In the same vein as SCP, there’s the Basement of Warehouse 23. It’s nowhere near the “scariest” website around, especially as it was originally intended to be a repository for potential RPG artifacts, but some of the entries are very creepy indeed. It’s great fun to browse through.
The whole SCP thing is just a huge collaborative fiction piece set around the premise that there is a secret organization, the “Secure-Contain-Protect” Foundation, trusted with the oversight of various paranormal objects, many of which are extremely dangerous, and some of which are living beings. The various entries are deliberately styled to look like laboratory reports or experiment logs; it makes things seem “objective”, authoritative, and official. Kinda like the documents you might find in file drawers at Area 51 or something. The redactions are intended to give an air of authenticity; you’ll note that most of the blacked-out information appears to be names or places that might identify people or locations where the SCP Foundation might be. Of course, a sp00ky government agency doesn’t want to be identified like that.
Most horribly vague SCP? Gotta be SCP-231. It appears that the sole remaining individual, SCP-231-7, is a young girl, possibly of single-digit age, who has been impregnated with some unspeakable cosmic horror by a doomsday cult; preventing the birth requires administering a procedure every 24 hours that appears to involve rape and/or violence. Failure to administer the procedure will result in an “end-of-the-world scenario”. Of course, none of this is stated outright, which makes it all the more horrible. And there’s the implication that, since personnel who perform the procedure are given amnesiac drugs and have false memories implanted, anyone, including you the reader, may have already been involved.
Reminds me of a short story I read years ago, where a man meets an attractive woman at a bar…has sex with her, whereupon she immediately undergoes an extremely rapid pregnancy and birth, dying in the process and withering away into a mummified corpse. The baby ages rapidly too, reaching adulthood in half a day or so, and is an exact copy of the woman, including her original memories, except now she calls the guy “Daddy.” The guy comes to realize that he’s now responsible for impregnating this bizarre creature every day, whereupon she gives birth to another incarnation of herself and dies. Don’t recall the consequences of breaking the cycle..
On preview: That’s what happens when I take too long to type out an entry. hehe
My take is that they’re in the style of a government agency. Think X-Files or Warhouse 13. The documents are presumably declassified documents that have been redacted in order to obscure certain names and dates.
Ah. For some reason it’s not setting off my creepy radar the way the others did. That, and the short story, feels a little too outlandish. Like, going out your way to be torture-ific for its own sake.
In the SCP story you mention
why not just kill the girl? They say it’s not an option but don’t explain why.
I’m gonna dispense with the spoilerboxes. I think it’s because, when 1 through 6 were deliberately or accidentally killed, the result of each death was more and more catastrophic each time. When #5 was killed, it appears the entire site was destroyed in the aftermath. There may be some sort of “cumulation effect” such that they believe attempting to kill #7 will result in a catastrophe that can’t be contained.
YES! That’s exactly what 231 reminded me of too. I can’t remember where I read that story, but I remember reading it as a kid and being horrified by it, especially the part where he was about to pull out before ejaculation but she begged him not to, and then he found out why.
ETA: Might it have been in a book called “100 Horror Tales” or something?
Freudian Slit, the answer to your question is obvious. They can’t kill her because [DATA EXPUNGED]
I’m seriously tempted to sign on as an editor, because I’m seeing niggling little mistakes that detract from the official tone that lends realism. (Like I don’t have enough demands on my time!)
I’m sure it was in a short story collection, not online or a magazine, but I can’t remember the book. I want to say that “Daddy” is the title of the story, but I’m not absolutely certain, and so far I haven’t found anything by searching for that title.
Well, I looked in the book I was thinking of – 100 Hair-Raising Little Horror Stories, one of Barnes and Noble’s collections of “100 <adjective> Little <genre>” they put out in the mid-90’s – and I couldn’t find the story in there. But I really don’t have that many collections of horror short stories, so I can’t think of where else it could have been.
Slight further update: I found three more possibilities, 100 Creepy Little Creature Stories, 100 Ghastly Little Ghost Stories and 100 Wild Little Weird Tales. Ghost Stories actually has a story called “Daddy” in it, which got me all hopped up with excitement thinking I’d found the story, but alas, it turned out to be a different story about a little girl whose dead father comes to visit her.
Man, I wish I could remember where I read that story. I think it had another story in it about a con man and his wife and their friend, who would travel from town to town and trick the locals into paying $10 each for a chance to sleep with the main character’s wife, and their friend was a plant who would always “win,” until they came to the town in the story, where the locals were waiting for them at the local bar, and when they got caught pulling their scheme,
I believe the woman was going to be raped by the entire group of bar guys, and in the meantime, the local pig farmer who also happens to be a champion “hog nutter” began to castrate the two men as the story ended.
And boy, did THAT phrase creep me out.
Chorpler: I hope that you find that story. It sounds pretty interesting.
Any further luck? I’ve been thinking about it, and I’m almost positive it came from a book of collected short stories that I bought sometime in the mid-80s from the Science Fiction Book Club. Unfortunately, the one book title I can remember (Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural) doesn’t seem to be sold any more, and I can’t even find a table of contents. I’ll ask my parents tonight if they’ve still got my old books or if they’ve been sold off.
Reminds me of a story I once read, I don’t remember where.
The police are cleaning up the scene of multiple bodies, but no evidence of what killed them, except that it was horrific. But one of the deputies knows what it was…
A couple, a nerdy little guy and a beautiful woman, are forced off the road by a brutal biker gang. They beat up the guy and proceed to gang-rape the woman. At first, the guy and her are begging them not to do it, pleading with them. When it’s pretty evident they’re not gonna stop and are just enjoying it, the guy starts egging them on, and she starts “participating” instead of fighting. When they’re all spent, the couple manage to escape…
It turns out that the woman has a very rare, very painful and fast-acting disease, to which only the nerdy guy is immune. So the gang were all infected and died horribly. The couple are never caught, and deputy isn’t about to chase them, seeing it as justice done.
I probably didn’t tell it as well as the author did.