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Chapter 1: What is the premise of 'Burnt to the Bone'?
No. This is Creepy. A podcast dedicated to sharing the most famous, chilling, and disturbing creepypastas and urban legends in the world. Whether these stories truly happened or are simply fabrications is for you to decide. These stories may contain graphic depictions of violence and explicit language. Listener discretion is advised. Hey, what's up, y'all?
Man, I don't know about the rest of you, but I've been having a blast lately avoiding anything that resembles the normal depressing news cycle. The horror world has just been so amazing lately. From stuff like sinners and weapons and hard eyes last year to what we have right now in the back rooms and hokum and obsession. There's just so much to actually look forward to.
I've even gotten into horror games, something I've never really had much interest in before. There are so many legit, scary, unnerving, independent horror games out there. Or, at least I think they're indie. I won't share some of the titles I've been playing because they are legit effed up, but...
It's just been so much fun to see the world coming around to horror in more ways than just thinking about slashers and grindhouse movies. Like, I watched Iron Long the other day, the movie adaptation of the game of the same name that was made by the streamer Markiplier. Seriously, has there been a better time for horror?
I'm not even getting paid for these shoutouts, I'm just seriously digging how far horror has come even with mainstream audiences. And the fact that I get to be part of this community?
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Chapter 2: How do the characters cope with the aftermath of a forest fire?
admittedly to a much lesser extent. But still, how can I not be happy? Oh, and I should do a quick request, some actual business. We're looking for more stories that feature either ambiguous or male narrators. By ambiguous, we just mean that there's nothing in the story that calls out that it's a male or female narrator.
You all heard our last ask for stories that feature female narrators, and now we're looking specifically to get some more that feature male narrators. As always, we accept stories regardless, and submissions are always open. Our current need is just for male-narrated stories. Not male narrators, as has been an issue in the past, just the stories.
And don't forget that we do a monthly drawing for all accepted stories for free swag to one lucky writer, just as a special thanks for the work they do. So, if you have a story, and you're interested in submitting and getting paid if that submission is accepted... please check out creepypod.com slash submissions.
Oh, and we have started getting in stories for the 31 Days of Horror event, so make sure to get on that if you want to see your story featured in October. I can't wait for October. Alright, I suppose I should get to the task of providing more horror to the wonderfully scary world of our creation.
First up, from writer Deirdre Gregg and narrated by Heather Thomas, Creepy Presents, Burnt to the Bone.
The Glass River Wilderness died on the afternoon of October 5th, when the family of Dominic and Jennifer Ware set off not one, but three, bright blue smoke bombs at a gender reveal party for Jennifer on a clear, sunny, and brutally dry day.
They thought they had extinguished the fire, despite the dad-to-be's idiot brother throwing his cup of whiskey on it at first, but they missed a spark somewhere, and the whole forest burned down. Glass River was so beautiful that people came from all over the country to visit. But it was only about an hour away from our home, and I practically grew up there.
There were literally trees with knife notches in the bark marking the height of my cousins and me as we grew. We camped there at least a couple of times every year. My aunt Lucy even got married on a mountaintop up there. And it was all gone now. After the fire, everybody told us not to go back, not to even look at the pictures. But my mother couldn't resist.
When she got back that night, she sat at the kitchen table staring blankly ahead. She tried to talk, but started coughing, and cracked open a beer and drained half of it before she tried again. I could smell the smoke rolling off of her. She'd kicked off her hiking boots and they lay crooked on the welcome mat, caked in ash and reeking mud. Promise me you'll never go, she said.
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Chapter 3: What supernatural elements are introduced in the story?
But my mom's handwriting is shit, and I couldn't make it out. Like it legitimately could have been a list of directions or a recipe for chocolate chip cookies. That bad. And somehow getting lost became my fault.
I had been really, really trying to get along with my mom, because having an entry-level job for the past few months has taught me some important life lessons, namely that having an entry-level job sucks. I want to go to college in a few years, and I don't have much choice other than to live at home while I do it.
That's going to become significantly more logistically difficult if my mom and I kill each other. We ended up pulling over to the side of the road, where my mom yelled at me for not being able to read her handwriting, until it turned out that she, also, couldn't actually read her own handwriting, although she pretended otherwise. Our stress level was jacked up further by the other drivers.
We were well off the road, to the point where I was worried the dirt verge would crumble out from under us, but two cars and three trucks laid on their horns honking at us like we were stopped in the middle of the street. This just wasn't a friendly type of area. We did eventually get to White Rock Mountain and parked the car.
We arrived hours later than we had been hoping to get there, but in plenty of time to screw up in several more ways before nightfall. The problem was, we had almost forgotten all the rules you should follow when hiking an unfamiliar trail. I yanked my backpack on and stomped off, ready to burn off the frustrations of the long car ride.
The trail split and split again, and while there were wooden signs to show the way, they were so old and worn. One of them I was pretty sure had been gnawed on, that it was impossible to read all the words. We passed a nurse log with three little saplings, and my mom gave her usual reaction, a cloying smile.
A nurse log is a fallen tree that starts to rot, and seedlings take root there to get a boost up closer to sunlight, and to gobble nutrients from the decaying wood. My mom, who is a nurse, very much views herself as my perfectly nurturing life giver. I know she is hoping that one of these days I'll break down and compare her to a nurse log. I give my own usual reaction, which is to roll my eyes.
I'd be more likely to offer a different botanical comparison. She's more like a stringler fig vine. Or maybe a kudzu. As far as the nurse log, there's a lesson I take from that, too. Get a jump on the competition by pillaging the bones of the dead. After the nurse log, we kept heading generally uphill, looking for a campground called Drake Plateau that was supposed to be a few miles in.
I thought we'd come across more intact signs. But eventually we realized that we didn't know where we were going, and we should probably go back to the car and try to find a trail map. Then we realized we didn't know how to get back to the car either. The trail that we thought we were taking back down petered out altogether. I didn't start to get really worried until we pulled out our compasses.
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Chapter 4: How does the narrative shift to the camping trip at White Rock Mountain?
That was glacial melt. It had to be brutally cold. I didn't know if he could actually get frostbite from flowing water, but his feet must be completely numb by now, and he must be losing body heat like blood from a slashed throat. My mom hurried forward, shifting into nurse mode, and asked if he was okay, and didn't he think he should take his feet out of the water? He looked up.
He guzzled from the water bottle at his side. He mumbled something about not wanting his feet to swell so he could put his boots back on. His gaze was skittering and wandering, and he kept pausing to drink from his water bottle. He stopped to refill it right from the stream. No filter or anything. The even grosser part was he filled it on his right side, just downstream of his feet.
He pulled it up and took another slug. I decided to try to get some useful information out of him before my mom got in too deep. I asked him if he knew the way to Drake Plateau. Drake, he said, snorting a laugh. I don't think you're going to find it. Not the one you mean. We're all in a lot of trouble. We've all gotten crossways with the Wood Wyrm.
He said it with emphasis, so you could practically hear the capital letters. Hear that Wyrm was spelled with a Y. Jack Pine and Lodgepole Pine, Eucalyptus and Bigsia. He rambled on dreamily. What do they all have in common? Anybody who'd been listening to NPR coverage of wildfire season knew the answer to that one. Those were all plants whose seeds germinated after being exposed to fire.
Enough fires, enough heat, and we've managed to hatch something very old and very deep down. I sighed. The guy was probably on drugs, and just as lost as we were, and now my mom was going to insist on bringing him along since he was obviously in bad shape. Sure enough, she reached out a hand to him, telling him he had to get his feet out of the water.
He looked up at her slowly, straightened up, groggily extended a hand. His torso looked weirdly lumpy through the crumpled fabric of his shirt. his fingers closed around hers, and then he leapt to his feet, somehow launching upward and knocked her over backwards. Her backpack cushioned her fall, otherwise she might have had the wind knocked out of her.
I rushed towards them, but then the man yanked up his shirt, and I stopped in my tracks, gagging. His belly was boiling with cysts, swelled to bursting, gleaming and hard with the internal pressure. He flung himself down onto my mother, and some of them ruptured against the bare skin of her leg. I really did throw up then. This is why I have no ambition to follow my mom into the nursing field.
I don't have the stomach for it. But when those cysts burst open, it was less disgusting but much weirder than I had expected.
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Chapter 5: What challenges do the characters face while hiking?
The liquid that came streaming out looked more like sap than anything animal. and the little clusters of leafy fronds that uncurled from each one were delicate, quivering, as new and as fragile as the plants I'd sprouted from seeds and paper cups at school. I might have stayed frozen, but my mom started screaming her head off and shoving at him with her arms and other leg.
I snapped out of it and ran at him, kicking him with a disgust turned to rage. He rolled away over the bank and into the stream and made his way clumsily through it and onto the other side. He staggered to his feet and started walking away, and then I wanted to throw up again. His feet were unraveling, long strands of skin trailing behind him like water weeds.
More boils burst open along his body with audible pops, and the frills of leafy tendrils extended out to the sides, blindly questing like newborn kittens. Now it was my turn to help my mom to her feet. We didn't see any cuts on her leg, but she walked a little ways upstream and then peeled off her boots and socks and then gingerly stepped into the water.
She gave an involuntary scream when she felt how cold it was, but I could understand wanting to blast off any residue of that diseased flesh. She said at least the cold was distracting her from the sharp rocks digging into her feet. I frowned, because we really couldn't afford for her to have any kind of foot injury.
But when she clambered out of the stream and scrubbed her skin with the alcohol wipes from the first aid kit, there didn't seem to be any cuts on her legs or feet. She quickly put her socks and boots back on. Her face kept reverting back into a rictus of disgust. One good thing had come out of this little meeting.
At least we could follow the stream downhill, which would hopefully get us to some kind of familiar territory. Maybe because my mom had been rattled by the encounter, or maybe it was the sound of the rushing stream, but she finished drinking all her water within the hour.
Of course, she could have used her personal water filter to purify water from the stream, but the thought of getting anywhere near the water that those diseased, disintegrating feet had been in made me want to puke. Unfortunately, given our late start to the day and our confused wanderings around the mountainside, it became clear we were not going to make it out of the woods before nightfall.
The good thing about getting lost while backpacking is, you have the supplies you need for a reasonably comfortable night's sleep. Before it got too dark, we found a sandy hollow under some tree roots, a spot that wasn't visible from the stream. Instead of our bright blue high-roofed tent, we tacked up a couple of brown tarps and a ground cover beneath us.
I thought we would be reasonably well hidden if the sick man came back our way. My mom broke out containers of self-heating noodles. Normally, I might have bitched about the amount of microplastics and dodgy chemicals we were consuming, but I didn't say a word as we gobbled down the spicy, salty, piping hot noodles.
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Chapter 6: Who is the mysterious man encountered by the characters?
Dragons of the earth, not of sky. Below me I saw a long, long golden brown body twisting toward me through the ocean of cinders. A huge, heavy-jawed head lifted out of the ashes to snap the flying man out of the air. Just as the man had said, something very old that had slumbered deep beneath the earth was finally hatching, or maybe sprouting.
The wood wyrm turned its glass-bottle green eyes on me, and then it breathed a torrent of flame. My own body caught fire, and it burned with all its ancient rage and sorrow. It felt the pain of Glass River burning and the pain of so many other wildfires. Wildfires that had grown bigger and faster and wilder given the overheated air, all the drying and dying forests.
Thousand-year-old trees consumed alongside the frail little things that scurried around them at a rate so much faster than they could be replaced. It was a relief when I jerked awake. I heard something outside of our tent, and I sat up fast. My mother was gone. I scrambled up, quiet as I could, and I saw her walking slowly into the forest. I called after her, but she didn't turn her head.
I got it. She had held it together for my sake, but she was going to go throw up now. I thought of how I had gagged and vomited at just the sight of the boil-covered man. It must be so much worse for her, with the feel, the smell, the contact of that infected flesh, cysts bursting and little live things squirming inside. My gorge was rising again just at the thought.
I ducked back in our shelter and grabbed her sleeping bag. I could drape it over her shoulders, at least, when she was shivering afterward. I felt a flash of guilt, thinking of times she'd sat with me while I was sick, back when I used to want that. I grabbed my pack, too. I wasn't sure how long we were going to be out there. Maybe until dawn. Maybe we would just keep going.
By the time I caught up, she was still plodding forward into the trees. She was going a long way from our campsite on a very dark night, and her lurching walk made it look like she was going to trip over a tree root any minute. I hurried after her, calling her name, but she didn't respond. I grabbed her arm. Even through the sleeve, the flesh was burning with fever.
She glanced over at me with glassy eyes, but didn't stop and didn't respond to my pleas. When I tried to physically block her path, she shoved me aside without much effort. She's still a little bit taller than I am and outweighs me by a lot. I reached for her arm again, but then recoiled. If she was infected, just from skin contact with that man, I didn't want the same thing to happen to me.
So for now, all I could do was follow. At some point, she would have to stop. And then I could do... I didn't know what. Something.
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Chapter 7: What transformations occur during the climax of the story?
but we walked on and on for hours. I was exhausted, my legs burning, my shoulders aching, when finally we broke out of the forest and started across a flat expanse. In the moonlight, I caught a glimpse of her leg, horribly swollen, the shape distorted by lumps under the skin.
Then I saw people ahead of us in the moonlight and almost called out, before I saw they were shambling along, just like she was. It was a long walk across the field before we came to the burned place. It was a low valley, blackened and dead. Some crumbling stubs of trees still stood, but mostly it was just ash as far as I could see. The man we'd met at the stream walked ahead of us.
He waded into the ash without hesitation. He stopped and laid down and buried himself in the ash like a kid playing in sand at the beach. And the rest of them followed suit, including my mom, lying there like so many nurse logs, ready to rot and feed the newborn forest. She was probably too far gone to save. I knew that already.
But I knelt down next to her and somehow stuffed her limp and unprotesting body into the sleeping bag and dragged it out of the ashes. As soon as we got out of the cinders, she started to struggle. She clawed her way out of the sleeping bag and back to her place in the ashes. I'm going to get help, I said out loud, more to convince myself than anything else.
I walked and walked, and when I got to a forest road, I sat beside it for a long time, hoping a vehicle would come along. But no one did, and so I finally hauled myself back to my feet. When I did see a Forest Service truck, I wasn't sure it was real. I figured they wouldn't believe me and I'd have to beg and plead to get them to listen. But I only had to say a few sentences before they nodded.
I realized this wasn't the first time they were hearing about people burrowing into the ashes. It was happening everywhere. It was happening in so many places that despite some initial hand-waving about classified information and national security, those of us who survived were able to compare notes. My mom was one of those survivors.
She was sedated and pumped full of countless medications whose names I couldn't keep track of. I was on some of them myself. They made us both terribly sick. My mom lost the 20 pounds she'd been talking about wanting to drop, and then another 20 pounds after that. She lost other things, too.
When they let me in to visit her, I drew the blind shut when I realized how much it was upsetting her to see a tree through the window. Plenty of the others did not survive. The ones who had been there a little longer, who had roots growing down through their backs into the soil, and seedlings poking out above them. Most of those people died. They dug them up and burned the bodies.
They said they cleared out the valley. Some people never learn. I'm not sure it will do much good. There are at least a couple dozen wildfires in the United States right now, and many others around the world. Who knows how many people are making their way towards the broken and burnt lands? Who knows what will rise from the ashes?
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Chapter 8: How does 'Choose Your Own Destruction' explore interactive storytelling?
A. Scream for help. B. Find the key. Okay, deep freaking breath in. You've seen these movies, read these books. You know this game. Another thing you know. The odds won't be kind to you, the hapless victim. Still, there's usually a razor-slim path to victory. It's no fun if you die right away. That's why the first choice is always an easy one.
Clearly, anyone still hanging around the projector booth and the popcorn stand is dead. Finding their gory, jackknifed corpses will prove quite dramatic if you manage to make it to the lobby. So, no point in screaming. That leaves the key. Which was definitely that metal object you spat out with the popcorn earlier. It gleams dully in the half-chewed kernels oozing under the seat before you.
You test your shackles. The wrist cuffs are tight, cutting off circulation. But with dim relief, you discover you've been sitting on chains. Your right shackle has an arm's length of extra give, enough to reach under the seat. Your hand feels deadened and oddly stiff. Your whole body, actually. But you twist forward and tweeze the key with your fingertips.
Something under the chair bear-traps down on your wrist. A hand. Your watcher's bony, spidery, nightmare hand. Clamping you in place, he slices out with razor fingered brutality, opening grinning gashes across your knuckles. You scream, shriek, bellow, and finally yank free. Like you suspected, nobody rushes in from the lobby to rescue you.
Instead, a crooked silhouette unfolds from the dark row ahead, standing silently. Like always, he's wearing your clothing, or tattered replicas. Same pants you wore to the theater, same shirt, even your favorite jacket. All of it shredded at the seams, too small for his distended form. Except that's not the worst of him.
Those shimmering, high-beam eyes have always cast the rest of him in ambiguous, bent-bone shadows. But he's tall. So tall, his unseen face turns fish-belly pale as he rises into the projector light and... That's not a face! No mouth, no nose, just a featureless egg-smooth terror dotted with two spherical lenses. Movie projectors for eyes?
They ignite, and he angles his gaze upon you, dazzling your vision. Your shackles rattle as you shield your eyes. Silent as the first films, your watcher waves at you with one gloved hand, waggling long, razor-tipped fingers like the first time you caught him prowling, three nights ago, outside your bedroom window.
Like something from the endless horror movies you use and abuse to escape your stressful life, fake kills to distract from the troubled pains of daily existence. The sight of him warps your reality. Your hyperventilating mind can't keep up. That razorblade glove is famous, like MTV famous, though you feel anything but starstruck.
You shrink back into your seat and press your hacked-up hand against your chest. Blood slicks your fingers. But despite yourself, you grin. The key digs into your palm. Your watcher observes you with a daft tilt of head, flickery gaze blinding and amused. He could easily reach over the seat and end you fast. Slash, slash. But where's the carnival in that?
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