09 May Siren Song
“Siren Song”
Written by Blair Daniels Edited by Craig Groshek Thumbnail Art by Craig Groshek Narrated by N/ACopyright Statement: Unless explicitly stated, all stories published on CreepypastaStories.com are the property of (and under copyright to) their respective authors, and may not be narrated or performed, adapted to film, television or audio mediums, republished in a print or electronic book, reposted on any other website, blog, or online platform, or otherwise monetized without the express written consent of its author(s).
🎧 Available Audio Adaptations: None Available
⏰ ESTIMATED READING TIME — 10 minutes
I woke up at 3 AM to someone singing through my window.
Her voice sounded so close – just inches from my open window. But when I peered out, I didn’t see anyone there.
I don’t even remember opening my window, to be honest. All I remember is falling asleep in a warm, cozy bedroom. I’d had barely four hours of sleep last night, and a long day of songwriting.
“Hello?” I called out into the night.
No reply.
I tried to make out the words. A few words caught my ear – something about the true heart underneath. Sung in a minor key, wavering through the cold air.
I finally closed the window and climbed back in bed. When I woke up two hours later, I drank about three cups of coffee and sat down at my desk to write.
Unlike the day before, the words came easily to me. I began singing to myself:
You waited all those years
Underneath the stones and tears
All alone, cold and still
Until the day we find you well
My pen scratched across the page. The lyrics came fast and swift to me, flowing out like blood. In just a few hours, I’d recorded the entire song, and uploaded it to my channel with the name “Underneath”. I played it back to myself.
The views, and comments, poured in at an astonishing rate. “Best song I’ve heard in years. You got tons of talent” wrote one user. Another said “this song reminds me so much of some of my darkest days, but in a good way. Great song.” As I scrolled through, my pride swelling, I came upon a comment unlike the others:
Haveh ex turnet escution klanchet
What was that? Latin? It wasn’t any language I recognized. I would’ve thought nothing of it, but then my eye caught on the user’s name. Savannahgirl125. That was one of my “fans” – she commented on every single one of my videos. Nice, typical stuff. Telling me I was super talented, I should release an album, and the like.
She’d never made a weird comment like this one.
I shrugged and closed my laptop. Maybe her cat walked across the keyboard, I told myself. Of course, that made no sense; the comment wasn’t random. It had spaces and words, even if they were nonsensical words.
But I didn’t think any more of it. Instead, I walked out the door to run some errands.
* * * * * *
When I got back an hour later and checked the video, I couldn’t believe it.
The video had almost eighty-thousand views. In just a few hours.
My excitement, however, was quickly deflated by the comments.
There were more comments like Savannahgirl’s. Dozens of them. All saying nonsense words. Some of them repeated the words in hers – I saw “haveh” quite a few times. Most were just single sentences, but some were whole paragraphs of nonsense, filling up the screen.
I copied some of the words and pasted them into a translation site. But when I clicked submit, the site said: no language found.
Riiiiing.
My thoughts were interrupted by my agent, Dan. “Violet! I saw your video, Underneath. It is blowing up! Someone wants to buy the rights to it. Someone big. Are you ready? It’s–”
“Have you looked at the comments?”
“No. Why?”
I sighed and paced the room, eyeing the laptop with fear. “There are these weird comments, all over the place. They look like they’re in a different language, or something.”
“Trolls, then.”
“No, I mean… dozens of people are posting them, Dan. It’s about half of all the comments on the video. And other people are replying to them, with more nonsense language.”
“Okay, well, that doesn’t matter. You need to meet me for lunch so we can go over this deal. Okay?”
“Uh, sure. Okay.”
I walked into the cafe with a heavy heart. As an artist, you want to interact with your fans. As a female artist, that becomes scarier, with all the creeps out there. What if someone was trying to scare me? What if a group of my fans had banded together for the sole purpose of freaking me out?
“Violet?”
I turned around – and froze.
Dan was sitting at one of the booths by the window. He was smiling and waving, dressed in his usual gray T-shirt and ripped jeans.
But there was something behind him.
A dark, blurry shadow. It started at his shoulder and grew up towards his head, dissipating into the air as if it were a cloud of smoke. But as he moved – as he bobbed his head, waved his hand – it moved with him.
I sat down across from him, trembling.
“What’s behind you?”
Dan glanced back, then turned towards me. “Nothing.”
“No. There’s something behind you. Like smoke. Or a shadow.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“There’s something behind you. There’s something–”
I stopped.
It was gone. Dan was staring at me, a concerned look on his face. The area behind him was perfectly clear and bright. No smoke. No shadow. No darkness.
“Never mind,” I muttered. It must’ve been a trick of the light. Or my imagination. I was sleep-deprived, after all. Too much work. Too much coffee.
“Okay. Can I finally tell you who wants to buy the song?”
“Sure.”
“Chained Up!” he squealed.
“Oh, wow.”
“Come on! Show more excitement! They’re big in certain circles. This could be our big break.”
“I guess.”
“So what do you say?”
Finally, a glimmer of excitement spread through me. This could be my big break. The chance of a lifetime. My song… being heard by millions of people.
“Okay.”
After I signed some paperwork Dan had printed off, I went home, turned on the TV, and promptly fell asleep on the sofa.
* * * * * *
“A strange incident occurred just outside of Springfield this afternoon.”
My eyes fluttered open. I turned towards the TV.
“While driving home from work, motorist Jeff Olsen saw a woman on the side of the road. He’s here to tell us the story.”
A pale, middle-aged man flashed onscreen.
“I was drivin’ home from work when I saw an old woman, just sittin’ in the yard behind the Catholic church. St. Monica’s, I think it’s called. Anyway, I pulled over, got out of my car, and went over to her. I thought she might be, I dunno, hurt or somethin’. I called out to her, asked her if she needed help. She didn’t say anything, so I walked right up to her.”
“As I got closer, I realized she was diggin’. Just diggin’ in the dirt with her bare hands. And the expression on her face… totally blank. Not lookin’ at me no matter how much I tried to get her attention. Just staring into space. So finally, I tapped her on the shoulder.”
“She turned ‘round and grabbed me by the arm. Then she lunged at me and bit me, real hard, right here.”
The man held his right arm up. It was swaddled in bandages.
“I ran back towards the car. The woman… she started to chase me. Man, I haven’t seen anythin’ like it before. Was real mad. Rabid, almost. All the while, shoutin’ somethin’ in a different language. Somethin’ I couldn’t understand. But I got in my car, and I –”
I turned the TV off.
Shouting something in a different language. Like the comments on my song? Like “haveh”, and those other weird words that even the translator couldn’t pick up?
No. It had to be a coincidence.
That night, I couldn’t fall asleep. I went online and checked my video again – now up to over half a million views. As I scrolled through the comments, I noticed that most of them were in the strange, nonsensical language of the others.
At 3 AM, I decided to take a drive to calm my nerves.
It was a freezing cold night. I drove down the small-town roads, watching the small shops and trees roll by. Everything was closed, at this hour, save for the QuickChek on the corner of Maple Ave. and Main Street.
I turned the radio on and scrolled through the stations. Some pop hit. A high tempo dance number. Some song in French. I pressed the seek button over and over.
Until I heard my own voice:
You waited all those years
Underneath the stones and tears
All alone, cold and still
Until the day we find you well
“No, no, no,” I muttered. “They stole my song. They stole it!” In my anger, I sped right past the QuickChek and continued down Main Street. My headlights flashed over the General Store, the pharmacy… and then St. Monica’s.
I froze.
Several people were standing there.
Standing there in the dark, at 3 AM, in the patch of grass between the church and the cemetery. Only wearing pajamas, not coats, despite the freezing cold. Some of them were digging; others were just standing there, blankly staring at the side of the church. As my headlights rolled over them, they didn’t even turn towards me.
As I got closer, I heard the chanting.
I could hear it clearly through the car windows. Haveh ex turnet escution. Haveh ex turnet escution…
I pulled out my cell phone. I needed to talk to Dan. I needed to tell him what was happening. How I thought it was all related to my song.
The song I just sold to an incredibly popular band.
I dialed Dan’s number. It rang once. Then, a few seconds later, a familiar noise came through the window.
Dan’s Metallica ringtone.
I looked up. There he was, standing near the edge of the crowd. I pulled over to the side of the road and leapt out of the car. “Dan!” I yelled. “Dan!”
He turned towards me, face still blank. Then, slowly, the rest of them turned to look at me with their empty, blank eyes.
I turned around and ran back to my car. Then I drove home as fast as I could.
* * * * * *
“Dan! Open up!”
There I was, knocking down Dan’s door at 6 AM. I hadn’t gotten a wink of sleep after the drive – but I also didn’t feel safe venturing out before dawn.
“Dan!”
After five minutes of constant shouting, thumps resonated from within the house. Dan swung the door open, hair rumpled, looking like he’d just woken up. “Violet! What are you doing here?”
“I saw you at the church. You were there with the rest of them, and…”
“What are you talking about?”
“Around 3 AM, you were standing in the church lawn.”
“No, I wasn’t.” Dan’s eyebrows furled in concern. “Are you feeling okay, Violet? You look a bit pale, and tired.” He reached his hand out and touched my face. “Are you worried about selling your song? I know it’s scary, putting creative work in the hands of other people. But I think they’ll do a good job with it.”
I wasn’t listening anymore.
My eyes had fallen on Dan’s hands.
They were covered in dirt.
He followed my gaze and looked down at his hands. “What the hell?” he said, staring at his hands. Then he ran over to the sink and began washing them vigorously.
I followed him inside. “See? That’s what I was saying! You were out there, digging with the rest of them. And it’s all because of me. Because you heard my song.”
“Violet, you sound crazy. I didn’t dig anything, okay? I just got out of bed and answered the door.”
“Then where did the dirt come from?”
“I don’t know, Violet! Okay? I don’t know!”
I fell silent, watching the suds and dirt swirl together in the sink. He turned it off and wiped his hands vigorously on a towel.
“You should go. You’re going to wake Margot.”
I stepped back. In all the years that Dan had been my agent, he never used such a harsh tone with me. Not even when I bungled the song for that perfume commercial.
So I listened to him. I drove home, made coffee, and watched my view count slowly climb to one million.
But at 1 AM, I returned to his house. I parked across the street, turned off my lights, and waited. After more than an hour of freezing to death and eating two expired candy bars, the door creaked open.
Thump, thump, thump.
Dan exited the house. With slow, ambling footsteps, he descended the porch steps. Then he made a sharp left and started down the street.
I started the car and crawled down the road, headlights off. He walked for a while, then turned left onto Maple Ave.
And that’s when I saw it.
A figure, walking several yards ahead of Dan. In the darkness, the silence, going the same direction. Then I noticed the cars – a few of them, driving silently down the street. Like me, they all had their headlights off.
As I got closer to St. Monica’s church, more people appeared. More cars appeared. All going the same direction, towards the church. They didn’t seem to notice me; apparently, I blended in just fine.
I glanced down at the clock. It was 2:58 AM, and the church was just up ahead.
When I pulled into the church parking lot, I slowly climbed out of the car. I hadn’t planned to join them – but now that I was here, I felt the need to. I wanted to know what they were doing. Why they were doing it after listening to my song.
I walked through the crowd of people that had gathered on the lawn. They might as well have been marble statues. They stared blankly ahead, taking no notice of me. The ones closer to the center of the crowd had already dropped to their knees and started to dig. They’d already made good headway; a large ditch of broken grass, about ten feet in diameter, lay in the center of the lawn.
That’s where I found Dan. He was clawing at the dirt frantically, sending clumps of it everywhere.
“Dan! Are you okay?” I asked him. I knew it was a bad idea to engage these people. But I needed to know.
He didn’t reply.
“Hey, Dan. I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but we need to get you home. Okay?”
Still nothing.
I leaned over and grabbed him by the arm. “Come on. Let’s go home. You’ve had enough digging –”
Hot pain shot up my shoulders.
Dan held me at an arm’s length. He stared into my eyes with a manic anger; the blank expression was long gone. A few of the other people turned to stare at us.
He dragged me out of the crowd, past the lawn, to the border of the forest. Suddenly, I got the feeling he wasn’t in a trance quite like the others were. Maybe he was okay. Maybe I’d woken him up.
“Dan, are you okay? What’s going on?” I asked. “What… what is all this?”
“We need to find what’s underneath,” he whispered.
“What are you talking about?”
“We need to dig her out.”
“Who?”
“The one that sleeps under the earth for eternity. She has waited until now – for this moment, when we free her. She will rain down revenge and pain on our foes, exalt us into kings and queens –”
“Dan! You’re hurting me!” His grip on my shoulders had suddenly become painfully tight.
“With just us, we will never burrow deep enough to reach her. But now…” He trailed off into a wheezing laugh. “In just a few days, the entire world will hear your song. I made sure of that when I contacted Chained Up.”
My heart dropped. The world spun around me.
“You didn’t actually write that song, by the way,” he said. “It came a little too easy, didn’t it? You had to realize that.”
“I… I don’t know what you mean.”
“I knew you had talent. Widespread appeal. You were the perfect vessel, as it were. So after grooming you for years, I put a cassette player under your window. Started playing the song, to put it in your subconscious. Make you think it was your own idea. Worked perfectly.”
He finally let go of me. I swayed dangerously close to the ground.
“Great job, Violet. Your best work yet.”
He shot me a smile before walking back towards the crowd. I collapsed into the cold, frozen grass, my heart pounding.
What have I done?
🎧 Available Audio Adaptations: None Available
Written by Blair Daniels Edited by Craig Groshek Thumbnail Art by Craig Groshek Narrated by N/A🔔 More stories from author: Blair Daniels
Publisher's Notes: The author requests that anyone who desires to narrate, perform, or adapt this story to any other format, or feature it on a YouTube channel, podcast or other platform, contact them for permission before doing so. Use of the author’s work without this permission is strictly prohibited. You may reach the author here. Thank you! Check out Blair Daniels’ newest collection of short scary stories, Don’t Scream 2: 30 More Tales to Terrify, now available on Amazon.com. Every night, I hear a woman crying in my backyard. Now I hear her in my closet. Have you ever played “The Flashlight Game”? I finally know why my patient wears a tinfoil hat. DON’T SCREAM 2 brings you 30 more terrifying tales for your darkest nights. A sequel to the bestselling Don’t Scream, featuring hideous doppelgangers, terrifying apps, lurking monsters, and more. Read… if you dare.
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Copyright Statement: Unless explicitly stated, all stories published on CreepypastaStories.com are the property of (and under copyright to) their respective authors, and may not be narrated or performed, adapted to film, television or audio mediums, republished in a print or electronic book, reposted on any other website, blog, or online platform, or otherwise monetized without the express written consent of its author(s).
This was good….