CreepyPasta Stories to read at night

The New Fish Part 1

I was jolted awake about an hour ago, confused and disoriented; my heart was pounding and my sheets were soaked in sweat. Some slavering, malevolent horror was in the trailer with me, creeping up on me while I slept with poised claws and razor teeth. The absolute certainty of this coated my mouth with the metallic taste of fear, sour and dry and thick. I grabbed the baseball bat that lays beneath my cot and tip-toed around the cramped darkness of my trailer, straining to hear over the keening of the wind outside.

And the pounding of my own heart.

Of course, there was nothing here except my goldfish and yours truly, the sweaty guy in his underwear. It was the gusting wind that startled me awake - it happens quite often in the late autumn and early winter. The wind rips through the scrub of skeletal trees that surround the trailer park and charges, with a lion's roar, into our lonely huddle of frail little shelters. It gibbers and shrieks and pounds on our walls with fists of dead leaves and frozen grit.

Satisfied that I wasn't about to become chow for some unspeakable creature, I laid back down on my squeaky, saggy old cot and tried to get back to sleep - but I couldn't. Instead, I found myself thinking about that night in the penitentiary, the night of the lockdown; I kept thinking about Mikey and Big Rob and the rest of them, all of us huddled in a cell with the lights off and the frigid northwest winds howling at the walls. After a while, I gave up trying to sleep. Instead, I sat down in front of the computer and I started typing. I'm no story teller, not like Mikey or Hutch, but I'll try my best.

When I first came to the Pen, the thing that struck me the most about the place was just how much the cons talk. On the occasions when I'd served time in the County jail, there had been talk, sure, but it was terse and impersonal - when they're only serving a few months, I guess a lot of people feel the situation is too temporary to bother forging any ties with their fellow inmates. You'd play cards with your cellie, or you'd sit in the day room and watch TV in relative silence; the only time that there would ever be any noise or action was when a scrap broke out over a card game. Fights were the only thing that passed as excitement in County; every other moment of the day was comprised of dull, boring nothing. Going in, you just hoped that the food wouldn't be too bad, and that your cellie wouldn't end up being a gang member or a meth-head biker waiting out a long patch of dead time. People, in other words, who might beat the shit out of you as a way to pass the hours.

The Pen, though - it's an incredibly noisy, smelly, vocal environment. I remember, very clearly, the moment when my little group of new arrivals were let out of the Fish Tank and into our new home, a pod housing two hundred inmates. I was overwhelmed by the deafening din of voices and activity when the hacks marched us, bundles in hand, out onto the range. Of course, there were the obligatory cat-calls and wolf-whistling, but most of the cons seemed completely oblivious to us - they were too busy living the ebb and flow of penitentiary life.

Of course, this was not actually true. Cons see everything. And I mean everything. But they talk even more.

My first cellie wanted both my bale and my ass, in that order. That wasn't happening. I hammered him in the mouth and it was on - the fight spilled out of the cell and into the corridor of the pod. He was a big, tough old bull, but I had him leaking and his confidence was shaken. Before the C.O.'s got to us, I'd managed to get the nasty old fuck face-down onto the floor, and was whamming away on the back of his head and neck like a jackhammer. Then the hacks got there and one of them laid a size twelve boot upside my skull. The kick knocked my brain clear over the Moon: the world immediately went out of focus and it stayed that way for almost twelve hours. I spent the next three weeks in the Hole for fighting, and when I got out I was placed in a different pod. Word had got around that this fish wasn't exactly new, and that I had a mean right-cross; no one bothered to try and roll up on me in the yard that day, and when I sat down at chow with my new cellie and some of his boys, no one objected. I had been checked, and I'd passed the test. I wasn't a punk or a sissy: I could sit with the men.