(Based on this nightmare fuel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T09iknuzDlw)

You got a job working the closing shift at your local clothing retail store, and tonight you’re alone, the yellow light filtering from the tiles in the ceiling and illuminating the individual flakes of dust floating in the artificial air. It’s mostly silent, a far cry from a few hours ago. The only sound is that of a distant machine, like a generator or an air vent, humming deeply like the building’s lungs, and occasional clangs of pipes as the generator sings a metallic song.
There’s three of you who normally go around and fix things up at night, refolding shirts and hanging misplaced articles back up while making sure nothing got stolen or defaced, but you’re on your own tonight. The chick, Amanda, had to leave early and Ben, the other guy, took the night off. It’s just you. You look down at your watch. It’s 12:30. You still have a good hour and a half before you can call it a night.
    You look around, and you’re astounded at how empty a massive clothing store can be at night. Nothing moves. There’s no aggravated customers demanding a full refund. No toddlers screaming as their retarded mothers talk loudly on cellphones, no kids knocking down stacks of novelty tee shirts and no light jazz elevator music played in the background of such chaos. It’s almost calming.
You make your way to the men’s section, and you pass one of those mannequins that has sample outfits on it. For a second, you stop and stare at him. His name is Goddfrey. You and the rest of the night crew pose with him sometimes and take Facebook pictures of him doing hilariously inappropriate things. Goddfrey Gone Wild. The night shift can be boring. Not tonight, though.
You salute Goddfrey, the normal greeting. He doesn’t salute back, and you stare at him, his white skin milky and plastic. For a second, you swear to god you see him twitch, but after a quick heartbeat you tell yourself it was nothing.
‘Damn,’ you say, “These things are fucking creepy at night.”
    You turn your back on Godfrey and journey deeper into the men’s section, until you reach one of those godforsaken “novelty t-shirt!” stands. Those things take forever because they were constantly out of order. ‘People need to learn how to put shit back,’ you think. You bend over and put the ‘I’m Next to Stupid’ shirts back in the right place, and after about five minutes you’re done. You stand up, and survey the area. Everything is fine. You head back toward Goddfrey, and as you pass him you stop dead in your tracks.
You swear to god that Goddfrey’s head is cocked a little bit to the right, and the hat on his hat is now on the floor. As you stare into Goodfrey’s dark, black eyes, you suddenly start to feel uneasy. You hurry as you bend down and place the cap back on his head, and as you turn your back to him your heart starts to beat faster and you can feel dark, plastic eyes.
            Dark, plastic eyes staring into your back.
You turn around. It’s just Goddfrey. Good old Goddfrey the Fuckbuddy. You turn around again and walk quickly until you reach the ladies section.
As the feeling wears off you convince yourself it was just the paranoia of being in the store alone. It’s kind of a creepy place.
You scan the ladies section- it’s a fucking rough tonight. Blouses cover the floor, and one by one you place them back on the racks. As you’re putting the last skirt back on the rack, you catch something out of the corner or your eye.
A flash of white.
You know the general direction of where it happened, and your heart pounds heavily in your chest as you slowly rise to your feet, eyeing the area intently.
All you can see is the left side of a woman’s mannequin. Sarah, you guys named her, or as Ben liked to say “Fucking bitch.” Slowly, you walk to her.
You’re standing in front of her. Her left foot is a little bit farther ahead of her right.
‘She probably just lost balance,’ you say out loud as you stare at her.
‘Too much stuff on her head or something.’ You say to yourself in a hushed self affirmation. You turn around, and you hurry to the front register. As you turn your back to her, you can feel her black stare burn into your back.
          The last thing you have to do is lock down the registers. One by one you go through and press the ‘power down’ button on the digital cash register, and it shuts off. As you’re doing this, you tremble a little, and as your brain tries to convince you it’s alright, and that you’re being retarded, and that you’re just frightened because of the nightshift. By the third register, you feel almost normal.
You see a small, children’s shoe underneath the counter to the last register, so you pull on it.
You pull out a whole infant mannequin. You stare at for a spilt second, into the tiny, beady eyes, and you swear, just for one instant, that the thing fucking blinks.
You let out a cry as you drop the thing to the ground, the plastic resonating on the marble floor. From the men’s section you hear a light crash, and the same plastic rattling. You hear creaking plastic. Tiny plastic footsteps.
You run to the front entrance, and go to the security system.
You try to remember the code to lock the front door.
Plastic rattling from the women’s section. With trembling fingers you punch the password- 409423.
Access denied.
             You yell out in frustration and fear as you hear tiny footsteps. You refuse to look at where they are and your heartbeat climbs and your head feels like it’s going to explode from terror. The footsteps echo through the silence, plastic hitting tiled floors.
Another attempt with the password: 4019423.
Access denied.
‘I’m going to die holy shit I’m going to fucking die’
Only when you hear the singing do you abandon trying to lock the store. You can hear one of them, a robotic, inhuman, terrifying voice, singing something like ‘Hey hey hey, hey hey hey’ over and over and over and over again, and it grows nearer with every tiny, plastic step. You scream “FUCK IT” fling open the side door, and run to your car.
You’re halfway across the parking lot when you hear the side door open and you hear a faint, horrible chorus of ‘Hey hey hey’ echo in the still, black night. You run faster, your feet blasting against the pavement, and when you reach the front door of your car you struggle in your pockets, flinging your cellphone and wallet onto the pavement as ‘Hey hey hey’ grows closer, the robotic voice locking into the night with some kind hypnotic, horrible melody. You can see a dark humanoid figure, a dark shadow in the distance moving at a steady rate, hobbling and shaking. You flash your eyes to the side door again. More humanoid shadows. More robotic voices. More plastic steps against the pavement.
More ‘Hey Hey Hey’ choruses.
       The car opens for you the first time, and you nearly dive into it. You refuse to look behind you as your fumbling hands struggle with the ignition. You hear gentle tapping on the window, and against your better judgement, you look up at it.
The plastic face seems to be smiling in the darkness, it’s plastic mouth moving in a tiny motion but a motion all the same. The dark eyes are so close to humanity but so horribly inhuman. They stare into your soul, plastic hand raised, knocking into the glass of your window. She’s mouthing words
“Hey hey hey. Hey hey hey.” You can hear it in your mind, and you start the car,and the radio turns on. You accelerate wildly you turn the radio on full volume.
‘We danced like spirits in the night’
As you speed forward, your headlight catches a group of them, all stumbling along with distinctly inhuman steps, rigid and without an ounce of flexibility or grace. Even with Springsteen Blaring you can hear the damn things.
‘Hey hey hey, hey hey hey,’
You’re store is next to another retail clothing store. As you pass at 70 miles an hour, you see a stream of them stumbling out of the store, an army of mannequins, some without heads, some without arms or legs, but all of them singing. You try to crank the radio up more, but it won’t, it’s maxed out. You scream and press the petal to the floor, peeling out into non-existent traffic.
It’s a long drive home. You go fast, and you don’t think. You’re mind is too clouded and exhausted for rational thought. You don’t notice the complete absence of traffic on the way to your house. You force the song out of your head. ‘Not the song, not the song.’
As you pull into your driveway, slamming the door behind you, you run to the front door and fumble with the key. Every shadow has a plastic face, every whisper of wind sings ‘Hey, hey, hey.’
          The door opens. You lock it. You run through the house and make sure everything is locked. You close all of the curtains, and you move the living room couch in front of the stairs that lead to your bedroom. You leap over it, run into your bedroom, and move your dresser up against the door.
Your girlfriend let sleeping pills on your bed stand. You take a handful, and soon you pass out, face first, onto your bed.
You don’t hear them, at 5:30 in the morning. You left the side door leading into the garage open. You left the door leading from the garage into the kitchen unlocked.
They climb over the stair-blockade.
By six, your surrounded. At seven they start to sing.
At 7:05 you wake up, and you are silent as they sing the infinite chorus of ‘Hey hey hey,’ and it’s loud, at least one hundred robot voices singing the same thing, and you sit on the side of your bed, staring at the door handle.
It slowly turns. The door gradually opens.
A white leg steps into your room. You don’t move as it invites itself in.
Your last rational thought is ‘Oh my god it looks just like me’ as the white body moves toward you, his arms outstretched.
‘Hey hey hey, hey hey hey…’
When he sings, it’s different.
          He has your voice.
As he embraces you like a long lost friend and you feel your skin harden, turning milky white, you discover why mannequins are nestled so deep in uncanny valley.
‘Hey hey hey,’ you sing in reply.

Published: /x/, January 2011

In 1999, I was twenty-two and I had just graduated from Emerson University in downtown Boston, majoring in screenwriting, specifically in cartoons and children’s programming. My debt was pretty bad, so when Nickelodeon Studios offered me an internship at the studio in California, I accepted immediately. I jumped at the chance to get away from dead end job at Benjamin Franklin tour guide.

Many of you ask to see Cry Baby Lane but if you want to see the original Cry Baby Lane, you never will, even if Nickelodeon somehow consents to releasing it to you. You won’t be seeing what was shown on TV, and you sure as fuck won’t be seeing the original that Lauer made.

I don’t even think Nickelodeon HAS the original cut of the movie anymore, and if they do it’s in only back-up copies; if the back-up copies exist they must be locked away in some vault along with all the deleted episodes of Ren And Stimpy and the never-before-mentioned episodes of Spongebob Squarepants. I’m pretty sure the director, Peter Lauer, has the original copy and it’s probably on his mantle next to his snuff films, that creepy ass fuck.

Anyway, I was hired in 1999 and immediately I was put on a creative production team for the movie Cry Baby lane. It would be almost a year before the movie was due to be broadcast; all in all, it was a pretty low effort kind of thing. There were only four people on the creative team and I was the only steady one; Lauer would replace them on a whim. He said it was to keep it fresh. I thought it was because he was hiding something… and I was right.

We had a little over a year to make a made for TV movie - not just to write it and cast it but to film it and get it edited. Lauer didn’t work fast at all; after the first three weeks we only had the ideas for the first 15 minutes of a 85 minute movie. Lauer, even at this point, was a weirdo. He was tall and lanky, and he carried himself awkwardly - he stuttered when he talked and sometimes, when you were hunched over a piece of paper during those endless ‘brainstorming sessions,’ you’d look up and you’d catch him staring at you, smiling.

He’d look away when you caught his eye, and I guess that was the creepiest part; he always looked like he had something to hide. The brainstorm sessions, at first, were alright. We got the premise of it down pat: two brothers unleash a demon and they get into mischief trying to get everything back to normal. Not exactly daytime Emmy stuff, but you know, it was an alright start. I thought the movie should be goofy and spooky, kind of like a Courage the Cowardly dog sort of deal. However, from the very beginning, Lauer made it clear that he wanted the film to be as scary as possible. He didn’t want it to be cheap thrills, with a good wholesome ending. He wanted to push it farther than Are You Afraid of The Dark ever dreamed of… and I guess he did.

It was about 3 weeks into production when I first noticed something: Lauer had the absolute power of persuasion over everyone else in the creative production team. No one fought him and by the third week, he was already suggesting some morbid things. I remember he said he wanted the the little brother to die halfway through the movie, getting hit with a dump truck. I immediately shot it down. I was the only one who said anything, and it stayed that was until I left the studio entirely and never came back.

At first, cannibalism and other fucked up shit was kept to jokes and tasteless comments but as time went on, it became more and more overt. I’d give him an idea idea (which most of the time he would end up using) like “How about the movie starts with a morbid undertaker who reads them stories,” to which he’d reply, “Yeah…and then he can cut them up into little pieces and force-feed them to his dog!” He made those jokes a few times in the early stages. Then he got serious.

He’d stand up like he was Jesus or something, clear his throat loudly, and proclaim his idea. I’d be the only one to shoot it down. Every-fucking-time.

One day near the end of our brainstorming sessions, Lauer cleared his voice and stood up. We all fell silent, and looked at him, like we normally would. He stood up, and said,

“Gentlemen and females, I have an idea.”

I remember what he did—he paused, and looked right at me as he said,

“The story will revolve around the legend of a pair of Siamese twins. Have you ever heard of the Donner Party?”

Everyone nodded, except for me. I didn’t like where the conversation was going.
“They ate themselves when it got cold. They ate each other.”

Everyone nodded again. I closed my eyes.

“What would Siamese twins do if they had nothing to eat? Would one wait until the other twin dies, then consume her own sister’s flesh? Would they claw out each other’s eyes until one of them died, then dine upon them like a vulture tearing at the skin of a dead deer? I do not know. It is interesting indeed.”

I didn’t know what the fuck I was hearing. I opened my eyes and looked around the room; no one was fucking moving. Everyone’s eyes were on Lauer except for mine, and when I looked at him, he was still staring at me.

“Children like violence, they revel in it. Children like to be scared. So we’ll scare them, won’t we, Jonny?” He leaned over the table, getting pretty damn close to my face. His breath smelt like decaying shit. I stared back at him.

“I think you’re fucked up, to be honest.”

He smiled, then backed away.

“Oh, I’m fucked up alright, but you have to be fucked up to survive in this cut-throat world!” His grin expanded.

“Literally. Right now, I’m going to show you some pictures that will spark some of your imaginations.”

He got up, and locked the door from the inside.

I stood up, and said, “What the fuck are you doing?”

“Let’s not make any… errors in judgement, Jonathan. Sit down.”

“No-”

“Sit.”

For some reason, I did; Lauer pulled out one of those shitty overhead projectors. He turned on the switch and he speak-shouted, in a unusually high and semi-frantic voice,

“This is the fucking MUSE we NEED to CONTINUE with THIS PRO-FUCKING-DUCTION!
THIS IS WHAT EVERY CHILD SHOULD SEE.”

His eyes bulged in his head.

He put the image down on the glass surface of the overhead.

It was silent.

The image was in black and white, but it was grainy. I could vaguely make out a boy lying on a brick floor, his arms cut off and his bloody little nub black dots. The only thing that was clear was his face. He was bleeding from the mouth.

Lauer almost threw the paper off the overhead, slamming down another one.

It was a zoomed-in shot of the boy’s face. It was in color. The blood trickled from his open mouth onto the brick floor, his eyes shut, grimy blood underneath his eyebrows and eyelashes.

Then, his eyes opened, and I screamed. No one else in the fucking room did, and it died in infancy, the shrillness ringing in the air.

The pupils were completely black. The rest of the eye was normal.

The longer I stared, the more the eyes opened, widening and widening untill it looked like the skin above his eyebrows and eye sockets was going to rip in half.

Then they started to bleed. Blood started as a trickle, and I swear to god I could hear it. More, now it was like a full blown stream. More. More, until the brick on the floor was a lake of blood. I could hear it, like I was hiking and I came across a stream, and now I could smell the kid. I could fucking smell his rot.

I leaned underneath the table and vomited. When I rose back up, the images were gone. Everyone else in the room was expressionless. Lauer turned on the lights.

“You may go,” he said, unlocking the door.

I walked through those fucking doors, and I never came back.

This happened near the end of the brainstorming process and by the time I left the casting was done and the script was almost fully written. They were desperately behind schedule; I think Lauer planned it that way, so there wouldn’t be time for proper editing. I never watched the real thing when it aired, but I heard from a friend who was working at the editing department that they had to cut a good 15-20 minutes of ‘disturbing’ footage from the film before it was fit to be released, and it was only fit to be released. They didn’t have enough time to check the footage frame by frame.

I guess he got his wish, unless they cut every single scene that had the pictures in them. Every child watching Crybaby Lane has an unconscious memory of those pictures, and I weep for them, I really do; they fucked me up, and as I write this to you, it will be last thing I’ll ever write before I slit my throat and before blood spatters all over this fucking computer screen.

There’s something I should tell you first, though.

Early on, Lauer posed an idea of the two brothers capturing a squirrel, putting said squirrel in a jar, and slowly drowning it before filling the jar with sand and dropping it into the bottom of a pond. Soon after this was suggested, Sandy from Spongebob Squarepants appeared in ‘Tea at The Treedome.’

Lauer also suggested, in one scene of the movie, for a man with a ‘squid-like-nose’ to take off his pants in front of the two boys and rape them off camera, but heavily implied. Squidward soon appeared as a major character in Spongebob Squarepants.

It was suggested that the two be stepbrothers, forced to live in the same house after the first one’s mom was found dead in a shallow grave, her body heavily cannibalized by her own husband, a local weatherman. A show with the vaguely premise, Drake and Josh, started in 2004, and the step-father is indeed a weatherman.

Lauer also suggested the younger brother have a dog house in which he keeps various animal fetuses incased in acid that he regularly uses to poison his mother to have sex with his abusive stepfather. As Told By Ginger debuted soon after.

A man who captures the soles of children in a vacuum cleaner and sends them to Hades? Danny Phantom.

A robot who goes insane on the two brothers, kills one of them wears his skin, pretending to be the dead brother at highschool? My Life As a Teenage Robot.

The list goes on and on. Nickelodeon knows, and they’re continuing the legacy of Lauer, sometimes subtly, and sometimes overtly. And there’s nothing you and I can do about it.

There’s a doctor in the city I live that people only talk about in passing, and only the only people that have this passing knowledge of him are junkies or vagrants that I meet under the railroad trestle, huddled around a trashcan fire.

I met the man once, though, and I guess you could say it was by accident. The junkies call him the ‘Dark Doctor’ and through the garble they incoherently spit , you can hear the term slip out, like his memory is the only one worth remembering in the chemical cesspit of their minds. I guess I share that with them. There’s never been a day in my life I haven’t thought of him, or what he did to me. He taught me how to revel in my own insanity.

I’ve been searching for him for many years, mercilessly, without rest. The junkies and homeless under the railroad trestle think I’m one of them, because I live with them most of the time, but that’s just because I have no need for a material life. You don’t need anything when you spend your life searching for Him. All you need is your freedom.

I’ve come close, since the day I met him, to finding him again. I take nightly walks in the places many are afraid to go. I walk through the abandoned houses, take vigil in the secret passages that hold such hostile spirits. I don’t fear, because I’m free.

The sewers hold the most for answers for me. In the sewers that run under the city, sewers that I’ve trudged through and explored, you can see traces of him everywhere: his sign. It’s a simple sign. It’s a X in red, and knowing the man, the red is most likely blood.

There are certain places the normal human mind is not supposed to go, and I accept that, I accept and understand the boundaries of the sane. It was my own conscious decision to tear down the limitations of morals, the limitations of society, the limitations of the sane. To be insane is to have the ultimate freedom, and I understand that. I’d say that I even foster it.

I wouldn’t have been able to do this without His help, however.
He showed me the truth.

When I trudge through the sewers, I see him everywhere. I know his signs. I see the plastic heads of Mannequins, thrown into the excrement, and see them to be allusions, a breadcrumb trail. He has walked this path.

And sometimes, on these nightly expeditions, I see a man with his eyes stitched shut, standing in the iridescent glow of floodlights in the long abandoned arms of ancient subways. With his have naked arms outstretched, he beckons to me, and I know that thousands of him are in the shadows, that we makes up the shadows.

I know not to fear him. Because he is what I want. His mind has the ultimate freedom.

His eyes are stitched shut so he cannot see, and his ears are cut cleanly off, the wounds filled with tar. I know what the Dark Doctor does to the noses: he staples the nostrils as one and seals the wound with piano wire.

The transformation, really, is quite beautiful.

Insanity is a commodity. The Dark Doctor is a commercial surgeon of freedom. And I only wish when I saw him the first time, I held the same love for his work, the same appreciation I do now.

The first time I met the Doctor, I was 13 years old and I was with friends, wandering the streets of this fine city at night, running into alleyways and throwing rocks at tenement windows, the like. We decided to lift open a window to one of the said tenements, and climb inside to satisfy some reckless childhood courage. And once we entered, it was dark. We walked around in the house, and we didn’t notice the shadows start to move. The insane slink into the paper like darkness. We didn’t see the stitched eyes watching us in the corners of the dark house, our flashlights didn’t catch the faces. But they surrounded us, all the same, and delivered us to him.

He smiled at me as he pierced my best friends eyes shut. he smiled at me, through slits in his pale skin, as his long fingers wrapped around piano wire.

He smiled at me as he let me go.

I ran. I couldn’t go home, because the people of the dark were my family. They were everywhere. They were everything. So I kept running, And once I was done running, I got to thinking. About how free they must be. The people that lurk in the shadows, the people who make up the darkness.

And I decided then that I want to be just like Him, that I wanted to show people this liberation.

I’ve been practicing. I’ve been showing people how lovely this freedom is, whether they volunteer or not. When you come from the same as the shadows on the wall, it’s easy to stand over the sleeping, easy to snatch them away.

In my search for him, I’ve dragged others along with me.

And people like you…well, people like you are nice practice for people like me.

Hi, my name’s Jon and I write Creepy Pasta. Over the past few years, i’ve written quite a few rather popular pieces, including the one that circulated before the release of Cry Baby Lane and one entitled ‘Ice Diaries.’ I’m going to post new and old work on this blog, so keep a look out. Thanks!