This is not a story that “started innocently enough.” It started pretty fucking horribly, actually. You see, it wasn’t a zombie, bug, or werewolf that haunted me. It was the beeping.
As I brewed my coffee one Saturday morning, I opened a window. This action allowed the beeping in. It was high-pitched, distant, and intermittent enough for me to forget for a time. Then it would creep back in.
I awoke to “BEEP!”
I drank coffee. “BEEP!”
I ate breakfast. “BEEP!”
I took a shower. “BEEP!”
It was incessant!I soon realized it must have been an alarm for a busted pipe, no doubt due to the recent freezing spells in the neighborhood. I was livid.
Despite all this anger, I’m not a “go-getter,” as my father would say. I resigned to letting the beeping rule my world. After all, I could escape it when I left the house. That was until it started to follow me. I was taking my twelfth bathroom break at work when I heard it. Surely I was mistaken. Surely I was going crazy. It couldn’t be.
But then, so clearly: “BEEP!”
Not a regular beep! A haunting beep. Soul-hounding beep. A beep you couldn’t forget, even in your sleep!
I had to take matters into my own hands.
Due to COVID, I hadn’t been in public since I moved to the city. So I wandered around my neighborhood aimlessly in a desperate attempt for social interaction. The beeping was always teasing me, just out of reach. I walked in the cold until my feet were sore and my arms were numb.
One night, I traveled further than usual and lost my way in a thick fog. Every direction I turned seemed to be wrong until I finally collapsed. I lay on the cold hard ground with the beeping as my only familiarity, taunting me from the darkness.
I rose from the hard ground and saw a golden glow. As I approached it, the beeping returned, growing louder with every footfall. I could barely see, and my big head slammed into a wooden door. A glistening golden cross shone on the front. It was a nunnery.
A nunnery? Who stumbles upon a nunnery? Trust me. I thought the same. It did not stop me from rapping my knuckles on its beautifully dark, solid oaken frame. After a moment, it creaked open. A face shadowed by a nun’s veil answered the door.
“What is it?” the face said.
“Please help,” I begged.
The face, teeth glistening in the darkness, smiled and said: “Well, nuns surely don’t turn away those in need, do they?”
She swung the door open with a loud creak. I hesitantly walked in from the cold and into the dingy abbey. Flickering candles lit the stone walls of the dank hallway.
“Sorry,” she said. “The power’s out. I hope you don’t mind.”
Things got stranger as we went. A single light led us through the dark, winding hallway. I crooked my head up to see a cobwebbed stairwell.
“It seems other nuns don’t stay up late, huh?” I asked.
When I looked down, she had disappeared just beyond a bend in the hallway. I followed it to find a heavy wooden door and trepidatiously pushed it open. Upon entering the smokey, candlelit cathedral, I saw the nun crouched at an altar. She fastidiously grabbed at something unseen with her hands as dark liquid dripped around her, staining the marble floor.
“What are you doing?”
I asked to no response. I stepped closer to see what she was so fixated upon. She slowly turned with a wriggling cauldron of putrid death in her arms. Maggots, worms, mites, severed appendages — all mixed in a miasma of thick, crimson blood.
I screamed until my soul threatened to set loose from my body, spirit torn from my bones, my face ripped from my —
“Wait!!!”she screamed. “I’m sorry. Shucks, I always do this!”
To my surprise, she started crying. She turned from me and wept into her hands, facing the stone wall.
“Why can’t I be normal!” she cried. “All the other ghosts have friends, but I always fuck it up!”
It sounds crazy, but I felt the urge to comfort her.
“There, there…” I said. “It’ll be okay.”
“No! No, it won’t! Sure, my brother, Casper, is the friendly ghost. And my sister, the Bell witch, is a family favorite. But who am I? NOBODY!”
I know; I should’ve run. I mean, she just revealed she was a ghost, for chrissakes. One with family connections, no less!
Instead, I said: “I get it.”
She turned, her pallid face streaming with ethereal tears.
“My father says I won’t amount to anything too. He says I’m a failure compared to my siblings,” I said. “Somehow, he finds a way to make me feel bad when I’m around them.”
I offered a handkerchief, and she dabbed the tears from her face.
“I’m sorry about the offerings,” she said, gesturing to the cauldron of blood and guts. “I thought this was the kind of food your kind ate! I just… don’t know what humans want, I guess.”
Her spectral hands wrung nervously in the darkness, and I thought it was charming.
I said, “Neither do I. Maybe we can be friends after all?”
It was from then on that I visited the spirit in the nunnery every day. At first, I brought her food and gifts — a can of sardines and bread or maybe a freshly killed dove. Things were happy for a while. I felt like I finally had a true friend.
Soon she confided to me that if she didn’t make a kill soon, her father would disown her.
Her overwrought tale struck me to the core, so I decided to oblige her. She lent me her gift of the beeping, a phantom trap that she used to lure fools into our web with its annoying cry. They’d follow it, the badgering beeping, to our doorstep, then:
Wham!
I’d hit them, drag them through the long, winding hallway and present them to her for feeding. They never saw it coming. Honestly, the poor boys probably wanted relief from it.
The pestering, the sickening, the maddening:
The beeping.
Millerwiller 