S14E16 - "Haunted Grounds, Haunted Minds" - Horror Hill

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Thank you for listening and enjoy the show. Disclamer Horror Hill is a horror anthology podcast bringing you scary stories from all corners of the internet and beyond. As such, certain stories include content that some listeners might find offensive, specifically

tonight's story includes violence against children and themes of white supremacy.

Listener discretion is advised. Hello listeners and welcome back to Horror Hill, I'm your host, Eric Peabody. Tonight we have a story that's a bit different than our usual fair. Don't worry, there are certainly supernatural scares to be had here, but more prominently it features some real life horrors.

The title is "Eden" and it's written by Christian Wallace. Christians work has been featured on previous episodes of this show, but this one was published on Reddit less than two weeks ago. Since I follow Christians account, I saw it pretty quickly and after reading it, immediately decided that we needed to feature it on this show.

This is a story about hate. Not hate against an individual that has wronged you, but the type of hate that's pounded into you, the type of hate that some people use to define themselves. The type of hate that poisons not only the individual, but the society in which they live, topical stuff, and while the subject matter is unsavory in a different sort of way than

we usually feature, it's also one of the best written stories I've had the chance to read in my four-year tenure on this show. So, with all that in mind, it's time to venture into Eden. You're listening to the free edition of this program, if you'd like to help support horror Hill and also remove these pesky ads, head to chilling tales for darknights.com

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Also, if you're watching on YouTube, do us a favor and drop a like and subscribe, become part of our dark circle, listeners. And now, from author Christian Wallace, I give you, Eden. The kid I shot was called Appner Howard. It's been all summer looking at me when he thought no one was looking.

Didn't recognize it straight away. If anything, I did my best to avoid catching anyone's attention. Appner was an older camper and a nasty piece of shit who spent his time cack calling girls way too young for him, and smoking cigarettes with some of the counselors. But when he wasn't strutting around the place like a chimp, pacing its enclosure, I would

often catch him looking at me and fertive glances. I guess he thought he was being subtle about it, but he wasn't.

A subtle tilt of the head.

“That was all it took for them to convey their suspicion and in a desperate bid to say”

face, Appner stood up from the railing he was perched on and cried out. "What the fuck do you think you're looking at pretty boy?" And I just had to be clever, didn't I? "Ah, you think I'm pretty, Appner?" He grabbed me.

The others joined in, a need to the chest pushed me and sawden mud as Appner's reigns like hands gripped my jaw. Won't be so fucking pretty now, Appner slid a pocket knife into the fat of my cheek and went to work, but it was wet and his hands were shaking. The blades skipped across my cheekbone, like a stone across water.

The tip of the blade nicked the eye and carved up my brow and forehead, leaving a gouge that had forever remind me of tectonic drift. By the time I cries attracted any attention from the counselors, I was sobbing and running in circles, bloodied hands gripping desperately at open air.

“I remember screaming for my mother, my gut twisting itself and knots.”

I wanted someone to enforce some logic back onto the world, some semblance of sanity. But the authorities at the Eden Reformation and Reclamation Project were not, sane. They bundled me into a private cabin and wouldn't let me speak to anyone or make a call. I was kept prisoner for two days before they finally bribed some drunken vet to try and patch me up.

When I told one of the counselors who stood guard outside my door that they'd be sorry once my dad found out what had happened on their watch, he snorted and replied, "Who do you think recommended the vet?" Should have figured, dad was the reason I was sent here. He didn't like me wearing eyeliner, so when it was his turn to have me for the weekend after

my 14th birthday, he decided to take me on a trip.

If you can believe it, I was actually excited because even though he'd always been a dick

to me, he was my dad and I wanted him to like me. But as soon as we passed state lines, he pulled up on the side of this road and we waited for a full three hours, wouldn't answer any of my questions, just smoked one cigarette after another. Eventually, this van drove up and three guys with masks got out. I asked dad what was going on, but he said nothing as they dragged me from my seat, cable tied

me and threw me in the back of their van. After that came the absolute nightmare that was Eden. They didn't explicitly label themselves a white supremacist camp, nor did they particularly tout their gay conversion therapies, the kind of people who sent their kids to Eden didn't want any official connection to that sort of thing.

But the camp's motto was, setting America's youth straight and their flag was a red flag with a white circle that encompassed a Germanic looking crucifix, where they operated and the Appalachian woods far from prioring eyes. Eden and its organizers were able to adorn our cabin's walls with swastikas and forces to watch hours and hours of revisionist documentaries that taught us the wrong people one world war

too. Our practice targets at the firing range were racially charged muckshots. Our team names were slurs. One morning prayers were in German and we shaved assess symbols and each other's heads for a mixture of fun and punishment. Officially, Eden was just one of many camps for troubled teens, but the camp wasn't there to convert or fix any of us despite its promises. It was a meat grinder meant to spit out

psychopaths. To sift through each year's attendees until they'd found the most promising candidates for recruitment into the movement, to blur the line between guard and prisoner and watch with thin-lived excitement at the resulting carnage. The counselors set out to torture and the most

“important tool and their arsenal was us. It wasn't the counselors who force fed one girl”

rode kill because she dared to try sticking to a vegetarian diet and it wasn't counselors who

tore the stud right out of one boy's tongue after he'd successfully hid it for the first few days.

It was the kids, the ones who wanted to be fixed, who wanted their wide-necked fathers to finally look at them like they weren't dog shit on the bottom of a shoe. The worst tradition was called the Wild Hunt. My counselors would pick the weakest kid to be that weaksteer and send them

break the skin. There were no points in that game, no incentive. Only a certain kind of kid would

“pull the trigger just for fun, finding those kids, signaling them out for recruitment. That was the point.”

I pulled the trigger. I never bought into Eden's racist bullshit, but the genius of a lot of

cults is that they don't always ask you to care that much about belief. Until I attended, I wouldn't have even thought of myself as a cruel or angry person. But the machine worked and it didn't work just once. It worked again and again and again. The psychopaths, Eden spat out They didn't always start out as bullies. Many probably started out more like me because it was about teaching kids that you heard others before they heard you. And its lessons were written in

blood and bruises. Abner gave me a chance to hurt him when he wrote me a strange and confused apology letter and slid it beneath my door. I still don't know why he wrote it though. I figure he must have been as dumb and confused as any other kid I suppose. But in that letter, Abner tried to explain himself. I don't remember the words in detail on account of the anger it set off in me. Even a sincere apology tastes like piss when you've got an eyeball weeping pause.

But what really set me on fire was the implication that somehow, I was to blame for his actions. I just ain't used to seeing cute boys. I remember reading those words clear as day. I don't know how to describe how angry they made me. A fat man exploding in my chest in my head, a piece of the sun laid gently in my skull and left to burn for all eternity.

“I still feel it now. That anger. It's something I'll never forget.”

I showed Abner's letter, complete with all its description of his confused feelings to the

counselors. And when I finally got off bed rest a few days later, I found that there had been an

important change in the camp's dynamics. Where Abner had once lurched around the camp, threatening any poor kid who made the mistake of rubbing him the wrong way. He now sculked in the shadows and stayed outside. When his friends walked by, he flinched. When they made hateful jokes with slurs for punchlines, he tried to awkwardly laugh it off, but that only made it worse. They didn't want his camaraderie, not anymore. Not after the counselors had made him stand in

front of the whole camp as they read out the confessional he'd left me. His friends kicked him out of the older boys' cabin. Counselors wouldn't let him into the others so he had to sleep in a tent.

“I remember getting up one night and looking outside, to see one of the guys taking up”

piss on it. I could tell by the light that Abner was inside, but he was just hiding in the corner like a beaten dog. There were moments when a better person than me might have felt sorry for him, but I was seeing the world through one eye and a suffering made me happy. And when it came time for the wild hunt and Abner was selected to be that week's deer, I spent an extra couple hours each day on the range practicing with the air rifle. I had to work real hard to learn how to

shoot well with one eye patched up. Even then, I was never as good as I was back when I had to,

but I figured Abner made for a bigger target than the pesky cans they had up in the range. On the day, I set off alone and hiked for three straight hours, before I finally spotted him moving between the trees. Pale skin and shaved head, covered in bruises, Abner was a gaunt figure panting and running desperately through the undergrowth. Sounds dumb to say, but he looked like a deer, my swear it, not in shape, but in spirit. The way he moved around looking so scared and alert,

dad and I had few shared interests, but deer hunting was one of them, and I knew the look plain as day. Made it easy to pull the trigger. The pneumatic warmth of the air rifle was satisfying, but not as satisfying as the sound of the pellets striking him in the temple, and certainly not as satisfying as watching him practically tumble head over heels and go rolling down the side of the mountain. I was grinning when I pressed at the top and looked down,

panting and laughing all half mad, filled with the kind of righteous anger that I'm

when I saw the broken tangle of legs and arms, it made me think of a spider that's been stepped on. He was all bundled up, his violent descent down the hill stopped by the narrowed roots of a fallen tree. His face was streaked with blood and reminded me strangely of Jesus and his crown of thorns, and his eyes, his open eyes. Abner was looking at the sky, too, just like Jesus,

“for those chipped and painted irises. After that came the panic, and I don't remember much”

else. They found me half collapse to mile out from the camp, feverish with an infection that was racing from my eye to my brain. I'd soiled myself, and in my hysterical stay, I told them about Abner, a terrible confession. I checked up on my story and found it to be true. Three weeks later, I woke up in the hospital recovering from surgery to remove the infected eye. Dad was beside me and spoken atone that resembled pride. When he saw me looking nervously towards

the door, he smiled and padded my shoulder. Don't worry, we look after our own. The meat grinder is effective. I'll give them that. I took me a long time to realize that the

“people who ran that camp had plenty to lose, too, if my story got out. But the way they treated me,”

they acted like they were doing me a favor, saving me from an unfair and unjust world that

would have persecuted me just for protecting myself. I never bought into it, not really.

I don't know. I like to think I didn't do a great deal to actually help them. But whether I wanted to admit it or not, I became part of the machine. I was in videos, I was in brochures. I had tattoos that remain even to this day as blotchy scars across my chest and back. There are photos of me as a teenager that make me feel physically sick when I look at them. A gangling 19-year-old with an SS tattoo poking out from beneath my collar.

These marks cost me educational and job opportunities, and that pushed me further into the machine. I went to rallies when they told me to, gave speeches when they told me to. Through bottles when they told me to. Eventually, they didn't have to keep telling me what to do. I was angry, so fucking angry, angry all the time, like a cancer of the mind.

“Do you want to know what ended it? What finally pulled me out?”

I was sent to jail for drunk and disorderly behavior when I was 21, and a young trans woman who was sharing the cell with me and six others looked my way. You're a pretty man.

And instinctively, I touched the scar on my face, the hollow socket that I never covered because

I thought it made me look intimidating. But she only smiled. It was so gentle and like she knew the fear I'd felt when Apner had held me down. She made a kind gesture to a man with a swastika tattooed on his neck. She didn't have to. Didn't have to show kindness to a man who wanted her dead. And then a thought came to me as clear as day. I don't think she deserves to die. After that, everything unraffled. For the last 20 years, my life has been dedicated to

deep programming people who got sucked up into the same machine I had. I've been on the news, interviewed for documentaries, lectured at every Ivy League university in the country. The charity I run has become my life's work and every step of the way. I've received letters from people calling me a trader. I'll say anything if they think it'll keep me quiet, but I just ignored them all. Only one set of letters came closer to rattling me.

I always threw them away with the rest, but they had a habit of getting stuck in my thoughts

for days afterwards. They were mean-spirited things that turned up in the strangest places. I found them in my fridge, in my shoes, in gym lockers. I saw them as nothing more than attempts to scare or bully me into silence. Most of them were simple, a few lines here and there. It hurt when you shot me. I confided in you. Something else found me in those ones.

real guts, they would have reported the crime for what it was, but that was as likely to

“incriminate them as it would be. But then a few months ago, one of the letters turned up in my car,”

and it shook me to my core. Reading the words within, it felt like I was out in those woods again. My heart racing and my stomach turning, as I looked down, at Abner's corpse. I was hard as a rock when I cut you. That's all there was on the page, but

that's all I needed to see, because I never told anyone what I felt pressing down on my torso

when Abner cut me. He never mentioned it in his letter, either. The only people on this entire planet who know he had an erection were him and me. Three days later, I got another letter. This one was inside the pillow on my bed. God only knows how to gotten there, but by this point, I felt as if my grip on reality was weakening. I hadn't been into work for weeks,

“hadn't seen any friends or family. When I read the final letter, I think I already knew what”

it wanted long before I actually saw the words. Eden waits. The sight of Eden's gates, downtrodden and collapsing beneath the weight of heavy woodland air, made the breath catch in my throat. In the 30 years since I'd last seen it, the forest had encroached on the abandoned grounds, and now the rotting cabins and algae slick decks were hidden in shadows. In places the building seemed to grow out of the woodland, their floors collapsing into the undergrowth as narrowed roots

explored and reclaimed the foundations. Dors left a jar offered glimpses of rooms crowded with ferns as tall as me, their dripping fronds hiding fading posters with words like "great replacement and skull shapes explained, barely visible in the dark." My feet navigated a loam floor that had half buried the long forgotten remnants of camp life, including old VHS tapes of revisionist documentaries and Rucksacks full of moldering clothes. In one cabin, there was even a flag still pinned by one corner

to the wall. It looked like it had been used to put out a fire. Pressing deeper, I found a cabin with a half charred timber frame, dozens of jagged logs, planks, and even a few rusted iron beams had been jammed between the door and the wooden deck. Try as I might, I couldn't budge them, and the windows were thick with mud and filth.

I never saw what lay inside, but I did note the gaping hole in the roof along with splinter

planks that shut it outward. Stranger still, when I went down by the lake, I found two pick-up trucks parked up beneath the canopy. Both had festered in the dank forest air, the rubber on their tires flaking and frail, and one the airbag had deployed, but there was no sign of damage to the exterior. And the other, the door had been left open, and embedded in the passenger seat dash, was a single human tooth. I didn't linger long in the camp, a cursory examination of my old cabin

revealed nothing the caught my attention. Once I realized there were no real answers for me there,

I set out for the woods. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't afraid as I took my first steps into

the trees, but I couldn't have told you why, only the feeling of eyes on my back.

“I think I kept at it because I wanted something bad to happen. I'd skirt a justice for quite”

long time. Sure, most nights I told myself I'd probably just imagine the whole thing, but so what? If I hadn't shot him, I would have. Could have. Does it make that big a difference? I had it in me to kill, and my sins were so great that I don't think the distinction between what had or had not happened in those woods even mattered anymore. Sure, what he did to me was wrong, but I'd excused a lifetime of fuckups by saying I was just a kid.

Difference was, I'd had time to grow and learn, while Abner had been robbed of that chance. I'd tried so hard to atone, but hurting him was the one thing I'd yet to face up to. I was scared of what I might find, but at least I didn't have to worry about getting lost.

incline. While I had to do was find the crest, and follow it one direction or the other.

50/50 I'd get it right the first time, and I had an instinct that if there was anything I needed

to see, it would stand out to me. I don't know how familiar you might be with woods by the way. If you are, you'll already know just how quickly the horizon fades to darkness as, it's lost to the ever-growing ranks of standing, leaning, and fallen trees.

“It's important you understand that, the darkness of it. It's like daytime is a bubble that only”

follows you. Everything farther than 20 or so feet away is in a perpetual dusk. A little farther than that, and it's as dark as any night. When I finally reached the top of the hill and looked

down, I saw a mountainside disappearing into a wooded trench where the sun made little progress.

It was like finding the border between day and night, and I had the strange realization that there must be places down amongst those trees where the sun might not have reached for thousands of years. I didn't have to walk far along the hilltop before I found the shoe. The red of its fabric laces was too bright for those woods. It lay just a dozen or so feet down the embankment like bait and a trap, but Jesus did I hurry to take it. My wooden by, in my memories of Abner,

“lying dead, his left leg had bent backwards and reached all the way around to the top of his head”

like a scorpion tail. Dangling off the toe was a single shoe with red laces. Decades later, I was convinced I was looking at that very shoe. I rushed down the steep hill with great speed. My feet sinking into the soft and loamy woodland floor like I was descending a snowy bank. Each step covered three or so feet as I took these great lopping strides, aided by gravity. When I slowed to grab the shoe, something beneath the leaves caught my foot, and I was sent

carining towards the ground. I built up speed so quickly that my descent was closer to a free fall than a roll. The world became a dizzying swirl of canopy and dirt that only stopped when something hit me in the gut like a car hitting a wall. The world continued to spin around me, but

“that was just my inner ear failing to catch up with reality. I'd been stopped by a tree,”

and I lay half wrapped around it like a t-shirt on a clothes line. When I tried to breathe, something inside my chest graded and hurt so bad I worried I might die. Craining my neck and looking back up the hill, I saw an incline as steep as a cliff. Climbing back up would be no more possible than flying. For some reason during my fall, I'd grabbed a hold of the shoe and it was still clutched in one

fist. I stuffed it in my bag and tried to take another deep breath to study myself, but it was like someone had slid a knitting needle between my ribs. The pain was agonizing, and I could just about manage short shallow breaths to keep my head from going a light and dizzy. But it wasn't like I could stay there. All those thoughts of sin and punishment gave way to the fear that I might die in those wounds. The way down would be difficult, but I could just about manage a slow crawl

if I was careful. I rolled onto my stomach and got to grips with the soft earth, and then began my descent. But I was moving for only 10 minutes when I felt something strange beneath

the leaves. It was another shoe. At first I thought it must be the other one to abnerce, but the

size was all wrong. It was barely as big as my hand. Better fitted to one of the younger campers than a teen like Abner. Angry and hurt, I tossed it to the side and kept going, but I soon found myself pulling up a pair of moldy boxers. Then a t-shirt, a jacket, a sock, a scarf. I realized that the woodland floor was littered with the scattered belongings of what must have been dozens of people, but that was just the beginning. Before long the leaves gave way and I was

crawling over a carpet of old and discarded belongings. At times there were so many that I imagined myself emerging out of the sea and mounting a coastline made up of backpacks and clothes. There were tents, nets, gun bags, sleeping bags, coolers that had been smashed open. They couldn't all have come from Eden. Had they been tossed over the top of the hill, I was hours away from the

it. The more I tried to think of some rational explanation, the more the scale of the discarded old

“camp and gear frightened me. I had no choice but to carry on downwards, but it was hard to swallow”

the growing sense that I was stumbling headfirst into a terrible forgotten place. And then I found it. The uprooted tree. I felt like I just locked eyes with something terrible. Like I'd gone to the fridge in the middle of the night and seen a face staring at me from the darkness beyond an open window. I couldn't even bring myself to breathe. It's narrowed and savage roots resembled a hand that clouched the darkness of the center of its naughty hollow. In all my wildest imaginings,

I could not have fathoms that I would find the tree exactly as I'd remembered it. A specter

plucked right from the nightmares that had plagued me every single day, since I'd pulled the trigger.

“Once, when I was younger, I found an abandoned bear's den while hunting with my father. It was”

just a hole in the side of an embankment. It's entrance littered with a scattering of small bones. The air around its stank of blood and meat, after it's been shipped out by an apex predator. Dad told me it was abandoned, but he still hurried me away with whisper gestures that let me know we weren't completely safe. The tree felt like that bear's den. They were both little things, but to the old instincts that lurk inside all living things, they were as big as the Grand Canyon,

enormous craters and reality condensed into tiny spaces like a black hole. I could not escape its gravity. And without thinking, I moved towards it, filled with the desperate urge to prove my nightmares wrong, to grip the smoothed roots and find nothing but wood, and dirt. When I reached it, I knelt on an old plastic tent like they were pews and reached towards the hollow. I expected my fingers to sink into old mud gripped tight by long dead roots.

Instead, I felt skin. It was cold, but soft. I snatched my hand away and disgust and terror, stumbling backwards and crying out. And Abner came into the light. Shaved head, pale eyes, the gaunt and angry frame of a teenage boy, one leg still bent agonizingly over the back of his head, an elbow where a neck should be. A mangled mess of joincent limbs that bent in ways they should not bend.

The more of him that emerged, the less his body made sense. Instead of a torso, there was only bruised flesh the color of a sunset. A canvas of skin stretched thin by fractured bones that moved with a sound like creaking floorboards. His face was expressionless until to the side as he gazed at me with pale and cloudy eyes. Nothing within those glassy orbs

“seemed to register my existence. Instead, when he finally recognized me, I think it was with some”

deeper, stranger instinct. Andro. I rolled backwards and fled, but a broken rib can't be magic to weigh with adrenaline. I ran as far as I could before the pain lanced through me, and I hunched over into a three-limbed crawl that quickly failed and sent me sprawling to the ground. When I turned back, the uprooted tree was a good 50 feet away. Andro, he was looking up at me from within an old hiking shoe. A single,

cataract riddled eye that searched blindly for my face. I screamed at the impossibility and

launched myself into a loping crawl that I couldn't see where I was going and stumbled head first

into a tree. A crack of my skull was not loud, but it shot me through as a sudden overwhelming nausea. My limbs turned to jelly, and I collapsed to the floor. I tried vomiting, but only a mouthful of thin acid came up, swimming briefly over my tongue before trickling down my cheek. Something in the woods found me. I opened my eyes and rolled over. Abner was there, and a mebow mass of nodded limbs with a shaved head for nucleus, a nightmare bereft of all color.

into his body defied easy categorization. Thumbs on thumbs and toes and toes. Heels with palms

“and hands with long canine arches. I felt like I was trying to make sense of something you'd”

find fermenting in an old specimen jar, squinting through thick glass at strange and viny protrusions. Only Abner was not contained safely behind glass, but instead floated freely above me, his knuckled limbs waving gently like a girl's hair in pool water. A hand reached out towards me, but I couldn't contain my terror and shriek as it came closer. In a mad scrabble, I began to drag myself backwards in a desperate attempt to escape the reach of a hand with a fractal's worth of

digits, but Abner was no hurry. And as I pulled myself the 20 or so feet to the foot of the hill, his arm kept moving forward like a bull pulled from a ball of yarn.

“I kept pace even as I reached the start of the slope and tried to kick my way up it,”

but I couldn't get any purchase and managed only to climb a few feet before falling back to the ground. When this brought me closer to Abner's probing fingers, I sobbed and thrashed even harder at the loosely packed dirt and trash of the woodland floor, but that only made things worse, and I only made another foot up the hill before I fell once more, back towards the ground. This time, Abner's hand was so close I could smell him.

Fungle grew this end, rotting meat, the dusty odor you ignore after opening an urn. The smell sent lightning coursing through my spine at limbs, and I was overcome by the kind of terror that blots out conscious thought. I would have crawled beneath the treads of a moving tank,

or slid head first into a woodchipper if it meant escaping this nightmare.

It is so old, andrel. Abner's voice paralyzed me. Have you ever seen educational videos on drowning? It's not splashing, you're taught to look out for. People who are drowning are so close to death, their nervous system nearly shuts down, and they freeze and terror. Lims locked, had to held up high, legs straight, and toes probing for the ground, anything to avoid the rising water that's close to pouring down their open lips.

Lying there, I felt an darkness rising up. Felted flow over my toes, my feet, my ankles, my legs, a blanket of heavy black that flowed out of the spaces between the leaves and dirt below me, summoned by the dread in Abner's voice. It was born when the Great Lakes of America were filmed with blood, and its tribe worshiped what swam in those waters. If anything

of its humanity remains, it is a humanity that we could never recognize. It's idea of mercy

is a flint axe to the base of an infant's scholar. The only love it knows is forced and screaming in the dirt of a neolithic breeding pet. The only humor it recognizes is the shrill braying of a crowd that the watches flayed victims twitch an open air. I swear, I did not just hear his words, but I felt them. Their impact made it hard to breathe, and I felt like a man plunged into icy water. My gasps were short and shallow, and tinged with the terrifying knowledge

that I would soon die. Yours was the only soul I could find whilst swimming, lost in the dark.

“A beacon of guilt, a thread that connects us. Now, you must help me.”

Whatever found me won't let me go, it binds us to our old things, the detritus that makes up this woodland floor as a sea of fetishes used to keep its victims in the dark. And mine, Andrew, you have mine, I consensit. The shoe, take it out of these woods, put it in the sun, and free me. The darkness filled my throat, and the last thing I remember as my consciousness faded

I need your help.

“When I came to, I was lying in an old bed too small for me, my feet dangling over the bottom.”

Overhead laid the ceiling of a once-familiar cabin, the place I'd once slept as a teenager

camper, now turned rot and ruin. Fallen beams and a patchwork roof that let the rain strike my face in a gentle drizzle. Fear prompted me up quickly, then pain nearly put me on my back again. Wencing, I lifted my damp clothing and saw rainbow of bruises brawling across the left side of my abdomen. Taking it slowly, I pushed myself to my feet and glanced at the crumbling ruins of what was once the otholome cabin where the boys aged 13 to 16 had bunked. It was raining, and great

“rivulets of water poured down the walls and cascaded through the open air. Outside, the sun was”

setting, and what little light made it into the camps clearing was tinted pink and yellow.

I limped to the nearest window and looked through an empty pane. In the fading light, the camp was a crowd of squat buildings lurking amongst the young growth of a healing forest. It's pathways throttled by saplings and ferns. Some I hid in porches and walls furry with moss. My head was a mess, but I distinctly remembered falling and decided I must have hit my head in the woods. Abner and the rest was just a dream, surely. But then, who had rescued me after the fall.

“Squinting hard, I thought I could see someone moving around out there. Was that them?”

I cried out, a sad groan. Some part of me cringed at the suddenness of the sound. My instincts told me to lay low, crouch, hide, but I ignored them and cried out again. This time louder. Clearer. Hello? A hand grabbed my ankle. A desperate figure pulled themselves out from beneath a nearby bed and gazed upwards at me. They had no eyes or jaw, but the wounds had been covered with smooth pink skin. Lips led to teeth, led to pallet and desophagus. Every breath seemed to

leave them ganging on spittle and blood. This was not Abner, but like him, they were pale with the shaved head. Recorialing, I moved from the window and let some of the fading sunlight under the cabin, and where the light hit the poor wretched skin, their flesh simply ceased to exist, like a shadow. It must have hurt, because they cried out and pain and snatched their hand away, and I realized that with fingers so small, they couldn't have been older than 13.

They retreated, but I soon discovered a scape wouldn't be so easy. In the mere moments that had passed, the camp had already fallen further into darkness, and there were more figures moving in the shadows, limping, drooling, crying, sobbing, naked, mutilated boys with scraggly, matted hair, and starved figures. Dozens of them hauling themselves out of the dark and stumbling blindly, a few had arms outstretched, looking for something in particular, but most shuffled,

heads downturned. None of them were whole, messing the arms, fingers. Jesus, one even had a hole going right through his chest. All of them were in pain. With every second the past, the camp came alive and surrounded me with a waking nightmare. One two of the figures bumped into each other, their nature immediately changed. The sad whimpering of two lost souls was replaced with gutteral rage as both erupted into violence.

I've been in my fair share of fights, and I've never seen anything like it.

Fist fights are rarely mortal affairs. You want to kill someone, you stab or shoot them.

You don't use bitten nails to fish hook a hole right through their cheek. You don't tear

“their jugular with your few remaining teeth. It didn't just happen once either.”

Each time two or more of those figures bumped into each other, the violence appeared like a switch getting flicked. But the worst part was that once the fight was over, and the loser had stopped thrashing violently on the ground, they would both just get back up. Ingeries dripping black fluid, but quickly sealing with new skin. I saw one boy smash another's

head in with a rock, and when his victim sat upright, he had nothing left of his skull above

the nose. His teeth chattered briefly, and then he stood up and kept walking. My only hope was the light. Each time one of those things stood in the sun, they disappeared.

“It was as if they were made of shadow, only able to exist as long as they were not exposed to”

direct light. It was a risk, but I had to hope it wasn't just the sun they feared. I had a flashlight in my pocket, and I grabbed it, but as soon as my hand made contact, something outside squeal like a stuck cake. The instant I heard it, it was like being plunged into cold water. The atmosphere in the bunk and camp outside immediately changed, and I turned to see that the army of dark figures. Now stared at me. Panicked and afraid. I fumbled briefly

before turning on the light, and pivoted just in time to catch something leaping at me from beneath the dark. They faded to nothing in the light. But then something else in the periphery moved,

“and when I turned towards them the previous attacker returned to existence. I was forced to”

flick the light desperately from one to the other just to keep the two at bay. Terrified, I tried to call myself and think of some way to escape, but there was no time. From behind, there came the sound of tinkling glass, and then hands so cold they left freezer burns on my skin, dragged me through the open window. I screamed, but did not let the flashlight go, as I was thrown to the floor, I saw a nightmarish mob surround me. They laughed and sneered as a knee pushed me into the

sodden mud. I felt it then. At same fear I had decades before, the eyes staring down at me. This was a familiar violence. But then there came another nails on chalkboard shriek, the kind of gut-wrenching whale that had belonged to a monster. My attacker's reacted like solid school boys, clenched teeth and flared nostrils suddenly replaced with downturn dyes and sniffling noses. They parted, reluctantly, and I sighed. Him. He crawled towards me, a small figure,

"Lyth, no more than five feet tall, dense muscle and a potbelly, a mane of hair that nearly touched the ground." He was the color of oil, no detail except a silhouette, a figure made of shadow. He grunted and sniffed the air like a dog. He smelled of copper and violence. His presence was as heavy as dark matter. I swear, the only other things like him are swirling around super colliders in Switzerland, and when he touched me, I saw the world. The real world, onto which ours

is only a painted image, an ocean with no bottom, an ecosystem with no ceiling, only ever growing predators, some large enough to engulf stars. I learned some of his memories. He learned some of mine. I felt the vague imprint of wisdom earned over 100,000 years. Fowl, sorcery, that might make a kind of twisted sense to a modern scientist. But for me to try to grasp any of it, even some of it, made me feel like I was at risk of dislocating something in my mind, some joint or hinge

that once loose could never be popped back into place. I shied away from it, and when I opened my eyes,

that monster's hand was touching the place where my eye used to be. And it was smiling. A

spoke to me. It told me that the modern world had been of no interest to this forgotten creature,

or so a dead thought. But as it scraped Abner's mind of every memory he had, it learned of Eden, and found echoes of the world it had once been fond of. It had been so long since it had had so many people to play with. And then I noticed something I hadn't before. This thing only had one eye. It knew what Abner had done to me, and it knew what I had done to Abner. The grin widened, and a hand made of the darkness between atoms, clamped around my head.

When I awoke, I was in my car, morning had broken, and my chest was painted with dappled light.

“I wasted no time in trying to remember what was, or wasn't real. I had somehow travelled halfway”

down the trail, a good two days hike, and was back near the road. A scape was in sight, and I took it. I drove so fast, I nearly came off the dirt road on more than monocation, kept going, barreling down the mountain until some part of me remembered the broken rib. At some point the pneumonia got the better of me. I must have passed out in the car rolled to a stop. The park ranger who found me said I had a hell of a fever, and it put me in the hospital for the next few

weeks. I spent my time rambling at doctors about a darkness so heavy it could drown the sun.

“Like an ocean drowns a candle. It's been about a year since then. Not a days gone by,”

I haven't thought about apnea, or the thing that holds him captive. That's smile. Sometimes I still see it, learing at me from the dark spaces, beneath the tablecloth at a busy restaurant, the dumpster in an alley. One time a homeless man asked for change and a single eye stared out at me from his open mouth. It's taunting me. It took Abner's shoe and didn't tends to keep him. It thinks it knows me well enough that I won't go back to help

him and the others. The mountain of trash at the foot of the hill. How long has it been up there collecting hikers and campers? Anyone unlucky enough to stumble into the dark places of Appalachia where the sun has not shown for millennia? I know why, and let me go. For Abner to have come so close to escape, for him to know that he nearly got out and spent eternity wondering if I might one day

“return? That would amuse it. And that's why it let me go. The thought that I might risk my own”

neck to help the boy who cut out my eye, it couldn't fathom such a thing, thinks that I'll scurry away like a rapid freed from a trap. It's wrong. I suspect I won't have it so easy next time.

That thing is smart. Smart enough to have been born mortal but still live half a million years

later. Smart, like evolution, like nature. Kind of thing like that can be hard for a human direct and with. And I think there's a good chance that I'll lose the next confrontation, lose it badly. But I'm no slouch either. I fought my share of hatred and I've got my own plans for how to help the people stuck in Eden. A truck with a generator. Flood lights, glow sticks, a quad bike, so expensive it could damn near drive up Everest. Home made napalm,

enough to burn a mountain to the ground. When I go back, I'm bringing the light with me. You've been listening to Eden by Christian Wallace. Christian Wallace is a PhD student and writer hailing from rain-soaked whales, where he grew up comforted by ancient castles, crumbling coastlines, and the old things that live in the woods. You can find more of his stories at chw-a-l-l-i-s dot co.uk and at Vellix Books. There's a lot that I'd like to say about this story far more than I have

themselves at the slightest provocation. I love the depiction of how loneliness and the need for

acceptance are so frequently the root of hatred. But most of all, I love that a single man can make a difference, and that the journey down the road of redemption is so frequently begun with an act of kindness. You all don't listen to this show to hear me preach, and I'm not going to start now. But I will close out this episode with a request. As you go about your lives, interacting with

“people both known and unknown, remember that many are fighting the same battles that you are”

and want the same things out of life. It's easy to assume the worst and folks. But there are those out there that want you to feel that way, that are doing their best to make you feel that way, and to delight in division and strife. So, when you go about your life, instead of bringing the hatred that others have done their best to saddle you with, instead bring some light with you.

Thanks again to Christian Wallace for this amazing story. Tune in next week for more horror

hell, and until then, stay spooky friends. You've been listening to the horror-hill podcast,

“a production of chilling entertainment and the creative team at chilling tales for Dark Nights.”

Tonight's episode was hosted, narrated, scored, and finalized by yours truly, Eric P. Body, additional music by Nikki Mixorley. Got a terrifying tale of your own that you'd like performed? Email it to us at [email protected] to have your work considered

for future production. Note that any writing utilizing artificial intelligence is ineligible.

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to get started. If you're looking for someone to narrate or handle audio production for your own personal project, I just so happened to know a guy. Email me at Eric Peabody [email protected] that's ERIC, [email protected], and we can talk details. If darkness is what you're after listener, your search is over. Yet let it be none. You haven't found the darkness. The darkness has found you.

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