Realistic or Modern 𝐈 𝐇𝐄𝐀𝐑𝐃 𝐆𝐎𝐃 𝐈𝐍 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐑𝐀𝐃𝐈𝐎 𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐂.

[mother of sorrows]

WELCOME TO

WAILING CREEK

a horror roleplay between me and livingdead .

code credit to miyabi !

 

[mother of sorrows]

• .
• .

• 
  
  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  
  

  XI.
  the newcomer

  
  

  
  
  
  

  
  

  lewis john bonovich.

  mood

  ...?
  
  

  location

  a strange gas station
  
  

  interactions

  paprika :-)
  
  

  tags

  answer
  

  
  

  
  
  
  
• The first thing he noticed about the town is that it's not on any map.
  
  Lewis had been studying the crumpled paper for two days now, a pencil path etched throught the highways - routes named for their ability to get you to bigger, cleaner towns. Route Braxdon was miles of forests, cement and towns noted for their utter lack of life. Motel owners smoke heavy and people sit on weed-struck curbs, faces pinched whenever he asks for directions; eyes stick to him when he walks, heavy on his back with envy. The opposite of Heaven isn't Hell, but whatever lies inbetween endless corn fields and abandoned houses crumbling into themselves.
  
  The holy road went as such; Deer Crossing. Decorah. Silver Falls. Horsfield. Braxdon. Lewis has been on the road for days, his brain was faltering and night clung to his headlights like a herd of animals, he hasn't slept in hours -
  
  but even now he knew there was not supposed to be a Wailing Creek after Decorah.
  
  There was, though. A sign washed of all it's paint and the wood water-clogged, peeking out behind pine trees like a fearful eye; it was as miserable as any sign for crappy, starved-out towns, limping around like an animal that just won't die. It's letters spelled out a weary whisper;
  
  WELCOME TO WAILING CREEK.
  
  Trees cramped on every side of the tiny, country road where Lewis had parked, looking up from the map. No cars passed. A lone cricket sang somewhere in the night, the silence dreary.
  
  Lewis had thought himself lost for a minute. His map was mute and there was no other way to Braxdon from here. Wailing Creek was not supposed to be here, and yet in the face of the non-existence it was. Whether Lewis tapped on the wheel or not, if he turned around or stayed - there was a town here, just down the road and no amount of confusion was going to make it leave.
  
  Paprika's heavy, gray-peppered head rose from the backseat, her tail thumping dully. Braxdon was still miles away and Lewis has not slept in...
  
  'I'll rest just for the night,' the man tried to convince himself. 'Just for a night, and then I'll ask for directions.'
  
  Lewis drove. Five minutes down the empty road, his radio lost signal.
  
  

  ***
  ​

  The night was so quiet that the darkness hummed - it followed his car to the gas station, paced outside the doors, devoured the neon lights flickering aimlessly like a ship lost at sea. It was a dirty, ruined thing. A broken chair huddled by the building and abandoned beer cans laid in the over-grown, yellow grass. Moths flung themselves at the lights, their only company a stray truck and two unwashed cars.
  
  Lewis did not want to be here. But his tank screaming red and Paprika needed a walk, and he might as well ask for the nearest motel, if there is any. It might have helped if there was music, or at least more light than the dreamy neon of the station; but the chill was sharp and the fog drifted in the woods just out of reach, suffocating anything that might prove that this place knows life. The moon was a heavy, large eye in the sky, glaring from behind a blanket of clouds. It gave one lost glare before disappearing again, the wind picking up.
  
  He needs sleep. At least three hours, two. Lewis fills up his car, rolls down a window for his dog and walks inside.
  
  Artificial lightning burned blue and white tiled floors, burning Lewis' red-circled eyes; the inside of his brain churned like rusty machinery, the long wail of a slaughterhouse that's run out to the end of it's line. Electricity going haywire in meat. There's only a few aisles to ramble through
  
  Lewis is half a ghost when he stumbles to the counter, the pimply cashier startling out from a magazine; he reflected in the glass beyond like a bad dream, pale and empty. The circles under his eyes purpled like bruises.
  
  ''Pump five,'' he said, catching himself a moment later. ''Please.''
  
  The cashier took the dollar bills, watching Lewis with some wary sort of interest; a young college student, probably, looking as abandoned as any part of this place. Silence. And then, along with the receipt, came a warning;
  
  ''You shouldn't pass any bridges when you're here. It's dangerous.''
  
  It takes an embarrassing amount of time for Lewis to register he's being talked to. He gapes down at the cashier (he gapes down at most people), his expression blank with synapses gone blind. Finally, like the genius he is, he blurts out;
  
  ''Whu - what?''
  
  The cashier nods seriously, shortly cut hair waving like a white flag in the wind. The light above them flickers. ''Yeah. People go missing around them all the time.''
  
  Silence again. Lewis stares. Blinks slowly, so slowly - his head feels like a stone. ''Oh.''
  
  ''So you shouldn't go past any. Just turn around.'' The cashier says again, as if to prove a point; they stare up at Lewis with squinted eyes, their mascara gone with the work hours. '''Cause that's where the Creek Walker is.''
  
  ''The Creek Walker.'' He echoes like a robot trying to learn speech, expression still so blissfully empty. Concept and meaning catches on to gray matter only to slip past the next heartbeat.
  
  ''Uh-huh. He stalks the bridges here. Catches people and leaves them there.'' The cashier stretches out a neck, looking past Lewis as if anybody waited behind him at all. ''Ronnie knows all about it.''
  
  Silence. And then, a thought; something in the sea of nothing, a lightning used by the last of his energy. Lewis turns around like somebody lost in their own skin, tired blinking from behind thick frames.
  
  'Who the fuck is Ronnie?'
  
  
  

designed by bad ending & coded by xayah.ღ

 

[livingdead]

• .
• .

• 
  
  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  
  

  I.
  the newcomer.

  
  

  
  
  
  

  
  

  Ronnie Alexander Machen.

  mood

  uncertain
  
  

  location

  the gas station
  
  

  interactions

  lewis bonovich
  
  

  tags

  answer
  

  
  

  
  
  
  
• 
  Static buzzed, and the screen etched itself into the room like a hazy fog, it reflected onto the sleeping bag stationed in front of it and curved on Ronnie’s pupils. Moonlight seeped through open windows, and somewhere a lone toad croaked.
  
  Bold, green letters flipped number by number on the screen, promised anything more interesting than mesmerizing, dancing pixels, but instead what he got was just that. That was all, for hours on end, and slamming the top of the box like an automotive salesman or reinserting cables hadn’t changed that. Aching pines and deep bridges had made sure that a phone call cost a nickel and a dime and that every Saturday the supermarket clerk would recite your shopping list to you so that you wouldn’t have to write it down. Insects threw themselves onto lamps and open signs outside of smoke shops. They had a longing for the uncovered lightbulb inside, flickering restlessly. No one drove unless they needed to. There was no goodbye when they would see your face again under street lamps. Wailing Creek was just as stretched out as it was tightly knit together, and the roof above his head groaned with age and its prior termite infestations.
  
  He silenced the TV, it darkened the room with ease. It settled on nothing more than emptiness, nothing to show and nothing to offer. Ronnie would replace it soon, just as he would everything else in his house, deteriorating around him.
  
  He felt in the near total darkness for a light, and flicked on his flashlight. It focused on the ice chest in the corner, and reluctant to live up to its name, encased sunken drinks in water that chilled his hand when he reached inside. Flicking the ice-cold water off his hand (though the “ice” part was nonexistent) he shut it with a gentle thud.
  
  Ronnie stood, the melted ice chest was a minor inconvenience at most. He determined that if he were to blanket himself in a cool sleeping bag overnight, the water would be lukewarm at best, a lesson he had to learn more than twice, tossing spoiled groceries that had him contorting his face each and every time.
  
  And he wasn’t fond of guilt. The TV he would pack up later, toss into his truck and dump it somewhere where it may be useful, but for now he followed his dim flashlight to pick up his coat that lied carelessly onto the floor until it wasn’t.
  
  The gentle night swirled with the breeze, jarring lights and an aged engine reeled against it, lighting up the entryway of the house, speaking over the singing crickets and night birds. He checked for glinting eyes and tiny shadows that scurried across the yard, faces sweet and begging for food. His face was as unfamiliar to them as the city sky was to Ronnie, and yet almost every night he fed the strays leftovers until they decided they would be on their way. That was one way to attract raccoons and not cats, he was always told, and failed to believe them until they were right.
  
  When they were fed, they were bound to come back, right?
  
  The truck issued a wrenching squeal in front of the store, threatening to give out at any moment. The door clicks behind him, buzzing lights adjusting to his eyes, and he tugged his jacket a little closer.
  
  He greets the cashier with a hand then disappears behind the aisles.
  
  There’s few choices, but Ronnie knows them all. In one hand a lime soda, in the other a snack, though not for himself.
  
  Reflections danced in his vision, piercing through the frozen glass. Bugs camped outside the door, blocked from the flickering panels of light by a barrier which only he had seen very few walk in and out of.
  
  He turned his head to look but then reverted, keeping it steady. Ronnie’s shopping was done, but he hadn’t dared move, rendering some vague interest in their conversation.
  
  “You shouldn’t pass any bridges when you’re here. It’s dangerous.”
  
  The Creek Walker, told like an urban legend. Ronnie had never seen the Creek Walker. Yet somehow it was real enough to invade his dreams. It was real enough to take Wailing Creek and swallow it whole. It was real enough that sometimes Ronnie carried a camera around his neck and poked into places he shouldn’t.
  
  “Ronnie knows all about it.”
  
  He placed back a small can where it belonged, unbeknownst to the strays outside his door this morning.
  
  He put the soda atop the counter and opened the freezer for a bag of ice. He set that down too, crumbling upon itself.
  
  The newcomer had eyebags redder than the hair that poked out from beneath Ronnie’s hat, and a certain, exhausted stance that Ronnie wholly recognized.
  
  
  “It happens more than I can count.” Actually he could, on one hand maybe, but he hadn’t thought to try. “Just be safe. That’s all.”
  
  There was more to that story. There was more to that story that he wouldn’t tell. Perhaps it didn’t matter. Then he went on, though he told himself he wouldn’t, “You stay away from it and it’ll leave you be, simple as that.”
  
  
  

designed by bad ending & coded by xayah.ღ

 

[mother of sorrows]

• .
• .

• 
  
  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  
  

  XI.
  the newcomer

  
  

  
  
  
  

  
  

  lewis john bonovich.

  mood

  ...?
  
  

  location

  a strange gas station
  
  

  interactions

  paprika :-)
  
  

  tags

  answer
  

  
  

  
  
  
  
• There was a man.
  
  Unnaturally pale under the blistering lights and a sunken face Lewis associates with small-town necrosis. Wild, outgrown hair poked out from under a hat, paused by slightly too wide eyes and an array of freckles - he looks more a stranger than he does human, the atmosphere sticking to his skin like the wet, ill gasps of an animal. 'It happens more than I can count.' The man says, as if warning about a flood rather than supposed bodies. It is not casual how he talks, but it sounded like averting a gaze.
  
  'You stay away from it and it’ll leave you be, simple as that.'
  
  Lewis stares at him.
  
  He stares at him for a long, quiet time, half baffled and half blissfully blank. He puts a hand flat on the counter and leans on it, his expression that of one who is listening and not understanding. Signals form the thought of a thought, overworked brain clinging to what must be meaning to noise - his mouth hangs open a fraction until he thinks to shut it close, looking from the nodding cashier to the man who must be Ronnie. Like molasses the comprehension leaks into cells and Lewis gives the man one last, squinting look, glasses reflecting cigarettes and coolers.
  
  ''What, so like - like a moose?''
  
  Stupid. He's so stupid. Lewis closes his heavy eyes, but the distant embarrassment burns all the same.
  
  Enough energy, pitiful as it was, whispered in his ear that he must be talking to the town eccentric - half a million of those in odd little towns such as these, where people lose their minds easier than they lose their house keys. The night draws them out like mosquitos to a fire camp and Lewis cursed internally for not stopping somewhere earlier. Serves him right for stopping at gas station in dark hours of the night; he ought to know better. Lewis pinches his lips together into too much politeness, a placation he always uses when stuttering, gaping strangers approach him to sweat over shadows.
  
  This guy did not act like the typical junkie losing their trail in stretching woods, but he did seem as bizarre as the rest of this town and Lewis counted down the moments to leave.
  
  ''I... I'll keep it in mind.'' The conversation was not real enough to truly unsettle him - it is remote enough yet that he is sure he will only realize its creepiness tomorrow. Night laid like a blanket on his mind and Lewis could not think.
  
  ''Listen, could you just point me to the nearest motel? I'm just staying for the night.'' He murmurs the last part, looking past towards the tiled floors and not at the cashier that stood in constricting silence. They said nothing and so Lewis had to rely on the mercy of this man, odd and convinced of stalking creatures as he much be. With any luck the hotel will be normal and safe and have only a tolerable amount of mold, but his hopes were on the water and it looks like there might be a drowning.
  
  ''Uh, is there a map of this place, by the way?''
  
  
  
  

designed by bad ending & coded by xayah.ღ

 

[livingdead]

• .
• .

• 
  
  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  
  

  I.
  the newcomer.

  
  

  
  
  
  

  
  

  Ronnie Alexander Machen.

  mood

  uncertain
  
  

  location

  the gas station
  
  

  interactions

  lewis bonovich
  
  

  tags

  answer
  

  
  

  
  
  
  
• 
  The stranger’s expression played back in his mind. The only unfamiliar faces were those who were lost, yet the man was lost not only where he was standing. A putrid, disbelieving stare that Ronnie had convinced himself didn’t haunt him under hazy lights, and that the cashier’s absentminded tapping didn’t ring inside his ears. He stood still, certain of his words he was sure the man wouldn’t remember, but he still envisioned a lifeless stare of the same nature, bloodied and food for maggots.
  
  There was nothing he could do.
  
  ‘What, so like—like a moose?’ Ronnie returned his stare. That was wrong. So very wrong. He breathes in deeply, holding back the corrections seeping through his lips, but they still hadn’t moved, and neither had he. Clueless, tired eyes surveyed him like he was a rabid dog, out of his mind, unhinged, and he knew now that nothing he could say would get through. That was how things went, inevitably, and the more he spouted words the crazier he made himself seem. This didn’t bother Ronnie, but what could happen to this man did. The worst part was he thought he wouldn’t bother to listen at all.
  
  The scanner beeped the humming of freezers full of energy drinks and bags of ice, adhering to Ronnie’s bewildered silence. He clutched the bag in his hand, letting it hang by his side. The man’s tired eyes clung to him like a desperate mosquito; it was enough to make him unsure of his own words if he chose to kept the conversation going.
  
  “What’s your name?” He asked suddenly. Ronnie’s stare was as morbid as his estimation of the future. The bag he held crinkled, and he held another, new plastic bag around his arm. The ice began to sting. He began by repeating his options to himself. “The motel is just down the street. I can show you there, because you know, there’s animals around here and such.”
  
  Ronnie’s map of Wailing Creek was purely memory, and not often had anyone needed one. “I don’t think so. I mean maybe. I never needed one myself.” It’s easy to get around when the moon didn’t gaze down atop his head and crickets played their symphony. Though they did that during all hours of the day here. The encounter here had given him a mission, albeit an odd one.
  
  
  

designed by bad ending & coded by xayah.ღ

 

[mother of sorrows]

• .
• .

• 
  
  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  
  

  XI.
  the newcomer

  
  

  
  
  
  

  
  

  lewis john bonovich.

  mood

  uncomfortable
  
  

  location

  a strange gas station
  
  

  interactions

  some weird guy
  
  

  tags

  answer
  

  
  

  
  
  
  
• The man was staring now.
  
  It was a silent and unblinking thing, and it made Lewis clear his throat with a glance towards the plastered ads that have gone a few decades untouched. Ronnie's gaze was sticky like a deer rotting away under a trailer or a gum clinging to your shoe, and Lewis found himself growing more uncomfortable for every second the man refused to blink. The cashier beeped the codes and said nothing, wearing the small-town blankness and nothing else beneath.
  
  Maybe this was a mistake. Maybe if he drives for an hour or two more, he'll find another town and crash there. There's always a chance out here, with towns wandered by drug addicts or wild-howling bums, but if he's lucky he can avoid where those walk. As it is, Lewis felt like he's stumbled into something he shouldn't have and that it gained him attention he absolutely did not ask for. Or maybe, if he can get past another hour of a grueling drive, he can park in some corner of a grocery store and try for at least a few hours of sleep.
  
  But Lewis was tired. He was so, so tired and his back was cramping up from quick naps stolen on highway rest stops. There was something wrong with this guy, that much he could assume, but it was a subtle, passing feeling, like catching the glimpse of a person behind you before they hide. Lewis hesitated at the question, gaze finally snapping back to look at too-wide eyes - but only for a moment, base instinct replying for him.
  
  ''Steve.'' He lies, staring right back.
  
  A name for a town he will leave behind in the morning and for a face he will never see again. Lewis mulls over the offer, unsure if he wants to take it on, but he doesn't trust his ability to navigate without a map and he gives a small nod. ''I'd appreciate it.''
  
  Lewis mumbles a quick goodbye as he goes after the man, receipt in hand and the glass doors sliding open with a quiet gasp into the awaiting night.
  
  The cashier's eyes are still vacant when Lewis looks back. They are smiling where the two men stood before, saying nothing.
  
  

  ***​

  
  Ruin echoed everywhere here.
  
  The decrepit, stalking degradation stared back out of every unwashed window, out of every crack in the cement and dirty, sticky-looking walls. A stretch of woods surrounded the little depressing motel, the parking lot just big enough for a dozen cars, of which there was only one beside Lewis and the truck he followed. The building looked like it has hosted maybe seven customers in it's lifetime and Lewis would hesitate too if he was not desperate for sleep. It was disgusting in the basest sense of the word, a place that seems as if it was built unkept and uncared for.
  
  Like a sad beacon the MOTEL sign flickered against the night. Lewis opens his creaking car door and steps outside.
  
  Paprika gives him a soulful look as he waits for Ronnie to do the same, or roll down his window, or do anything at all really that would make Lewis feel like he is not stuck in a half-dream as he stands there. He opens his mouth to say something, to thank the man - something, something, something that dies in his throat at the sound of tires creaking over gravel. There, in the thick darkness, he sees it - the outline of a cop car, pulling into a space right next to them. Lewis sees his own baffled reflection in the black glass before it slides down.
  
  A shadowy, gloom-clad man looks out. Lewis' heavy heart beats, unsure of what is about to happen.
  
  ''...Everything okay over here?'' The cop's voice whistles like air escaping collapsing lungs, his face hidden by a pair of sunglasses and cap. If he is smiling or frowning or sneering, Lewis can't tell - the man is expressionless in the darkness, only the barest features revealed by the neon glow and dying street lights.
  
  ''Uh.'' Lewis starts intelligently, eyes flickering from the cop to Ronnie. ''Yeah. Everything's good, officer.''
  
  Silence. The cop doesn't roll up the window.
  
  He stares at them both and Lewis has no idea what he is waiting for.
  
  
  
  

designed by bad ending & coded by xayah.ღ