A True Story
Posted: 2006-03-23 11:57am
This is a genuine account of the creepy-assed experience I had last night. It's short, but hopefully, it'll stimulate your brain-weasels.
This was two or three nights ago, now, so I felt I should get it down before any more details of it escape me. To begin; it wasn't a dark and stormy night. Well, it was dark, but nights tend to be, so that's something I've always considered redundant.
It wasn't stormy at all, in fact, it was extremely still, the trees barely swayed, but the night was bitterly cold. I don't think there was frost in the morning, I don't think it was quite that cold. This has been a rather cold and delayed spring, this year in the north of England. Apparently, an arctic blast (Arctic Blast is a name I plan on calling a black metal project I'll found in the future, I think it's a great phrase) has been bearing down on the country, giving us sudden blizzards (evidence, photos of the snowfall recieved from this arctic blast, deposited in a few hours: photo 1, photo 2, photo 3) and potentially treacherous, deadly roads. That snow has melted since, we're now pretty much perpetually overcast with chilling winds.
I was in the bath, reading Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk, the guy that wrote Fight Club. I'd just finished the story by Lady Baglady, I think, and like fight club, I thought it was not only cool, but creepy since I could envisage it happening. Of course , it was also laced with satire and sarcasm and other words that start with sa, but it was completely unpretentious. Unlike me, obviously.
My eyes were complaining about the reading, and I decided to give it a rest and go to bed. The parents are in Prague all week, so I've got the house to myself, and have a mean case of insomnia. It was about 3:30 AM when I got out of the bath, got dried and went for the post-bath KO on my bed. The cat (photo 1, photo 2) loves me and likes to sleep on my bed till he's ready to go outside (usually at some really inopportune time like 6 or 7 AM), and had already taken up a position on my bed, in fact, the exact position that would be least helpful for me to get in the bed comfortably.
So I get in, push him out the way and feel bad about it, momentarily. I place my glasses on the windowsill, then toss and turn for a while, trying to not do it so much I piss off the cat. I get most comfortable hugging the left pair of pillows, and close my eyes, feeling the relief from rest almost immediately.
I lie there and feel the psychic static of my thoughts start to tune out. Then I hear it.
The sound is a drone. A far away drone, like you'd hear from a personal plane, one of those small ones. I think to myself, how cool and weird it'd feel, flying at 4 in the morniing, above the sleeping world, the dead streets and blinded, darkened houses. I envisage myself as a flying demon, a fantasy I've had since primary school, glowering down at the silent world, soaring high above with impugnity.
The drone's weird, though; it doesn't seem to be changing it's pitch, or growing quieter and subsequently louder, which is something you'd expect from a small plane that was circling above your general area. There was none of that, which marked it as peculiar and potentially dangerous, given how long this drone sound had resounded.
It wasn't without variation, I apologise, it was in fact, getting louder as time went on. I get images in my head of news reports of a private plane crashing at 4 AM and the mop up by 9, a helicopter-mounted camera showing all the shit and wreckage blasted out of some old guy's house. I think of how horrible it'd be if I looked out the window and this plane was coming right at my house, and how fucked I'd be.
I start making contingency plans, I want to check for this crashing plane and get ready to phone 999. Nobody else is up at this time, and it's possible it could come down in a field around here, where there's no people. I could be partially responsible for the pilot's death if I don't make sure I do everything I reasonably can.
I perch on my knees, on the creaking mattress of my bed, retrieving my sight with the glasses. I don't see any planes through the diamond lattice decorated glass. Just the black of the sky and the darkened houses, very little detail showing on them.
This strikes me as odd; it's possible that the plane has passed over my house already, of course, but the drone is still getting louder. I open the window and give it a really good listen. It's really loud, I'm surprised that nobody else has woken up due to it. With my greater field of view, I scan the frozen, blackened skies.
Nothing, can't even see any commercial airliners in the distance. Still, that fucking drone, it's like a vacuum cleaner, I guess, sounds like air being blasted through a tube, with all sorts of weird muted industrial clunkings and hisses. The sound reminds me of the overnight working that used to go on over at some new houses within sight.
I look over at the -now finished- houses to see if some work is going on over there, but they're in darkness just like the houses near me.
Then I see it.
Well, I see what looks like fire. A river of fire. Interrupted by wheels. There are some train tracks I never knew were that close to my house, but there it was, some enormous black train, with what honestly looked like fire or a fuckton of sparks shitting out of the bottom. Even though it's dark, I can see the train has no windows, it's a very irregular shape, almost as if it's got layers of armour. It's all angular, long, loud and slow. It does have periodic lights on it, coloured like the undercarriage, each of the lights looks like pure fire. There wasn't any smoke that I could see, however, it just looked like the mane of flames the Balrog wears in Peter Jackson's Fellowship of the Ring.
What was making the undercarriage light look so much like fire were the twigs and branches of the deciduous trees that stood between my estate and the railway. Tiny, bony wooden fingers, slicing up the infernal light from this monstrosity that was crawling along the railway.
Eventually, the big black behemoth crept beyond my view; it's rear headlamps facing away from me, but their beams so powerful, I could tell without seeing them directly they would've looked like the wide open eyes of a damned face, burning terribly from within.
I was just left there, leaning out of my window at 3:50 in the morning, watching the railway fade into darkness as the lights dimmed with distance. The drone faded similarly.
One of the damnedest things I've ever seen, there's no doubt about that. Two images ran in my mind, trying to find something to compare it to; the first probably won't make sense to anyone not from England, it reminded me of the opening sequence to that series of Games Master (the computer games show hosted by Dominic Diamond and Dexter Fletcher) that was set in hell. The show started with the camera sitting down on a train, and the conductor says "one way ticket where we're going!" or something and the train goes through your average infernal scenes. The other image was one from Final Fantasy VIII, the GF summoning for Doomtrain, the poison GF. He was a ghoulish train, with a screaming face, full of lost souls, whose rails grew before him, out of the abyss and over the enemy. He too, had fire burning from his wheels and on his sides.
Damn weird, anyway. Over the next two days, I tell people about it, I ask "what trains are out at 4 AM anyway?" I hear some great theories, one was that the drone was the banshee, and the enormous black cart I saw was the death carriage. Another was it was a train moving something highly classified, probably military, in the dead of night. Perhaps an alien body, or perhaps a serial killer in a custom built max security cage, at the only time it'd be safe to move him.
I talk to my brother about it, he asks about the railway by the time I'm talking bout not seeing the plane. I'm taken aback, I ask him if he's ever seen it. Yes, he says, 5 years ago, not before and not since. Loud as hell, and he felt extremely creeped out by it. Supposedly, it's some sort of maintenance car, that's what he and his friend Li'l Dave concluded. Though, it's not listed on any publically available schedule, and I have to say, it was indeed one of the weirdest things I've ever seen.
I hope to never see it again.
END! (Narf!)
This was two or three nights ago, now, so I felt I should get it down before any more details of it escape me. To begin; it wasn't a dark and stormy night. Well, it was dark, but nights tend to be, so that's something I've always considered redundant.
It wasn't stormy at all, in fact, it was extremely still, the trees barely swayed, but the night was bitterly cold. I don't think there was frost in the morning, I don't think it was quite that cold. This has been a rather cold and delayed spring, this year in the north of England. Apparently, an arctic blast (Arctic Blast is a name I plan on calling a black metal project I'll found in the future, I think it's a great phrase) has been bearing down on the country, giving us sudden blizzards (evidence, photos of the snowfall recieved from this arctic blast, deposited in a few hours: photo 1, photo 2, photo 3) and potentially treacherous, deadly roads. That snow has melted since, we're now pretty much perpetually overcast with chilling winds.
I was in the bath, reading Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk, the guy that wrote Fight Club. I'd just finished the story by Lady Baglady, I think, and like fight club, I thought it was not only cool, but creepy since I could envisage it happening. Of course , it was also laced with satire and sarcasm and other words that start with sa, but it was completely unpretentious. Unlike me, obviously.
My eyes were complaining about the reading, and I decided to give it a rest and go to bed. The parents are in Prague all week, so I've got the house to myself, and have a mean case of insomnia. It was about 3:30 AM when I got out of the bath, got dried and went for the post-bath KO on my bed. The cat (photo 1, photo 2) loves me and likes to sleep on my bed till he's ready to go outside (usually at some really inopportune time like 6 or 7 AM), and had already taken up a position on my bed, in fact, the exact position that would be least helpful for me to get in the bed comfortably.
So I get in, push him out the way and feel bad about it, momentarily. I place my glasses on the windowsill, then toss and turn for a while, trying to not do it so much I piss off the cat. I get most comfortable hugging the left pair of pillows, and close my eyes, feeling the relief from rest almost immediately.
I lie there and feel the psychic static of my thoughts start to tune out. Then I hear it.
The sound is a drone. A far away drone, like you'd hear from a personal plane, one of those small ones. I think to myself, how cool and weird it'd feel, flying at 4 in the morniing, above the sleeping world, the dead streets and blinded, darkened houses. I envisage myself as a flying demon, a fantasy I've had since primary school, glowering down at the silent world, soaring high above with impugnity.
The drone's weird, though; it doesn't seem to be changing it's pitch, or growing quieter and subsequently louder, which is something you'd expect from a small plane that was circling above your general area. There was none of that, which marked it as peculiar and potentially dangerous, given how long this drone sound had resounded.
It wasn't without variation, I apologise, it was in fact, getting louder as time went on. I get images in my head of news reports of a private plane crashing at 4 AM and the mop up by 9, a helicopter-mounted camera showing all the shit and wreckage blasted out of some old guy's house. I think of how horrible it'd be if I looked out the window and this plane was coming right at my house, and how fucked I'd be.
I start making contingency plans, I want to check for this crashing plane and get ready to phone 999. Nobody else is up at this time, and it's possible it could come down in a field around here, where there's no people. I could be partially responsible for the pilot's death if I don't make sure I do everything I reasonably can.
I perch on my knees, on the creaking mattress of my bed, retrieving my sight with the glasses. I don't see any planes through the diamond lattice decorated glass. Just the black of the sky and the darkened houses, very little detail showing on them.
This strikes me as odd; it's possible that the plane has passed over my house already, of course, but the drone is still getting louder. I open the window and give it a really good listen. It's really loud, I'm surprised that nobody else has woken up due to it. With my greater field of view, I scan the frozen, blackened skies.
Nothing, can't even see any commercial airliners in the distance. Still, that fucking drone, it's like a vacuum cleaner, I guess, sounds like air being blasted through a tube, with all sorts of weird muted industrial clunkings and hisses. The sound reminds me of the overnight working that used to go on over at some new houses within sight.
I look over at the -now finished- houses to see if some work is going on over there, but they're in darkness just like the houses near me.
Then I see it.
Well, I see what looks like fire. A river of fire. Interrupted by wheels. There are some train tracks I never knew were that close to my house, but there it was, some enormous black train, with what honestly looked like fire or a fuckton of sparks shitting out of the bottom. Even though it's dark, I can see the train has no windows, it's a very irregular shape, almost as if it's got layers of armour. It's all angular, long, loud and slow. It does have periodic lights on it, coloured like the undercarriage, each of the lights looks like pure fire. There wasn't any smoke that I could see, however, it just looked like the mane of flames the Balrog wears in Peter Jackson's Fellowship of the Ring.
What was making the undercarriage light look so much like fire were the twigs and branches of the deciduous trees that stood between my estate and the railway. Tiny, bony wooden fingers, slicing up the infernal light from this monstrosity that was crawling along the railway.
Eventually, the big black behemoth crept beyond my view; it's rear headlamps facing away from me, but their beams so powerful, I could tell without seeing them directly they would've looked like the wide open eyes of a damned face, burning terribly from within.
I was just left there, leaning out of my window at 3:50 in the morning, watching the railway fade into darkness as the lights dimmed with distance. The drone faded similarly.
One of the damnedest things I've ever seen, there's no doubt about that. Two images ran in my mind, trying to find something to compare it to; the first probably won't make sense to anyone not from England, it reminded me of the opening sequence to that series of Games Master (the computer games show hosted by Dominic Diamond and Dexter Fletcher) that was set in hell. The show started with the camera sitting down on a train, and the conductor says "one way ticket where we're going!" or something and the train goes through your average infernal scenes. The other image was one from Final Fantasy VIII, the GF summoning for Doomtrain, the poison GF. He was a ghoulish train, with a screaming face, full of lost souls, whose rails grew before him, out of the abyss and over the enemy. He too, had fire burning from his wheels and on his sides.
Damn weird, anyway. Over the next two days, I tell people about it, I ask "what trains are out at 4 AM anyway?" I hear some great theories, one was that the drone was the banshee, and the enormous black cart I saw was the death carriage. Another was it was a train moving something highly classified, probably military, in the dead of night. Perhaps an alien body, or perhaps a serial killer in a custom built max security cage, at the only time it'd be safe to move him.
I talk to my brother about it, he asks about the railway by the time I'm talking bout not seeing the plane. I'm taken aback, I ask him if he's ever seen it. Yes, he says, 5 years ago, not before and not since. Loud as hell, and he felt extremely creeped out by it. Supposedly, it's some sort of maintenance car, that's what he and his friend Li'l Dave concluded. Though, it's not listed on any publically available schedule, and I have to say, it was indeed one of the weirdest things I've ever seen.
I hope to never see it again.
END! (Narf!)
