Creepypasta Stories – Scary Stories and Original Horror Fiction

It is one of the lesser mercies granted to the mind in the early stages of its undoing that it still seeks corroboration. A man may stand upon the lip of the irrational and yet believe, for a little while longer, that some outward witness, some ledger or parish register or sober testimony preserved in municipal dust, will either recall him to sense or else confirm his fears in terms manageable enough to bear. I clung to that hope with more desperation than I then understood. The journals had become too inward, the chapel too charged with implication, the repeated face in the portraits too dreadful in its persistence for me to rest content with family writings alone. If the Cohen line had indeed preserved, beneath the appearance of inheritance, some darker continuity of office and expectation, then traces of it must exist beyond the walls of the house. Secrets kept across generations seldom remain pure. They leak into account books, burial records, hurried correspondence, and the local habits of silence by which communities learn what subjects are best approached indirectly, if at all.

Accordingly, I left Cohen House on the second morning after my first examination of the journals and made my way to the village church, a low grey structure of unlovely aspect, older in part than the house itself and attended by a churchyard whose stones had sunk at angles suggestive of long familiarity with damp ground and little affection from the living. There I made the acquaintance of Reverend Oswin Peterson, a man of perhaps sixty years, spare in build and careful in manner, with a face more marked by study than by age and eyes that had the unfortunate habit, common among scholars of a certain kind, of revealing interest before caution had had time to intervene.

I introduced myself, explained in general terms my relation to the Cohen estate, and asked whether the church retained family records older than those I had already seen among the house papers. At the mention of Cohen House, some reservation p***ed over him so swiftly that another man might have denied having noticed it. Yet his learning was plainly of the archival sort, and curiosity, once touched, contended in him with prudence. He led me after some hesitation into a vestry room crowded with registers, memorandum books, tithe rolls, and various ecclesiastical remnants that had outlived both their authors and their utility.

“The Cohens,” he said, drawing out a ledger from a shelf darkened by long neglect, “were generous where land and repairs were concerned, though never especially warm in the ordinary parochial sense. They maintained themselves alongside the church rather than within it, if you understand me.”

I said that I did not, not fully, and he gave me then the first of several looks I would later remember with growing unease.

“There are families,” he replied, “who attend. Others who influence. And a very few who preserve private devotions under the appearance of propriety. The records concerning the western estate are not complete.”

This was said lightly enough, yet when he opened the ledger and turned its pages with a practiced hand, I saw at once that the incompleteness to which he referred was not the common result of mildew or neglect. Several entries had been crossed through with such force that the original names could scarcely be recovered. On three pages the lower portion had been cut away altogether. In the margins of a much later register, beside a note of repairs to the church roof funded in part by one Matthew Cohen, another hand had added, in smaller script: Family oratory not visited. Matter deferred.

“What matter?” I asked.

Peterson did not answer at once. He drew out a second volume, then a third, and compared them in silence. At length he selected a loose sheet tucked between two later sermons and laid it before me. It was unsigned, but clerical in tone and plainly not meant for public reading.

The private chapel at the western house stands outside the authority of this parish and ought never to have been so maintained. I have refused again the request to consecrate the lower chamber or to examine the painted line kept there. The family insists upon an office for which there is no doctrine and no allowance. They speak of succession not in spiritual but in hereditary terms, and have upon more than one occasion used a title I will not record again. The place should be closed and the matter concluded, but there is reluctance among them that exceeds superstition.

He stopped me with a gesture when I attempted to read on.

“The rest names names,” he said. “And I do not yet know whether it is well that you should have them.”

I confess that his reluctance acted upon me as fuel rather than restraint. I asked whether the “painted line” referred to portraits, and whether the private chapel mentioned might be the very chamber I had found behind the bricked corridor at Cohen House. He answered that it could be nothing else. When I then told him, perhaps unwisely, that I had already opened the sealed p***age and entered the room, a silence fell between us so complete that I heard the faint rasp of my own sleeve against the edge of the table.

“You opened it,” he said at last, not as a question, but as a repetition by which the mind buys time to grasp what has already been heard.

“The chapel was hidden behind later brickwork. I found journals there. Family papers. Sermons, if sermons they may be called. The name Surjawobi appears often.”

He closed the ledger before him with more force than the doblockent deserved.

“Do not say that word here again.”

The sharpness of the rebuke would have startled me in any case, but what unsettled me more was that it seemed less an admonition born of theological offense than an instinctive recoil, as though the utterance itself had crossed some line neither of us had agreed to recognize until it had been crossed. I asked him then, in a quieter tone, what he knew of it.

“Only enough,” he said, “to wish your family had succeeded in forgetting it.”

That phrase, so much like a contradiction, required elaboration, and in the hours that followed I extracted from him, from the ledgers, and from several other parish doblockents a picture more fragmented but also more alarming than anything the journals alone had offered. The Cohen line had, for at least two centuries, maintained a strange and intermittent relation to the parish church: supportive, outwardly orthodox, yet resistant at every point where clergy sought access to the western chapel or inquired too closely into deaths, successions, and private rites. Three clergymen had recorded concern, though each in different language. One called the family’s observances “deformed survivals.” Another, more cautious, referred only to “a hereditary anxiety touching the elder line.” The third, whose unsigned note I had already seen, came nearest frankness and was also the one whose pages had suffered most from subsequent removal.

What emerged beyond dispute was this: the chapel had been sealed not once, but after an internal conflict within the Cohen family itself. A memorandum dated in the middle of the last century referred obliquely to “the elder Mr. Septimus, who has closed the western sanctuary and forbidden the procession below.” Another letter, from a solicitor in Bath to a parish officer, mentioned concern regarding “the mental and religious state of Mr. Septimus Cohen, whose alterations to the estate have rendered access to a certain internal chapel impossible.” Yet still another note, written several years later by a different hand, described the closure not as an act of derangement, but as “an attempt to delay the appointment.”

There, for the first time in an external record, I found the notion of delay used in the same sense as the journals. Septimus had not sought to end the thing hidden at Cohen House. He had sought only to slow it.

Peterson, who had thus far confined himself to doblockents, now spoke with greater directness than I believe he had intended when first admitting me to the vestry.

“Your family,” he said, “appears to have cultivated some idea of office bound not to ordination, nor even to belief, but to descent. That much is plain. What is less plain is why successive generations feared it and preserved it in equal measure.”

I told him then of the portraits, of the repeated face, of the memorandum that declared the likeness neither hereditary nor symbolic, and of the dreams—though of the last I spoke with reluctance, for even then I was ashamed to hear such things in my own voice. Peterson listened without interrupting, but his expression altered with each sentence, withdrawing from scholarly attention into something nearer private alarm.

“When did the dreams begin?” he asked.

“After I had begun reading in earnest.”

“And before you opened the chapel?”

“No. After.”

He turned away from me then and went to a small cabinet near the vestry wall, from which he drew a packet of folded papers tied with faded blue tape. These he did not at first hand over, but held with the indecision of a man who suspects that concealment and disclosure may both now be forms of harm.

“There were rumors,” he said, “not church records exactly, but correspondence preserved because it touched upon burials, legal transfers, and matters the parish wished no involvement in. I had not connected them fully before now. Perhaps I did not wish to. Several heirs to Cohen House died before taking possession. Others vanished after brief residence. In one case there was no body. In another, the body was buried with unusual haste. At least twice the language used by surviving relations suggests that the deceased had begun to resemble some earlier member of the line in ways judged… inadmissible.”

He gave me the packet. The first letter within concerned a young man of the family who had inherited in the absence of two elder cousins and died within the winter of taking rooms at the estate. Officially, the cause was fever. Unofficially, a relative wrote to the rector that the deceased “had taken on, in the last month, an aspect so painfully akin to the painted ancestor in the west chamber that his mother forbade mirrors in the upper rooms.” Another letter, decades later, referred to a Cohen daughter married out of the line whose son “ought not to be received under the western roof, the old resemblance having shown itself in the eyes.” The writer had underscored the last phrase twice.

By the time I had read through these, the room around me seemed to have shifted its relation to daylight. The vestry window, though small, had admitted a modest brightness when I first entered. Now the weather had lowered, and the light across the ledgers had taken on the grey cast that precedes rain though no rain yet fell. Peterson offered tea, which I refused without courtesy enough to thank him, and asked instead the question which by then had imposed itself upon every other.

“If this was known,” I said, “why was the estate allowed to p*** on at all? Why not sell it? Pull it down? Break the line of succession in some ordinary legal fashion?”

He answered with a gravity that has remained with me more stubbornly than many grander utterances of that unhappy season.

“Because not every inheritance depends upon law.”

We said little after that. He gave me copies of certain extracts and permitted me to note references from others, but his willingness to ***ist me had plainly reached its limit. When I rose to leave, he accompanied me as far as the churchyard gate and there, after a visible struggle between decorum and conviction, placed a hand upon my sleeve.

“If you can leave the house,” he said, “leave it. Whatever your family preserved there, it does not appear to have required belief in order to proceed. And if the chapel was opened by your hand, then I do not think research will keep you safely outside it.”

There are moments when warning and prophecy stand so near one another that only hindsight distinguishes them. At the time I thanked him, ***ured him that I meant only to understand the matter sufficiently to place the estate in order, and walked back toward the road with papers in my pocket and a confusion in my mind that no longer admitted any simple hierarchy of fears. I had sought corroboration and found it. The chapel was real in the oldest and least comforting sense. The Cohen line had, across generations, maintained some private conception of office bound to blood and likeness. Septimus Cohen had sealed the western sanctuary not from caprice, but in resistance. He had failed. Several heirs had been byp***ed not by chance, but by death, disappearance, or disqualification of a sort no legal register could honestly record.

Yet the most disturbing conclusion arose not from the doblockents, nor from Peterson’s warning, but from the pattern they implied when placed beside Bellam’s letter and my own arrival at the estate. The succession had narrowed over time. Branches of the family had withered, or turned away, or been made impossible. Relatives I had scarcely known had died childless, withdrawn abroad, or severed themselves from the western house with what I had once considered ordinary family coldness. Now these histories ***umed another shape. They looked less like the common attrition of a lineage than the stripping away of alternatives.

I returned to Cohen House by a longer path that led first past the village and then across a rise from which the western wing could be seen more distinctly than from the front drive. There, with the afternoon dwindling and the house set dark against a sky of dull iron, I noticed something which had escaped me before. The sealed corridor and hidden chapel, judged against the outer m*** of the building, occupied no improvised corner or accidental annex. They stood very nearly at its concealed center. The rest of the estate, for all its breadth, seemed from that angle less a residence than a shell built outward from one protected chamber.

Mrs. Martha Rook was in the kitchen when I entered, laying kindling for the evening fire. She looked up as I came in, took one glance at my face, and set down the bundle in her hands without finishing the task.

“You’ve been asking in the village,” she said.

“I have.”

“And at the church.”

“Yes.”

She nodded once, not in approval, but as one acknowledging the arrival of something long anticipated and never desired.

“My mother told me,” she said after a pause, “that when the west side was shut, no one in service was to p*** that way again. They said it was for safety. But she said the old master gave the order as if the house itself had heard too much. When he had the bricks laid, he stood and watched the whole work, and afterward made them put plaster over the joins so a body might forget where the p***age had been.”

“Did he say why?”

“He said forgetting was the only kindness left to the family.”

It is difficult to describe what effect such words produce when they answer not curiosity, but suspicion already half-formed. They do not enlighten so much as settle, like fine ash, upon conclusions the mind had hoped still to disturb. I asked her whether she had known Aldus Cohen well.

“Not well,” she replied. “Well enough to see he listened, sir. And well enough to see he hoped it might stop with him.”

That night, long after she had gone and the kitchen fire had burned low, I sat alone in the study with Peterson’s copies before me and the chapel journals unopened at my side. Beyond the walls of the room the house lay in a quiet no wind interrupted. The effort to leave, which Peterson had urged upon me, still presented itself as a practical option. I had a valise. I had what papers I needed. By dawn I might have been on the road and beyond the district before noon. Yet even as I considered it, I knew the thought had lost its former simplicity. One does not easily flee a place once one has begun to suspect that the place is not the true center of the danger, but only its appointed chamber.

For by then another conclusion, darker than any yet written in the records, had settled into me with intolerable steadiness. I had not inherited Cohen House because I was the nearest surviving relation in the ordinary sense. Nor had the estate fallen to me merely because the family line had thinned by chance. The line had been pared down, delayed, and brought, through a sequence of failures and partial resemblances, to a point where only one claimant remained who had not yet stood before the chapel and understood what waited there.

The inheritance had not selected me after the fact.

It had been narrowing toward me for years.

Part V