Welcome to the CAMPFRIES.
Our shared storytelling sat around a lone flame in the night. This episode was inspired by the Kerr Martin and Ramona Moth colaboration - Monstrosity.
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Entry 1. December 10th, 1936
Wake up with a start that made me hit my head on the bottom of the dining table. The four chairs are around me in a loose circle. I don’t remember doing any of this, but I must have decided that pulling the chairs towards the table would give me some kind of protection from the noises. But the noises around me are not the same as last night. Wind passes through openings, crunching animals foraging in the woods.
It’s pleasant.
******
The chicory in the coffee and the warmth from the buffalo coat make last night feel like an unpleasant borrowed memory. For a little while, I was in someone else’s head. But the afterimages don’t linger, and don’t make me feel any safer. And then there’s that floorboard. A lot of them creak, but the one I step on when I go from the stove to the window next to the door makes a different sound. It reminds me of that house in Boston I visited when I was looking for prospecting funds. They had a doorbell with a metallic ring.
This board is the hollow wood version of that sound.
******
After finishing the coffee, I decided to pry the board and see what made it different. A shotgun. Wrapped in faded tan oilcloth. The cloth itself was oily from the care the shotgun had received, from whoever was here last. I crack it open and can smell the oil from the double-barreled chambers.
A smaller piece of oilcloth, cut from the larger one, holds a dozen rounds of red-capped buckshot cartridges. This is comforting in some unexplainable way. Whatever terrified me and sent me under the table like a child last night, it wasn’t in here with me.
It’s out there.
Whoever left this shotgun here they were going to do something; they got interrupted. Maybe I could finish it.
Entry 2. December 14, 1936
‘Everything is explainable, my dear.’
I have written that sentence three times now. As though repetition might sand the splinters from it. The creak of the door, the footsteps in the hall. The scratching behind the wallboards. It is the house settling, no doubt. The wind is blowing hell outside the window. It is perhaps, even, the overactive imagination.
A monster of the mind.A monster all the same.
I woke this morning under the dining table again with dryness in my mouth. The chandelier above the table hung still as a hanging thing. For a moment, I did not remember how I had come to be here. Then the memory returned. I lifted the floorboard, and the shotgun was sleeping in its narrow coffin.
The faded tan oilcloth was like a handkerchief for some delicate sorrow. I have not yet touched the gun again. It lies where I left it. Beneath the loose plank in the floor. But I feel it in the room as one feels another presence. An uninvited guest who does not cough or shuffle but simply waits.
Slick and seeping cavern wall, where angels weep, and demons crawl.
The line came to me as I stood in the cellar doorway. I did not descend. The air below looks wet even when dry, as though the stones perspire secrets. The house is older than I first believed. Its beams complain in languages I do not know. Sunlight dies upon your face? Monstrosity lives in this place. The words circle me like moths, drawn to something hot and ruinous.
I told myself I would leave today. I packed the valise with two shirts and my razor. The small tin of pomade, and Mother’s photograph. Yet when I reached for my coat? The door gave a single, patient creak. As if clearing its throat to remind me of obligations not yet met. It is the wind. It must be.
Autumn’s leaves and winter’s bite, our tendrils stretch and claim the night.
The leaves scrape across the porch boards like fingernails. I tried nailing the shutter fast, but the hammer slipped twice and struck my thumb. The pain felt clean and honest. I welcomed it. It proved that at least one thing in this house obeys the simple rules of cause and effect.
Inside your mind, throughout your home, we lay claim to all unknown.
I found the corkboard in the study disturbed. The tacks had been nudged aside, though I swear I have not touched them. Behind it, the wallpaper bears a faint bloom of black. Like mold beginning its empire. Like a cellar that never dries, mold sprawls this cave of doomveined lives. I pressed my ear to the wall and heard nothing but my own pulse. Yet the sensation persisted that something listened back, patient as rot.
There are moments when the shotgun seems less an instrument and more a remedy. A knife, a gun, a choking rope? Simple tools to end all hope? The thought is obscene and yet terribly logical. To end the argument between the mind and the house. To silence the footsteps in the hall that occur precisely when I am most determined to ignore them.
Suicide, a charmcursed call, yet we resolve to haunt these halls.
I do not believe the house wants my death. That would be too swift, too merciful. No, it prefers rehearsal. It prefers the pacing of the corridor at dusk, when the light thins. When the mirrors forget how to reflect properly. It prefers the soft percussion of branches snapping underfoot. Though there is no one walking the yard.
This afternoon, I unfolded the faded tan oilcloth the gun was wrapped in again. It is heavily stained with oil in one corner, a brown bloom like dried tea. Wrapped within it, there is nothing else. No shells. No letters, no map to buried explanations. Only the cloth itself.
‘Everything is explainable, my dear.’
And yet tonight, as I write, the chandelier trembles though the air is still. The corkboard ticks softly. The floorboard near the china cabinet rises and settles with a breath that is not mine. If I wake again beneath the table, I shall know the house has moved me. As a child moves a toy soldier across a painted battlefield.
Monstrosity makes a puppet out of you. I will leave this diary open upon the dining table. If there are words added by morning in a hand not my own? Then explanation may finally give way to truth. Until then, I shall sit on the couch. With the lamp lit, pretending the light belongs to me.
Entry 3. December 15, 1936
Morning found me trapped; tightly swaddled in a small, tight space. Had some eldritch force tried to mummify me? Had I been buried alive like something out of a Penny Dreadful tale? The terrifying thought lent strength to my efforts, and when I tipped my head up I could see a dull grey light. I writhed towards that light as if my life depended on it—I believe it did. Eventually, I was free of my prison and felt open space around me. Rolling on the floor, away from the darkness, freed me. I’d been wrapped in my bedclothes under my bed. How had I ended up in this predicament? I had no memory of falling out of bed, or of any nightmare that might torment me so. Yet here I was. Sheepishly, I rose and made my ablutions, but when I saw my reflection, I baulked. I did not recognise the man looking back at me. I blinked, refusing to accept this. Order was restored: my own physiognomy was there. I pulled faces, sticking out my tongue and gurning until I was satisfied that my mind had stopped playing tricks on me. On the dining table, this diary sat as I had left it, but with a difference that set me praying like a saint of old—may Providence protect me. On the blank page on the other side was a faint—but unquestionably bloody—handprint.
Entry 4, December 19th, 1936
I no longer know which day it is. The house is still the house, but it is not the house.
Something has changed in its bones, or in mine.
The hallways are longer now and the doors do not sit where I remember leaving them. When I walk through the kitchen I have the strange sensation of standing inside something that is breathing very slowly.
This house used to be safe. It used to be beautiful. Light came through the windows in warm squares across the floorboards. I remember that clearly, it is one of the only things I remember clearly.
Now all I see is beige and shadow. The house is a stomach and it is digesting my mind, thinking feels like banging my brain cells against concrete. I know that sounds absurd, but the thought will not leave me. The walls feel too close. The air feels warm and damp in places it should not.
The pit.
The abyss.
Have I already written this?
The calendar that hung beside the sink is gone. I know it was there yesterday. Or the day before that, wasn’t it? Yes, I checked it every morning because I feared losing track. I have clearly failed in my attempts not to.
The top of this journal entry says it is December 9th.
That cannot be correct.
I know it cannot be correct because it has already passed me by, hasn’t it?
I tried to look back through the earlier entries for proof. To see where I last knew the date. But the pages behind this one are not right. They are filled with scribbles and crazed ramblings. Words written over themselves until they are nearly black.
There are symbols there too but I do not recognize them, so how could I have drawn them? Some of them repeat. Some of them circle out specific words again and again. Woods. Hollow. Mouth. Mind.
There are scratches on my arms. My jeans are stained and torn. Was I attacked?
I do not remember but my muscles ache. Not as much as my head does, but I hurt. What was here? I stand by the sink again and look out of the window.
When I look out there at those woods, they are all wrong. The trees are too still. No breeze or rambling animal. Has time stood still, or is it being eaten? The house groans again in a way that reminds me of digestion.
If the spirits that lived beyond the treeline followed me here, they now own this place. They have become it.
The ceiling drips with tar coloured condensation. It is staining the page as I write.
Perhaps I should venture out. Take the spirits back to where they came from. Or burn it all down.
Forest, house, and all to ash.
I shall consider it.
Something must be done.
Entry 5, December 22nd, 1936
I have made my decision.
If there is something in those woods that hunts me, then it is better that I meet it on my feet rather than continue waking beneath tables and beds like a frightened child. The shotgun lay where I had left it, wrapped in its faithful oilcloth like some old soldier awaiting orders. I cleaned the barrels again though they were already spotless. Ritual is a comfort when reason fails.
The diary goes with me—it must. These pages are the only proof that I have lived through the hours that disappear from me. Without them I might believe the house, the scratching, and the blood upon the paper were inventions of a tired mind. Yet the marks remain. The handprint has not faded.
Something did that.
And if I am to survive this night, I must know what.
The woods wait beyond the treeline like a congregation that has fallen silent upon my arrival. Even from the window they appear wrong in a way I struggle to explain. Trees where the leaves still do not sway. Branches that seem to lean toward one another in quiet conspiracy.
I stepped outside just before dusk. The cold bit my skin like a reprimand.
For a time I believed I was walking through an ordinary forest, different from what I had gathered while looking through the cabin window. Dead leaves beneath my boots, the occasional snap of a twig, the distant call of some unseen bird. But as the last light withdrew, the woods began to change.
Paths I had taken only moments before were gone.
The trees stood closer together now, tall and narrow like the pillars of some ancient cathedral. The sounds that had once lived in the forest had vanished, and the silence thickened until my own breathing sounded intrusive.
It was then that I found it. Not a clearing, not quite, but rather a place where the woods seemed to thin into something else entirely, like a curtain drawn back from a stage.
Before me hung a strange shimmering veil, faint as breath upon glass.
Beyond it I could see a room.
A room lit by the dimmest of light. A room I had never been in, yet I knew the type at once. It was nothing like the cabin I had awakened in, but another place entirely. A proper house, perhaps. Through the window, I could see a narrow garden, wet with recent rain. On a desk sat a photograph of a woman whose face I somehow knew, though I could not place her name.
And there was a man.
He stood half-lit by the reflection of a mirror mounted on the wall. My heart stopped when I saw him. He moved through the room with a terrible familiarity. The slope of his shoulders, the way his hands flexed, belonged to someone accustomed to violence. Yet something about him felt wrong, as though I were watching a stranger wear my body like a borrowed coat.
A knife glinted in his hand.
An urgent thirst rose inside me. I tried to shout, to warn whoever might enter that room, but my voice did not cross the veil. I could only watch.
The door opened.
Someone entered.
What followed happened with terrible swiftness. The violence was sudden, brutal, and over before my mind could accept it. I gripped the shotgun instinctively, knowing I would have used it if the veil had allowed me to intervene. But the veil kept everything distant and dreamlike, and for a moment I wondered if that was all this was—a dream conjured by a mind worn thin.
That thought died when the man laughed.
It was a familiar laugh.
He stepped before the mirror then, as though aware of being observed, and lifted his head.
The face looking back from the glass was mine.
My stomach turned cold. The man who had committed that atrocity wore my features, yet there was something in his expression I did not recognize. Something older. Something patient.
My head panged as the diary thumped in my hands. One thump followed another, like the beat of a nervous heart. The pages shifted beneath my grip and fell open to a line I did not remember writing:
Something must be done. Tonight, I will go out into the forest and kill whatever has been hunting me.
The words were written in my hand. The same ink. The same careful script. Yet I had no memory of setting them down.
“Did you enjoy that?”
The whisper came from beyond the veil.
Sound rushed back into the forest all at once—the wind through the branches, the distant creak of trees shifting in the dark. Pressure gathered around me as realization assembled itself piece by piece. This forest was not a forest. The cabin was not a refuge. Everything that had happened to me—every missing hour, every scratch upon my skin, every waking confusion—fit together with a terrible simplicity.
The monster I had come here to hunt was not waiting in these woods.
The monster was me.
My hand remembered the shotgun and tightened its grip.
Entry 6. December 26, 1936
I’ve made my way back to the cabin. Winter is here, and my tattered buffalo coat does little to keep me warm. After the paralyzing heat of this summer, after experiencing the suffocating dust that choked everyone, with its static electricity that meant you couldn’t even touch someone, I thought I’d never be cold again. Never draw a clean breath of air. Now, I draw air into my lungs, but it is not clean. This cabin is a filthy place. It welcomes me because I fear I have become a filthy being.
What I saw beyond the veil horrified me. I do not know who is real and who exists beyond the veil. I do not know if the veil exists to protect my sanity, to keep me from remembering the things I’ve done. They say the will to survive is primal, instinctive, but is that an excuse for my deeds?
It was the time when desperation made beggars of strong men. Dimly, like a story in a nearly forgotten tale, I remembered my old life. A small farm, a cheerful wife, and we wanted children someday. But that was before the heat, before the dry, before the dust, before she died. I went west, like the other migrants, looking for any kind of work.
The hunger was upon me when I stumbled upon this cabin. It was empty then, or so I thought, but now I know differently. There are shadows of the families that passed through here. And now, I’m becoming a shadow as well, consumed by whatever it is that lives in the house. It doesn’t breathe, but it consumes.
There was flour in a container, and it had very few insects to be picked out. And a piece of dried meat of some kind hanging on a hook in the kitchen. I took this to mean the cabin had been recently occupied. The shadows of what happened here were not old shadows.
Rusty water came from the pump outside, but that would only work until the hard freeze came. I was happy with the shotgun because I could hunt for more meat. If I couldn’t hunt, I would starve. How much further could I go before the snows were too deep? Already, travel was hard, if not impossible. The thought of staying here filled me with loathing and disgust, and I wondered what the man on the other side of the veil was doing. Did he have a plan to survive? Would he tell me how to survive?
Going back into the kitchen, I took down the small haunch of meat and tentatively took a bite. It was surprisingly soft and chewable. Before it was hung here and cured, it must have been a young animal. It didn’t look like a deer or any other four-footed animal I could identify. This was distinctly a thigh muscle. Perhaps a young pig, or sheep? Out here in the woods, with no sign of a pen or place to keep domesticated animals? My stomach lurched at the unthinkable thing I was thinking, but that didn’t stop me from tearing off another strip and savoring its sweetness.
Entry 7, December 30th, 1936.
This will be my final confession. I try to set it down plainly, as one might record the weather, but my mind refuses to hold still.
With these two hands…
Oh Lord, forgive me—
What have I done with these two hands…
The cabin’s madness came upon me yesterday evening, but it was not a storm—it was a possession. A tightening. A closing of the mind until there was nothing left standing.
I only remember it in fragments — A door half-open.
The glint of metal in my grip. A voice—female—uncertain, polite. No…
I think I understand… but I wish I didn’t. The veil's illusion was not a recollection. It showed me not some echo of a former life, nor a dream conjured by this starving brain. It was a prophecy, something still to come to pass. The room exists, here, in the forest, just beyond the trees. Though I do not remember walking there, I found it yesterday evening, or perhaps I was guided.
There was a knock.
Or perhaps her door was already open when I approached—I cannot be certain. But she stood there, framed by the last of the evening light. I remember that much. Not afraid, she never expressed fear, ot yet. She spoke my name as though testing it, as though she expected it to sound different in her mouth.
I recall answering her. I recall the sound of my own voice. But the words were not my own. Then, but not all at once, like a fist forming slowly in the dark, an unholy thought shaped in my head, pressing outward. She must have seen through my intentions, or she had noticed the shotgun. There was a change in her posture—a hesitation. A step that was almost a retreat. I remember reaching for her.
No—
She did not move quickly enough.
After that, the memory fractures.
A struggle, perhaps. Or the suggestion of one. The room seemed smaller than it should have been. There was a sound. Not hers. Something dull and distant, as though it belonged to another world entirely.
And now I am left alone in the cabin, with the feeling that something has yet to be done. It lingers within me. Quiet. Patient. I thought, once, that whatever stalked me in these woods was something apart from myself.
But when I look toward the treeline, I no longer feel watched.
I feel a longing.
This place shall bear witness to this monstrosity no longer...
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Well done everyone!
Thanks for accepting me on to be part of this awesome story. The imagination and skill from everyone is top tier! I truly enjoyed the experience.