14 Feb We Can Put You Back Together

Posted at 11:00h in Strange and Unexplained by CreepypastaStories.com 0 Comments

📅 Published on February 14, 2022

“We Can Put You Back Together”

Written by Bryce Simmons
Edited by Craig Groshek
Thumbnail Art by Craig Groshek
Narrated by N/A

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🎧 Available Audio Adaptations: None Available

⏰ ESTIMATED READING TIME — 12 minutes

Rating: 8.75/10. From 4 votes.

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I’m sitting in a bar right now, somewhere in the more southern portions of Missouri; Howell County, I think. I haven’t bothered to ask. The police are on their way, the owner of the bar called them the moment she saw me stumble through the door, covered in…

She’d been standing at the bar and rushed to grab the phone at the sight of me, a purely instinctive reaction—I must’ve looked pretty awful. I feel awful.

While I’m waiting, I’ll type out what happened to me. I’m exhausted, physically, psychologically, spiritually—I wasn’t a spiritual person earlier today.

I’ve been told that it’ll take a while for the police to get here, that they usually delay themselves when they get calls from this place. I guess, considering the locale and the present patrons, it’s understandable. It’s not a friendly-looking place, contrary to the hospitality I’ve received from its owner. I think the bar wants to give the impression that it’s a sports bar; it might even have been one years and years ago, but now it’s just a drab, faded place, with crooked signs, loosely pinned flags, and dated sports memorabilia.

I feel fucking awful.

The owner insisted that I give her my jacket. I complied, and I remember it feeling like I had instead removed some weighted thing, a heavy winter’s coat or body armor. I don’t know what she did with it after putting it into a trash bag, but I think, just a moment ago, I caught a whiff of something burning, some kind of fabric. I was given a few napkins to wipe my face, and I wasn’t surprised to find them lightly dampened with whiskey. My shoulder hurts, but the pain is tolerable for now.

I’ve had a few drinks—it’s been about fifteen minutes, ten since the shock wore off—and I guess I’ll get started, now. I’ve decided to write it out in the hopes that it’ll help me forget it later on. I know if I keep it inside, if I allow it to develop in my mind, it’ll eventually drive me insane. Please excuse any lapses, wanderings, tangents, etc. It’s a hard thing to keep inside, but I’m sure it’ll be even harder to let out, to put into a coherent sequence. I’ll do my best.

Maybe one more drink, first.

I was visiting my friend, Stu, at his house in Wentzville, Missouri. He lives—he lived—alone, although there was a girl in the picture, Sophie, or maybe Sophia. Marriage was still far-off, but they seemed in love. I’d come to visit him somewhat on a whim, having discussed the idea a few times but without ever setting anything in stone. I knew he’d be free and that he’d welcome my arrival.

There was no plan, really; just wanted to hang out with my friend for a day or two. I’d considered bringing my PS4 since he’d sold his months ago for a PS5—which he never managed to get—but ultimately decided to leave it behind since I only have a single controller and didn’t want to spend sixty bucks on a second one.

Sitting in his living room, we chatted for a bit, though there wasn’t much to catch up on since we’d been sharing every notable event of our lives on social media for years. After about thirty minutes of this, he asked if I wanted to go somewhere, and I said sure, and we were in his car a few seconds later. I opted to let him pick the destination, being unfamiliar with the area.

Initially, he drove without a destination in mind, exiting his subdivision and getting onto the highway with the vague notion of going somewhere beyond his immediate area. After a while, maybe five minutes on I-70, he asked if I’d like to meet some of his friends, and I said sure. I knew enough about them to know that they were generally alright guys since Stu had never associated with bad people.

A few changes of direction later, we were on the way to the house of a guy named Derek. Surprisingly—since Stu hadn’t mentioned the distance—I found myself noting the gradual reduction of neighborhoods and businesses as we drove along. After a while, things resolved to look a bit more rural, Missouri’s flavor of the boonies, I imagine, and by this point, it had gotten kind of dark, enough to where the oddly placed street lights were on, the sun on its last legs.

After a staggering, cramping three hours—which we’d spent listening to stand-up comedy—we pulled off the highway and turned onto a street, which, after about half a mile, devolved into what I’d more accurately describe as a road, and then that diminished into a “path,” poorly paved and weed-eaten.

Stu pulled his car into a gravelly driveway and announced that we’d arrived at Derek’s house. The house was what you’d expect, being out in the parts of Missouri where people spoke with a drawl that I couldn’t—and still can’t—distinguish from a stereotypically Southern one, even though it’s my understanding that Missouri is a Midwestern state.

That is to say, the house appeared to have been built more so with function in mind than aesthetic. It was a hulking thing, with a chest-high porch around it. The porch’s banister held a few items: clothes, towels, tarps, what might’ve been animal hides. It was dark, and I didn’t think to take note of every object and aspect of the house. The front lawn was decently trimmed, I guess.

We walked up the short flight of sturdy porch steps, and Stu knocked on the front door, opting to use his knuckles instead of the knocker in the shape of—or what might’ve actually been—a deer hoof. The door opened a moment or two later, with a tall man standing on the threshold, two-liter of soda in hand, beard dripping with orange. He smiled, wiped his face on his t-shirt, and exchanged warm greetings with Stu. My friend introduced me to his, and I threw out some random, unnecessary compliment about the man’s home, which he accepted without acknowledging the awkwardness of it.

He welcomed us in, and minutes later, we were all sitting in his basement, drinking soda—in my case, coffee. I listened to them retell stories they’d told to each other, about themselves, only now with a bit more enthusiasm since there was another person present. The guy seemed alright, and despite the unexpected change of scenery, I felt comfortable, relaxed.

That didn’t last long.

Derek told us—quite somberly—that he had work in the morning, so he couldn’t drink, which I assumed had been Stu’s general plan upon arriving, if not the reason for coming altogether. Instead, we went outside and sat on Derek’s back porch, I in one of the pock-marked lawn chairs he’d brought out of a shed. He and Stu sat on the porch itself, beside me. I accepted the guest-of-honor position happily since the porch seemed freely infested with a weirdly varied assortment of bugs (I am not a fan of bugs). Neither of them seemed to mind, though, and Stu even let one curious beetle crawl from his finger to his wrist before flicking it away.

The sun had gone completely down by this point, and we were starting to feel the chill of the night when Derek told us, suddenly and almost dramatically, to be quiet. Behind the house, there was a long, sprawling lawn—maybe an acre, which was huge to me—with knee-high, obviously unmaintained grass. Beyond this, there’s a wall of woods, the vegetation dense to the point of having its own darkness separate from the night’s. Derek’s eyes were directed at this area and, upon looking at him and seeing his severe expression, Stu and I directed ours out there as well.

I saw nothing, just that wall of wood, which, in its density, seemed more like a low-lying mountain range than a collection of trees and bushes and whatever else constitutes “the woods.” But my ears, when directed to listen for something above the general ambiance of the night, honed in on something strange—a whisper, frantic, but not irregular. The sound was rhythmic, as if spoken to a beat. And though it was obvious that the whisper-noises were coming from the woods, I heard them quite audibly; the words themselves were indistinct, just beneath a level of comprehension, but the volume was loud as if the source was nearby. I don’t know how else to explain it, really; to stick with the senses for an analogy, it was like how they say you can see a lit match from a mile or however far away at nighttime. You obviously can’t feel the heat, but you can see the little flame. I couldn’t make out the words, but I could clearly hear the sound.

Am I making any sense?

I didn’t think for a second that Derek was playing with us. He hadn’t known we were coming, had been in the basement with us the whole time, and lived alone. There’d been no time or opportunity for him to plan some weird prank, and he had work in the morning. Anyway, he couldn’t have possibly accomplished what happened after I consciously acknowledged the sound.

As if feeling the need to do something, Derek stood, and Stu and I followed suit. I thought he was going to head back inside, that he was as creeped out as I was about the weird, incomprehensible sound, but he instead strode on toward the yard, obviously meaning to investigate the noise. Stu followed due to some friendly duty of accompaniment or his own interest in the sound. I, of course, followed, not wanting to be left alone in the dark, in the ass-end of Missouri.

I tried not to think of how only a thin layer of polyester separated my legs from the bug-ridden grass. I do remember thinking how the air felt fresher, cleaner, and how this made the circumstances all the weirder because I had, by this point, begun to unconsciously suspect the presence of something very strange, something deeply unnatural about the sound.

Leaving the lawn—which ended a few paces short of the tree line—we stopped, brushed ourselves off (no clinging bugs, somehow) and listened. The whispering was as audible as ever and as unintelligible as ever. There was definitely a rhythm to it, now made obvious by how, incredibly, the darkness within the woods seemed to…shift? To throb with it. If you’ll allow me to be a bit “poetic,” imagine the entire stretch of woods submerged underwater and a steady current ebbing and surging through it, almost hypnotically. That’s what it was like, and looking at it made me feel more than a little uneasy. I didn’t want to say anything, though, for fear of coming across as jumpy to Derek. I don’t know why I gave a shit about what Derek thought.

Thankfully, Stu voiced my unease, saying, “That doesn’t look right.” Derek nodded absentmindedly, and I noticed for the first the knife he’d brought, which he held in his trembling hand. I can’t tell you when he drew it. Must’ve been upon coming face to face with that odd, pulsing darkness and feeling some powerful sense of vulnerability. He was obviously scared shitless, and I found myself feeling much better about my own fright.

I don’t think he intended to take that horribly fateful step. His foot seemed to rise and move forward of its own volition, this autonomy accentuated by the expression of surprise—of fearful bewilderment—on Derek’s face as the foot landed a foot ahead of him. That’s all it took. A single step, a single gesture of approach; the suggestion of encroachment. Or of invitation from the opposite side.

In a mentally reeling moment, the whispers were reversed, turned into a shout, and the three of us heard, with perfect clarity, the message that had been repeating itself for minutes:

WE JUST NEED ONE OF YOU. COME CLOSER. WE JUST NEED ONE OF YOU. COME CLOSER. WE JUST NEED ONE OF YOU. COME CLOSER. WE JUST NEED ONE OF YOU. COME CLOSER,

I burst into tears almost immediately. Uncontrollable, profuse crying. The sound—how could I even begin to describe it? There was a vastness—that’s the most fitting word I can think of—about it. Not just in volume but in quantity of voices. There seemed to be dozens, if not hundreds, of voices, all speaking at once, perfectly at once. There is no human choir capable of performing so simultaneously. Aside from the vastness, there was an urgency about the voices, a need that terrified me. The vastness, the aching, it was all so horrible. I was scared for my life, and I hadn’t yet even seen anything.

Stu fainted, his mind utterly incapable of handling the bizarre phenomenon. Derek, receiving the brunt of the vocal assault—by only a few feet, mind you—started to jitter in place. I heard his teeth rattle, and a moan, low and gurgling, escaped his lips, somehow still audible against the sonic backdrop of the dreadful chant.

“Jesus Christ.”

Those were the last words Derek ever said. I don’t know if it was a general acknowledgment of the circumstances or if he’d experienced something even more heinous in his final moments, but a second later, he was pulled into the trees, into the darkness.

I froze, then—mid-sob, mid-sputter, mid-breath. My body just stopped working upon seeing Derek get yoinked away. A series of sounds followed; the most notable of them was a loud, prolonged, tearing sound. A scream, only loosely human, accompanied it. In my petrified state, I could only listen. The scream died out before the tearing sound. That continued on for a few more seconds. What knocked me out of my terrified shock were the sounds that arose not long after. Horribly, bleakly familiar sounds. That same, agonized scream, only now played through dozens, hundreds of voices. It echoed and resounded, seeming to come from multiple directions and elevations. I made a single, clarifying observation:

“They’re testing it out.”

Still, I wasn’t yet prepared to run. I wanted to, my nerves screamed at me to, but my legs were still defrosting, the control of my limbs not yet returned to my brain. I was therefore forced to see the first manifestation, the first emissary of the voices in the darkness.

It walked out from between two tightly pressed trees, and I don’t think I’m embellishing what happened when I say that the trees leaned away from its figure. The thing was humanoid, and that’s the nicest thing I can say about it. Two arms, two legs, something that would’ve, in deeper darkness, passed for a head. But in that still early night, with the moon somewhere overhead, it was obvious that what or whoever had assembled this thing hadn’t thought to make its outward appearance adhere to that of a human beyond the most basic form.

The “head” was just a ball of meat, with a set of eerily shiny antlers jutting partially out of the forehead, partially from the temples—a sort of tripodal crown of bone. The face was a mask of glistening, dripping mush. The body was similarly grotesque, although certain parts seemed roughly stylized to resemble the inner musculature of a human. A tightly woven thigh muscle here, half of a row of abs, there. The handle of a knife, Derek’s knife, jutted out from the chest, and I got the grisly impression of a knife embedded in a slab of meat on some butcher’s counter. There was a smell, an animal odor, tinged with a weird sweetness that wasn’t altogether unappealing…

The raw nudeness of its body, its anatomical incompleteness, the obvious impossibility of natural function really touched something within me. Really loosened a screw. More tears came.

There were no eyes, no mouth, no nose, no ears, nothing in the way of facial features or sensory organs. Yet the thing nonetheless spoke, and this time I heard all the voices, all the obscenely inhuman speakers, focused into one loathsome voice.

And this, their first words through a roughly human vessel, drove me to move—to run:

YOU’LL NEVER BE ABLE TO FIND JOY IN LIFE NOW THAT YOU’VE SEEN US.

YOU’LL NEVER BE ABLE TO FIND JOY IN LIFE NOW THAT YOU’VE SEEN

ME.

I left Stu behind. I left him there on the grass, unconscious, five feet away from that nightmare. I turned heel and pathetically fled through Derek’s lawn, crying, probably pissing myself. But the thing, that consolidation of horrors, didn’t just let me run away. Had it been some weaker thing, a smaller choir, it might’ve. But there’d been so many whisperers; so many had repeated Derek’s dying scream. The thing was an amalgamation of many—a legion of horrors.

When I heard the steady, distinctly four-footed trot of some large animal approaching quickly from behind, I put my heart and soul into my sprinting. I dipped my head, pumped my legs, and let my animal brain take over. Meanwhile, the more “intellectual” aspect of my humanity was relegated to assume control of a momentarily non-essential function: sight. It wasn’t necessary to see where I was going; the path was a straight line back to the house. Turning my head, I glanced behind me, feeling an equally desperate need to get a look at the thing whose footfalls sounded like those of a horse or an enormous dog.

It was, of course, neither.

Thankfully, Derek hadn’t offered us anything to eat. If I’d had food in my belly, I’m sure I would’ve needed to vomit at the sight of that thing, or even would’ve been too full to muster up that last, life-saving oomph needed for my escape.

It was that same abominable, ungodly creature, only now running on all fours; its arms had lengthened to allow for terrifyingly efficient quadrupedal movement. The glistening crimson flesh flapped sickeningly. The head, crowned with that unwholesome set of antlers, bobbed hungrily. Had the thing been silent, I would’ve been instantly captivated by the sheer evil of it. It was an insult to human anatomy, absolutely appalling in every normal regard, but an incredible representation of some demon’s infernal image.

But, as if to further demoralize me, the thing had thought of something new to scream at me. The moment my eyes locked onto its “face,” it started up again, this time calling out:

YOU THINK DEATH IS THE END OF PAIN?

THERE WILL BE NO END AS LONG AS WE CAN PUT YOU BACK TOGETHER.

I made it to the house. Tripped on the porch. Banged my knees and shins on the wood. Turned around. Saw a single, world-blotting image: a red form, unspeakably textured. Felt a sharp pain in my shoulder. A sudden wave of wetness over my face and chest. Got up sometime later, dazed beyond sense. Finally entered the house. Found Stu’s wallet, but not his keys. Walked through the house, out the front door. Walked to the path, took that to the more defined road, eventually made it to the street. Walked along that for an hour or three. Pulled a chunk of bone out of my shoulder at some point; tossed it into the field beside the road. Eventually came upon the bar, where I’m sitting now. Dry on the outside, wet on the inside. I can hear sirens now. The police aren’t far away.

In a last, desperate attempt to get me—or some other, equally spiteful reason—the thing had headbutted me, gored me in the shoulder with its twisted antlers. I don’t know if the impact with a more “solid” form caused it to explode or if it had lost some of its integrity, having gone so far away from its place of birth, but the thing just kind of splattered against my body. I suppose I realized it unconsciously at the time; can’t imagine any other reason for my comparatively casual, half-conscious navigation through the home.

So yeah, that’s the story—as much of it as I’m able and willing to tell, at least. I don’t why it happened to us, tonight. I have to assume that our combined presence somehow attracted the thing, drew it out of some woodland slumber.

I don’t know what’ll happen from here, but I can already tell that writing this out hasn’t done shit. I know it’ll haunt me—I can almost hear its voice, whispering from the wound in my shoulder.

You’ll find nothing but despair in the darkness of your closed eyes.