A Creepy Challenge!

Halloween may have passed, but that doesn’t mean we still can’t scare the pants off each other! Simply put, I just had an idea for an open challenge thread based around spooky scenes made with Heromachine. So here’s a simple list of what this thread is for:

1) Sharing scary scenes you’ve created with Heromachine and the accompanying spooky stories, if they have one. However, this doesn’t mean just a scary looking character, the challenge is to create an entire horror scene with Heromachine or simply a spooky and atmospheric background. So for this thread, character on white background = bad, eerie setting with something scary happening = good.
2) Got a scary story in your head that you just can’t quite recreate in HM? Feel free to share the tale and see if anyone else would want to take a crack at making an image to match it.
3) Likewise if you’ve got an image but can’t think of a good ghost story to go with it, feel free to ask others here to come up with one.

I’ll go ahead and start things off with these two pictures I made awhile back which I’ve always been quite proud of.

Bedtime

Operator

Operator

That word had been hammering itself into his brain for several months now. He’d been hearing it whispered in his dreams like a cryptic warning, finding it spelled out in his cereal, and hidden in the newspaper’s crossword puzzle. Something about the term just brought a sick feeling to his stomach whenever he heard or saw it. Who is the Operator? What is the Operator? And most of all, why was he so afraid of he answers to those questions?

His moonlight walk had been meant to clear his thoughts, yet instead it only let him think more deeply on all that had been happening. He wasn’t paying attention to where his feet carried him as he turned down a short alleyway, reflecting on the disappearance of his younger sister while he walked. She’d claimed that “The Boogeyman” was outside her window every night for weeks before she vanished… The police had come to the conclusion that some creepy pedo had been stalking her before abducting her, but something about that explanation didn’t sit right with him. His sister’s bedroom was on the second floor, and they’d never found any sort of trace of a ladder being propped outside it.

The many questions swirling around his head were suddenly interrupted as he doubled over into an intense coughing fit. These sudden coughs had been plaguing him ever since his sister went missing, and he remembered she’d been having the same coughing fits before she disappeared. It was strange, he felt fine and all of the doctors he’d seen said he was perfectly healthy. But the coughing never stopped, and it seemed to get worse every day.

Finally as the coughing passed he heard a loud ringing in his ears. He winced as the piercing noise invaded his skull, gritting his teeth as the ringing only grew more intense with each passing second. He felt almost paralyzed by something… He could still move, but no longer of his own accord. Something seemed to control his body for him now, like a puppet on strings. Fear washed over him as his gaze lifted toward the opposite end of the alleyway and saw the man standing there.

Though perhaps man would not be the correct term. The figure towered above him, quite literally more than twice his height. Its form was impossibly thin and slender; legs stretching up like a pair of stilts and arms hanging down so its long pale fingers dragged along the ground. He tried to focus and make out the features of the being’s face… Yet he didn’t need to, as there were none. Its face was completely blank. No eyes, no nose, no mouth… Simply pale white skin stretched over where these features would be.

An odd smell managed to snap him out of his terror-fueled trance. It took him a moment to identify the strong smell, but when he did it was unmistakeable. Blood, and lots of it… He tore his gaze away from the figure at the end of the alley to try and find out where the odor was coming from. His senses guided him to a puddle of the crimson liquid at his feet. Bellow it someone seemed to have painted a message in blood on the pavement. A warning of sorts.

“No escape”.

A shudder went down his spine as he read this. Quickly he shook the thought from his head as his eyes followed the trail of blood to its source. Swaying above the blood puddle he spotted something hanging from a protruding pipe… A black trash bag, soaked in and dripping blood.

His eyes widened as everything suddenly seemed to fall into place. He now knew why the word “Operator” had been causing him such fear, as the creature itself stood before him. He now knew it was the reason for his coughing fits, as he collapsed to the ground coughing and wheezing. He now knew that the “Boogeyman” really had taken his sister, as what remained of her dangled above him. And finally he knew that there truly was no escape, as The Slenderman claimed his next victim…