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Reunion

It’s a while since you’ve been back to Manchester, and ten years to the day since you had been in this bar. You remember the date because it was the last day before you and your university friends scattered to the four winds after graduation. The bar had changed name but the decoration and the vibe felt the same. Nine of the eleven who met a decade before had managed to make the trip to reunite. One was in Australia, and the other had taken a bend too fast on a holiday in Greece six months after graduation and the group had shrunk by more than geography.

You all raise a glass to her, and you all catch up on each other’s lives. It’s easy, and it’s fun. No one is there to show off, no one is bragging about their career or their house. For the most part everyone was more interested in recounting the various terrible mistakes we had made and ridiculous disasters that had befallen us all.

As the two friends you were talking to move from in front of you to go for more drinks, you look around the bar. It’s still early evening, so it’s a mix of the post-office crowd have one last one and the early-start evening people warming up.

Then you see him, across the other side of the bar. You pass him over for a second, then look back. He’s not that remarkable to look at, just a young man with curly black hair sat on his own at a small table in the corner. What is so striking about him though, is the look of sadness on his face, and the fact that when you look at him an almost overwhelming feeling of despair rushes out at you like a physical wave. And what is even more striking than that is that you remember so well how you saw this man on that last night after graduation, and that terrible, terrible feeling of despair. He doesn’t look a day older.

When your friends come back, they ask you what’s wrong, because it’s visible on your face. You say oh nothing really, but can you see that man over there? They look round, look back at you. They can. Has he been hassling you? Is he staring at you? Do you want us to have a word? You make your face make a smile and say no no, he just reminded me of someone. Do you remember him at all from - you don’t say the last time we were here - when we were at uni. There’s shrugs and shakes of the head, and they don’t seem to have felt anything odd about him, so you let the conversation run on. After a few minutes, he gets up, and makes his way through the crowd to the door and leaves.

You put him out of your mind as best you can, and enjoy your night. The next morning, as you all meet for breakfast in the hotel before leaving, someone says, “we should do this once every so often,” and you say without thinking, “we must, we must in ten more years.” Then you think, just to yourself, I wonder if he will look the same, and what will happen if I go and speak to him.

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Night Watch

There’s an old office building in South London, where every business is out of the building by seven, and until six the next morning there’s no one there except one security guard, who spends much of his time drinking tea, and watching old episodes of Only Fools and Horses, Formula 1, and porn on his phone. Every so often, he has to go round and shine his torch along corridors and try doors and generally earn his living for a while.

One December night quite soon though will be his last night at work, and he’ll quit the next morning and take a job in a garden centre, which apart from the early morning and late afternoon is a daytime daylight day job.

That’s because on that night, he’ll be doing his 2am rounds in the dark and when he reaches the third floor he’ll notice light shining under one of the office doors. For just a moment’s break from the boredom rather than caring about the bills, he will find his master key and unlock the office door to turn the light off.

When he opens the door, he will stop one step in, and the four men who are round a table talking will stop for a moment. “Sorry,” one of them will say. “We’re just borrowing the room for a time. We’ll put it back when we’re finished,” and he will give a big reassuring smile.

The security guard will just nod and back out of the door and lock it again. He will go downstairs, post his keys back through the letterbox, and walk away from the building into the night because there had been no light for him to switch off in the upstairs office. It was well enough lit by the daylight streaming in through the windows.

#eerie #weird #horror #creepypasta #creepy #spooky

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SSSHHH

The first time it happens you think it’s just a dream. You wake in the early hours, and there’s a light in your room. Dazed, you think it’s moonlight shining through the curtain as it has that cold silvery quality, but your curtains are fully drawn. Then you see it, scrawled across the walls of your bedroom, what look like words written in a glowing script you cannot understand, letters curling around in on themselves and twisting around each other. It looks like Arabic, but it’s not. Sleep takes you, and in the morning you laugh at your empty walls and the strange dream and go about your day.

A few days later it happens again, and then not for a month and then again, and again. It puzzles you and you speculate on what might be. A dream, a vision, a weird brain artefact in the hypnopompic state, you don’t know for sure. You wake, see it, close your eyes and open them again and it’s still there, then sleep comes and when you wake it isn’t.

But the one thing that you do start to believe is that each time it happens, you come that little bit closer to being able to read it. It’s almost as if the words are forming in your mind, and all you would have to do is to start to speak and you would read them out, even if you don’t understand what the words mean. You may even start to feel, to know, that in the speaking would come understanding.

Don’t ever give in. Don’t ever voice the words, even if you are sure that you know them, that you could speak them. If you do, the words will be gone from the room forever. And alas, so will you.

#eerie #weird #horror #creepypasta #creepy #spooky

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LET'S TAKE A RIDE AND SEE WHAT'S MINE

You’re not sure if it’s the second time or the third time. Hell, for all you know it may be the fifteenth and you just didn’t notice. But this time, you do.

The car that overtakes you is an unremarkable red Ford, but you recognise it and the driver, a woman in late-middle age. It passed you a little while back, but you don’t remember over-taking it in turn. A young man is sat in the passenger seat, staring ahead, jaw slack, as if he’s fallen asleep with his eyes open.

Gradually, the car disappears out of sight, you take a turn-off onto another dual carriageway, some more songs play and you still have hours to drive.

Then, miles on, she passes you again. Same car, same woman. Different passenger, an older man, slightly confused as if he’s just forgotten something very important. What are the odds of that you think, and then you laugh. She’s driving about ten miles an hour faster than you, and it’s not long before the car is out of sight.

Half an hour later, every light on your dash comes on. The car splutters and chokes and stalls. You manage to guide it to the verge, too shocked to swear until you stop and then you swear a lot. You’d meant to renew your breakdown cover the other week, but there was always something else to do first.

A red car passed you, and pulls up just in front. The driver’s door opens and the woman walks to your car, looks in, and tap, tap, taps on your window.

Don’t wind down your window. This is what will happen if you do.

“I can give you a lift,” she will say. “Come on.”

You will look ahead at her car. The passenger seat will be empty. There will be a small voice in your head that says you shouldn’t but it is such a small voice and so, so far away. You will get out of your car, walk to hers, and open the passenger door.

#eerie #weird #horror #creepypasta #creepy #spooky

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Darkness

It’s an ordinary day, in an ordinary place, and you’re walking down an ordinary street on your way to do some ordinary things: buy some teabags, pick up shoes that have been re-heeled, post a letter, maybe stop for some coffee even though you know you might get cake too and shouldn’t have cake but almost certainly will.

The weather is the definition of nondescript: a flat, low grey sky, like a lid over the world. Fitful drizzle. A breeze that promises to turn into something stronger but then can’t be bothered.

All of which is why the last thing you are expecting is for the world to suddenly go dark, but as you pass a vape shop, and step over some dog shit, that’s exactly what it does.

At first there’s a cold wave of fear washes over you: I’ve lost my sight. Aneurysm, tumour, breakdown, incipient death. But after a moment or two, you realise you can still see, just. There’s enough light to make out the street around you, although you can’t tell where it is coming from. It’s like the last moments of dusk have fallen, just before it turns into night.

Then it’s light again, the street and the drizzle and the sullen traffic, just as it was before. You stand and look around you, confused, scared. The door of the vape shop opens and a short, balding man comes out. He looks intently at you and says, “Did you see that?”

You feel a huge sense of relief. It’s not you. What the hell did just happen? But most importantly, it wasn’t you. Meteorological event, eclipse, sunspots, ozone layer who knows. It wasn’t you. “Yes,” you say, struggling to get anything else out. “Yes.” You wait for him to share his fears, his concerns, to feel that solidarity of human beings both dealing with something.

But instead, he winces. “Most people won’t have. Sorry. Got something a little wrong. Really sorry. Don’t let it bother you.” Then he scuttles back into the shop.

The wind makes an effort, shrugs and gives up. The drizzle starts, and stops, and starts. The cars go by. You walk on, and try and not think about what just happened because it makes you feel like you don’t know the world.

And you don’t.

#eerie #weird #horror #creepypasta #creepy #spooky

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Seen/Unseen

If you’re keen on new technology, you might have one of those video doorbells that detects movement. If someone comes and tries your front door, or your car door, they’re captured there on video.

If you’re keen on new technology and animals, you might also have a wildlife camera that detects movement and takes photos using an infra-red flash. It was a bit of an indulgence for your small surburban front garden but you’ve seen ghostly images of grumbling hedgehogs and a twitchy mouse, as well as any number of cats slinking around their inscrutable business. And once, to your amazement, a young fox, who wandered in without a care in the world, sniffed at a few things, and then trotted off to his next appointment.

One day though, you might be reviewing the night’s capture on the wildlife camera and see a shape like a person walk slowly into your garden. Unlike the shots of the animals in the night (three cats, one hedgehog, an insomniac blackbird) you can’t make out any detail illuminated by the infrared flash, just a blurry but unmistakeable shape. It stands there, completely still for about three minutes, then moves it head. After a moment more, it turns and slowly walks away, out of your garden and out of sight.

Indignant at this intrusion, you review the footage from your video doorbell, which they passed to get onto your garden, and when they walked out. There’s nothing there. Nothing at the timestamp on the wildlife cam. Nothing around it. No

thing. But when you look really closely, you think you can see two impressions on the grass. You’re not sure which unsettles you most. The fact that the shape like a person could be seen on one camera but not the other, or the fact that just before it left, despite the lack of detail in the picture, when it moved its head you are sure that it was sniffing the air.

#eerie #weird #horror #creepypasta #creepy #spooky

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Departing

Darkness comes in fast at this time of year, and you got caught out, further along the beach than you’d planned to walk. The light faded almost with every step, and you had to be careful as you crossed a strand of rocks, not wanting to lose your footing and hurt yourself on a deserted beach. The sea is just a restless grey now, a cat pawing at the beach.

As you walk up through the dunes and onto the road that leads inland, headlights come your way. You step back from the road in case you’re not seen. A small green hatchback passes you, and there’s just enough light left to see the dark figure of a man inside. He doesn’t look at you as he passes, but pulls up soon after, where the road ends and the dunes begin. You expect him to get out, which makes you a little apprehensive, but he doesn’t.

The driver sits there motionless, staring out to sea. Enough, you think, this is creeping me out, or maybe he is troubled and wants solitude, so you are just about to turn away when it happens.

The interior of the car lights up, a brilliant blue-white that hurts your eyes. You squint at the car to see where it’s coming from, but it seems to have no obvious source. It comes from everywhere, and nowhere all at once, as if the air inside the car has been replaced with light, poured in like water.

Then abruptly as it started, it stops. You’re left with nothing but the afterimage, brilliant white windows drifting across your vision until they’re gone, and everything is dark again. Far out at sea there is a distant flash of brightness, like a flicker of lightning right at the horizon, but in a moment it is gone.

When your night vision returns, you peer at the car, and think you know what you have seen, but do not want to have seen it. You nearly walk away, but your curiosity gets the better of you. You have to know.

You were right. When you walk up to the car, there is no one in it.

#eerie #weird #horror #creepypasta #creepy #spooky #spooktober

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Refill

You are so relieved that you shout ‘yes’ to yourself when you see the distant glow and realise that it is a petrol station. It has been a few miles of winding country roads since your fuel warning had pinged, miles of trying to coast when you could, and you can’t believe your luck, especially given that you have been off the main roads.

You sigh in relief as you stand in the forecourt, watching the dials spin on the pump. Full tank, and hopefully a snack and maybe even a coffee to take with you. As you walk up to the garage you realise that there are a couple of people already in there, as well as the person behind the counter, which you think is surprising as the garage is in the middle of nowhere. As you push through the door, you also realise that there are no other cars parked outside.

The three men inside appear to have stopped speaking when you came in, but a reason you can’t name you feel very strongly that they weren’t speaking before then either.  One is standing near the counter, looking at nothing in particular. Another stands at the back, looking at nothing in particular. The man behind the counter is standing there, very still, looking at you. It strikes you that the three look very similar, short dark hair, quite tanned, same build, as if they were brothers.

“Pump two,” you say, and you know it is ridiculous as they all saw you. The man’s eyes flick down to the card machine, and the price is already showing. You hesitate, decide that you can well do without any coffee or a snack, and then tap your phone against it. “Thank you,” you say, and head for the door, every hair on your neck standing up. 

None of them move, but as you get into your car you feel watched. You don’t look back, but you drive away very fast.

You didn’t want to stare, you didn’t want to look at all, so you can’t be certain, and as time goes by you’ll convince yourself that you were just tired and overwrought. But a little part of you will still know, deep down, that you were right. None of the people in that garage blinked once, and you are fairly certain that none of them ever took a breath.

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Unbelonging

In a scrubby extension of a park in Sunderland, there is a small set of allotments, dotted with ramshackle wooden sheds with peeling green paint, lopsided greenhouses that look as if they’d fall down in a strong wind, and others which just have tarpaulin for a roof.

Some of the people who you will see there, raking soil or leaning on a spade, or just sitting on a rickety plastic chair, smoking a cigarette, are not really people. 

Many years ago, when they were just a baby, the Folk crept into a few bedrooms in bungalows and modest terraced houses and took the babies that slept and gurgled there, and replaced them with their own.

The changelings do not know who or what they are, but they feel drawn to one another, and these allotments are where they have ended up, leaning on spades, smoking cigarettes, knowing that there is a bond between them, but not knowing quite what. And yearning, all the time yearning for something that feels a half-remembered dream just out of reach, like trying to catch fog in your hands.

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A Beltane newsletter: strangeness on Zoom calls, a nondescript old man with a history, what's behind the last door, and the mysterious builders' work. Oh, and something's in the garden, but you can't see it. It'll probably be fine. Lhude sing cuccu.

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The Old Forest

You might be out walking in the woods near Aconbury in Herefordshire, and find yourself wandering off the path because you want to try and get closer to the bird that’s making that unusual call that you can’t place. The more you pick your way through the undergrowth the less certain you are which direction the bird is in. First it seems to come from the left, then in front, then even behind you. Perhaps there is more than one, you think.

You realise that you have no idea which way to go back to the path, so you just walk on. A few steps later you find yourself in a clearing the size of a car, surrounded by twisting trees whose leaves whisper and shuffle. The air feels so clean and fresh here you pause to breath it in, and it is like a refreshing drink of cold water on a hot day. The grass in the clearing is soft like a carpet, and so inviting you consider lying down so the trees can whisper you to sleep. Don’t though. Keep going and find your way back to the car. If you sleep here, you will sleep a long, long time.

This is the last of the Old Forest. You may have seen on TV that in pre-medieval times a man might ride for days without leaving a forest, or read articles about Britain’s original rainforest, surprising though that phrase sounds, but this is much, much older than any of those. 

It is much, much older than almost anything.

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Can You Imagine?

You’re standing on a station in the South London sprawl out into Kent, there for the earliest train on a Sunday morning. It’s cold, and its drizzling and given it’s a Sunday the trains probably won’t run to time this early, so you’re the only one on the station. You can’t be bothered to get your phone out from underneath your waterproof jacket, so you stand and stare across to the opposite platform, at the old-fashioned clock still hanging from the canopy. Its second hand jerks round, and you find yourself almost hypnotised by it.

Then, it stops. You blink, because you know about that optical illusion where when you glance at a clock it can seem not to move for longer than a second, but you didn’t just look at the clock and anyway, it is now much longer than a second.

“This is the moment,” a voice says behind you, and you turn. There’s a man standing behind you, with bright red hair and an engaging grin. You look up and down the platform as if that will tell you something, because you don’t understand how you didn’t hear him approaching. 

“This is the moment to walk off the platform,” he said. “While the clock is stopped. When it’s stopped on here, it’s stopped out there. Can you imagine?”

You look at him, trying to understand what he’s saying, what is going on. He smiles again, and turns and walks off the platform. There’s a clunk, and you look back at the clock and see the second hand in jerky motion again. You rush to the platform entrance, and look up and down the street but there is nobody there, because the man who spoke to you has had all the time in the world to walk away.

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Tea

There’s a certain market stall in a small town in North Wales which sells different kinds of tea. The table is filled with glass jars of Sencha and Darjeeling First Flush, Pu-erh and Oolong, and a man with a wild fuzz of dark hair and a wilder fuzz of dark beard behind the table can tell you anything you want to know about them.

Right at the back of the table, half-hidden by the Russian Caravan, is a much smaller glass jar, with just a few scoops of tea leaves in it, labelled only as ’tea’. Most people ignore it for the Irish Breakfast or the Ceylon Silver Tips. If you ask what it is, the stall holder will look at you for an uncomfortably long time and just say ‘tea’.

Perhaps you’ll be the one who thinks what the hell, and buys some. The stall holder will say nothing, just scoop leaves into a brown paper bag and hand it to you. When you try and pay, he mutters that this one’s on the house and moves to the next customer.

At home, you enjoy the ritual as you always do. Best cup, warm the pot, this tea looks black so full boil, no milk or lemon. The tea has an unusual taste, more bitter than usual, but there’s a soft under-note that you can’t place and which you enjoy.

It will be only minutes after you finish your tea that you start to see the lines. Coloured, flickering lines that seem to trace a room within a room, or which lay out a path which disappears through your wall. You think at first: I’ve been drugged and you think second: something’s wrong with my brain; but you feel in perfect health and after a while you get up and go out of your house, seeing where that path leads. When you’re outside, you see the whole world overlain by these faint, flickering colours, and you follow them.

As well as paths the colours trace tall structures, as high as a cathedral, reaching up to the skies. Once or twice, in the distance, you see other lines in blue or green, and you think they are moving along the paths, but you cannot make out what shape those lines make.

Somewhere on your wanders, you will see a door, outlined in faint, flickering red. You will open it, and step through to the other side.

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Wanderer Fen

Anthony Ellinson was a record producer who went from being studio tea boy at Olympic, to an engineer at Trident, to his first steps in production in the early 1970s. He quickly became the go-to producer for a growing list of psychedelic folk bands like Taking Back Autumn, and The Wild Hares and then for a band that came out of nowhere, never gave an interview or spoke about themselves, but built a cult live reputation in just a few short months: Wanderer Fen.

Record companies were falling over themselves to sign the Fen, and the band could have had their choice of producers, but they chose Anthony, took a small advance but much more control in a deal with Archipelago Records, and began to record the tracks intended for an album the band announced was to be called Open The Door.

Recording was problematic from the beginning. Studio gear broke down, the electricity supply to the building suffered random outages, and the band would disappear for two weeks and then come back and record for forty-eight hours straight, allowing no one in the studio other than themselves and Ellinson.

His friends became increasingly concerned as he lost weight, and looked as if he hadn’t slept in a week. His hands shook slightly, and his eyes were always moving, looking over people’s shoulders and around the room as if he expected to see someone or something there.

His friends saw him less and less though, as he spent all of his time in the studio when the band weren’t recording, playing the tapes over and over, headphones on, hands moving on the deck as if in search of something only he could hear. When an old friend from Trident delivered a tape delay unit he was lending Ellinson to replace one that had broken in the studio he asked how recording was going, and the producer replied that he could hear something in the music, and he had to find it. His friend assumed he meant some interference, an annoying hum, and thought nothing else of it.

But three days later Anthony Ellinson went to the studio at two in the morning, poured petrol from a can over all of the tapes, the desk, and himself, then sat at the recording desk and lit a match.


Several of the people who lived near the studio watched the building burn and the sparks leap up into the sky, and said afterwards that they could have sworn that they heard singing. It sounded as if it came from right in front of them but also a long way away, and it made them feel sick and disorientated, as if they were standing on the deck of a boat in a storm.



No one knows what Wanderer Fen made of all of this, because after that night no one saw or heard from them again, and the one phone number that Archipelago had for them would just ring three times and then answer to what sounded like the crackle of flames.

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Old Friend

You’re sitting in a pub in Leeds, near the railway station, killing time before your connection when a man gets up from a group of four men sitting near you and comes over with a smile on his face. As most people do, you feel yourself slightly on the defensive when a stranger approaches. But he smiles still, and doesn’t seem threatening, and then he says, “Hello” and then says your name.

You move from defensiveness to that horrible feeling of being at a disadvantage, and risking being rude, so you don’t say you don’t know him, you just say, “Hello!” back, a little too brightly and hope that something will jog your memory.

He asks you how things are back where you live, naming the place, and then asks if you are still doing that sport that you always used to do. The nicer he is, as if you are someone he’s missed very much, the less you want to admit to not remembering him. So you fake a conversation and ask the same questions back at him, and so it goes for a few minutes.

Then you see the time on the clock over the bar and you say, “I’m sorry, I’ve got to get a train,” and he tells you it was lovely catching up, and that he hopes you stay well, shakes your hand goes back to his table with the other three men.

You gather up your bags, and as you straighten up you take a sneaky photo on your mobile, so you can share it with friends and family as someone is bound to remember who he is, and you won’t feel so bad for forgetting.

You’ve left it a bit late and have to rush for your train, so don’t get a chance to pull up the photo and share it to social media until you’re sat on the train, bags stowed away, and its lumbering out of the station with a screech of wheels.

For a while, you sit there and look at the photo, but you don’t post it on social media. You don’t send it to any friends. What’s the point, when in the photo there are only three men around the table, and your old friend is not one of them.

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Can You See Me?

You like to think of yourself as a nice person, but you get stressed, like we all do, and that gets worse when you’re hungry and tired and sometimes you say or do things that you wouldn’t if all was well in your world, or you had that moment to think before your mouth spoke.

That was how you were when you came out of a shop, looking on your phone at your work email even though it was well into the evening, and you nearly fell over a man who was sat in a corner of the doorway, blackened cardboard underneath him, a dozen layers of clothes on. He looks up at you, and his bright green eyes stand out against the outdoor tan and the ingrained dirt in the lines of his face.

“Did you not see me?” he said, and that is where another time you might have said sorry, no, apologised for nearly walking over him, perhaps given him some money or gone back into the shop for a sandwich. But this time you are tired and hungry and apprehensive about everything and you don’t think, just snap, “No, I didn’t see you, and you have no right to be there.”

By the time you get home, you regret this, and feel bad about saying it, but there’s nothing you can do about it, and by the time you’ve eaten you’ve mostly forgotten it.

The next day at work you’re searching through a stock photography site for an image to use in a newsletter, and the first hit on ‘man at desk’ is the same man, shaven and clean, sitting behind a white desk in a pale blue shirt and red tie, holding a mouse with one hand, and looking at his laptop, which doesn’t appear to be connected to anything. You have a horrible feeling that if you keep looking, even though it’s just a photo he will turn his head and look at you. The newsletter goes out with some clip-art of a desk, nothing else.

On the way home you’re sat on the train and pull your phone out to pass the journey and look busy so no one talks to you. But then you drop it on the floor, and as everyone else looks at you while pretending not to look at you, you scoop it up and shove it into a pocket, feeling all the journey as if it’s burning you. When you took it out and the lock screen lit up, there he was. Not aggressive or angry, just stood in a park, a little way away, staring at you. It’s a few hours until you dare look again, and when you do the lock-screen picture is your dog, muddy and grinning, just like it has been for a year.

Over the next week he appears in a crowd scene on a Netflix drama set in New York, in with other people on a charity fundraising poster, all stumbling across a finish line in t-shirts and shorts looking exhausted, the only one looking up at the camera is him. He’s modelling trousers in a Boden catalogue and eating fried chicken on a flyer posted through your door and he’s stood behind your friends in a photo one of them shares on Facebook post, and he walks past the window of a colleague who’s working from home and calling in to the office on Teams.

At the end of the week, you have hardly slept and you can’t face speaking to any of your friends. You scuttle out of the house for another few bottles of wine to get through the day, and as you turn a corner, there he is. Just standing there.

“Do you see me?” he says, in a very ordinary voice.

“I see you,” you reply. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

He nods and walks away, and you never see him again, on the street on in a picture or in a film, or anywhere but in your memory, and from that he cannot ever disappear.

#weird #weird fiction #weirdfiction #eerie #copypasta

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The Shells

The house has been empty for years, blank-faced, weed-grown, curtains and blinds down. You pass it regularly on a run, and each time are surprised that it’s not been broken into, vandalised, and then pleased because it says something about the village you’ve moved into.

One day, you slow to a stop, catching your breath, as the front door of the house is open. You’re too curious to run on, so you approach it slowly, listen out for movement, call into the house but without answer. So, you step in, to have a look around.

The hall is dark and your eyes haven’t adjusted from the light outside, so you don’t see them until you take a step and your foot crunches something.

You switch on the torch on your phone, and look down. A little line of seashells, curving in front of you.  We’re a long way from the sea, you think, forty miles or more. A bowl on a hall table, memories of holidays, now spilled onto the floor and your foot the first to find it.

But you lift your phone to light the way ahead, and you see it, sinuous as a snake, a line of shells curving from side to side, halfway down forming into a spiral and then out of it again and leading onwards, into the house.

If you follow it, you will find the shells tracing their way through every room in the downstairs of the house, arcs and patterns and lines that if you follow will take you in and out of every room and finally to the stairs, where the shells disappear up into the darkness. You could follow them. But best just retrace your steps, close the door behind you, go back to your run, and from now on find another route. If you go up the stairs, you’ll follow the shells into a dark room and then a day or two later, depending upon the tides, you’ll wash up on a beach a hundred miles away and no one will be able to puzzle out why you went there, or when.