As you read this thread, you find, as others have noted, that the plausible posts are much scarier than the fantasies.
But the post that will truly haunt you - the one that will forever creep around the edges of your consciousness and grasp hold of your imagination at the strangest moments, never fully releasing it no matter how you laugh, or shudder, or shake your head - isn’t one that could happen… it’s the one that will.
He looked at the remains of the burned wasp nest and noted the tiny charred bodies arranged into letters: “vingince” scrawled across the gravel drive. As the black cloud descended on him, he realized: Wasps can’t spell.
“It’s OK, kids” he said as the two children climbed into their parent’s bed after waking up in the middle of the night, “There’s nothing to be scared of.”
“I disagree.” came a strange voice from under the covers.
Being a heartless bastard, he didn’t even hesitate when he saw the nest of baby bunnies while pushing the lawnmower through the long grass. Later that night, though, as he drunkenly ambled home from the pub, he found his footsteps dogged by an odd multiple echo, and when he looked around in the gloom, he saw hundreds of flares of pale white in the darkness, for all the world like the flash of a cottontail…
If they could spell they probably would’ve been writing out “Please don’t kill us!” with all their sheared ends.
The nest of stinging mud daubers* that I disturbed, however…I don’t know if they can spell, but the can definitely say something close to “Kill the intruder!” in a drone-y, dive-bomb-y sort of way.
*You’ve always heard mud daubers don’t sting, you say? Yes. So have I, and we were wrong. In all fairness, however, they are pretty wimpy stingers, and they aren’t all that dedicated to it.
The newest and most pernicious plague of them all was transmitted not by contact, not by infected air or water, not by fleas or ticks, but an entirely new and unanticipated means: through the very ether of the Internet.
And by the time you so much as read the words of someone infected with it, it was alreaaosidhfpa oi a[oidfn apoia [oaijs[dfco (* 09we8r cxlzvck
“Time heals all wounds, my ass!” he thought bitterly as another one of his fingers fell off. Then again, the talon beginning to poke through at the stub where his thumb used to be held some promise…