Lot 085: narrator.txt

R equals C.

Hello, friend.

Thanks for coming by.

Lot 85 is recent.

Digital even.

A USB drive.

No markings.

No case.

It was left in the return bin of a public library.

Wrapped in a receipt from a bookstore that no longer exists.

There's only one file on it.

A plain text document.

No date, no author, just a title.

Narrator.txt.

Which happens to share the name of the story I'm about to tell.

Make of it what you will.

Before we begin, I want to point out some of the customers whose names have been etched in brass on this beautiful plaque I had made above the front desk.

These are some of the members of the inner circle of the antiquarium.

We go by the Obsidian Covenant.

Recent initiates include Jamar Lamar Jr.,

Caitlin McFarland,

Jordan Tyler Hindra, Michelle Roberts, Joseph J.

Pierce, Christina Hornberg, A Winter's Wind,

Amy,

Ray,

and

Korg.

We are ever appreciative of your devotion to the Order.

Go to theObsidiancovenant.com to receive the sacrament.

Now,

where were we?

Oh, yes.

Welcome to the Antiquarium of Sinister Happenings

and Odd Goings On.

I narrate horror stories on the internet.

But this time,

the story

came true.

You don't know me, but perhaps you know my voice.

I'm a narrator.

Specifically, I narrate horror stories online.

I scour the internet with a raven's eye, searching for gems buried amongst the thousands of short fiction stories posted to places like No Sleep and Night Scribe.

It's a time-consuming task, believe me, I've lost entire evenings descending deeper and deeper into a rabbit hole of the worst scenarios a human mind can imagine.

There are more stories out there than a single person could read in a lifetime of lightless nights.

I discard many, to be honest.

Those that are too amateurish, too derivative, or that are churned out by AI, which is getting harder and harder to tell, by the way.

But if I keep searching, I'm rewarded with something truly terrifying.

Or thought-provoking, or emotionally resonant.

Perhaps even all three.

I read the story from start to finish.

When I reach the end, a smile slowly creeps across my face.

Yes, I think to myself,

this is something I want to share with the world.

I go ahead and message the author, make sure they consent to me telling their tale.

Luckily, they often do.

At that point,

I cease to be myself.

I forget about my day job, forget about the pile of unfolded laundry downstairs.

I forget that I need to eat or sleep.

I turn out the lights and take a seat in front of my computer.

I open Audacity and adjust my Sure microphone to the perfect height.

I take a deep, steadying breath.

I click record,

and I begin to speak.

I become the protagonist of the story.

Who I really am no longer matters.

I'm just some guy in the dark, or girl in the dark.

It depends on the story, really.

With only my voice, I bring the characters to life,

leading them slowly down the path towards their inexorable doom.

I pause, record a second take of an especially powerful line.

My throat trembles with emotion as the account comes to its cathartic climax.

I edit the recording together.

Add ambience to the mix to enhance the story's atmosphere.

And then

it goes online.

All across the world, people listen.

Just a few at first, my regular audience.

But soon, others drift in,

following a link from somewhere else, lured in by the algorithm.

They sit at the fringe of the campfire's light as I speak.

In their darkened rooms, in their cars,

at their places of work,

in their headphones, like you right now.

My voice narrates for them a tale of visceral imagination they may have never found by themselves.

And just like that,

the world becomes

harmlessly

a little darker

and a little more fun.

Harmless, perhaps,

until today.

It's a couple of days before my weekly upload is due.

So I went looking for a story to record.

I poured myself a cup of black coffee, opened up tabs to the usual sites, and began my search.

I've got a simple rule.

If a story doesn't grab me within the first minute, then I move on to the next.

It doesn't take much to grab me, me, really.

A certain eloquence in the writing style, an interesting hook for the plot,

even just a turn of phrase I find appealing.

Some days, I find the right story right away.

Other days, like today, nothing seems to fucking stand out at all.

After an hour of scrolling up and down and clicking on every new submission, I still hadn't found anything that held my attention.

This happens sometimes, and I have ways of dealing with it.

I could narrate a classic, for instance,

a creepypasta from the ancient past of 2010.

Everyone knows the stories of Jeff the Killer and the No End House,

but they've never heard me tell them.

I could write my own story, of course.

I do that when the time permits, but

I didn't think I had that kind of time today.

Or

I could check the emergency folder.

This is where I saved promising stories that didn't stand out enough to get narrated first time,

but still impress me enough to warrant a second look.

The folder is a haphazard jumble of text files, the stories copy-pasted from wherever I found them.

I opened a couple, scanned the first few paragraphs of each.

Oh yeah, I remember why I saved these these now.

They're pretty good.

A hiking trip gone wrong.

A late-night encounter with a sinister stranger.

Well-trodden concept, sure, but the tale, quite literally in my case, is in the telling.

Even a story you've heard a hundred times before can be riveting if the details are just right.

I keep going, working my way down the list.

And that's when I saw it.

Narrator.txt

What was this?

My first assumption was a list of saved settings for my microphone or some other technical detail I hadn't wanted to forget.

Evidently I've forgotten about it.

I double-clicked the file.

And a window expanded to fill my monitor.

You don't know me, the first line of the story said.

But perhaps you know my voice.

Interesting.

It was a story about a narrator,

specifically one who narrates horror stories online.

I hadn't seen many stories like that.

The first few paragraphs described the concept of online narration and the community around it quite succinctly.

I smiled at the mention of the SHUR microphone.

That's what everybody uses for this kind of thing.

I sipped at my cooling cup of coffee as the eponymous narrator described pouring their own.

Whoever had written this clearly had a similar process to mine, right down in the emergency folder full of backup stories.

I paused

when I got to the part about them finding a file named narrator.txt.

My first instinct

was to look back over my shoulder.

I'm not sure why.

My chair creaked loudly as I turned and scanned the deep shadows of my room.

There was nobody there.

Of course there wasn't.

But when I turned back towards my monitor,

I couldn't shake shake the sensation of someone hovering just behind me.

I could almost feel their breath on the back of my neck.

This happens sometimes, too.

As much as I live and breathe horror stories, reading them for hours in the dark could lead to these little bouts of paranoia.

When that happened, I usually took a break.

So, I grabbed my empty coffee cup and headed downstairs to the kitchen.

I said to my housemate as I entered.

He was seated at the counter, replying to a text on his phone.

He and I have an understanding that he won't make too much noise on nights when I'm narrating.

Truthfully, I don't think he really grasps what I do up in my room.

He and I couldn't be any more different, and he couldn't be any less interested in horror whatsoever.

He's more of a sports guy, but he's easy to live with, so we get along just fine.

I haven't started yet.

I'm having trouble finding the right story, and it is kicking my ass.

You'll get it, no problem.

You don't have to worry about me making noise, anyways.

I'm off out with the boys in a sec.

I busied myself with making a fresh coffee, offered to make him one with a raise of my eyebrows.

He shook his head.

Nah, I'm good.

If I mix coffee and booze, it'll be a a long night.

Know what I mean?

I feel you.

All right, have a good night, man.

You too.

Fresh cup in hand, I headed back towards the stairs.

I ascended the stairs, entered my room, closed the door behind me, locked locked it,

took a seat back at my desk.

A little break had done me good.

I no longer felt the indefinable tension that had intruded upon me before.

Not until I read the next few paragraphs of

narrator.txt.

This happens sometimes too, I read aloud.

As much as I live and breathe horror stories, reading them for hours in the dark could lead to these little bouts of paranoia.

When that happened, I usually took a break, so what the fuck?

I read the next scene in which the narrator spoke to their housemate while making a fresh cup of coffee.

It was the same conversation that I just fucking had.

Word for word.

I mean, this could no longer be a coincidence.

A story about a horror narrator

could have been about anyone.

It's not like I'm the only one out there.

But a story that described my every action,

every word,

even my every thought.

How could that even be possible?

I rubbed my eyes and thought about it logically.

Okay, someone's pulling a prank on me.

My housemate was the most obvious suspect, but he'd never read a horror story in his life, much less written one.

And both of us respected the boundaries we'd set when we first started living together.

We never entered each other's rooms without permission.

I just couldn't see him doing this.

So, what did that leave?

Had I written it myself and forgotten about it?

Was it a draft of a story I'd started and then abandoned, saved into the wrong folder, maybe?

I mean, that seemed more plausible, but I really had no memory of doing anything like that.

What's.

I had an idea.

I checked the file's properties to see when it had been saved exactly.

Maybe I'd found it online six months ago, forgotten all about it, and was now subconsciously acting out the events of the story as the memory of it slowly resurfaced.

That's got to be it.

Stranger things had happened.

It had been created today.

2038.

My eyes slowly traveled to the bottom right of my monitor, where where the current time was displayed.

It was

20

2003.

If my computer was to be believed, this file wouldn't even be created for another half hour.

I took a swallow of my coffee.

It was too hot, but it helped calm my nerves.

There had to be a rational explanation for this.

I looked back at the text file.

There were several more pages of the story left to go.

That tension settled across my shoulders again.

Cold

and heavy as December snow.

Two thoughts hit me like a pair of punches.

One to the gut and one right between the eyes.

First, what if this story actually was about me?

And secondly, what if this story recounted something awful, like my own death?

What if,

just a scroll of my mouse wheel away,

it described some psychopath charging into my room, burying an axe in the back of my skull?

Or a horrifying face manifesting in the darkness.

its skeletal jaws distending to swallow me whole.

If I read those words,

would they come true?

It's fucking ridiculous.

Ridiculous.

It seemed ridiculous.

In that moment, it also seemed like something that could very conceivably happen.

Seized by a sudden impulse, I scrolled down to the very end of the story.

If I was about to die, then I needed to know right now.

Otherwise, this tension is going to kill me.

Skipping to the end of the story won't teach you anything, I read.

You have to become a part of it.

Yourself.

That was the final line.

I felt like a novice chess player, hopelessly outmatched by a superior opponent.

My every move predicted and turned against me.

I scrolled back up,

my eyes plucking out random sentences as I went.

They looked like nothing that words could describe.

They were coming towards the door.

I unlocked the door.

Fuck.

Keep scrolling.

I finally arrived back at the conversation with my housemate, or rather I arrived at the narrator's conversation with their housemate, which coincidentally resembled the conversation I had with fucking my housemate.

Find that.

The story,

the story, whatever it was, wanted me to read it from start to finish, so that's exactly what I'll do.

I read about the narrator wrestling with the concept of the story coming true.

I read about them scrolling to the end of the story, only to find that final sentence waiting for them like a punchline.

I read about them scrolling back up and reading about a narrator wrestling with the concept of the story coming true.

I read about that narrator scrolling to the end of the story only to find that final sentence waiting for them.

Like a punchline.

I saw something about a loud knock at the door

and exhaled a sigh of relief.

Without being conscious of it, I'd been holding my breath.

But now that something was happening in the story that hadn't happened to me, it proved that the story was just that.

A story, a work of fiction.

Maybe I needed it to drink less coffee at night.

It was really starting to make me bad.

There was a loud knock

at the door.

Ah, apologies.

Something's just come up in the back room.

One of the motion sensors tripped.

Could be a draft.

Could be the thing in Cabinet 7 again.

In any case, I should take a moment.

The file will keep.

Don't go far.

Why, hello there.

You've reached the antiquarium.

If you wish to leave a message,

please do so with the town and have a great day.

Hey, Trevor, how's it going, man?

I got something something for you.

A real nasty piece.

Picked it up outside this rusted-out vanity at a condemned bed and breakfast near the coast.

The place was abandoned, but every mirror in there had been turned to face the walls.

Anyways, it's a silver hair comb.

Real dainty, little roses etched into the spine.

It looked harmless, so I gave it a quick pass through the old hair.

Big mistake.

Two days later, a woman starts following me.

Never spoke, just stared.

Eyes locked like I was the only thing in the world she could see.

Day after that, a second one shows up.

Different face, same look, same hunger.

That second one handed me a letter, Trevor.

Perfumed, handwritten, every word trembling.

She said that she loved me, said that I was hers.

And at the end, just six words.

I handled the competition.

You're safe now.

I found her body later that night.

Now, here's the part that really chills me.

There's a mark on the back of the comb.

Subtle, like it was etched with a needle.

A V overlapping an M.

I've seen that symbol before, Trevor.

Not often, but always on the kind of item that looks beautiful and destroys people slowly.

I think someone's making these things.

Not some random curse.

I'm talking deliberate craftsmanship.

Someone out there is feeding obsession to the world one artifact at a time.

I've got the comb sealed, charm bag warded all over the place, the whole shebang.

But I swear I can still feel it pulling.

If you want it, it's yours, but fair warning, man.

You don't get to choose who falls.

You just get to live with what they'll

end of messages.

No sign of movement.

Everything's exactly where I left it.

Except.

Well,

the file was open again.

Even though I'd closed it.

Small detail.

Anyway, let's pick up where we left off.

Shall we?

That the story was just that.

A story.

A work of fiction.

Maybe I needed to just drink less coffee at night.

It was really starting to make me bad.

There was a loud knock at the door.

Who's there?

My eyes flicked back to the text of the story.

The next few lines describe the narrator calling, who's there?

And then flicking their eyes back to the text of the story where they read about the narrator narrator calling who's there

and flicking their eyes back to the text of the story.

The next line

described them opening the door to investigate.

A stupid idea.

Stupid fucking idea.

Hadn't this narrator ever seen a horror movie?

What kind of genre fan were they?

I got to my feet and cautiously approached the door.

Stupid or not, there was no way I could go back to reading now.

And besides,

it's probably just my housemate.

Maybe he needed to borrow something before he went out.

I unlocked the door.

The hinges squealed as it opened.

There was nobody in the hallway.

My eyes bulged as the floorboard creaked into the corner of the corridor

towards my housemate's room.

Hey, buddy,

you still around?

Come on, man, it's not funny.

I shuffled to his room, knocked on the door with a trembling fist.

I listened,

ear pressed to the grain.

Not a sound from within.

I gripped the doorknob,

turned it.

I gently opened the door.

My mind was conjuring all kinds of deformed figures with distorted faces, ready to rush at me.

But there was nobody there.

After 20 seconds that lasted an eternity, I closed the door again

and crept back downstairs.

My fight or flight response felt like it was jacked up to 200%.

I was ready for literally anything,

but I had no idea how I'd react if I actually saw it.

Would I run?

Would I lash out?

Or would I simply shut down from sheer terror?

Reading these stories aloud every week was one thing.

Being the main character of one

was something else entirely.

My housemate's shoes weren't in the foyer.

He had already left the house.

Upstairs,

I heard the slam

of a closing door.

I knew that if this were one of the stories I was narrating, I'd be internally screaming at the protagonist to get out of the house.

Just go somewhere safe, you idiot, somewhere public.

Be smart.

Use your head.

But this actually was a horror story, wasn't it?

It was all written down in a text file on my computer upstairs.

The final line said that skipping to the end wouldn't teach me anything, that I had to become a part of it myself.

It didn't matter if I ran away.

I would just be delaying the inevitable.

I could leave the house for hours, even days.

But these kinds of stories never ended that way, with an easy escape.

Sooner or later, I would have to come back and finish it.

I would have to accept whatever fate fate was written there.

My feet felt like they were encased in concrete as I climbed the stairs, as did my heart.

My bedroom door was closed.

I knew for a fact I hadn't closed it.

I tentatively tried the handle.

It wouldn't turn.

Whoever was in there had locked the door.

I don't know why, but I knocked loudly.

My fist was a lead weight strapped to the end of my arm.

Who's there?

Came a muffled cry from inside.

I was too shocked to respond.

It was my own voice.

It sounded just like it did in my recordings,

cracking with emotion as it read the final few lines of a story.

I heard footsteps approaching the door.

Fear gripped my throat like a leather-gloved hand.

I was convinced that behind that door, just a few inches away, was another me.

And I knew that if we made eye contact, even for a second, we'd both lose our minds.

This wasn't supposed to be happening.

The other me was unlocking the door.

The hinges squealed as it started to open.

As quickly as I could, I ducked around the corner of the corridor.

cursing the creak of a floorboard as I did.

I opened the door of my housemate's room and slid inside, closing it silently behind me.

Hey, buddy

I heard from the hallway.

You still around?

It's my own voice again.

It sounded small.

Come on, man, it's not funny.

Insubstantial.

They were coming towards the door.

I threw myself to the floor, crawled under the bed, and held my breath.

I heard the doorknob turn.

The door crack open.

I closed my eyes and counted the seconds.

Five, ten, fifteen.

I didn't want to see myself, and I didn't want them to see me.

Something awful was going to happen if we saw each other.

I don't know how I knew that or what it would be, but I fucking knew it was true.

In many ways, that moment lasted forever.

It had no beginning or end.

Finally, the door closed again.

And I heard footsteps descending the stairs.

When I was sure they were gone, I darted back to my own room, slammed the door, locked it again.

On my monitor, waiting for me was narrator.txt.

My eyes felt huge and white in the darkened room as I took a seat and continued to read.

I didn't have much time.

The other me would be back any minute now.

I read about the narrator searching their housemate's room, going downstairs, returning upstairs to find their door locked, knocking on the door.

My eyes flicked past paragraphs of text describing an endless loop of narrators chasing each other around an empty house.

I read about the narrator returning to their computer, their eyes huge and white in the darkened room as they took a seat and continued to read.

Several words from the next paragraph caught my eye before I had any context for them.

Blood.

Scream.

Death.

The words came at me like bullets fired from point-blank range, thudding into my skull.

I reeled back from them, my chair skidding across the bedroom floor.

My breath burst from my lungs like startled birds exploding out of a tree.

It took intense concentration just to control my hands.

I gripped the mouse so hard I heard the plastic casing creak.

I closed narrator.txt and deleted it.

The mouse clicks echoed in the silent room.

I even emptied the recycle bin.

I waited for something to happen, but nothing did.

It was over now, right?

I couldn't be trapped in a horror story if the story no longer existed.

If this were one of the hundreds of stories I narrated, this would be the part where after a moment of false hope,

everything

got real,

real bad.

Silence filled my room,

spreading and thickening like smoke.

I screamed as the knock at the door began again, louder this time.

This wasn't a knock for attention.

This was a fist pounding against the wood.

This was the sound of someone trying to break through.

A violent, incessant sound.

How could this be happening?

The story didn't even exist anymore.

I deleted it myself before I could even finish reading it.

And then I remembered.

Skipping to the end of the story won't teach you anything.

You have to become a part of it yourself.

I looked at the clock.

It was 2010.

There was just enough time.

I opened up a text editor and began to type.

You don't know me, I wrote, but perhaps you know my voice.

The words flowed out from me.

From memory, I typed out the story just as I remembered it.

The process of finding and narrating horror stories, the discovery of narrator.txt in my emergency folder.

The conversation with my housemate, skipping to the end of the story, skipping back, hearing a knock at the door, knocking on that same same door myself, the words blood and scream and death.

And then I began to write new words.

Words I hadn't already seen.

I described the deletion of narrator.txt,

the pounding at the bedroom door.

I typed about typing the story again in my own words, which were the same words that it had always been written in.

I wrote about the sentence I'm currently writing.

A sentence that must have always been a part of the story, even as I see it now for the first time.

I wrote about writing this sentence.

And this one.

And the next.

This was my story now.

And it had always been my story.

Another blow against the door.

Then another.

It sounded like the wood was about to splinter, like the lock was about to give away.

My words hadn't described the assailant.

If they actually broke down that door, they would be indescribable.

Maybe they looked just like me.

Or maybe they looked like nothing that words could describe.

I wrote about writing the final lines of the story, even though as I type this now, I haven't typed them yet.

The time was, or will be, 2038, when I type the final line and save the file as narrator.txt

The most terrifying thing about time travel stories

is the tenses.

I opened Audacity and adjusted my Sure microphone to the perfect height.

I took a deep, steadying breath.

I clicked record

and I began to speak.

You don't know me,

but perhaps you know my voice.

The knocking had finally stopped because I hadn't described it as ongoing.

Silence

had settled upon the house once more.

Anyone listening to this narration would just hear my voice.

And the ambient sound I would add later to enhance the atmosphere.

I'm a narrator, I continue.

Specifically, I narrate horror stories online.

I scour the internet with a raven's eye, searching for gems buried amongst the thousands of short fiction stories posted to places like No Sleep and Night Scribe.

It's a time-consuming task, believe me, I've lost entire evenings descending deeper and deeper into a rabbit hole of the Worst scenarios a human mind can imagine.

Already, I was beginning to lose myself in a story that was about myself

and nobody at all.

That had been written by myself

and myself

and nobody

at all.

Who I really am no longer matters.

I stared into the nylon darkness of my pop shield,

and I told the tale as if I were sitting in a campfire

an audience of wide-eyed friends and strangers all around me

I took my time

speaking slowly and carefully

stories like these are not to be rushed

the soul of them cannot be summarized in a few bullet points

you have to inhabit them

Live in them.

Just for a little while.

I paused,

recorded a second take of an especially powerful line,

and my throat trembled with emotion as the account came to its cathartic climax.

Skipping to the end of the story won't teach you anything.

You have to become a part of it yourself.

P G P C J W C C A D C P E F C Y D E C E S P D S C A

Thank you for your patronage.

Hope you enjoyed your new relic as much as I've enjoyed passing along its sordid history.

It does come with our usual warning, however.

Absolutely no refunds, no exchanges, and we won't be held liable for anything that may or may not occur while the object is in your possession.

If you've got an artifact with mysterious properties, perhaps it's accompanied by a history of bizarre and disturbing circumstances, maybe you'd be interested in dropping it and its story by the shop to share with other customers.

Please reach out to antiquariumshop at gmail.com.

A member of our team will be in touch.

Till next time, we'll be waiting for you whenever you close your eyes

in the space between sleep and dream

during regular business hours, of course, or by appointment, only for you,

our

best customer.

You have a good night now.

The Antiquarium of Sinister Happenings, lot 085, narrator.txt.

Written by Doom Spiral Daydreams.

Narrated by Trevor Shand.

Featuring Conan Freeman as the housemate.

For more, visit nightscribe.co slash u slash 69808 slash doomspiral spiral daydreams.

Additional music by Coag, Vivek Abishek, and Clement Panchout, featuring Stephen Knowles as the antique dealer.

Engineering production and sound design by Trevor Shand.

Theme music by the Newton Brothers.

Additional music by COAG, Vivek Abishek, Clement Panchout, and Red Light Chill.

The Antiquarium of Sinister Happenings is created and curated by Trevor and Lauren Shand.

Follow us on Instagram and Twitter at Antiquarium Pod.

Call the Antiquarium at 646-481-7197.

Hello, and welcome to the world of Scare You to Sleep.

I'm your host, Shelby Novak, a show for those of us who need something a little stronger than counting sheep, who find horror to be a strangely relaxing escape.

Here you'll find a myriad of fright-filled tales, from fictional to true stories, to high strangeness to guided nightmares, where I take you on a journey through your own personal nightmare.

So come get lost in the terror with me.

Listen to Scare You to Sleep, wherever you listen to podcasts, sweet screams.