Creepypasta: Prometheus's Scion

Creepypasta: Prometheus’s Scion


“A locked room, a burned body with no trace of ignition, and a murder victim. There’s a brainteaser in there somewhere” Stan said.

“If you can think of the answer right now you could save us a whole lot of paperwork” Kenny sighed.

Stan and Kenny were having about as much fun as they could collecting fabric fibers from a couch in the diminutive cabin for lab analysis. Which was to say not a whole lot. Fuck that TV show, being a CSI was freaking boring. Even the deeply unusual matters of the possible crime scene and the nature of both of the deaths associated with it did little to liven the pace.

Ernest Carrel had always been the definition of a harmless hermit. He had kept to himself in his three-room cabin in the outskirts of Alpenview. He enjoyed exploring his cabin’s large grounds, much of which was in rough terrain and thus had been visited very often, but that had pretty much been all there was to him. Until one day people slowly began to realize he hadn’t been in town for quite some time. To alleviate the townsfolk’s worry Deputy Roderick said he would check out the retired painter, just to make sure he hadn’t suffered a nasty fall or the like.

And now here Stan and Kenny were investigating both men’s deaths in the cabin’s claustrophobically cramped dining room. Ernest’s body was still seated in a rocking chair, third degree burns visible all over him and his clothing yet strangely the chair itself was untarnished. Upon his ruined face was a crudely fashioned wooden mask, rendered solid white with a mincing gel with a single inverted triangle in dripping red paint taking up the center mass. To judge by the lack of burn marks it had been placed upon his face after his gruesome demise. Roderick on the other hand seemed to have suffered a more straightforward death, lying in a four-sided pyramid design drawn on the floor with ashes apparently taken from the wood-burning stove. He had been stabbed multiple times in the upper body with a kitchen knife before just being left there to bleed out.

“Hey, think we should take a look at this now or send it back to the lab?” Kenny asked as he picked up an ancient-model camcorder that had been lying on a shelf over the shoulder of Ernest’s corpse.

“What the hell, time is everything to an investigation. Hit playback and let’s watch it now” Stan said as he and Kenny began observing the events of the tape.

The first scene was strange, it was like the camera was being lowered with a rope into a hole in the ground. A flashlight seemed to have been taped to it, and it revealed the hollow interior of a cave as it opened up about twelve feet down. Interesting if disturbing petroglyphs were inscribed upon the walls of the cave, and an inverse red triangle within a white circle being a recurring symbol. After this the rope or whatever had been suspending the camera seemed to break and the camera/flashlight combo tumbled to the floor. It was with some shock that Kenny and Stan could now see the floor of the cave was riddled with charred, disfigured corpses of men with gruesome deformities. A high-pitched keening sound then became deafening as something picked up the camera and shook it violently before focus resumed in the next scene.

In this next scene, it seemed that Ernest had videotaped himself sleeping in fast-motion. As he tossed and turned, a few orbs began to flicker and blur by the camera now and again. After a few minutes a deformed man wearing ragged clothing and a mask similar to Ernest’s could be seen standing over his bed, staring into Ernest’s sleeping face. The man then looked directly at the camera. Stan and Kenny couldn’t help feeling more than a bit terrified when he gibbered something and pointed twice at the camcorder’s lens before the scene just faded out with the same high-pitched sound.

In the final scene the camcorder seemed to have been positioned in the spot it had been occupying on the shelf above Ernest’s corpse when Kenny had picked it up. Stan and Kenny watched dumbstruck as they saw Deputy Roderick open the door only to be attacked with the kitchen knife by Ernest’s immolated corpse. After Roderick fell on the ground in a maimed heap, the dead body that by all right should have been quite literally falling apart left the room. It returned momentarily with the ashes from the stove, tracing the design on the floor around Roderick’s dying body. It faced its back to the camera, removed its mask, and placed it on Roderick’s face. Next it knelt and spread its arms wide as if seeking to embrace an invisible suitor.

That keening sound returned and then faded as quickly as it had come. Its back still to the camera, Ernest’s charred body bent down and picked the mask up before repositioning it on its face. It then walked back to the chair it had been seated upon and sat back down. Next it bent one knee over the other at the thigh and propped its head up with a charred glove of a hand in contemplation, matching Ernest’s current pose.

The two looked at the recording in horror. When the playback cut off they glanced up from the battered camcorder and their jaws went simultaneously agape in stunned disbelief. The incinerated body was in fact no longer in the chair, having evidently disappeared at some point while they had been watching the found footage. For that matter there wasn’t even the expected trail of ashes and scraps of flesh that would have been left if someone had snuck in and dragged it off.

“WHERE’D IT GO?!” Stan screamed.

“How the fuck should I know?! Hell, even if the thing got up and walked away it would have left a trail!” Kenny retorted.

“Maybe. Maybe not” a dry croak snickered from behind them. Paralyzed with dread, it was at that point that Kenny realized the murder knife was missing from Deputy Roderick’s body as well.