This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/PriestessOfSpiders on 2024-05-28 17:01:56+00:00.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Content warning for suicide.

I should have known better than to expect uninterrupted sleep. I was awakened at some point in the early morning, before the sun came up, by a tapping against my window. I opened my eyes to find that the lights I had made sure to leave on the night before were all now off. Flipping the switch on the bedside lamp did nothing. The tapping came again, and I turned to look.

The blinds began to roll up by themselves, slowly, revealing a view of the parking lot illuminated by the bright moon. Creeping down from the top of the windows, I caught sight of a pair of feet dangling into view. Then legs, arms, a torso, all descending like a puppet on strings and clothed in ripped, blood-stained nightclothes. Finally, the face came into view, and I shuddered with recognition.

It was me.

The neck was bent at an impossible angle, long greasy hair cascaded over sunken eyes and lips curled into a pained almost-smile, but it was me. I realized with horror what lookatme.png had been depicting when I noticed the noose around the corpse’s neck.

One of the arms began to move, pressing a lifeless finger against the glass of the motel window and scrawling a series of letters in dark, dead blood.

F I R S T K I S S

When the corpse was finished, the arm dangled lifelessly against its sides once more, and it turned around to face the moon. It seemed to float out into the parking lot, the hanging rope carrying it along as it slowly gained altitude, ascending further and further upwards into the dark sky. The blinds began to move again of their own accord, covering up the window like curtains at the end of a play.

Despite everything I had been through, despite the horrifying dullness I felt in my heart from days of constant lack of safety, I still had enough energy left to cry.

The thing’s instructions were simple enough to follow. I knew where I had received my first kiss.

I arrived at the zoo as soon as it opened, hoodie up over my head in an attempt to obscure as much of my sleep deprived, dead-eyed face as possible. I didn’t bother stopping to look at any of the exhibits, instead making a bee-line for the reptile house. I hadn’t visited it in a long time, it brought back bad memories of a relationship that had already begun to curdle at the time of that long-ago visit.

My prompt arrival at the zoo’s opening, combined with the fact that it was a weekday, meant that for the time being I was the only visitor in the building. I walked past the chuckwallas, the tortoises, the gila monsters, the rattlesnakes, the horned toads, a veritable parade of cold-blooded beasts, ignoring them all until I arrived at my destination; the anaconda.

It just sat there, as it always did, an albino serpent the length of a truck, just lazing about in the moist, green habitat that was its whole world. I doubt it even registered my presence in the room. I sat down on a bench and waited to see what would happen next. It didn’t take very long.

After a few minutes, someone else walked into the room. I didn’t even need to look up to know who it was, or, rather who it was pretending to be. Even in my peripheral vision, I could recognize myself.

“Hello Thomas” it said, its voice a perfect mimicry of my own.

“That’s not my name.”

It cackled, mockery dripping from its voice as its laughter reverberated through the dark room. I just sat there and waited for it to finish. I was too tired to be afraid anymore. Part of me hoped that it had brought me there to kill me.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“Look at me.”

“I already have.”

“Look at me.”

I did as I was told, raising my eyes to look at the thing that had systematically worked to destroy my will to live. Its face was pale, its eyes dull, with lips a dull blue. The ends of its twisted not-smile twitched slightly as I made eye contact.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked.

It didn’t respond, it just kept looking at me with its dead, glassy eyes.

“What do you want from me?”

The thing reached a stiff, dead hand into its pocket, producing a scuffed and ancient flash drive.

“Pass it on. Make someone else look at me,” it said, tossing the flash drive to the ground with a clatter of plastic on concrete.

“No.”

In a flash, it was on top of me, hands tight around my throat. I struggled to breath, and frantically tried to push off my doppelganger’s stiff, cold body, but to no avail.

“It is very different,” it said, “to think you want to die, and to actually want to die. If you really wanted me to kill you, you wouldn’t be here right now, you would have done it to yourself already, you disgusting coward. You wouldn’t try to fight back as you feel your own hands close around your neck, you wouldn’t even try to take another breath. But you don’t really want to die. You just want to stop suffering. That’s not the same thing. And until you do choose to die, I can make you suffer, much, much worse than this.”

It let go, abruptly, and I fell to the ground in a heap, shaking and coughing. The shot of adrenaline from my body’s latent desire to stay alive provided me with just enough emotional energy to feel very, very afraid. The thing picked the flash drive up off the ground and placed it firmly in the palm of my hand. I winced at its touch.

“Make someone else look at me,” it said, and walked away, melting into the shadows of the dimly lit room.

And that brings us to the here and now. I’m sitting at my computer now, staring at this word document and trying very hard not to pay attention to the reflection I can see in my monitor, at the figure standing right behind me.

I’ve been writing this all out in one sitting, so I apologize if it isn’t particularly coherent, Helen, but I know you’ll understand. I trust you will have done as I instructed, and hopefully by the time you’re actually reading this, it has been several days after I wrote it.

Right now, in another window, I have an email draft open. I’m using a temporary account, one of those “self-destructing” addresses that will delete in about an hour. I imagine I don’t have to tell you what the email’s title is, nor the name of its sole attachment.

I haven’t set a recipient yet. When I first started writing this all out, I thought for sure I’d just send it to Seth, set the title to something like “Here is a check for how much I owe you” or something like that. But no matter how much they hurt me, I can’t bring myself to do this to them. Even if it is their fault that this is happening to me. I think I’ll just try to find someone on linkedin or something and send it to them instead. It feels less horrible if the victim isn’t somebody I know. If it’s personal, it feels like murder.

You’ve probably been wondering why I divided this all into stages, why I told you to only look at one each day. It’s actually very simple; I didn’t want you to call the police. It is very possible that by the time you are reading this, I am already dead.

I don’t want to see how much this thing can make me suffer. I’m hoping that after I pass on the email, it will just leave me alone, but I can’t trust that that is the case. I don’t want to be put on suicide watch and kept from getting out of this if there is no other way.

At the same time, I want other people to know. I don’t want anyone else to have to suffer through this like I have. I want the next idiot to download lookatme.png to have a fighting chance, an idea of what they’re up against. This is the only way I can make that happen.

I’m going to send these documents to you Helen, so you can spread them far and wide. Then, I’m sending the email. What happens after that, I don’t know.

Thank you.

Postscript

Immediately after reading this final document, I made the hour long drive to Trinity’s house. I will admit, I feel like a total fool for not having called the police in the first place, but I knew that it was at this point already too late if the worst had occurred. Fortunately, I knew where Trinity had left a spare house key under a false stone in her front yard, so I didn’t need to resort to breaking and entering.

Despite the car in the driveway, I was greeted with an empty house, In some ways this was more disturbing than if I had found Trinity’s corpse dangling from a beam. Nothing seemed to be missing, and the suitcase containing her clothes from her brief stay at the motel sat open in the entryway.

The only sign of Trinity’s presence that I found was her laptop, long-since dead from battery drain, with a battered old flash drive plugged into one of the USB ports. For obvious reasons, I did not remove it.

I have filed a missing persons report with the local police, and dearly hope that someday, somehow, Trinity will be found, safe, alive, and unharmed.