of danger that itself wants to eat you. Be eaten or be eaten. Oh, wait…
So what makes jellies so scary?
Jellyfish pack some mighty venom. Despite obvious differences in mobility, they are related to anemones and corals. But not the Man o’ War which looks similar but is actually a community of microorganisms that function together as a whole, not one creature. Not that it matters when you’re on the wrong end of a nematocyst, really. Because regardless what it’s attached to, that stings.
Box jellies are among the most venomous creatures in the world and can move of their own accord rather than just drifting about like many smaller jellyfish do. And even if they aren’t deadly, the venom from many jellyfish species will cause blisters and lesions that can take a long time to heal. So even if they do resemble free-floating plastic grocery bags, you’d do best to steer clear. Because those are some dangerous curves.
But what does this have to do with slime molds?
Absolutely nothing. I honestly don’t know enough about jellyfish or slime molds to devote the whole of a Nightmarish Nature segment to either, so they had to share. Essentially, this bit is what happened when I decided to toast a bagel before coming up with something to write about and spent a tad too much time in contemplation of my breakfast. I guess we’re lucky I didn’t have any cream cheese or clotted cream…
Oh, and also thinking about gelatinous cubes and oozes in the role-playing game sense – because those sort of seem like a weird hybrid between jellies and slime molds, as does The Blob. Any of those amoeba influenced creatures are horrific by their very nature – they don’t even need to be souped up, just ask anyone who’s had dysentery.
And one of the most interesting thing about slime molds is that they can take the shortest path to food even when confronted with very complex barriers. They are maze masterminds and would give the Minotaur more than a run for his money, especially if he had or was food. They have even proven capable of determining the most efficient paths for water lines or railways in metropolitan regions, which is kind of crazy when you really think about it. Check it out in Scientific American here. So, if we assume that this is essentially the model upon which The Blob was built, then it’s kind of a miracle anything got away. And slime molds are coming under closer scrutiny and study as alternative means of creating computer components are being explored.
Jellies are the Wave of the Future.
We are learning that there may be a myriad of uses for jellyfish from foodstuffs to cosmetic products as we rethink how we interact with them. They are even proving useful in cleaning up plastic pollution. I don’t know how I feel about the foodstuff angle for all that they’ve been a part of various recipes for a long time. From what I’ve seen of the jellyfish cookbook recipes, they just don’t look that appealing. But then again I hate boba with a passion, so I’m probably not the best candidate to consider the possibility.
So it seems that jellies are kind of the wave of the future as we find that they can help solve our problems. That’s pretty impressive for some brainless millions of years old critter condiments. Past – present – perpetuity! Who knows what else we’d have found if evolution hadn’t cleaned out the fridge every so often?
Feel free to check out more Nightmarish Nature here.
Continuing our junkyard dawg werewolf story from the previous St. Patrick’s Days… though technically he’s more of a wolfwere but wolfwhatever. Anyway, here are Part 1 from 2022, Part 2 from 2023 and Part 3 from 2024 if you want to catch up.
Yeah I don’t know how you managed to find me after all this time. We haven’t been the easiest to track down, Monty and I, and we like it that way. Though actually, you’ve managed to find me every St. Patrick’s Day since 2022 despite me being someplace else every single time. It’s a little disconcerting, like I’m starting to wonder if I was microchipped way back in the day in 2021 when I was out lollygagging around and blacked out behind that taco hut…
Anyway as I’d mentioned before, that Scratchers was a winner. And I’d already moved in with Monty come last St. Patrick’s Day. Hell, he’d already begun the process of cashing in the Scratchers, and what a process that was. It made my head spin, like too many squirrels chirping at you from three different trees at once. We did get the money eventually though.
Since I saw you last, we were kicked out of Monty’s crap apartment and had gone to live with his parents while we sorted things out. Thank goodness that was short-lived; his mother is a nosy one for sure, and Monty didn’t want to let on he was sitting on a gold mine as he knew they’d want a cut even though they had it made already. She did make a mean brisket though, and it sure beat living with Sal. Just sayin.
Anyway, we finally got a better beater car and headed west. I was livin’ the dream. We were seeing the country, driving out along old Route 66, for the most part. At least until our car broke down just outside of Roswell near the mountains and we decided to just shack it up there. (Boy, Monty sure can pick ‘em. It’s like he has radar for bad cars. Calling them lemons would be generous. At least it’s not high maintenance women who won’t toss you table scraps or let you up on the sofa.)
We found ourselves the perfect little cabin in the woods. And it turns out we were in the heart of Bigfoot Country, depending on who you ask. I wouldn’t know, I’ve never seen one. But it seems that Monty was all into all of those supernatural things: aliens, Bigfoot, even werewolves. And finding out his instincts on me were legit only added fuel to that fire. So now he sees himself as some sort of paranormal investigator.
Whatever. I keep telling him this werewolf gig isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be, and it doesn’t work like in the movies. I wasn’t bitten, and I generally don’t bite unless provoked. He says technically I’m a wolfwere, to which I just reply “Where?” and smile. Whatever. It’s the little things I guess. I just wish everything didn’t come out as a bark most of the time, though Monty’s gotten pretty good at interpreting… As long as he doesn’t get the government involved, and considering his take on the government himself that would seem to be a long stretch. We both prefer the down low.
So here we are, still livin’ the dream. There aren’t all that many rabbits out here but it’s quiet and the locals don’t seem to notice me all that much. And Monty can run around and make like he’s gonna have some kind of sighting of Bigfoot or aliens or the like. As long as the pantry’s stocked it’s no hair off my back. Sure, there are scads of tourists, but they can be fun to mess around with, especially at that time of the month if I happen to catch them out and about.
Speaking of tourists, I even ran into that misspent youth from way back in 2021 at the convenience store; I spotted him at the Quickie Mart along the highway here. I guess he and his girlfriend were apparently on walkabout (or car-about) perhaps making their way to California or something. He even bought me another cookie. Small world. But we all knew that already…
If you enjoyed this werewolf wolfwere wolfwhatever saga, feel free to check out more of Jennifer Weigel’s work here on Haunted MTL or here on her website.