- NOSTU, Part I: Third Time’s the Charm
- NOSTU, Part II: Last Round Before Heading Home
- NOSTU, Part III: Watching and Waiting
By Draven Copeland, Managing Editor
**CONTENT WARNING: This text contains sexual references, strong language, homophobic behavior, and references to self-harm**
Bella held her favorite pink marshmallow plushie in her lap, her left-hand fingers set on the WASD keys of her glowing multi-color RGB keyboard and her right hand cupped around her computer’s mouse. Stardew Valley played on her right monitor while her stream’s chat scrolled on the left, text steadily rolling upwards with each new message. At the top of the left screen was a live video of her current stream, which she glanced at now and again to make sure her bright pink hair fell flatteringly and that her chest was visible enough over her top to maintain viewership without her nipples peeking out. It was a delicate balance between growing a fanbase to earn donations and being banned for nudity.
“Chat, do I trade with this dude,” she asked in the quiet apartment bedroom, looking away from the game monitor to see whose response spoke to her the most.
“tradeeeee” said pumpkiNRAT, their message already scrolling up the screen as more answers flooded in.
“omg no queen hes asking too much” added BootyWarrior69.
“trade but only for the hat” posited L0RD0FTHEC0CKRINGS.
“Oh, hey Cock Rings,” Bella said, smiling the bright white smile she’d perfected in the middle school bathroom years prior. “I didn’t know you were here, welcome to the stream. Okay guys, you already know I’m going with our Lord and Savior – let’s get this cute hat.”
A string of messages swarmed into the chat, erasing the previous ones from the screen; the new additions were all negative and complaining while still making sure to praise WTFBella’s body, outfit, or overall looks to lessen the impact.
“I don’t know what to say guys, you’ve got to get donating if you want to override Mr. Rings,” she said, sticking out her tongue for the camera. “You already know he’s paid my rent multiple times over, hashtag life of a broke bitch.”
Her phone buzzed and she glanced down at it beside her keyboard. “BABYYYYYY ♥️” was calling, their contact name lighting up the screen with a photo of Bella and Jackie smiling at a concert (the tickets for which she had paid for) in the background. She shrieked with excitement.
“Ohmygod guys,” she said, looking up at the camera above her desk to address her audience more directly. “Jackie’s calling from his top secret mission!” The chat scrolled with love for WTFJackie and sadness for what they knew would be the imminent end of the stream. “Guys our two-year anniversary is coming up, don’t forget to donate to the next stream so I can get him a really good present this time! I’ll see you guys tomorrow, mwah, mwah!”
Bella clicked away at the screen to end the stream and let out a guttural groan when she was finished, leaning back into her gaming chair and kicking it back to roll away from the desk. Her outfit was too tight and uncomfortable. Her head itched and her ears were sweaty from the cat-ear headset she had worn for the last four hours. She uttered profanities while she looked up at herself in the video that was still streaming to her computer from the camera, making sure she was still looking her best. With a few strokes through her hair to straighten it back after taking the headset off, she was. Pulling her pink-and-white patterned shirt sleeve down to cover up the hesitation marks that started to sneak out when she’d leaned back, she opened the FaceTime call, casting it to her computer camera.
“BABYYYYYY,” she yelled, smiling brightly and holding her plushie tight between her hot pink nails.
Jackie’s face appeared on the monitor, his sunglasses down over his eyes and his phone held at a somewhat unflattering angle as he walked down what appeared to be a forested backroad sided by tall pine trees. “Happy 19th birthday, baby,” he said, smiling.
“Awww, you didn’t forget this time,” she said, raising her arm to curl her pink hair in her finger and push her chest together with her elbow at the same time. She’d made it look natural over the years, like it was a happy mistake. Truthfully, it was incredibly uncomfortable.
“I said I wouldn’t,” he said on the other end, hardly noticing.
“How did the meeting go,” she asked. “Did the old Sheriff guy show you any nasty pics?”
“No, but he did just give me a crazy fucking lead… apparently his wife died the same fucking way as these other girls, like, way back in the day. Like 20 fucking years ago or some shit.”
“No fucking way,” Bella replied, rocking her chair back and forth with her toes on the carpet.
“That’s what I’m fucking saying. But, like, he wouldn’t say anything more about it. He damn near whispered that shit to me on the way out and said, ‘Don’t trust anybody.’ Like, what the fuck?”
“For real, oh my God, baby, this is huge! Are you being safe?”
Jackie seemed suddenly distracted, looking at the trees and standing still. From the angle he held his phone, Bella couldn’t see anything but his face and the sky that was turning purple, pink, and orange in the sunset. He raised his sunglasses and squinted his eyes at something off camera.
“What is it, baby?” Bella asked.
“I don’t know babe… it’s windy as hell out here and when it goes through the trees they, like, shudder and make a weird, like, snickering sound.” He turned back to the camera and smiled as he continued walking. “They must appreciate a true comedic visionary like myself.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Bella laughed.
“No, but really, the fucking townspeople have been giving me the creeps, I’m not even gonna lie,” Jackie continued, sliding his shades back down over his eyes.
“They don’t see a lot of out-of-towners, huh? Isn’t that how it always is?”
“No, not… I mean yeah, you’re not wrong. They just all look the same. Like everybody is twins with everybody else, like some fucking weird incest village or something.”
Bella snickered.
“I genuinely can’t tell if they’re guys or girls either, like, I don’t know what the hell to call ‘em. I don’t know if they’re all fucking queers or just on some weird shit –”
“JACKIE,” Bella gasped.
“Sorry babe,” he relented. “‘Non-binary’ or whatever the fuck.”
“Gender non-conforming is what you’re looking for, I think.”
Jackie let out a short groan. “Yeah, that, I guess. Whatever it is, they look fucking weird and they dress fucking weird. And they look at me fucking weird. Their eyes all look the same… dark and, like, wide. It’s like if they got hit in the back of the head, they’d pop right out of their fucking skull. And they’re always looking at each other and snickering — like they know something I don’t.”
“Oh, I know you hate that.”
“You know me so well, baby,” Jackie replied, pausing for a moment before adding: “I miss you.”
Bella sighed to herself. She knew what that was code for; maybe, she thought, even more than Jackie did. “I took pictures for you to use tonight, don’t worry baby. Just think of me while you’re doing it later… like it’s my hand instead of yours. Or my mouth… or whatever you want it to be. You know you can put it anywhere.” She winked and stuck her tongue out between her teeth.
“I love you so much,” Jackie said.
Bella looked down at her arm, tugging on the sleeve again. “I love you too, baby. I miss you –” Jackie had hung up before she could finish.
Later that night, having showered and removed every layer of her makeup, now warmly comfortable in her My Little Pony pajama pants and oversized grey hoodie, she stood over the bathroom sink. Her phone was propped up against the tile wall playing an episode of Nana, which she half-watched as she reached into her makeup bag and pulled an unused razor blade from her collection.
Blood dripped against the pale white of the sink as her tears ran down her cheeks, welling up on her chin before they finally fell, darkening little circles into her hoodie. As she wrapped her arm in gauze (which she also kept in her makeup bag), she watched as water from the faucet swirled in the porcelain bowl, the deep red diluting to crimson amber before sinking into the drain.
She looked at herself in the mirror, snorting with ironic laughter. Imagine if her followers could see her now, she thought. Blood seeping into cheap medical gauze she had to hide from her boyfriend, hair half-wet and tangled, her eyes and nose uncomplimentary with the rest of her face, her skin not nearly as smooth as it appeared online… what would they think? Would they only give her attention in brief glances like he did, waiting until she was back to ‘feeling herself’ – which really meant ‘wearing everything he liked to see’ – before they watched her again? Would they go to someone else, someone who could pull it all off more naturally? Would he? And how long was it until that happened? Would she even make it that long?
Suddenly wishing never to see herself again, Bella turned off the lights and went back into her bedroom, falling onto the pink sheets that covered her bed and cuddling with the stuffed animals. She scrolled on her phone for hours before her brain finally allowed her to fall asleep.
Jackie was used to lying to Bella; in fact, it had become second nature to tell a white lie whenever there was an opportunity to practice. “No, baby, I had to finish editing this week’s video and it went later than I thought” was a classic. “I thought you wanted time to work on your stream” was another good one. And, when all else failed, “I’m sorry you feel that way” always came in clutch. After all, he was Bella’s first; that made it easy and, most importantly to Jackie, it made her easy.
But, somehow, “it’s windy as hell out here” had been the first lie he had second-guessed in quite some time. In fact, he hadn’t felt so much as a light breeze in Insmith since he arrived. The air was completely still all the time.
It was as if he were living in a photograph of a town. No cars passed by him as he walked the street. No one came in or out of any building he passed and, inside of the buildings, the people only stared with their abnormally wide eyes and hardly spoke back to him. Even as he looked around at the sites where the victims’ bodies were found, there was nothing breaking the normalcy of the surroundings other than a dark stain on the pavement. Not to mention the snickering and crunching of leaves that seemed to follow him just out of sight behind the shade of the forest wherever he went making the hair on the back of his neck stand up.
Back in his hotel room, he stared down at a clear Ziploc bag that rested on his bedside table as the darkness of night finally fell on the town. His name was scrawled in Sharpie on the front of the bag and he could see a piece of paper and a cell phone inside it, but the most interesting thing about it to Jackie was the fact that it had not been there when he had left that morning.
He looked in the bathroom and around the main bedroom, finding nothing. Opening the hotel room door, he looked right and left down the hallway, assisted only barely by the flickering yellow recessed lights that lined the ceiling every 10 feet or so. “Hm,” he grunted as he shut and locked his hotel room door, flipping the light switch on his bedside desk and opening the plastic bag.
Sitting on the bed, he pulled the somewhat cracked phone out of the bag along with the paper that he realized held a hastily-written note.
“Don’t say I didn’t do nothing for you,” it read. “Robyn’s last phone call was screen recorded. Someone saved it to her phone – whoever she saw right before she was attacked started it and she didn’t know it. I say again: DO NOT TRUST ANYONE. – Wydell”.
He turned the phone on, swiping and tapping to get to the saved photos. Crossing his legs on the bed and leaning back against the headboard, he tapped the most recent video.
A week before Jackie arrived in Insmith, Robyn walked down Bram Street in utter darkness, savoring the safety in the soft, uneven glow of each orange-yellow street light lining the road every forty feet or so. The beams of the sodium bulbs only covered about fifteen feet each, but they felt like less and less every time — each time she stepped back into the unlit darkness, her senses went back into overdrive.
The trees surrounding the boulevard shuddered and swayed. The branches crunched and her ears perked, listening closely as she increased her pace. Her heart pulsed faster along with the clicking of her heels as she scanned the treeline, seeing nothing but darkness… darkness that the synapses of her mind told her was moving, waiting, and watching. She wasn’t ten steps back into the darkness before she pulled out her phone and called her sister, looking back to see only the long, straight road behind her. She was only about halfway down the street now, and the liminal space between destinations made her eerily uncomfortable; it was as if the road ahead and the road behind were exactly the same, only differentiated by the side the streetlights rose from in her point-of-view.
The full-volume monotone ringing noise startled her at first and, suddenly, everything around her went silent. The only thing she could hear in the darkness was her footsteps and the emotionless ringing that she hoped with each passing second would become her sister’s voice.
After what felt like an eternity of the repeated automated noise, the sound of a water droplet told her that her sister was now live on the other end. Erica’s camera wasn’t on, so all that was displayed on Robyn’s screen were the words “Lil Sis 🐠” and the grainy pitch-black video Robyn’s phone camera was actively taking in the bottom right corner.
“Robbie!” Her sister’s voice broke through the silence. “Girl, are you in bed?”
Robyn laughed, a wave of relief coming over her as soon as she heard Erica’s voice. “No babygirl – don’t kill me – I’m walking to the bus stop right now and it’s dark as hell out here! I just met up with that Hinge guy I was telling you about…”
“Amazing, how was it, tell me everything,” Erica said, the screen brightening as she appeared sprawled out on the bean bag in her bedroom. The sounds of a melodramatic soap opera played quietly from her end and the whites of her eyes were more like a light shade of red. “Wait, hold up a minute. Firstly, why in the hell are you walking back, he didn’t buy you an Uber or nothing?”
“Apparently, they don’t have Ubers around here,” Robyn said. Now that the screen was brighter, she could almost see herself in her little corner of the screen, like a pale ghost hiding in the dark. “And the bus stop isn’t far anyways–”
“HE AIN’T BUY YOU NO UBER GIRL WHAT?!?” Erica nearly shrieked from the other end of the phone, sitting up rigidly on the bean bag. Her neon purple wall art shone behind her, consumed onscreen by the black curls of hair that fell around her dark face. Around Robyn, the trees sounded like they were snickering in the wind. “And that motherfucker ain’t gonna walk you home? Bitch, is the bar in hell nowadays or are we fuckin’ trippin’?”
“Listen, if you’d felt what I felt tonight, you wouldn’t be so judgy about it, trust me.”
“Oh it’s like that huh? He kiss you when he was done or something? He make you cum before he exploded on your leg and maybe gave you a lil cuddle afterwards? That made the whole letting-a-bitch-walk-home-alone-after-dark-in-a-place-she-never-been okay?”
“Girl, you know I’ve been here before, like, one time driving through.” Robyn laughed again as she stepped into the next light, illuminating her face for the camera. “I’m not that fucking stupid.”
“Oh so just a little fucking stupid, that’s okay then,” Erica said on the other end of the phone, looking at the TV offscreen. When she looked back at her phone, she added: “Damn girl, you weren’t lyin’! He gave you that business, huh?”
“What did I say babes,” Robyn responded. It was true: she looked like she’d just survived a minor tornado. Her eyeliner was smudged and slightly running, her dark hair frazzled and unkempt, not to mention her lipstick smeared and, even worse, uneven. “Insmith twinks are built different… probably get no box out here that isn’t their fucking cousin’s. I’m telling you girl, I couldn’t tell him from his boys if I had to, they’ve got to be–”
Robyn stopped just before she reached the end of the streetlight’s beam, her shadow reaching out into the darkness. The road ahead dipped before leveling out three streetlights ahead, which she figured was probably a couple hundred feet away. Under that third streetlight, a shadow slowly rose from the ground, centered under the orange-yellow beam. She couldn’t tell for certain from the distance, but it seemed to be about her height and still rising.
“Robyn,” Erica was saying. “You okay? What’s wrong?”
The shadow kept rising, now a couple of feet taller than her.
“There’s… there’s something ahead of me…”
“Like an animal? Oh my God, Robs are you okay? Don’t fuck with me again, I swear to God…”
The trees snickered again. Robyn looked down at the phone and switched her side of the FaceTime to the outer camera, raising it so that Erica could see.
“Do… do you see that? Under the light?”
The shadow suddenly stopped rising at about two-thirds the height of the streetlight. Its form was still unclear from the distance and in the weak light, but it appeared to have pointed ears on the sides of its head and some sort of dark cloak shifting around its slender body, flowing downward into the ground as the creature remained still, staring in her direction. Robyn hesitantly took a step back.
“What the…” Erica started, leaning towards the camera to better see her screen. “Robs, what is that?”
When Robyn spoke, her voice was barely audible even in the absolute quiet. “I… I don’t know… I can’t… what do I do?”
“Can you hide? Do you think it sees you?”
As if in response, the creature suddenly moved, a long, bony leg extending out of the flowing cloak of shadow and into the darkness between streetlights. It disappeared into the pitch-black darkness, but Robyn knew it was still coming in her direction. She took another step backwards, her subconscious doing the legwork for her as her eyes stayed locked forward. Erica was talking on the phone, but Robyn couldn’t hear. Her arm was frozen in place, keeping the phone’s camera forward.
The creature appeared again in the next streetlight. It was moving quickly toward her, using its arms along with its legs to help propel itself over the ground, gathering speed. The cloak was seemingly gone and, instead, black liquid sweated and flew off its long, naked body as it moved. It was in the light for no more than a second before it disappeared again in the darkness. She could hear it now, the wind moving against it as it came and the wet, crunching sounds its feet and hands made against the hard concrete. Erica was screaming. Robyn was frozen still, just under the streetlight.
It appeared again, one light away from her. It was moving so quickly now that it was only a blur of dark, breathing, crunching muscle, its needle-toothed mouth open uncannily wide. It screeched loudly as it disappeared into the darkness one last time, a mix of a high-pitched squeal and wet, guttural regurgitation. Tears streamed from Robyn’s eyes, rolling down the path of eyeliner she’d made earlier that night. Her heart raced, hammering blood and adrenaline throughout her body that went to no use but to keep her shocked into immobility.
She stood, waiting to be hit by the creature, but nothing happened. There was complete silence once more besides Erica’s screams, and she could see nothing in the pitch-black ahead of her except for a large shadow that seemed to move vaguely and immaterially in the darkness. Her eyes searched wildly to see, creating all sorts of possibilities as they stared into the unknown.
A wet clicking noise began, almost inaudible at first, but slowly rising in volume. A deep, hollow breathing sound gurgled along with it.
“I–” she started to say. Before she knew it, the creature lunged out of the darkness, its broken, hanging jaw and its long, knife-like fangs the only thing she saw.
Erica held her hand over her mouth, listening to the sounds her sister made as she was attacked. Her screams turned to slurred cries as loud squelching, regurgitating noises echoed out around her. She coughed, spat, then gagged, breathing shortly and only in the few moments that she had the opportunity. Robyn had dropped her phone, and now all that Erica could see was the orange-yellow glow of the streetlight staring straight into the camera.
After Robyn fell silent, the vomiting noises continued as a flood of liquid splashed onto the pavement offscreen. An organic pulsing began, seemingly coming from the creature that was just out of frame. Sometimes, she caught a glimpse of it as it moved over her sister, but she couldn’t make out any defining features or any idea as to what it was doing. Then, suddenly, the streetlight bulb popped, startling her before leaving the screen in complete darkness. The noises still didn’t stop.
Her attention was so glued to the screen that she almost didn’t notice the creaking of her bedroom door just ahead of her. It slowly opened just a crack, and a pale white hand reached out from between the door and its frame. Something in its fingers glinted in the neon purple light that bathed the room – she screamed when she realized what it was.
The door began to creak open even more, a malicious snickering coming from the person behind it as the kitchen knife held in their hand slowly turned back and forth.
