Book Of Creepypastas #2

folder: "hjklrk"

Hello!

My name is David, and I live in Skibbereen in County Cork in Ireland, which I suppose is relevant to, this, due to the hilly terrain in this general area. The neighboring county, County Kerry, has some of the biggest mountains in Ireland, and Cork has a few interesting ones as well. My parents had actually met for the first time in a mountaineering club in college, and this led to a sort of tradition of mountaineering in my family, at one point myself and my Dad would climb a local hill almost every Sunday!

As a result, I often went hill walking with them and later in my teenage years, with a small group of friends, one of these being a guy named Adam, who I'd known since we had started school, and, well to put it simply, he went missing. It was about a year ago actually, he had been behaving a little bit odd at school and one day just didn't turn up. Eventually, a teacher or parent of someone told us that he had gone missing, and to this day no one knows what happened to him, but I think I may have found out.

You know how I said that I and my Dad would climb a hill every Sunday? Well, we stopped a few months ago, because of in-grown toenails I had. I have a minorly deformed foot, which had been a problem for me in the past, and for whatever reason this made in-grown toenails very nasty and very painful, two surgeries for it were aborted because the local anesthetic wasn't working as a result of infection, antibiotics didn't work, so I went up to Cork City to have it done under general anesthetic. Since both my large toes were ingrown, for a couple of days I was practically immobile, both my doctor's orders not to walk and by the fact that my toes were almost constantly painful. I spent these immobile days on my computer.

Said computer is one I've had for five or six years now. I got it when I was 11 or so, I won't talk about it but at the time my family was going through some difficult times, personal stuff really. Anyway, over the years I upgraded parts and removed others to the point that now the only thing that remains of the original rig are the hard-drives (yes, even the motherboard isn't original!) I was never very efficient at keeping hard-drive space so I generally just got larger or more hard-drives, I have four now, that's six terabytes in total, and I've used 90% of it. I had never really done any mass cleaning of them, so they are littered with miscellaneous files dating back years.

For these aforementioned immobile days I was feeling depressed, sort of agitated and claustrophobic, kind of like cabin fever but worse because I knew at any moment I could go outside, and family members were going outside all the time. After the initial excitement of being able to stay in playing Counter-Strike all day I felt constantly surrounded and I didn't want to be in the same room as anyone for too long. I didn't feel lonely or anything like that, it must have seemed that way to other people, but if anything I was feeling just the opposite.

Probably just a side effect of the anesthetic.

These feelings however quickly disappeared when my father dug out an old box of mine, containing various items from my pre-teen years. It included, among other things, a lot of paper (I used to draw on A-4 sheets, maps of imaginary places and guns and the like, I was a weird child!) an incomplete "fold a day" paper aeroplane calendar which had fallen off my table and could not be rearranged, a few "Adventures of Tintin" graphic novels, and an A-4 pad titled "Atlas of the World" in which I had begun to chart an imaginary planet with cities of <100,000,000,000,000,000 people.

It gave me a huge amount of nostalgia.

For whatever reason, it relieved me of my stress!

I then decided to look through my computer's file system in search of more delicious nostalgia, and more delicious nostalgia I found!

I found folder after folder of project after project, with a large spectrum in terms of organisation. There was one folder in particular, "Videos etc." in which I made stupid little YouTube videos, I found hundreds of compressed raw video files on a variety of different games. I was amazed by how my voice sounded, I cringed at my lack of self-awareness, and laughed at the fascinating humour one has at that age.