I Thought I Matched With A Beautiful Woman On Tinder, But It Turned Out To Be A Nightmare
I wiped the sleep from my eyes. The clock across the room glared red, 3:32 AM. Who could have possibly texted this late at night? Reaching across the pillow, I picked up my phone from the end table. Apparently someone liked my face and my dry attempts at humor on Tinder. I opened up the app and waited for it to load. It was then I noticed the faint but specific smell of sulfur.
I thought nothing of it as the light from my phone lit up the room and a gorgeous woman was now staring back at me. I remembered her from a couple days ago, hoping we’d match. Strawberry blonde hair with silver eyes, a dazzling smile and a stunning body to boot. What the hell was she doing matching with me? My average looks coupled with a short bio that read, “can cook minute rice in 58 seconds” couldn’t have been enticing enough to draw in this genetic jackpot.
I sat up in my bed as I flipped through the rest of the photos. She really was stunning. Being far pickier than I should considering how average I am, I honestly could not zero in any flaws on this perfect human. Her pictures were of her either hanging out with friends or in athletic gear on some nature trail. For some reason, the last picture wouldn’t load though. Bummer.
“5’6″, love the gym! My hobbies include a mixture of writing, indie films, cooking, and hiking. I love reading Oscar Wilde.”
I definitely needed to message this girl in the morning. Maybe I could charm her into possibly getting coffee sometime soon —
“Julia sent you a new message!”
It was almost 3:45 AM at this point. I opened the app back up and tapped on Julia’s conversation.
“hi”
“hi”
“hi”
“hi”
“hi”
“hi”
This can’t be a bot can it? Usually they just send you a grammatically incorrect paragraph with some shady looking link and hope you follow it. Julia said hello about eight times before stopping. Wasn’t entirely sure what to make of all this so I decided to message back.
“Hey what’s up?”
Not really much else to say when it’s almost 4am on a Monday night. Without missing a beat she replied back.
“i like u”
Twenty-six-years-old and still can’t spell out “you” in conversation. There’s that flaw I was looking for, but it was only an insignificant blemish on the ruby that was this girl.
“You’re pretty straightforward haha. I like you too!”
This was a pretty weird conversation, especially at this time. I couldn’t shake off feeling that something was off. My phone lit up again.
“i need”
I had just noticed the scent from earlier had been getting stronger to the point where it was a nuisance. I live alone in a pretty big house in Illinois, more of a rural area. It wasn’t uncommon to have strange smells fill your home from time to time. Before I had a chance to reply, I was being flooded with messages.
“INEEDINEEDINEEDINEEDINEEDINEEDINEEDINEEDINEEDINEEDINEEDINEED
INEEDINEEDINEEDINEEDINEEDINEEDINEEDINEEDINEEDINEEDINEEDINEED
INEEDINEEDINEEDINEEDINEEDINEEDINEEDINEEDINEEDINEEDINEEDINEED
INEEDINEEDINEEDINEEDINEEDINEEDINEEDINEEDINEEDINEEDINEEDINEED
INEEDINEEDINEEDINEEDINEEDINEEDINEEDINEEDINEEDINEEDINEEDINEED”
Now this was getting really fucking weird. I turned on the lamp next to my bed and swung my feet to the side.
“what do you need?”
A coyote yelped outside. Another one howled. Time ticked away as the clock reached 4:15 AM. No response from Julia. I decided to check her profile again to see if there was anything strange that I hadn’t picked up on earlier. Her photos were all still the same but the bio had been erased. I flicked through her pictures again and the last one finally loaded. It was a picture of a countryside road lit only by moonlight and the photographer was standing right in the middle facing down the road.
I stood up and shut my window. The smell was becoming unbearable. I looked back at the picture when something else caught my eye. Under her name, it said that Julia was only 3 miles away. Earlier I could have sworn it was around 35 miles away. What the fuck is this?
“Julia has sent you a new message!”
Fuck.
“I NEED TO. BE WHOLE.)”
It sounded like what had to be more than four coyotes simultaneously howling and yelping outside. I wouldn’t say I’m one to be scared easily, but I fucking bolted downstairs and locked every door as quickly as I could. I got back to my room and sat on my bed with my phone in my hand. This better be one of my asshole friends playing a stupid joke on me. I went back to her profile.
Every picture was erased. The last picture was now the first followed by another picture of a house in the distance. The third picture was the same house but closer. The fourth was my door. The smell of sulfur was painful at this point as I quickly locked my bedroom door.
It’s 4:59 AM and my doorbell has been slowly ringing for over half an hour.
Have you ever looked at a clock and it seemed to hold that second just a bit longer than the rest? It’s got a term for it, Stopped Clock Illusion or something like that. Our mind has this fascinating way of warping time depending on what we’re doing. Sometimes it’s during class, constantly glancing back at the clock to see if it’s time to go yet and you notice it. Other times, you’ve got a demon crashing through your front door and you have just a few extra seconds to react.
Well, I guess Julia or whatever the fuck this thing is decided it was tired of pressing a button for hours on end. By the time she stopped, it was well past 8 AM and the daylight eased my nerves. I carefully walked downstairs, checking every possible corner and window on the way down to make sure I wasn’t about to get eaten or fucked to death. The one thing about adrenaline is that as soon as you’re not freaking out anymore, you become extremely tired; especially after not getting any sleep whatsoever.
I walked into the kitchen and grabbed the biggest container of salt I could find along with some garlic just in case Julia turned out to suck blood too. (My friends suggested using salt and that maybe I had a “succubus” on my hands, whatever that is.) Better safe than sorry I guess. I walked around to every window on the first floor and poured a generous amount of salt right in front of each window in a half circle. I did the same thing with the garage door and was almost done with the front door when I saw the doorknob turn. I was experiencing Stopped Clock Illusion, but with a door as it swung ever so slowly, each second longer than the last as a woman in a white dress entered my field of vision.
A layer of strawberry blonde hair broken only by piercing silver eyes. The sun glinted off her perfectly porcelain skin as her lips curled into that stunning familiar smile. My heart was beating out of my chest, sweat pooling around my hairline. Her smile grew deeper and wider as her lips began to part and a row of impossibly sharp teeth emerged. Her eyes turned a horrible black tint with a white speck offset. Mouth opened impossibly wide, a shrill screech pierced the air as she rushed the door and stopped inches away from my face. This putrid stench of flesh engulfed me as she breathed hot air onto my face. My senses finally caught up and I bolted up the stairs back into the room I had been a prisoner of all morning. I realized I had fortunately been flinging salt everywhere as I sprinted upstairs, slamming and locking my door in one swift motion. I poured the rest of the salt all around my door and windows in my room and immediately dialed 9-1-1 while simultaneously shitting my pants.
The cops showed up 20 minutes later, which is usually the case in rural areas such as mine. They scanned the perimeter and did a sweep of the house finding nothing unusual. I honestly didn’t expect them to find anything after seeing how completely not human that thing was. They told me there would be a squad car patrolling the surrounding areas for the next few weeks and to just give them a call if anything unusual happened again. We walked to the squad car and I thanked them for their help as the car roared to life and went on its way. I turned around and looked back at my house. My bedroom curtain swayed a little. Julia looked down at me and smiled that impossible smile while the knot in my stomach tightened tenfold.
I immediately got in my car and drove to my friends place a couple miles away, explaining everything that happened as soon as I got there. Ryan didn’t believe me whatsoever. I tried to pull up the Tinder profile and show him what I was talking about, but when I went into my conversation list, it wasn’t there anymore.
Even though he didn’t believe me, he agreed to let me crash at his place for a couple days to unwind my nerves and to at least have another person around in case anything did end up happening. It’s been a couple of days without much incidents. Ryan works a lot, so he’s never really home. His roommate has been on a family vacation for a couple days now and he won’t be home for another two weeks, so I’ve been holding down the fort from 9 to 5 every day. Like I said, there hasn’t been much incidents, but the coyotes won’t stop howling.
As soon as Ryan leaves, they start yelping and howling and it doesn’t end until he gets back from work. The smell of sulfur keeps coming back every so often to assault my olfactory senses and from what I’ve read online, that’s apparently very bad news. Ryan got home the other night and told me he was on Tinder during his lunch break and matched with this stunning broad who’s way out of his league. He told me she seems really cool and that she’s into writing, indie films, cooking, and hiking. She’s got silver eyes, strawberry blonde hair, a great body, and a killer smile. I immediately told him to pull her up on his phone, but he told me she had unmatched him later in the day or something.
I asked him if he remembered what her name was. He told me it was Julia. I tried to explain myself when my phone started buzzing on the table in the other room.
“hi”
“hi”
“hi”
“hi”
“hi”
“hi”
Well I’m not entirely sure how she/it got my phone number. I decided it would be a good idea to stay off social media and anything technological in nature after I got that text message two weeks ago. The noise of my phone buzzing incessantly in the other room shut both Ryan and I up. I walked over to the lit screen and saw text after text scrolling up my phone as the messages kept coming in.
‘hi’ ‘hi’ ‘hi’ ‘HI’ ‘HI’ ‘HI’ ‘HI’
The letters in the text messages got increasingly more jumbled. After a seemingly never-ending barrage of greetings, a longer text came through. I only got a chance to see it for a split second before my iphone went dark and the apple logo stared back at me. It shut off after a few minutes and I haven’t been able to get it to turn on ever since. I ran into the other room and got onto Ryan’s mac and clicked on iMessenger, signing into my cloud account. My conversations flooded the screen with top one coming from (111) 696-6969. I actually chuckled a little bit seeing as this demonic entity was messaging me from a number that had 69 repeating. The laugh quickly faded as I remembered and imagined Julia’s rows of infinite canine teeth scraping on my shaft if we were to ever partake in a 69 session.
As soon as I clicked on the last message and copied it, the entire conversation disappeared. Here’s what I saved onto a word processor that night.
“S̸̶̢͟͡Ļ̵I̸̶͟͞C̷̀͠͠E̷̢̕͞ ̸̛͡T͏̀̀͞H̸̸̛͞E̢͡ ̶̀̀̕͠F̵͘͟͜͠Ĺ̛҉̴E͞͝S̷̢̨̢H͠͏̵̡̧ ̛̀͟A҉̶̧͘͟Ń͠͡͏͢D̶͞͝͞ ͘͏̴̶͜D̷͟͞R̢͜͜͢I͜͞͏N҉̴̕K̀̕͠ ͏͏͢͝T̷̶̕H̀͞E̢̧͘͡ ̵̶̧́͜R̴̛͜E̵҉D̸͘͢͞ ͟͟É̵̡̕̕Ś͝͡S̨̡E̴̵̷̡̛N̷͢C͏̀̕͘E̴̸̷̷͘”
Isn’t this that zalgo bullshit? I remember seeing this kind of text like six fucking years ago. Julia needs to get her shit together if she really is a demon trying to suck my soul out through my downstairs neighbor. I keep making dick jokes but that’s honestly the only way I’m keeping sane right now. How else is one supposed to deal with the fact that a horrifying, unearthly thing is behaving like a crazy ex-girlfriend?
So like I said, my phone stopped working. It was an iPhone 4 though, so I guess now I have a reason to finally upgrade. Two weeks ago — Tuesday — was the last time Julia communicated with me through technology; she found other ways to do it. I woke up the next day in Ryan’s guest bedroom with blood on the window. Understandably shaken, Ryan immediately called the police and it was determined to be coyote blood. One of the cops was the same guy that came to help me out when Julia was inches away from eating my face. He suggested we put up some cheap security cameras throughout the perimeter of the house. He thought if anything happened, we could possibly have footage of it. Ryan was finally convinced that something was incredibly wrong and he agreed to split 50/50 on a security system with me. We installed the camera’s the next day and went to sleep feeling slightly safer.
The dreams I had that night were horrific, enough so that I remember them clearly 11 days later. I saw myself in a dusty, small room sitting on a wooden chair. There was a dim light but the source was indistinguishable. A feeling of dread swept through me as the light flickered and a door materialized on the wall adjacent to where I was sitting. I was wearing nothing but a hospital gown. At this point I realized I was dreaming but could not wake myself up. I tried pinching myself, slapping myself only to have my hand go through my face, and even standing up and running into the wall hoping the impact would startle me awake.
The wall felt surprisingly soft and…fleshy. Pulling my hand away, I could see an imprint of my hand slowly and increasingly sinking into the wall. A gush of blood ruptured the imprint and the room around me came to life as crimson liquid seeped from every corner of the room. I freaked the fuck out and ran towards the door, yanking it open and shutting it behind me only to find myself in a desolated hospital hallway.
If you’ve ever played Left 4 Dead, imagine the hallways in the hospital from the level “No Mercy”. It was exactly like that, but much, much darker and harder to see. The scent of bleach violated my nose only to be over taken by an even stronger scent of sulfur. I pushed a dusty hospital bed out of the way as I slowly made my way down the hallway, dim lights flickering. A blood-curdling scream erupted from a door to my left, my bowels almost instantly evacuating. The door swung open, smashing into the adjacent wall and launching a volley of glass and wood into the air. Julia stood smiling in a bloodied hospital gown when she took a step forward ever so slowly.
I broke out of my stupor and sprinted as fast as my dream legs could take me down the hallway grabbing whatever was in front and throwing it back in hopes of slowing this thing down. If you’ve ever ran from something and had that creeping feeling that whatever is chasing you is right on your heels, breathing down your neck, you know how awful it is. This feeling was magnified tenfold as I had no idea where I was, where I was going, and what was about to bite into me. There was no screaming, no panting, just the quickened sound of heavy footsteps matching mine only slightly offbeat. Julia was catching up and her silence was unnerving.
I wheeled the corner, darting into an open utility closet, slamming the door shut behind me and jamming a broom underneath the handle. The closet was pitch black with the only light coming from the small, frosted glass window on the door. A dark outline slowly appeared, the sound of my heart a metronome ticking away the seconds before I would either hopefully wake up or die. Julia shrieked, shattering the glass into my eyes as I stared into the depths of hell that were once seas of silver.
I woke up in a pool of sweat. It was Wednesday, 6 A.M. I looked out the window to the security cameras that we’d set up outside. One of them we’d fastened on a pole and stuck in the ground in the backyard. It was sticking straight up out of the rib cage of a coyote, a circle of blood and an upside down star encasing the grisly scene. The footage from the other cameras didn’t show anything out of the ordinary. The footage from the one in the backyard was normal up until 3:33 A.M. when it cut off entirely.
The nightmares haven’t stopped although they haven’t been as bad as the initial one. I realized today that I am burdening one of my friends with my presence and problems and he really doesn’t deserve it. I’ve decided to go back to my house tomorrow and hopefully find a solution. I’ll update if I can.
