Doomscrolling in the Dark

"Growing up with violence, with inescapable expertly choreographed brutality in every home builds not only a kind of desensitization for it, but it also creates a market for violent entertainment by people for whom even what they see on television is not enough, is not graphic enough, is not explicit enough, and some movie productions, some big productions really cash in on that market. What is peculiar about this is that as time goes on, a greater dosage is necessary to satisfy this need."

- George Gerbner

Transcript

It was the worst day you’d had at work in a long time. But you feel a little bit of relief when you pull up to your driveway, and even more when you walk through your door. At least you’re home now, and that makes you feel better. You pour yourself a glass of scotch and order some food, but there is still one more thing to do before you relax. You pull down the latch to your dusty attic, and still in your shirt and tie, you crawl up. You haven’t done this in so long, you haven’t needed to, which you remind yourself is a blessing. You grab the string of the attic light once you’re up, and it does its job of lighting up the space just enough that you won’t trip over anything. You could replace it with a better one, but you don’t because it sets the proper ambiance for what you’re about to do. You walk to the far end and open up the old wooden crate. Your father and grandfather always argued about how long it had been in the family, but regardless of the exact date, it was old. Older than your house, older than your city, hell maybe even older than your country. You grab the ceremonial dagger, somehow never rusted, and you hold out your arm. You slice into your forearm in a jagged line, because straight scars stand out more. Then you hold it up and drip blood down over the blood of your forefathers. You know now that you’ll have a better day tomorrow because for your family better days are always guaranteed when you need them. At the bottom of the box, as your blood starts to freshen the contents, you hear stirring. You know you’ve fed it enough then, and feeling ready to unwind at last, you close the lid on; The Podcast Inside Your House. 

Scary stories didn’t scare me, not anymore. These days I have to find other ways to get my scares. These days I get my fix mostly by watching videos of things that I shouldn’t be watching. I do this on my phone in the dark before bed, because these are not videos meant to be watched during the day. 

That’s what I’m doing tonight, and If I let my eyes wander just a bit to the space where the blue light drops off to pitch black, I can sometimes catch a glimpse of movement. I’ll see part of a face, or a long bony appendage reaching out for me. But the second I turn my light to it, it’s gone. But while I wait patiently for the witching hour, summoning dark thoughts, and other dark things, let me tell you about the things that used to scare me. 

Growing up, campfire tales had done the job just fine. We’d lived on the edge of the woods, so it was something I could treat myself to even at home. I could sit at the start of the forest with my little brothers and we’d tell each other horrors. I was never happier than when I was imagining something reaching out from the darkness. 

The scariest story though, the one that genuinely terrified me and the one that wasn’t any fun, was one my mother shared with me on my twelfth birthday. She told me of my great-great aunt Polly, a girl who’d loved the macabre just as much as I did. Mommy dearest told me this story out at the edge of the woods, where the darkness was close enough to reach out and swallow us both if it wanted to. 

Polly had lived out in the country in a house not unlike ours, and close enough that we could drive past the old ruins if we wanted to. And years later I would, looking for answers that I would never find at some bare brick foundation. 

Anyway, Polly had loved the forest dearly, and more than anything she loved the forest at night. She liked to wander out and build a fire. Sometimes she’d even fall asleep out there, staying lost until sunrise. She was always reading horror; Poe and the like, she had no interest in anything else. I understood that well, there was a coziness to being scared. Polly didn’t have many friends, I understood that too. So when her twelfth birthday rolled around, she hadn’t had a party or gone out to the diner. No, she’d packed up her bag and her books and wandered into the woods. My mother didn’t tell me about Polly’s parents and if they’d ever objected to her venturing off all alone. So whether she snuck out or simply walked out, Polly left that night and never came back. 

They’d found what was left of her a week later when her teacher notified police she’d been missing. Why her parents hadn’t reported her missing, my mother didn’t say, and I didn’t ask. The pieces of Polly that the police pulled out of the woods were her right leg, her head, and part of her torso. Animals had made off with the rest, and everyone had assumed that animals had been what had killed her.

Now I know that what killed her was something much worse. Now I know that if she’d just put out the fire, just braved the darkness, she would have been fine. At least, she would have survived that night anyway. See it’s not the darkness that draws in the monster, it’s the light. It’s the flame or the flashlight or the phone that makes you an easy target. 

Right now, I think I’ve mostly given up on tonight being the night. I’ve stopped looking at the edge of darkness and instead, I focus on the carnage I hold in my hand. It’s cartel executions tonight, but there’s a lot of sorting through the ones I’ve already seen. No one values originality anymore. 

Back when my mother told me about Polly though, I took the tale as a cautionary one. I thought that Mother was simply warning me about the dangers of staying out by the fire alone. And it did deter me, to a degree, but it didn't stop me. I just tried harder to rope my brothers into staying out later with me. But when they went inside, sometimes I stayed out alone. Sometimes I sat and I looked into the woods and I thought about how nice it would be to let the darkness take me, to lose myself completely to the monsters and the ghosts that made me feel so comfortable. 

Two years after I heard of Polly’s fate I was turning fourteen. We’d moved to a house in the city, in a place where the danger of wildfires meant I had to find a new hobby. I transitioned to reading by candlelight. I suppose flashlights would have worked just as well, but I missed the warmth and the smoke of my childhood backyard. Candlelight felt like keeping a small part of that alive. 

Mother sat me down on my birthday again, which I only knew about because I’d kept track. I knew by then that it wasn’t an occasion to celebrate. My little brothers would sneak me a small party later that night, with cookies and candy and whispered congratulations, but by then they too understood that I was different. They knew that celebrating out in the open would infuriate our mother. 

When Mother said “I want to tell you a story,” I dimmed the kitchen lights and lit a candle. Might as well set the mood. I was never short on candles. In fact, the one regard in which my mom not only cared but spoiled me was in buying me candles and books whenever I asked for them, and sometimes even when I didn’t. 

This story was about my great-aunt Miranda. By then I’d gathered that it was only a matter of time before we dropped the ‘greats’ altogether. I knew there was a story much closer to home, but I let Mom tell the stories in the order she wanted. I listened to Miranda's story but really I wasn't thinking about her, I was thinking about Mom's sister. I figured that would be the story that would give me real answers.

Miranda, like Polly and like me had been a child obsessed with death and doom and gloom. She'd lived in a house in the city, not far from where we lived at the time. By then I understood that that was more than mere coincidence. Miranda had been a bookworm, always staying up late to read by candlelight. They'd had electricity back then, it wasn't that long ago, but Miranda had loved the flames. I understood that well. Mom didn't elaborate on what she read, but I knew; the same books as me and all my predecessors. 

I knew where the story was going because by then I was aware of the pattern in our family's history. I wondered if Miranda had known too. Had she gone into her birthday afraid, or had it been a relief? 

She'd been fourteen when she died. Being inside this time it was harder to blame what had happened to her on animals. Something had taken her heart, her left eye, and various bits from her torso. The cuts weren't clean, and had she not been in a locked room, had there been any signs of forced entry at all, police might have guessed a bear had broken in. Fantastical as that was, it made the most sense, as the edges of the wounds were ripped apart with teeth and claws. 

I've looked her up since then. Nowadays a story like that would draw attention, but back then it spread only in the town news. I didn't find pictures of Miranda, but I found drawings. Sometimes I liked to look at them late at night and anticipate what’s coming for me.  

Now as I lie in bed, I trace my fingers along my body and I wonder what parts of me the monster will take. I was ready, and I waited for the beast with a mix of anticipation and nervousness. I had butterflies in my stomach like I was going on a date, but I wasn’t sure how it would go. 

Sometimes I fantasized about slaying the beast. Sometimes I went to bed with knives or a bat tucked under my bed ready to end this curse once and for all. On other nights I went to bed naked, ready for death. Sometimes I pictured myself in another life, born to another family. I wonder, if I hadn’t been raised as someone already doomed,  would I still be so desperate for something bad to happen to me?

It was my sixteenth birthday when I got the full story about Mom’s sister. She didn’t tell me her name. Mom told me it didn’t matter, just like my name didn’t matter because I was never going to live very long anyway. 

Mom and her sister used to share a room. They were in a small apartment, like the one we’d moved to after our first house in the city. Mom and her sister used to stay up late into the night talking and giggling and of course, reading each other scary stories. They’d tell each other all the classics, the ones written for the dark. They’d stay up at all hours hiding under sheets and reading by flashlight. Mom said she never felt scared, not really, not when they had sheets to protect them from the dark. 

I think maybe my grandparents had hoped the curse, or whatever it was, wasn’t real. Mom didn’t remember them treating my sister any differently. She didn’t remember them warning her about the things lurking in the dark. She says she wishes she’d known not to be so close to her. After a lifetime of trying, she’s convinced my brothers not to be too close to me. 

When the monster, or ghost or curse, whatever you want to call it came for my aunt, my mother was in the room too. She’d watched the beast dissect her sister, and take what it wanted. She was the first eyewitness who could describe the monster, at least in our family's recorded history. She passed that sighting down to me, making me the first in a long line who knew what was coming for me. 

I was scared for about a year after that, scared for the first time in so long. I didn’t want to die. But you can only be scared for so long before you get used to it. Then, you start to crave it. Being afraid loops back around to some strange comfortable feeling. I was ready to star in my own horror story, after all that’s what my entire life had been building up to. My own sixteenth birthday was spent alone in the dark, but by then that was how I preferred things. 

Lying in my room now, I’m ready for the beast. It’s cold tonight, I get cold so easily, and the thought of dying makes me feel warmer. It makes me feel safe. 

I feel like, in my internet pursuits, I’ve seen every conceivable way to die. I’ve seen all the greatest hits, and then some. People sucked into machinery, people skinned alive. People killed in front of their loved ones, hacked to bits by a cameraman who just laughs and laughs. If you’ve seen every possible way to die, death doesn’t seem so scary anymore. 

Who knew smartphones would revolutionize the campfire story so well? How convenient, how delightful, to have both the light source and the horrors coming from the same place. 

I don’t know what time of day I was born, or even if today was certain to be the day the beast would come. I’d dug further into our family records, and though the beast had had a penchant for birthdays the last few generations, strange and gruesome deaths had plagued our family at all phases of life. 

It was getting late, and I was feeling less hopeful that tonight would be my date with death. I was about to give up and go to sleep. But as the carnage on my screen, and the cheerful music drew to a close, I heard the closet door creak open. 

Let’s fucking do this. I thought.

I kept my phone on, the screen paused at the moment of someone else’s death. That seemed fitting. I didn’t turn on the flashlight, but the screen would be enough. Light was important, like a moth to the flame, the monster was drawn to the edges of the dark. I’d often wondered if I’d start to regret taunting the beast and welcoming the darkness when it actually came for me. Would I actually be scared when I finally heard fleshy footsteps at my bedside? But in that moment all I felt was anticipation. It was here, and I’d been waiting so long. 

I held out my phone and the flickering light showed me one long spine, with bony bits sticking out, ribs and legbones attached in place of vertebrae. It was a beautiful sight. 

The beast panted heavily as it moved, its footsteps disjointed from a dozen limbs working poorly together. Flesh on the beast was sparse, only what it had deemed worthy to take from its prey, which left windows into its insides. I spotted several hearts, and a pair of lungs that I knew had come from my aunt. The creature’s organs pulsed an irregular kind of rhythm but didn't seem to be working in the same way they had in their original bodies. 

The breathing was right next to my ear now, so I moved my phone light up, tracing all along its long long spine and rotting legs. Finally, I reached a broken open skull, with mismatched eyes and fleshy bits bulging out through various holes. 

“Just do it.” I said, “Let’s get this over with.” 

But it just kept breathing in my ear, its warm breath a welcome relief from my cold and lonely bedroom, in my cold and lonely house. Mother had taken my brothers away for my 18th birthday, and they hadn't even said goodbye. 

The beast rasped in air, and I waited for it to bite me with stolen teeth, but instead, it spoke. 

“You’re not ready.” It said, its voice that of death and decay. 

“I am!” I yelled, “I’m fucking ready, I’ve been ready, just fucking kill me already!” 

“Where's the fun in that?” It asked. I looked into its eyes, one gray and one green and though the flesh on its face was almost nonexistent, I could have sworn it smiled. 

“It’ll get better,” The beast told me. It put its bloody, bony hand on my shoulder, and I moved my light over, illuminating fingers in various stages of decay. “You’ll grow up and you’ll think this was just a dream.” It dug its bony claws into my shoulder. “One day you’ll be happy, you’ll even have a family.” It moved its hand off my shoulder and pulled the blanket up around me, tucking me in. “One day,” it whispered, “you’ll be afraid of the dark again.” 

Then it leaned its bony face into mine and pursed the rotting flesh around its mouth into a kiss, planting a trace of gore on my cheek. It slithered away to the closet and looked back one last time as it closed the door. Then the beast said, “That’s when I’ll come for you.” 

Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the podcast inside your house! To hear every tale of terror as they are released, subscribe to our show on your podcast app or on Youtube or follow us on Bluesky, Facebook and X. And until Next Time; remember that too much blue light before bed can be damaging to your sleep, your health, and even your life.