Nailed to the Floor

I intended for this to be a standard, creepypasta like thing.

I now know at least a little better why it is so difficult to be a good person. 

Just a little. 

 The Pantheon is written and produced by Joshua White.

  Sharing Links: 
 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-pantheon/id1498984739
 https://www.buzzsprout.com/811181
 https://open.spotify.com/show/6Pmngtn7BBnOeAiOzAriHJ
 https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-the-pantheon-57860820/
 https://podcasts.google.com/?  feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5idXp6c3Byb3V0LmNvbS84MTExODEucnNz  

Transcript

I first noticed it when I sat down to eat breakfast. The chair had already been pulled out. This, of course, was not the weird part. I lived by myself, had no guests over, so I had every excuse to be lazy and not respect common manners. Sometimes I pushed the chair back in, sometimes not. But then I sat down. Ancient and battered thing that the chair was, it was supposed to have a little ‘give’, some bit of creaking that would satisfy the inbuilt urge in my muscles to have everything around me react to my presence a little. But there was no usual creak, nope, not even a squeak. My first reaction to this weird detail was, well, nothing. It was a tiny inconvenience, nothing that a bowl of cereal and a cup of coffee wouldn’t fix. But then, as I stood up to pour myself a cup of that unholy manna, my back bumped against the chair, and… nothing. A little bit of protesting from the floor panels, but the chair did not give a single inch, nay, it did not even give a centimeter. This I noticed, and without thinking about it, tried to shift the chair. At first, I thought the thing must have weighed a thousand pounds. But, putting my arms into it, I figured that the bloody thing was just bolted into the ground.
My chair. Nailed to the floor. In my house. Overnight. Someone had been in my house in the middle of the night and nailed the thing to the floor. 
What. 
What?
What?!
I’d had a few bouts of insanity in the past. You know, little outbursts when work got bad, or one of my exes got really onto my nerves. But I’d never hallucinated. Never even did shrooms. And I was a light sleeper, too. 
But there were nails in the chair, going down into the floorboards. 
My heart was pounding against my chest. Had it pumped any harder, I might have worried that it would explode straight out of my rib cage.
They might still be here. 
They might be anywhere.
What could they be? This thing which crept into my home and… what even was this?
What could be the purpose?

In a haze, I leaned against the table. This, too, did not budge. Not a millimeter, even though I am, by my own admission, a rather heavyset man. I stumbled over against another chair. No movement. I tried picking up the fridge. Didn’t even budge. The microwave was glued to the counter; I could see a bit of the adhesive poking out from the underside.

Maybe it had always been this way. Was I the one who was mad? Had I spent the last few months of my life gluing my furniture to the floor? 

I tried the living room. Sofa wouldn’t budge, even with my full strength put against it. TV? Strapped to the mount by a substance I couldn’t quite define.

I was, at this point, prepared to… what? Call the police? What would they even? What could I even do?

What could God even do?

Every single bit of my furniture, pasted in one way or another to the floor. In the middle of the night. One night. All of it.

There was nothing to be done. I was already dead. This was hell. That made sense, right? This was a punishment for what I did back in Belize. I probably deserved it. I died in the night of a clogged artery, and now I was being forced to live through a perverted, hollow echo of my former life. Yes. That explained why even my car’s wheels were clamped to the ground by metal straps that had sprouted out of the concrete overnight. 

Everything, bound to the ground. Even if the cops couldn’t do anything… I needed someone to see. Someone to protect me from… whatever this was. 

I checked my pockets and regrettably remembered that my phone was at the shop getting debugged. But I still had the land-line. I headed back inside to the kitchen… and the blasted thing was nailed down, too. 

The only thing that wasn’t nailed to the ground was my feet, and without protection I wasn’t going to be staying in this cursed place for long. So, I went outside. To where? Anywhere where the vague horror of my home was far away. To the police station, perhaps. The church, maybe. I had no faith that the either the forces of heaven or earth could do anything more than assuage my fears. Tools could unbind my chair from the floor, but would they be able to unbind them from my mind? 

No. No. Not at all. 

There was nobody out on the streets. No cars, no old ladies getting in their morning aerobics. A few birds chattered in the sky, and the wind still whisked about, but even still… the eerie quality of my morning was not helped by the quiet. 

I’d made it a good thirteen blocks into town and still not seen another soul. My legs were getting tired, so I decided to rest one of the sidewalk side benches, one of those rusty old things that the bums liked to sleep on. They always had a bit of give to them.

Then I sat down on the rusty hulk of one same said bench. No give. Not even a bit, even though the bench itself was three times as old as me. My eyes drifted down to the obvious: the bench’s legs were wrapped about in glue.

Nailed to the floor. Even here.

There was no where I could go.

Everything was permanently affixed to the ground. The trash can. The stray cigarette butts. Someone’s potted plant that they’d left on their doorstep. Their door. Permanently sealed shut with a blow torch.

No. Now was not the time to go insane, even as the facade that was my prior world kept collapsing around me. 

The police. They must still be out there. The army. Another living person. Something that wasn’t nailed to the floor. I could find some amount of solace in any of those. But where could I go to find them? I didn’t know the locations. I tried the pay phone at the gas station. Sealed in an impenetrable knot of velcro. Everything…

But there were other people out here. The thing that nailed everything to the floor might have been a god, but if there were others, other people out there with a scrap of sense left in their brains, they would know to join with me, to take our claws to ripping all of this nonsense out. To make a world where things were mobile once again.

There were others out there. I could only hope that they too weren’t sealed to the ground.

I had walked fifty blocks by this point. It was more exercise than I’d had since middle school. My legs ached. My back was sore. But this was my sacrifice, to find a place not nailed to the floor.

Perhaps a forced rhyme, but I needed something to distract myself, keep the heart pounding in my chest from undergoing catastrophic convulsions. 

I was well into the city. The quiet itself felt grafted to my skull. There was the chattering of birds and the gentle pitter patter of unmentionable fluids falling from the gutters… wait a second. There wasn’t even that. The gutters were sealed up with tarps that were in turn chained to the buildings. 

Nothing but the birds, and the steady stomping of my feet against the ground, feebly searching for answers. 

We’d finally gotten into a part of the city that I felt familiar with; most of the other parts I’d idly glanced at from my car as I was stopped at a red light. But these shops, these convenience stores… they comforted me with a bit of their familiarity. Even though their entrances were sealed, too, their old presence brought back a sense of feeling to my gut, something that wasn’t abject fear. I was nearing someplace where this bizarre, maniacal hell would be explained. Such a feeling was bolstered by the sound. I could hear the tinge of something different on the horizon. Something…


Hyde park. I’d always loved the place. It was the only spot in town where the leaves reliably changed colors in the fall, where I could be out in public and not really feel the pressure of other people’s eyes. 

But this was the only place there were eyes now. 

Tens of thousands of people. Some with nails. Some with glue. Running around securing everything to the ground. The grass. The trees. All of it. Nailed to the floor.

Even though each individuals actions were quiet, the mass of unrepressed madness screamed a horrid song into the sky louder than any falling star. This was the entire city, compressed into this writhing mass devoid of all the culture and order that defined life. In it, the people were made less than animals, for even the beasts of the earth knew to not nail things to the floor.

My legs compelled me forward out of some morbid sense of curiosity. Perhaps I, who knew things ought to be a little free, could talk them out of this. Perhaps there was some secret object in the middle of Hyde Park that compelled my fellow man to behave so. A meteor. A relic of demons. Something. Anything that I alone, the one with eyes, would be able to find and destroy. Because without that miracle of my willpower… what would be left in a world so constrained, unable to even pick itself up off the ground?

Nothing. There was nothing to a world nailed to the floor.

A bright shriek pierced the staggering chorus of muffled madness. At once, the revelers of glue and velcro gathered in a closer circle near the middle of the park. I, 

The nails bit straight through her shoes, through her flesh, and down through the wood. Even from so far away, I could see the little bits of steel poking out underneath.

More cries of terror and pain. Gibbering reason fell from the woman’s gasping mouth, even as blood poured from her wounds. But that was not all. Then came the velcro, grinding into her open injuries. Then the glue, and the tape, ensuring that not even the greatest expenditure of her strength could ever win her a little bit of freedom. 

So she would die. Nailed to the floor.

The crowd cleared as her fate was sealed. And so I saw even more of the terrible truth. She was not the only one. A hundred others stood round the plaza, permanently affixed. Most had passed out from pain, but a few mumbled the truth under their breath. 

This… what even was this?

What was this nightmare?

I crept closer to the now doomed woman. It had only been recent for her; I could wipe away the glue, extract the nails. If I couldn’t save the crowd, I could save her. 

But there were many others wandering the center of the plaza, nailing down bird droppings and stray sticks. They were throwing glances at me, now. 

That had been how they suspected her. She didn’t join them. And so she would die. I could feel a phantom pain in the top of my feet where the nails would be driven. 

Could I?

No.

I couldn’t.

There was a roll of tape sitting just by her. If I could feint being one of the insane crowd, maybe I could?

I picked up the roll. The woman was mumbling to herself about her grandmother. Poor thing. There was still time. 

And yet the others were watching me, their eyes sharp as hawks. 

I didn’t have time. Not even for a ruse.

I took the tape and strapped a stray rock to the ground. Then another. A feather. An empty burger wrapper. A car tire just outside the park. Another gas station phone that had been missed.

I worked all day until I finally grew tired enough to head home, tape roll in hand. Despite having spent more tape that day than any of the others combined, the roll was still there, ready to bind. So I returned to my apartment, and so I slept. And so I would would live always, in a world where everything was nailed to the floor.