Walking Sam (cover art by xBennyRGraux on deviantart)

Walking Sam

A teenager named Brayden was on his way home from school once again. He did the same thing every day. It got boring every so often, but for the most part he was fine mentally...at least that's what he told himself. He'd pretty much memorized the layout of the town after all the time he'd lived there, down to the people he'd see on his way back. One in particular stood out this time though: a tall man in a brown pinstripe suit, stove-pipe hat and a satchel at his side filled with what looked to be little paper cutouts of people. As Brayden looked at the man, their head turned away, as if they were staring at him prior. He sped up his walk slightly and continued on until he reached the end of Baker Street, then he stopped in his tracks. "Which way is home?" He thought.

Suddenly he couldn't remember. "All these years of doing the same thing, why can't I remember?" Then he saw the same tall man turn a corner to his left. He looked...taller? Towering over the other people in the area, but no one seemed to notice him, or the fact that his eyes were glowing white, illuminating what looked from here to be a featureless lower face. Brayden ran the opposite way, taking the long way back to his apartment complex. Once he was there he saw the tall "man" out of the corner of his eye, yet he could somehow make out that the man was in the same form as when he first saw him.

He grabbed his keys and rushed for his apartment, then into his bedroom. It was rather thin, the room was eight feet wide, but with the bed taking up some room it was only about four feet wide, longways was much more spacious, with probably eighteen feet in front of Brayden. The room was lit by two overhead lights, each lighting half the room. Only the one on the bed side was lit, as the other had been blown for two days now. He sat down on the bed, wondering what had just happened. Was it just his concern from seeing the man originally that made him seem so...distorted? Had he actually seen it? Did he eat something strange at school? Or was the whole thing just imagined? No...it was much to vivid to have been his imagination. As he checked out the window to look for the man, he heard a deathly sounding voice from the unlit part of the room: "be not afraid."

Brayden turned his head to see an eight foot tall figure, crouching slightly to fit into the room, emerge from the shadows, now Brayden could see him much clearer. He was right, the man had no features aside from his glowing white eyes. He now had long skinny limbs, sporting his same hat and suit that was now elongated to fit his proportions. As he reached out and put his hand and Brayden's shoulder, Brayden noticed that he had white silhouettes of humans with nooses around thier necks hanging from under his arms. "You can call me Sam. I've noticed you from time to time, walking back from school" The tall man said in a frightfully calming voice. "What...why were you watching me? What are you?" Brayden asked him. Sam seemed to simply ignore the question "Doing the same thing every day, never affecting anyone else, never helping anyone, never truly doing anything of note. It must get so very boring, so...miserable." Brayden tried to speak, but he couldn't think of an argument. He began to consider that Sam was right. What had he ever done to help someone else ever since he started life on his own? "I'm sure we both know what I'm going to say" Sam added. "I'm sure you've at least considered it at some point."

"I..." Brayden couldn't get a sentence out. The thoughts he'd tried so hard to suppress were now bubbling to the surface. He didn't even notice it, but they were both now sitting on the edge of the bed. "Let's be honest with ourselves: no one's likely to notice, save for the cleaning crew. You may even do some people a favor. With one less human, opportunities open up for whoever was behind you. They can probably make much better use of it than you can." Sam said somberly as he lifted his arm and carresed one of the ghastly visages hanging from it. As much as he wanted to argue, Brayden couldn't. As far as he could tell in his current emotionally fragile state, everything Sam was saying was true. "Just consider how much good you'd be doing at such little cost... Here" Sam held out a line of rope, his boney hand clutching it in a subtly anticipating manner.
Braden was found dead by suicide the next morning. But his journey had only begun. He woke up on a mountain, surrounded by black smoke, so thick he might as well have been blind, with voices repeating wrathful phrases all around him.
But as everyone else saw?
Walking Sam had claimed another victim.