Creepypastas

Hands

The worst thing I've ever done in my life happened about twelve years ago, when I was a sixteen year old kid living in Cleveland, Ohio. It was the early fall, when the leaves were just starting to turn orange and the temperatures were starting to fall, hinting at the freezing chill that was only a few months away. School had just started, but it had been going on for about a month now, so all the excitement of going back and reuniting with old friends had been replaced by the realization that we were captives in a place that only wanted to load work upon us. Understandably, me and my friends were all eager to do anything that might remind us of the worry-free, responsibility-free days of summer.

Earlier that year, about the time the last school year had let out, one of my friends from work, (McDonalds, which some people think is lame, but I always had a great time there), had taught me a technique to make yourself pass out with the help of an assistant. It worked something like this: One person would rapidly take ten deep, heavy breaths, and on the tenth, squeeze his eyes shut and hold his breath as tightly as possible while crossing his wrists over his heart. The assistant would then give the person a huge bear hug from behind and squeeze the person's wrists into his breastbone. Within seconds, the person holding their breath would lose consciousness. The assistant was then in a perfect position to make sure you didn't totally collapse and crack your skull open on the sidewalk. The effect only lasted for like a second or two–it wasn't like we were putting ourselves into comas or anything–but it felt like you had been out for hours, and when you came to, the disoriented feeling of not knowing where you were and what you were doing there was awesome.

Now I know some people are like "Are you an idiot?" And yeah, I know, we were probably killing about a million brain cells each time we would knock ourselves out, and I think probably my memory has suffered for it. But to a bored-as-heck sixteen-year-old, I thought it was hella cool. All the effect of getting your lights punched out, with none of the pain of getting hit in the face. I'd tell you to try it to see for yourself, but after what happened; I would never recommend it to anyone.

One interesting side-effect of doing this, which was really most of the reason we did it, was that while you were out, you'd have extremely lucid, vivid dreams, which you could always recall upon awaking. (After all, you were only asleep for two seconds). We were good kids, and had never, and would never try drugs, so to us, this was like a poor man's LSD. These visions, in some way, were usually related to what you were looking at right before you passed out. For example, once I dreamed that I was climbing a mountain. Way up in the Himalayas or something, but there was a hand rail there. Who the hell puts hand rails at 20,000 feet? When I came to and remembered where I was, I realized I had been looking at the staircase at the corner of my girlfriend's living room. Another time, I had a vision of Fred Flintstone smiling and holding out his hand in front of a mural with the D.A.R.E. logo. (That's Drug Abuse Resistance Education, a program cops teach in public schools. You've probably seen the bumper stickers). I woke up and saw that my friend Brett had been standing in front of me right before I slipped into dreamland, and that logo was on his shirt. Where Fred Flintstone came from, I have no idea.

The visions were always mundane things like those. Always, until that one day.

Like I said, school had been going on for about a month, and we were already sick of it. We were hanging out one Saturday in "the field," which was really an easement for the electric company to run their high voltage lines. A few of us were sitting on the metal beams at the bottom of one of the towers. My friend Mike was climbing up to the second tier of beams so he could jump the eight or ten feet to the ground. I thought it was stupid, but hey, I'm the guy who thought it was cool to induce unconsciousness by starving my brain of oxygen.

It was a warm day for October, but the light gray of the sky was slowly getting darker, and in Cleveland, in October, that probably meant that before long, the temperature would soon drop from a comfortable 70 to about 50 in the course of a few minutes, and if we were really unlucky, an ice-cold rain would start to fall. The air was already damp and heavy, and we could hear the quiet buzzing of the high-tension wires above us.