CreepyPasta Collection

Higher Powers

Hey, sorry for not updating this. I just been a bit busy. But I'll try to update soon.
.........

The chairs were the old school folding kind, brown metal with tan cushions that were almost comfortable. They were usually folded and stacked neatly against the wall in the basement of the church on Dionin street. Three times a week they were unfolded and made into a circle: once for bible book club on Monday afternoons, another time for prayer group on Tuesday mornings, and then every Friday night for meetings.

Some Fridays, the circle could get up to twenty members. Most weeks it was half that. Tonight was less. Langston didn't really care. He just needed a meeting.

It had been six years since the last time he got high. It didn't matter. His life was a constant series of triggers. Whenever he felt like pulling one, he would end up here, in this circle, or one just like it, telling strangers he occasionally recognized explicit details of how he threw away his life.

The ritualistic aspect of it was important. The circle was important. The repetition was important.

They joke about how people get addicted to meetings instead of drugs. Langston didn't mind the trade off. At least meetings didn't send you to the emergency room with abscesses. Or into jail for the weekend, sick and detoxing. They don't kill you and swallow you whole like addictions do.

He sat down at one of the chairs, six synthetic sugar packets heartlessly drowned into his coffee. The styrofoam cup was warm in his cold hands. The meeting was about to start.

There was a banging noise coming from down the hall. It sounded like a door hadn't been closed properly and the echoing, cavernous booming rattled through the empty basement and into the little meeting room.

The girl next to him was pounding her feet against the cement floor in time to the noise. She was grabbing her knees with her fingers. Her nails were mostly imaginary, gnawed nearly to the bed.

Between the way she looked and the way she acted it was either her first meeting or a court mandated appearance. Both options were lousy. He smiled over at her and she turned her head slightly.

There was something wrong with her eyes.

She looked down again. Her blonde hair with dull roots obscured her face. And her eyes.

He could hear her teeth grinding against each other. It sounded like an old and dying machine.

He looked away. Someone was speaking. It was Marc. Langston had seen him at dozens of meetings. He had heard his story dozen of times. He could tell it. Wife divorced him, then he was fired, now his brother was dying of esophageal cancer. The repetition was good for people. The ritual was important.

The door rattled off in the distance. It sounded like it was being slammed and reopened by wind. It had been breezy all day, with the October leaves flying in twisting little patterns across the sky. Red and gold and dying in celebratory sacrifice for the coming of fall.

After Marc finished, someone else went. Langston heard them as a dull noise, waves in a seashell in another room. He couldn't focus. He couldn't stop thinking about her eyes.

She was still grinding her teeth. He noticed her knuckles were cut up and weirdly scarred. She was making very, very weird noises very, very quietly. Deep jagged breaths with another noise coming from her. A weird sibilant sound.

Was that really what her eyes looked like?

It must have been the light. A reflection. Someone was talking. He couldn't hear a thing.

He tried to pay attention. The person talking was saying it seemed like there was a new member? And would she want to say something?

He saw the girl next to him raise her head. She stood up.