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The Man From the Uncanny Valley

By Caleb Hermit

The following is a work of fiction, inspired by true events.

Legends tell of a place where no man can tread, a place shrouded in darkness and full of terrors. For generations, man had no idea what such a place was called, across the years it had many a name, from Sheol to Hades to Hel or Hell for the uncultured amongst us. This place was ever present, yet had no name, no one ever came back, and nobody wanted to go there. We constructed stories around this place, tales to scare children into never stepping foot in such a realm, and we wrote fables to keep the withered old folk from straying too far into the shadows. Cultures and societies were build upon the foundation that this place was the ultimate punishment of all men, and that it should be avoided at all costs. However, one can assume, similar stories are not told within Hel itself.

For one autumn night, in the years that would later be called the nucleus of human evolution, man had a visitor. Humanity had grown a great deal over the course of its observation from the other realm, we had advanced our technology in leaps and bounds and we had learned the secret to keeping the reaper at bay just a little longer. However, we had started to forget what the world on the other side looked like, the pure, untamed fear that awaited all people. So something decided to remind us of terror, of fear itself, and for one night, it taught us this lesson. That, is where our story begins.

His name was Barney White, he was a middling excuse for a human at best, nothing special in the grand scheme of things. He spent his days at home living vicarious lives through pixelated men on a screen, and his evenings making pizzas for people who would merely hand him a wad of cash and expect him to scurry away into the night, uttering nary a word to them. Yet, Barney was comfortable with this existence. He saw his pitiful labour as nothing more than a fair trade off so he could continue living his life in meaningless gluttony. So, on the night where everything he understood about the world was shattered, he felt nothing out of the ordinary when he got into his car and drove the fifteen minutes to his work.

“Hey, Pete. Sorry I’m late, traffic was shit” He muttered to his shift manager, barely even looking up as the words slipped from his lips.

“Fine. We have two out for delivery, both for the same address, I need them gone and I need them gone quick” Pete said, before informing his driver of the address.

“Bizzare choice of toppings…” Barney said, as he looked at the note atop the cardboard boxes. The first pizza was plain, not in the no toppings kind of plain, but the no sauce, no cheese, just base, kind of way. The second had every single meat topping on the menu on it, so much meat that the smell flooded the room like toxic gas. The thick rustic odour of bacon and ham, the spiced tang of pepperoni and chorizo, the warm roasting smell of the chicken, in all the three ways it was available on their menu.

“I don’t pay you to study the toppings, I pay you to deliver the damn things! So deliver it.” Yelled Pete from the other side of the room.

Barney scurried out of the door, as he stepped out into the cold air, a slender hand grabbed his shoulder, he spun round, almost dropping the boxes out of shock. It was the girl from the desk, seventeen years old, openly just doing this job because her parents didn’t want her to have a life, or so she claimed. Despite the immorality, Barney was lost for words, her beauty suffocating him.

“Listen, Barn. The guy who put in that order, I don’t know what it was but it creeped me the hell out” She whispered.

“Wh… why? What was it?” Barney asked, nervously.

“His voice… it just didn’t sound right. It was like he was talking with his hands over his mouth, or like he was choking on something… it just wasn’t right…” She was shaking a little, maybe it was just the toxic combination of her short sleeves and the abnormally cold October night.

“Thanks. I’ll keep my guard up, I guess” He mimicked the stance of a boxer, blocking a blow.

“Good. Just… y’know, stay safe man” She smiled and patted him on the shoulder. “Have fun” she smiled, maybe a little forced, maybe Barney needed that.

He got into his car, placed the pizzas on the seat next to him, started the engine and turned on the radio. As he drove away, he glanced back at the girl, nervously walking back into the shop. But Barney was brave, he didn’t let it get to him because why would he? Yeah, there were addicts and dealers lurking in the corners of his town, but they were far from a commodity in this world. Thankfully, the address was in a nice part of town, just on the outskirts. A little area where the rich and c-list famous could get away from the busy life of the rest of the town, and by busy life, they meant poor people.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, you are listening to 102.8, Electric Radio” The smooth voiced radio host said, his voice filling the car. “Tonight, we have a very special guest on our show, the author Reed Hayman, here to talk about his new release, Spectrum of Evil. So Reed, your book is pretty messed up and dark, what inspired such a bold choice?”

Barney sighed, partly thanks to the dull country road he found himself driving on, devoid of street lights or proper signs, and partly in anticipation of the faux-intellectual, pretentious answer he knew Hayman would provide.

“Well, really, it was a lot of things, but if I had to pick one I would say religion” Hayman said, not knowing that a great many miles away, a pizza delivery guy on a back country road just applauded himself for his brilliant deduction.

“How so? Considering some people would say your story is actually anti-religion, with all those brutal moments, none of which I want to spoil for our listeners”

“Well, every religion throughout all history has a view of the afterlife as this big amazing golden gated place, but there’s obviously the polar opposite to that, Hell. And I guess, in some ways, my novel is the best look we have at what this realm of so-called divine punishment could look like” Barney muted the radio.

About six minutes later he arrived in the little cul-de-sac where the order came from, he looked at the delivery address, house number 19. As Barney drove into the street, he counted the houses as he passed, all the way to eighteen. At the end of the street, there was nothing but a cluster of trees, no house 19.

“Crap” He cursed. He got out of his car and looked around for the house on foot, there was nothing, the eighteenth house was, without a doubt, the last house on this street. He re-read the note, it was clearly 19. Just as he got back into his car, he spotted a figure moving in the trees, just a few feet away from his car. It seemed to be heading deeper into the trees. As he looked closer, he just about made out the shape of a house, if you could call it that. It looked old, decaying and dead, it was more a shack than anything.

“Fuck me…” he whispered, ignoring his instincts and getting out of the car holding the pizzas. He left the engine running so that the headlights produced two faint beams of light to give him some form of guidance. Near blindly, he headed into the trees. He could barely see anything for a good few feet, but eventually, just ahead of him he confirmed that the house was in fact merely obscured by the trees. They must have just been part of an overgrown garden, he thought, as he trudged through thorns, regretting his choice to wear thin fabric trainers, feeling the sharp prickling pain of the plants, stabbing his ankles. Just as he was about to reach a clearing into the trees, he slipped, falling hard into a thin layer of mud, it covered his face and shirt, he was gasping for breath from the fall, but managed to grab a branch and hoist himself to his feet. His eyes refocused, and after wiping the dirt from his eyes, he saw something. About ten feet away, standing in the doorway of the shack, was a man.

“Hey!” Barney shouted, half out of instinct and half as a legitimate greeting. Regardless, there was no response from the figure. It seemed like he didn’t even hear him.

The man, who Barney could now see was about a foot taller than him, and wearing a dark trench coat that still somehow, despite the man’s towering form, still looked about three sizes too big for him. He had slicked back hair, greasy as hell, ripped pinstripe suit trousers and big boots. His posture was off, he was slouching to one side, his entire body looking tilted, or even bent.

“Sorry, hi, I have your pizza? Number nineteen?” Barney said, the man did not respond. Barney noticed a new and unpleasant oddity, a pungent odour filling the air, radiating from the open door of the shack, so strong that Barney couldn’t even smell the pizza, despite it being just a couple of inches away from his nose. The smell was repulsive, the closest thing he could compare it to, was trash that had been left out in the sun, for a very, very long time. At this point, for the first of many times that night, Barney considered running, as fast as he could, faster than he had ever run before. A base primal instinct deep inside him urged him to bolt, but he didn’t listen. He ignored the smell and shouted out to the man once more, promising himself this would be the last time.

“Sir, you ordered this pizza and I won’t leave unless you take it and pay” He stared at the man, studying his face. It was wrinkled and pale, his eyes were sunken and dark, so much so that even with the admittedly faint headlights from the car, he couldn’t actually see the man’s eyes, it was like staring into a void, Barney thought.

He still didn’t say a word but Barney noticed that the man’s head had started bobbing from side to side, accompanied by something that looked almost like a grin, but forced. Very forced. For a good few seconds, the man kept on just bobbing his head, from side to side, like a metronome. Barney took a step backwards. Without breaking eye contact, Barney reached into his leather jacket pocket and pulled out his mobile phone, quickly glancing down at the delivery note on the box, and with trembling hands he dialed the number with from the pizza was ordered. It rung. Rung again. And ever so faintly, muffled even, from deep amongst the trees facing the lone delivery driver’s back, one could hear the melodic beeps of a phone’s ringtone. Barney, in a sense of unique and perhaps scary calmness, hung up the phone and placed it back in his pocket. Across from him, the faint grin on the man’s face had turned into a full smile, it looked wrong and alien on his face, his teeth like tombstones, some cracked, others missing entirely.

Barney had never felt terror like this, he had built himself the most safe and mundane life he possibly could, day in day out doing the same old pointless shit, up until today. He was feeling fear itself for the first time in years, the raw childlike feeling that pushes children to tears.

“Dude… this is creeping me the fuck out, so take the pizza!” Barney pleaded, and for the first few seconds it seemed like he would, once again, get no response. That was until the man opened his mouth, first he grunted, then made a near choking sound, Barney saw the man almost struggling to get the words out.

“Notmy… food….” The man slurred. Barney wondered what toxic cocktail of drugs this guy had taken, because he had never heard another human being speak like that, not once in his entire life. It was without a doubt inhuman, there was no other explanation.

Just managing to force out the words, through a wall of sheer terror, Barney said “Then who… who ordered the food, sir?” Those childish tears started forming in the corners of his eyes.

“Washis…” said the man, all one word, sounded more like a cough or a stutter than any form of actual speech. As the words clawed their way out of the man’s throat, he stepped towards the car, a slow, nervous step. Childlike almost. Followed by another, and another. Barney held out the pizza for the guy to take, bracing himself for the moment that he got close to him. His arms outstretched as far as he could. Then, suddenly, the man spasmed forward, not like the other steps, this was one movement, like all of his muscles seized up at once, propelling him towards Barney. He was now just maybe five feet away from him, staring right into his eyes.

“Food… washis… food…” He slurred, but louder this time, almost shouting it, in a higher voice than before. Sounded in pain. Barney was paralyzed with fear, there was nothing he could do as the man jerked forward once more, he was so close Barney could taste his rancid, rotting breath. A burst of confidence filled his mind, maybe not confidence but it was enough for Barney to force out a sentence.

“Take the fucking pizza or I call the police…” He realised that tears were streaming down his face at this point, he didn’t even try to hide it, he stood there, frozen still, weeping. The man raised his hand out to Barney, not in a manner that any normal human would, but in a creaking, broken way, like his arm was that of a marionette. Barney wasn’t able to move, he didn’t even react. The man opened his abnormally tight, white knuckle, clenched fist, each finger unfurling back, revealing a handful of rusted coins, covered in thick black liquid. The coins were nothing like anything Barney had seen before, no currency of this world.

Then the man did something that Barney, with his knowledge of the man limited to what he had seen in the last few minutes, would never have expected. The man shed a tear, a single drop of liquid dripped down his cheek, the man didn’t seem to respond, or even notice that he was crying, he just kept staring dead into Barney’s eyes. The tears kept on flowing, until there was a veritable river flowing down the pale skin. Then the man spoke.

Not in the same harsh, rattling tone that he had spoken with before, but in a much cleaner sounding voice, younger too. It sounded alien coming from the mouth of the man, with his wide grin and tear stained cheeks. “Please! Help me! Someone call the fucking police!” He half yelled, half whispered. Almost with a mocking tone. Barney was so close to being able to have the strength to run. He needed it soon, as the man reached out, his hand edging closer and closer to Barney’s chest. Still grinning a wide grin, breathing heavy, almost a death rattle. Barney managed it, in one staggered motion, he half fell, half ran, right past the man, into the one place he would later realise he never should have set foot inside. The rickety old shack in the clearing in the deep dark woods.

As he bolted through the still-open door, the man’s head snapped around, following him as he entered, until it was facing him in an impossible manner, rotated fully like an owl’s head. Barney slammed the door shut and grabbed the first thing he saw beside him, an old umbrella. Threading it through the handles of the door, he stepped back, still sobbing, breathing heavy. He slumped to the floor, not caring about the thick gel that coated the old wood floor, not bothering to question what it could be. Just a few metres away from him, the door shuddered with a loud thud, through the tinted glass doors he could make out the shape of the man, smashing against the old wood. It wouldn’t hold long, he knew that. It kept getting louder with each and every hit, over and over until suddenly, it stopped. Dead silence. The doorbell rang. Shattering the calm before the storm, the bleak absence of sound.

“Outof myhouse…” slurred the man loudly from outside. “Getout… ofmy… house!” Fumbling around, Barney looked for something to defend himself with, any blunt tool that could hold off the man, finding nothing. He managed to get to his feet and look around his barely lit surroundings, big black bags of rotting trash filled the otherwise empty room, there were only two entrances, a door at the front and one at the back, the back one was so blocked with waste that it was pretty much useless. The front door still had the shadow of the ever present man emblazoned across it, his form like a tattoo against the stained glass. Thinking fast, Barney crawled across to the nearest pile of trash and buried himself in it, pulling black bags across his body, trying his hardest not to choke on his own vomit from the smell.

There was silence for what felt like an eternity, nothing moved, nothing but the gentle yet stuttering rise and fall of Barney’s chest. His mind was running through the last few minutes, the worst few minutes of his life. He had been a realist since he was a child, but in that moment, he wished for nothing more than to be an optimist, in the hopes it would improve his slim odds of survival. He thought of his home, of his cat, of the moments in his life when he felt like the world was his, and he could be whatever he wanted to be, just as his mother told him. And then, in that moment, Barney let his guard down and for the first time since he got out of his car, he stopped feeling the intense fear. Just for a second. However, a second was all the man, who had taken a hunter’s vigil over the pile of trash bags needed to move in for the kill, grabbing Barney by the arm with great strength and dragging him out from the rotting heap. Barney let out a shrill, piercing scream as the man’s grip, unusually tight, hoisted him up, more than a foot into the air, his legs flailing around. He realised that since he stepped out of the cluster of trees, he had been in the clutches of this ungodly man, marked for death from the beginning.

Barney was face to face with the man, no, beast. He had a front row seat for the horrifying moment that the thing opened it’s mouth, gaping wide, as though it’s jaw had dislocated, unveiling row after row of teeth and a snakelike tongue. The beast screamed into Barney’s tear-stained face, a noise that Barney had never heard before, but it shook him to his core, deep down he knew what that sound meant for him. Some may call what happened next an act of mercy, a sweet relief perhaps, because from the combination of the fear and the pain caused by the grip of the beast, Barney slipped into unconsciousness, allowing him to remain oblivious to his own fate.

When he awoke, he was sitting, cross-legged, on the cold wood floor of the old shack. He felt tired, in ways he had never felt tired before, a deep exhaustion that made him feel far, far older than he was. He hoisted himself to his feet, his body felt wrong, it wasn’t co-operating with him, it felt rusty, broken. He fumbled around in his coat, which was covered in the same thick gel that the floor was, he found his phone and dialled the first number he thought of, not his mother, not his best friend, but his work. The pizza shop. The most beautiful girl in the world answered.

“Hiya, Pizzaland, can I take your order?” She answered. Never in his life had Barney been happier to hear a voice. And with a deep, rasping tone, he responded, he told her exactly what he wanted, and his address. And then he sat down and waited. Sure enough, about ten minutes later the girl arrived, he knew this because he watched her from the window, as she gingerly stepped through the tangled mess of woods and stopped dead in front of the house. He headed out to greet her but found her beauty was so stunning, so powerful, he was lost for words.

“Listen, sir, I have your pizza. Can you come down and get it?”

He opened his mouth, smiling at her the best he could. He noticed her grimace, he tried to calm her down, stepping forward. He tripped, falling fast towards the girl, but managing to stop himself, yet he wasn’t able to halt the shriek that came from her throat. Using every last ounce of his strength, Barney White uttered the best thing he could think of to comfort her.

“Staysafe… maaan…” he slurred, nearly suffocating as the words escaped his voice box.

Instantly, the wonderful, mesmorising girl dropped the pizza and ran into the house, diving under a bag, smart girl. She chose the one that smelt far better than the rest, the most recent one. The bag containing Barney White. But the man didn’t even need to look into the house to know where she was hiding, since they all hid in the exact same place. They all suffered the same fate. He took a nervous step forward, and grinned.

“Foodwas… his…” he snarled, savouring her stunning looks, one last time.

End

Special Thanks: I won’t say this “wouldn’t have been possible without the following people” because that would be a lie, I would have written this anyway. BUT, these people helped me make this the best story I could.

~My awesome proofreaders who read the horrible rough versions of this book and helped me refine it into something good.

~4chan /x/ for coming up with such damn scary stories that inspired this one.

~Stephen King, because he’s a good writer and I tried my best to channel his style when writing this, plus he wrote short horror stories and did well in life.

~Amazon, for terminating my contract and forcing me to go indie and stop writing for ages. Because you allowed this messed up story to boil in my brain.

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