story-murky

Murky Midnight

Somewhere, somebody must've been feeling their pumpkin-spice, first-chill-in-the-air October vibes, but in Los Angeles, Jules broiled like a 7-11 hot dog under a heat lamp, in a packed Expo Line car, with an AC unit farting puffs of tepid wind directly onto the top of her head. There could be no worse place than this. It was literal Hell.

Airless heat enveloped the city. At 4:30 in the afternoon, the sun slanted straight into everybody's eyes, and gilded every surface with a molten gold-orange light. Jules' cute pink face mask was damp. She could feel her cheeks getting more chapped with every breath. She'd been quick enough to score a seat at Downtown Santa Monica station, but already she regretted her own greediness: she was riding backwards. She'd be green with motion sickness long before she made it to Metro Center.

As the train clattered along, Jules gazed out the window, holding her backpack in her lap with both arms wrapped around it. The city streamed past. Concrete walls covered in colorful graffiti. Tight little bungalows with bars on the windows and the doors. Sprawling storage unit complexes. Apartment anthills bristling with balconies. Bumper to bumper traffic. All of it shimmering in the pitiless heat.

A wheeze of brakes, a whoooonk of the horn, and the train slowed.

Bing-bong. The automated voice came over the speakers: "Now arriving Westwood Rancho Park Station. Exit here for Westside Pavillion."

The doors opened, letting in a blast of volcanic air and five billion more commuters.

Bing-bong. "Please stand clear and allow riders to exit the train."

The people inside the car shoved toward the doors as the people on the platform tried to squeeze in.

Bing-bong. "Please stand clear. The doors are closing."

"Not a chance," murmured the guy in the seat next to Jules.

Jules smiled politely, then remembered her nose and mouth were covered by her mask. It didn't matter. He wasn't looking at her. He was watching the crowd, his phone held loosely in his hands, despite the automated warnings to keep valuables out of sight and report any suspicious activity by using the train intercom.

Bing-bong. "Please stand clear. The doors are closing."

Some fool was actually trying to maneuver his bike into the train. Jules blew out a breath, misting the inside of her mask with her own gross mouthsmell. Same thing every morning, same thing every night. An hour on the Expo Line, followed by another twenty minutes on the Red Line. She just wanted to be home in her tiny apartment so she could swelter in blessed solitude. She missed her cats. Pathetic, but true. She'd petted them goodbye in the early morning dark, touched the silky cool tips of their ears, and it seemed like an eternity ago.

Somebody's phone buzzed behind her. Then someone else's with a snatch of a song Jules didn't know. A cacophony of chiming, buzzing, popping and mingling tunes filled the train car, as everyone's phone went off. It triggered a sea change: everybody went from ignoring everybody else to looking at each other in confusion over their masks. Phones came out of pockets and bags.

"Is it an Amber alert?" someone said.

It couldn't be. Probably even the person who'd asked that, knew it was wrong. Jules dug in her ragged backpack. Her fingers found her sunglasses case, her wallet, her keys on their leather strap, a lip balm missing its lid, another crumpled mask, and at the very bottom, a smashed receipt. No phone. She didn't have her phone. She'd left it in her cubicle. Goddammit. Just one more crappy happening in another crappy day of her craptastic life.

The guy sitting next to her thumbed his phone screen to open the message pop-up, and a tinny jingle started playing.

"Down in the deepest, darkest ocean, where the pressure is intense; that's where we swim and frolic, by the steaming thermal vents…"

That squeaky, burbly voice was probably meant to be cute. What was that? Had she heard it before? It niggled at her brain, but she couldn't place it.

"It's that show," the guy said to himself. "That old kid's show."

Jules snapped her fingers. "Midnight… something. "

His mask moved and his dark eyes crinkled at the corners. He was maybe-cute, at least from the bridge of his nose up. He had ridiculously long lashes. Too young for her by at least a decade, judging by his lanky build and his oversized Lakers jersey, but cute all the same.

"Murky Midnight," he said.

The theme song tootled at them from all over the car, overlapping itself as more people opened the message.

The guy frowned, and it clicked for both of them at the same time. He hadn't watched Murky Midnight, and Jules hadn't watched it either. Nobody had. It was lost media, supposedly from the 90's. One of those legends that floated around the internet. She'd seen a YouTube iceberg video, or a Reddit thread, maybe even a post on Tumblr or Livejournal back in the day. There was only one episode. The creator spent his life working on it, and then killed himself because he couldn't sell his idea to Nickelodeon or whatever. Typical internet legend, and supposedly if somebody discovered this lost episode on some dusty VHS tape…

"This is a creepypasta," Jules said.

Had they all gotten hacked? Was some media company building up hype for an ironic Murky Midnight movie?

An older man sitting across the aisle from Jules scowled at his phone screen, and demanded, "What the hell is this garbage?"

All the color drained from his dark-skinned face, leaving him blue-gray and gasping. His eyes bulged, his fingers clawed at his throat. His phone clattered to the floor of the train car. Then he exploded. A hot rain of blood and flecks of flesh splattered Jules and the guy sitting next to her.

Jules blinked and blinked; there was blood in her lashes, blood all over her face. She lifted her hand and then remembered she wasn't supposed to touch her face without washing her hands. The older man's legs below the knees stood upright in their shoes, still held in place by his deflated khaki pants.

One long, attenuated second of silence stretched like gristle, and then everyone in the train car absolutely lost their shit. The woman sitting next to where the man used to be, let loose with a piercing, operatic wail of fright as she scrambled up onto her seat, clutching a bright yellow tote bag in one hand and her phone in the other. Her white sneakers squeaked and slipped in gore. And then this woman too, was gasping for breath and turning blue, and the same invisible force crushed her like a tomato. The maybe-cute guy sitting next to Jules vomited pink-tinged water that erupted from all sides of his mask, before he disintegrated. His phone thumped to his empty seat, landing on top of his crumpled clothing. A briny, dead-fish stink filled the car. Jules caught a glimpse of a grainy video playing on the phone screen.

"Happy in the murky midnight, swimming in the —"

Jules shoved the phone away from her, and turned her face to the window. She curled into a ball and covered her head with both hands. Behind her, screams and screams and that relentlessly chipper theme song, and then a terrible silence, broken only by a sticky dripping.

Swiftly, the sky dimmed to starless black, leaving only a thin band of stubborn orange burning low on the horizon. As the train sped over an elevated section of the track, Jules watched a minivan careen into the pumps of an Exxon station and explode. The white-yellow burst of flame was shockingly bright against the descending dark. After-images danced in her vision like falling white petals.

Bing-bong. The automated voice came over the speakers: "Now arriving Palm Station. Connect here with Big Blue Bus Five weekday rush hour service to Century City."

The train blew through the station without stopping. No one waited on the platform. No pale, shocked faces swam in the gloom. Nothing but formless dark lumps. The yellow warning zone at the edge of the platform was splotched and splattered red.

Again, Jules thought of her stuffy little apartment with the rent too high and the single AC unit that never cooled more than half the living room. She had no one out here. Everyone she loved was back East. They might as well have been on the moon. The job she'd moved out here for had evaporated in eight months. She was too poor and too proud to move back.

Something struck the train. A thump and a shudder, a dark spray across the windows, as if the train had run through a puddle. Jules pictured her phone sitting on her desk at the call center, tweetling the Murky Midnight theme to nobody: a brave little light of apocalyptic fuckery in the black void of a zillion cubicles. It was full dark outside now. Mysterious lights drifted past and vanished behind the train. Jules glimpsed a digital billboard advertising not Red Bull or Samsung, but a pink cartoon fish. Jules could do nothing. This train wouldn't be stopping until it reached the terminus at Metro Center.

The interior of the car was pitch black, but Jules closed her eyes anyway, and leaned across the seat next to her, fumbling on the floor through damp fabric until her fingers found a phone. It was probably locked. She swiped her finger across the screen anyway, and the phone lit up. That same stupid-looking pink fish jittered across the screen, swimming through glitchy bands of distortion.

"Oh no!" it squeaked. "Oh gloober globs, what have I done now?"

"You know exactly what you've done, you bitch," Jules said.

Her cats waited for her in her dark apartment, trusting that she'd unlock the door and walk in, just the same as she did every night. Her eyes filled with hot tears. As the chill of the deep consumed her, Jules pulled off her mask and took one last deep breath of air. Then the darkness crushed her.

⊹ 💀 ⊹