The Grey Man
by Palmshark
When I was seventeen, my best friend Mike kept a YouTube channel for “Let’s Play.” He was a fan of old and not-so-well-known games, most of which he played on a pSX emulator on his laptop.
The channel wasn’t particularly popular; he had about thirty subscribers, most of which were just his friends. I used to watch his videos for a few minutes when I got in from school to raise his views and help him out. He was as entertaining as any game commentator, I guess, but some channels just don’t lift off.
We took the same chemistry class and sat next to each other in it every morning at school. One day, he asked me if I had heard of a game called LSD: Dream Emulator. I hadn’t. He concluded that if I hadn’t heard of it, it was definitely obscure enough for his channel.
He had uploaded some videos of it that night. It was a very peculiar game; the objective seemed to be only to walk around various Japanese environments, colliding with things that transported the player to other environments. Various animals and people glided through the game, usually taking no notice of the player, although there was one NPC known as the Grey Man.
He was, as the name would suggest, a grey man, in a hat and coat. He tended to appear without warning, and slide sullenly towards the player. If the player got too close, the screen would flash white and he would disappear. Each time this happened, Mike would gasp, then nervously laugh it off and continue playing.
The gameplay was divided up into days. Each day lasted only a few minutes, after which the player would be taken back to a menu and prompted to start a new dream. Mike played up to Day twelve over the course of a week, and had clearly enjoyed the game, as it was apparent in his videos. He seemed immersed in it, almost captivated by it. However, one night, he posted a bulletin on his YouTube channel stating:
“You know it’s time to stop when the grey man pops up in your real dream :L what should I play next?”
I wasn’t fazed by this casual joke, and he told me in chemistry the following morning that he was mainly stopping because he just wanted to play something new to him. I’d have recommended something, but an exam was nearing and I wanted to concentrate on my work. I suggested that he take a short break from YouTube and do the same. He agreed that this was a good idea, and we arranged to meet at his house that evening to revise.
Saddled with several chemistry textbooks, I walked through town that evening to his house. The lights were on, but there was no reply when I knocked. Out of politeness, I waited a minute before I knocked again. This time, it opened instantly. Mike stood in the doorway, his hair wet, looking extremely shaken. Without saying a word, he led me to his room, where various papers and books were spread across his desk. He seemed surprised to see them. After a few minutes of pretending to read while actually curious as to why he was so anxious and jumpy, I finally said, “What’s wrong?” To which, he mumbled some incomprehensible response. My efforts continued until he finally confided in me.
He said that about ten minutes before I arrived, he had fallen asleep in the bath, and had a dream. He said that in the dream, he was drowning under the bathwater, completely paralyzed and unable to lift his head for air. The quivering silhouette of the Grey Man towered over the water, watching him. I sympathised that this may have caused a few seconds of distress when he woke up, but could not understand why he was still petrified. I tried to comfort him, but he sensed that I didn’t understand, grabbed my shoulders and screamed at me, “It lasted for weeks! Ten minutes I was asleep, I was choking underwater in that dream for weeks and I wouldn’t die!”
Mike grew increasingly distant after that. We exchanged no words in our chemistry lessons, and he began to look extremely unwell. His eyes became pink and sunken into his head, surrounded by purple rings. Over a week, his neat writing deteriorated into a careless scrawl, until he stopped writing completely and instead spent the duration of the lessons with his head buried in his hands.
Occasionally, he would accidentally fall asleep in this position, and wake up several minutes later shrieking furiously and pounding the table with his fists. After two instances of this, he was removed from the lessons and taken to be educated in private, but after his refusal to sleep made him too tired to be angry, he returned to normal lessons and sat through them, completely motionless. I found new friends, and he existed as a shell of a human being.
It was around this time that a new brand of graffiti began to appear frequently throughout the town on walls and such, resembling a Japanese word or phrase: “バイオレンス街”. The placement and colour of the paintings varied greatly. I didn’t think much of it at the time; new artistic vandals were always trying to get themselves reputations this way. However, one night, I was walking home from a party with half a bottle of vodka and noticed the moonlight glowing on the fluorescent red of fresh paint, down a thin alley to my left. I walked down it and found a half-finished piece of graffiti above Mike, who was slumped on the ground, weeping, with a can of spray paint rolling away from his hand. I sighed, sat next to him, and offered him a drink of my vodka. He drank a very large amount of it and handed the bottle back to me, wheezing. His eyes were closed. I don’t think he knew where he was.
“I can’t rest.”
“What?”
“I go to sleep and wake up in another version of where I was. It’s exactly the same except he’s there. Torturing me.”
“What does that mean, Mike?” I indicated the Japanese symbols above him, but all he did was hang his head lower.
“The pain doesn’t stop when I wake up.”
Mike didn’t speak again for half an hour, and I eventually persuaded him to go home. He stood up and stumbled into the night. I found a completed piece of graffiti on the next street and took a picture of it with my phone, then went home myself.
The next day, I Googled, “list of japanese symbols”, and matched letters of the Japanese alphabet to the image on my phone in order to get typed symbols I could search for. This took a good while, as the Japanese alphabet is extensive and, to me, the symbols all look very similar.
After I finished finding the symbols, I entered them, “バイオレンス街”, into Google. It turned out to be the Japanese name of the “Violence District”, a region in the LSD game consisting of dark city streets littered with graffiti and corpses lying on the ground, hanging by the neck from lampposts, or headless. I had seen Mike encounter this area many times in his videos.
I woke up in the middle of the night to find Mike standing in the corner of my room, a hood hiding the stone-dead face I had grown to associate with him. His laptop was under his arm, and he placed it on my bed, telling me to delete the game, delete the videos and delete the YouTube channel.
I asked why he couldn’t, and he replied, “I don’t want to touch them”, before climbing out the window he had entered through. Too bewildered to get back to sleep, I opened his laptop and did what he had said. I deleted all the videos from his documents folder and cancelled his YouTube account, which was signed into automatically.
I then noticed the file “psxfin.exe” on his desktop.
I double-clicked to run up the PlayStation 1 emulator and opened the LSD: Dream Emulator CD image into it. I then loaded his file, which was still at Day twelve. Mike was clearly unstable, I had figured. Many people had played the game and been unharmed; I could easily do the same.
I continued where Mike left off, and wandered aimlessly through the dream worlds as he had done. The game was very strange, as I remembered from the videos, perhaps even a little unsettling, but after I shut off the laptop, my state of mind was completely normal. The one thing that had confused me somewhat was that I had played another six days of the game and not encountered the Grey Man at all. Regardless, I drifted off to sleep.
I dreamed that night. I was on the brown mountain that I had seen in the game, against a dark green sky with thick fog. Nearby was a poorly-rendered figure facing away from me. It was difficult to tell through the fog and simple graphics, but it appeared to be wearing a green parka and blue jeans, like Mike. I was unable to move, and it slowly glided towards me, though facing away from me. Finally, it turned around, and I saw a still image of Mike’s smiling face plastered across the sphere of the figure’s head, before I woke up.
Mike wasn’t at school the next day, or the day after, or the day after that. I had started my own file of LSD: Dream Emulator, and continuously seen the Grey Man, concluding that there was no issue with that copy of the game, and yet he never appeared on Mike’s file. I frequently searched the internet and asked fans of the game why the Grey Man would stop appearing. Each of them insisted that this wouldn’t happen, and that at that point in the game, the player should expect to meet the Grey Man at least once per dream.
The police knocked on my door that weekend, asking if I knew anything of Mike’s whereabouts, or if I knew what had been troubling him. I calmly replied that we didn’t talk much anymore. Putting the whole situation out of mind, I started thinking about my future and concentrating on getting a good chemistry grade.
A couple of weeks later, they found him in the woods a few miles out of town. Forensics concluded that he had bludgeoned himself to death with a rock very soon after the day he went missing.
I dream about him sometimes.
The Narrator
by SimpleSam
Okay, so nothing has happened to me. At least I don’t think it has. I’m not even sure anymore. When I tell you about it you’re going to think I’m either insane, paranoid or I have some kind of anxiety disorder. Well, I guess they’re all pretty much the same thing. I don’t think I’m crazy, sure I see things but who doesn’t? Enough of that though, I’m beginning to get ahead of myself. So I’ll start again.
It happened about a year ago, sometime in the summer of 2012. I didn’t really have anything to do; my girlfriend had just broken up with me so I didn’t feel like seeing the few friends I had. I was just sort of there, alone, tired and not really feeling anything.
To pass the time, I would often log onto my computer and do the usual. I would watch porn, browse eBay and scroll aimlessly on social networking sites, looking at everyone’s bullshit statuses and laughing at them. It happened on a day like this, just a normal day for me. Scrolling up and down, laughing at others. It was on this day I saw someone had posted a link, it wasn’t some dodgy website or from someone I didn’t know. It was from this guy called Michael who attended my college, not that it’s important- well maybe it is but I don’t know, I’m going off topic again.
The link was just to a YouTube video of a guy reading some kind of short horror story. I was going to click straight off it; I’ve never really been fond of things like that but I saw how many likes it had and the positive feedback it had been getting. I started watching. The video was called ‘A Memory’ and it had a picture of a little boy sitting on what looked like a bed. The background was very low key, dark and I thought I saw outlines within the darkness. I don’t know exactly what they were but I felt uneasy looking at them.
The most disturbing thing was the expression on the boy’s face; he was permanently smiling. I say permanently because from what I could see his ‘smile’ was carved in his face. He also had empty sockets where his eyes should’ve been. It wasn’t terrifying; just unsettling, to say the least. The narrator of the video began to speak. His voice was kind of- I don’t really know how put this- but I guess you could say it was unnerving yet comforting at the same time. Perhaps I should have stopped there.
Of course, my curiosity and boredom got the better of me. The story was okay, nothing outstanding yet still pretty creepy. If I had just stumbled upon this and read it for myself I doubt I would’ve ended up in the condition I am now. It was due to the atmosphere the narrator had created. His voice accompanied by that unsettling picture along with the music playing in the background – I forgot to mention the music! This really drew me in, I… As soon as I heard it I just felt so hopeless and so full of dread, it was really just the icing on the cake. It was all just perfect… it was disturbing. Then I saw he had other videos. I began watching them one after another, listening to his every word, and every time the same feeling would just flow through me. Maybe it was due to boredom, curiosity or because of how I had been feeling lately. I don’t know but the videos… listening to them, experiencing them within my head just… it just gave me a sort of rush. It’s safe to say I was starting to become addicted.
The videos became a substitute for porn. Before, I would often find myself jerking one out every time I logged on to my computer. Now I would always end up watching one of the narrator’s videos. When the summer was over and I had returned to college, I began neglecting my work and my attendance dropped significantly almost to the point of being suspended. My friends at that point they were strangers to me. I hadn’t spoken to them in weeks, I just didn’t feel like it. I didn’t feel like doing my work, going out or even flirting with girls. I just didn’t care. At least I still had the narrator and his videos. My addiction grew to the point that I would dream about the characters within the stories. The monsters became real to me, they were in my mind. In the dreams I would often find myself being stalked by a tall figure in the woods, or I’d see a pale man at the end of my bed or… I don’t even know. This whole portion of my memory is just a blur and the dreams have all merged together into just one horrifying nightmare. All I know is I couldn’t stop watching them. They terrified me but I had to listen. I had to sustain whatever was making me want, no not want, need. Whatever was making me need to listen I had to, I, I had to obey it.
A few months after that, I was expelled from my college due to extremely poor attendance and neglect of work, accompanied by aggressive and disrespectful behaviour. Who could blame them, right? I could. I could blame someone… The fucking narrator. That’s what I told my teachers. I told them it was his fault. Fearing something was wrong with me the college sent for a doctor. I ended up being recommended to a therapist; at least, I think it was a therapist. My mind isn’t too clear right now but I don’t think he helped that much. In fact I think he made it worse. He made me tell him about the stories. I told him all about the narrator and I even showed him the YouTube channel with the videos on. He told me what I already knew. They were just stories, just images with music and a narrator. Of course I knew that. I still know that to this day; not once have I ever doubted that they are just stories. I mean stories are just fiction, they’re not real and you can’t make something real by thinking that it is, can you? Could it be possible that my fucked up mind made these monsters real? It made them haunt me, it made me… insane. At least that’s what my therapist had said. He told me that these videos had affected me subconsciously at a point when I was vulnerable, when I wanted to feel bad. He said it was all in my mind and that he would help me. I only saw him about three times. On the last time I went he said something to me as I was leaving. “Don’t give in to your fears. If you do, you won’t be able to talk to your heart”. For some reason this scared me; it was like he was in my mind as well, and he knew exactly what I was feeling. That was the last time I saw him. No one came looking for me. Since I was no longer in my dorm, no one knew where to find me, and I could be alone.
For the next couple of weeks I thought about contacting the narrator. It would have been easy, just a simple message over YouTube. However, every time I tried, I couldn’t. I got as far as ‘Who are you? I think your videos have done something to me, I need your help’ and then I would delete it. Sometimes I would plead with him for answers, other times I would threaten him and make demands. Still, the same thing happened. There was something in the back of mind, something saying no… Maybe somehow the narrator had got in my mind also, maybe he was just as terrifying as the monsters in the stories.
Its been a while since I tried to contact the narrator; I haven’t done much since then. I’ve been doing odd jobs here and there, making money and just trying to survive. I still don’t sleep much, but when I do I have nightmares and when I awake I’m still in those nightmares. I’m finding it difficult to separate my dreams from reality. The other day though, something happened. The narrator uploaded a new video. However, this video was different. I think he was in it. He was wearing a mask, a blue mask with dark eyes and tubes hanging from his mouth… That’s all I remember, I can’t recall anything after seeing him in the video. I just woke up and it had finished, the video was over. I have no idea what happened to me. I probably passed out but that’s never happened before. I never sleep but I’ve never passed out due to lack of it. That mask stuck with me though. Why was he hiding his face? Was he a spirit? Was he a robot? Was he a virus’s patient zero? Who the fuck knows? I tried to play the video again but my connection was out, at least I think it was. My memory is blurry again, I’m forgetting things. I wanted to be alone but not anymore. I don’t have anyone to talk to about it, people ignore me and they think I’m insane but I’m not! I know it’s real it has to be! Sorry… I’m still a little shook up. I know it’s not real, it’s, they’re just stories and it’s all in my head. I just… I can’t do this anymore.
For fuck’s sake! Why have I let these, these things take over my life? I’ve tried to ignore them, but I can’t I fucking can’t. They’ve taken the excitement, the rush I felt before and it’s just been warped into fear. Uncontrollable, depressing, fucking fear. I fail to see the point of anything lately. Why live if all you see, all you know is fear? I can’t sleep, I don’t want to eat and I only do it out of necessity. I barely wash, I’m too scared to even take a shower and I no longer leave the house. I’ve forgotten so many things; these stories have just taken over my mind they’re the only things I truly know and care for. Strange what the brain chooses to remember. I see things, out of the corners of my eyes. I see people and, and memories. They won’t go, they just, they just stay there and stare at me. I keep telling myself that they aren’t real, they’re not here! This makes them angry; I can feel them all the time. They’re watching me right now as I am typing this; they’re all here and so is he. Please, please for your own safety do not feed your curiosity, at least not as much as I have. I’ve lost everything because of him. Just live your life, just… just take it easy.
P.S. fuck you Mike
– “Don’t give in to your fears. If you do, you won’t be able to talk to your heart.”
Very spooky, Spooky!