"Something comes up our alley at 4:10 every morning. My mother met it for nine years." Creepypasta

0:02 My mother had cancer for four years and never opened the morphine. The sealed box is still in the cabinet over her sink. The date on it doesn't run out until August. I know why now. I found out the morning after we buried her, standing at her back door in the cold, holding out a dinner plate like an idiot.

0:26 I'm 41. I did roofs for 19 years, Mostly tear-offs and re-sheeting. In 2021, I went through a warehouse deck in Frackville that had been rotting under the membrane since before I was born. 22 feet. They fused L4 to L5, put hardware in, told me I'd be back on the ladder in 8 months. The fusion took. The pain didn't care.

0:56 They called it Failed Back Surgery Syndrome. My wife left in the second year. I moved into my mother's front bedroom on the third. So, it was already my house, sort of, when it stopped being hers. We buried her on Tuesday, November 4th. Nick drove up from Reading and went back the same night for work. I stayed. Around midnight, I went down to the basement to shut off the water to the outside spigot before it froze. The breaker panel is at the bottom of the stairs. Taped inside the door, where you'd put a list of which breaker does what, was an index card in my mother's handwriting. 410.

1:46 Not before. Left. Don't say anything to it. Lock the door after. On the back, in a different pen. Softer. If it doesn't come... Go back to bed. It's fine. The card was soft at the corners, like it had been handled for years. In the drawer under the phone, there was a spiral notebook. Dates down and left, dollar amounts next to them. Twenty, forty, twenty. It went back further than I cared to count. Initials against maybe a third of the entries. My mother worked at Boscov's in Pottsville for 26 years. She was the kind of woman who'd float you 40 bucks, never bring it up again.

2:38 So I read it as a lending book and put it back in the drawer. That was Tuesday. I didn't sleep. I don't much. Sitting is worse than standing. Lying down is worse. So most nights I do a rotation. By 3.30, I was downstairs in my coat. The kitchen faucet was running, maybe a quarter turn into an empty sink. I shut it off. I took the note to mean my mother had been feeding something. A cat, maybe. Whatever gets into an alley in this town. I got a plate down out of the drainer. A stack of plates sat in the cabinet, each one chipped along the same edge, some badly.

3:28 At four, I unlocked the back door and stood in it with the plate. Our alley runs behind the row. Cinders and dirt widen it for one truck. A pole light at the fifth street end throws a cone maybe thirty feet up. At ten past four, something came into the alley from the dark end and stopped where the light did. I didn't see it that night. All I had was that it was low, no higher than my waist, and that it held that height while it moved. It came about eight feet into the cone of light, stopped, and did not come any further. I put the plate down on the step. The thing in the alley stayed exactly where it was, long enough that my hand started shaking.

4:23 I stood in the doorway and thought,'' Alright.'' So she was crazy, and I'm out here too. So what does that make me? Then, I thought about the card. I reached my left hand out past the doorframe into the cold, palm up, and held it there. I heard something moving. It was warm. It came up under my hand, wet and steaming. Whatever part of it touched me was soft.

4:55 softer than a dog's nose. It pressed up into my palm for a few seconds, and it was heavier than it looked. Then it wasn't there, and I heard it going back up the alley, unhurried. I locked the door, turned around, and stood in my mother's kitchen with my hand still out in front of me, like I was waiting to be handed something. I slept eleven hours I'd made coffee before sleeping and drunk it half-standing at the counter.

5:32 Only when I set the cup down did I realize I couldn't feel the left of my tongue. I bit down on it, hard enough that it should have squirmed. There was nothing there at all. I went up the stairs without having to hold the rail for the first time in years. The tongue came back Thursday afternoon. most of the way. Wednesday night, I didn't go down. I sat on the edge of my bed with my boots on from 3.40 until almost 5, telling myself I was making a decision. What I was doing was waiting to see if the pain came back first. It did. Thursday at 11 in the morning, all at once. By 4 Friday morning, I was at the door, It came the same eight feet into the light and waited. I felt the warmth in my palm and the numbness. Saturday, too.

6:37 I didn't put a plate out either night. I stood there in my coat over my pajamas, left hand past the frame, and got two more days without my back pain. I'd once been offered a spinal cord stimulator. Eleven thousand dollars my insurance wouldn't cover. For a 40% chance I'd feel a difference. Nick came up Saturday afternoon to start on the house. She'd planned it out in a notebook, as usual. Three days, one floor a day. Dumpster, ordered for Monday. She's 34, and she's had endometriosis since she was 19. It took until she was 26 for anybody to figure it out. In between... She got told it was anxiety, her weight, her birth control. She's had two surgeries, and there's a third on the list. She stands up,

7:34 out of the chair the same way I do now, in stages. We've never talked about it. We did the front room, then the stairs, and we were okay. It was almost good. There's a stretch in the middle of clearing a house where it turns into a job. and you stop looking at what you're holding. We got about two hours of that. Then, she opened the kitchen cabinets for the plates. Mom, she said. She held one up.

8:09 The chip was the size of a quarter, right on the rim, and the glaze under it had gone brown from the dishwater getting in. She put it down and took the next one. Same edge. She went through the whole stack, and stood there holding the last one with her thumb over the chip. She was using these? Yeah, she wasn't wasteful. Ross, these are all broken in the same place. She turned it in the light. I said something about arthritis. She let it go. I watched her put the stack in the trash box. I didn't stop her.

8:51 I already knew she was onto something. What I felt wasn't concern. It was closer to embarrassment, like she'd walked in on me. Around four in the afternoon, Pauline Yost came up to the gate. She lives two doors up, seventy-something. She'd been at the funeral and brought her ham over the day before. She had a foil pan in her hands.

9:20 She stood at the gate at the bottom of the yard instead of coming up the walk. and waited for me to come down to her. You two doing alright in the house? Getting there. Your mother wanted Nicole to have good glasses. She handed the pan over. Then she didn't leave. She looked past me at the back door, then at the alley. You want to be careful up here at night. That step's uneven. There's nothing wrong with that step. I'll watch it. thank you I said your mother watched it a long time Pauline was already turning she got about four feet and said without looking back you're on your own with it now I stood at the gate with that pan of ham and understood that she knew. I'd been down there three nights and it

10:26 had never once occurred to me that anybody else in the row had seen it too. I went in for the notebook and sat down with it. Dates down the left, amounts. I'd read P.Y. on Tuesday and slid right past it. The amounts all went one way. every entry a payment out. She wasn't lending. She was buying something. Twenty dollars at a time for years from her neighbors. I put it back in the drawer and didn't tell Nick. I don't know why. To protect her, I told myself. What I'd actually thought was that there was a thing you could buy on this street, and I'd already started thinking of it as mine. She found the card in the basement that night. I heard her come up and stop in the kitchen. When I came down, she had it in

11:29 her hand, holding it by the edges, and she'd read it four or five times already. I could tell. What is this? It's mom's. I know it's mom's. She turned it over and read the soft line on the back. What does it mean? I had a lie ready. She got confused at the end. The nurse said the last few months she was seeing things. It would have worked.

12:01 Nick wasn't there for the last few months. What I said was, It's ten after four, downstairs, not before. You reach out your left hand. She'd have gone down there anyway, and I'd rather she went knowing it. That's what I told myself at least. What was true is that I'd done it three nights, and I had to know if she could see it too, or if I was crazy.

12:34 She didn't believe me until she looked at me standing there, straight, no hand on the counter. We were in the doorway at four. I told her to stay behind me, and she did for about a minute. It came into the light at ten past and stopped. I heard a breath behind me. That's it, I said. What is it? I don't know. She was past me before I got my arm up. She went out onto the step in her socks and held out her left hand exactly as I described a minute before. Her arm shaking. and her whole body turned slightly away. It came the rest of the way for her. I couldn't see her hand, only her shoulders and the side of her jaw. I saw her mouth open, and it stayed open a long time after the sound of it going back up the alley had stopped.

13:38 She came in, and I locked the door. She stood in the middle of the kitchen, with her left hand still up in front of her, And she looked at it, and then at me. She wasn't frightened. Oh, she said. She didn't go home Sunday. Monday morning, she called out of work from the front step. I listened to the window, or she told them her mother's estate was more complicated than she thought. Which was true, just not in the way she meant it. Then she slept until two in the afternoon. She hasn't done that since she was a teenager.

14:22 We didn't talk about it that day. We got up, we ate, and did the second floor like she'd planned. And neither one of us said a word about it for nine hours. The whole time, it was in the room with us like a third person. I was pulling the rack out of the oven to clean it, and inside of the door, had a burnt pattern that didn't make sense until I put my own arm on it.

14:49 Two marks, forearm width, up near the top edge, where you'd brace if you were reaching all the way to the back of a hot oven and didn't much care. My mother had scars up both forearms. She told us for years it was the oven. It was. I never asked why she would keep doing it. The stove knobs had tape on them, little strips with pen lines showing where medium was. The bathroom scale in her bedroom had a note on top. Every Friday. I lined up the pill bottles on the counter and read the dispensing dates.

15:30 Morphine was the newest thing there by four years. Everything else went back further. The oxy was for her hip. She'd been on it since 2011. And the last time she filled it was in October of 2016. She never filled it again. The first entry in the spiral notebook is October 14th, 2016. $ 20, no initials. You can lose the feeling in your tongue and call that a side effect.

16:01 But a woman doesn't tape her stove knobs because her hips stopped hurting. She weighs herself every Friday. Because she's stopped being able to tell whether she's hungry. It takes away the pain. And more. I sat on the kitchen floor with the bottles in a row. The tape on the knobs in front of me. What I thought it was.

16:27 Nine years. She was still driving herself down to Pottsville in year six. She made it to eighty-one. and she was recognizably my mother the whole way through. I waited to feel something about that. Relief came. Nick came down around six with a box of mom's shoes, and I told her everything. The oven, the tape, the dates. I laid it out like a case. She listened all the way to the end. Then she picked up the oxy bottle, looked at the date, and put it back down. So, she got nine years, Nick said. She had already thought about it. It's not just pain, I said. It's everything on that side of the wall. I understood the first time.

17:23 She sat down across from me. Russ, do you know what my last laparoscopy bought me? Fourteen months. Fourteen thousand dollars. Eight weeks off work. Fourteen months. Then it came back, exactly the same. That's not... You've done it four times, and you're walking up the stairs without the rail. She said it evenly. I've had one, and I've slipped through the night. Do you know when the last time was?

17:55 I don't. I can't tell you the year. We went at it for a while. I had no argument, only a claim. I said, we didn't know what it does long term. She said, we had nine years of data in the next room, and a woman who died of cancer, not of that. I said, mom paid for it, and I still don't know what with. She said, then find out.

18:29 You're standing in the door, she said. You're standing in the door, telling me it's dangerous out there. so we made a deal. Alternate nights, hers then mine. Neither of us goes down on the other one's night, and we told each other we'd stop eventually. We'd just know, we said, which is what you say when you have no intention of stopping. Hers was Monday, and I didn't go down.

19:00 I lay on the bed with my boots on, listening to the back door, the lock, For four minutes, the lock again. Tuesday was mine, and it was fine. Wednesday was hers, and I woke at seven after four for no reason at all. The house was quiet, like someone was trying not to wake anyone. The bedroom door was open.

19:25 I came out onto the landing and looked down the stairs. She was already in the kitchen, coat on, hand on the bolt, not moving. waiting out the last three minutes. She heard me on the landing. She turned her head, looked up at me, said nothing. She didn't take her hand off the bolt. we were going to be in that doorway together every night from there on one of us earlier than the other the deal had lasted two days and neither of us mentioned it was over Thursday she was down at four Friday at ten of Saturday, I came down the stairs at 3.30, and she was sitting at the kitchen table in the dark, coat on, hands flat on the table. She said good morning to me, like we'd run into each other in public. By the

20:25 second week, it had stopped being a schedule. It was a race with no starting line, where the only way to win was to already be there, We were both going to bed at eight in the evening, lying awake, listening to the other one not sleep. Her hand changed. The first week she held it out flat and turned slightly away, the way you do with something hot. By the tenth day, she wasn't turning away. By the twelfth, she was leaning into it, whole arm past the frame, shoulder in the doorway, weight forward on the step. when it came up under her palm. She pressed down. I watched her do it from behind, and I remember thinking that if she pressed hard enough, it might take more, and that I ought to know how hard. She taped

21:24 the stove knobs that Sunday, little strips with pen lines. She did it without a word to me, without any sign she knew where the idea had come from. She just needed to know where medium was, I never said anything about it. By then, the faucet was running every morning. I'd shut it off, go up, come back down. It'd be going again. Same quarter turn, into the empty sink.

21:55 I stopped shutting it off around the 15th. It's still running now, as far as I know. I haven't been in that kitchen in a while. I broke a plate that week. I set it down on the counter and took the rim clean off it, and I didn't know until I heard it hit the floor. She found the notebook on Tuesday of the third week. I'd moved it, but there are only so many drawers. She came into the front room with it open in her hands, her thumb down the column. Twenty dollars for what? I told her what I'd worked out and sat on. that the amounts go out, that P.Y. is Pauline, and W.M. is the Marchetti man from the corner who died in 2019, that our mother had been paying people on this street $ 20 and $ 40 at a time for nine years. Nick

22:54 did in 90 seconds what I hadn't managed in three weeks. She's buying nights, she said. Then she went through it properly, sitting on the floor in the window light, running her finger down the dates. I watched my sister assemble it all. There aren't 365 entries in a year. There are 40 or 50. The payments weren't for her own rights. They were for the night somebody else had a claim on the doorway, and she wanted it anyway. 20 was the rate, and 40 was a night somebody didn't want to give up.

23:36 there's a run of six straight entries in March of 2019 $ 40 each all with WM against them they end three days before the Marchetti man's funeral and the last entry in the book is November 4th $ 40 initials PY that's the day we buried her Nick put the book down on the floor between us she paid her head Neither of us said the rest. That somebody in this row sold a dying woman a night and took the money knowing she wouldn't be there to use it. That there's a going rate on our alley and somebody's keeping count.

24:25 I went up to Pauline's the next morning. She had the storm door hooked and talked to me through the gap and she wasn't ashamed of a thing. She wanted them. Pauline said. She was in a hurry at the end. She knew what she had. You sold her a knight she was dead for. I gave her the knights. The old woman shifted the door an inch. Russ, I'm 78 years old. It's my turn out there four times a month, and I've sold every one of them for 11 years.

25:03 Your mother is the reason there's a roof on this house. She looked past me down the row. You two want to sort out between yourselves whose nights are whose. You can't both do it. I didn't want to hear it. The night I saw it properly was four weeks in on a Thursday. I got down at twenty to four and Nick was already at the door. She turned on the porch light. She'd never done that. Neither had I.

25:38 I understood it the second I saw it. She wanted the light further up the alley. I'd wanted the same thing for two weeks and hadn't had the nerve. It came into the cone at ten past and stopped in its spot. With the porch light on, its spot was eight feet inside the light. It's about the height of a kneeling person and it holds that height the way a jellyfish holds its shape from the inside there are no knees in it the whole surface moves very slightly all the time like skin on milk it's wet warm enough to steam in December the steam comes off it in a thin constant sheet you can see the pole light through it grey brown underneath there are darker shapes held in suspension 8 or 9 of them and they

26:39 keep their position relative to each other while the outside moves around them. It does not have a front, and the soft thing that comes up into your hand isn't a part it puts out. It's all of it, moving forward at the bottom edge, arriving where your hand happens to be. It doesn't reach out. It keeps coming until something stops it. Nick had her arm out. I got up off the step and put myself between her and the frame. I got my shoulder into her and put my own hand into the space where hers had been.

27:20 She took a fistful off the back of my coat and pulled, and I didn't move. She hit me twice in the side of the head with the flat of her hand, hard. I stayed in the door. She was saying my name over and over, close to my ear. The way you'd say it to wake somebody up. I felt it come up into my palm and press. Then she went low. She got down on the step under my arm, flat on her belly, and put her left hand out along the cinders at ankle height in front of it. It came forward until something stopped it. Both our hands did. It didn't choose. It was on both of us about four seconds longer than any night I ever had alone and half of what I'd taken on was my own. I could feel it going two ways.

28:19 Then it was gone up the alley and we were on the concrete in the doorway, cold and tangled. She was crying. I wasn't. I got her inside and locked the door. The next morning, I put my hand flat on the stove for a four count. I felt nothing. The blister came up that afternoon, and I watched it happen to somebody else's hand. Then I went up to check on Nick. She was sitting up in Mom's bed with her left arm across her lap, not looking at it.

28:59 She asked me, quietly, whether her hand still moved. It moved fine. She just couldn't feel it. Nick went back to reading that Sunday. She drove herself. She figured she could drive fine with her left hand in her lap and off the wheel. She took the good glasses mom wanted her to have, wrapped a newspaper in a produce box, then loaded them into the trunk with her right hand, one at a time. I stood in the yard and let her do it. At the car, she said, Come down and stay a while. I've got to finish the house the house is finished Ross we looked at each other on the sidewalk with a dumpster out front that had been paid for four weeks earlier and never filled then she got in and went That was five months ago.

30:02 We've talked twice, both times about the estate. She answers if I text, but she doesn't call. I opened the morphine on March 4th. I thought about it for nearly a week. If the numbness came from outside, then something coming from the inside might still land. And if it did, I hadn't lost anything I couldn't get back. I took what the label said then sat on the bottom stair with a bottle in my hand and waited an hour and a half nothing I waited for the warmth people talk about and it didn't come there's no pain left in me for it to quiet nothing in me for it to reach my mother never opened hers for the same reason I can't taste salt sweet is still there faintly.

31:01 I've been eating things I don't like, the way you'd press on a bruise. I can't tell when I need the bathroom, so that runs on a schedule now, taped inside a cabinet door in my handwriting. My back is fine. I did the gutters on the front of this house in April off a 24-foot ladder. I'm out there every night now, ten past four. It comes up the alley, and stops in its spot, and it does not know I'm there. The nights aren't all mine. Pauline was trying to tell me that through a storm door, and I wasn't listening. There's a book, and there's a rate, and if you want a night that isn't yours, you buy it.

31:49 The money doesn't reach the thing in the alley. All it buys is a neighbor's agreement to stay in bed. I keep a spiral notebook in the drawer under the phone, dates down the left, amounts, initials. Pauline gets 40 now. In March, I came up a walk with two twenties. She took them and asked after Nicole. The last entry in my mother's book was a night she didn't live to use. She wasn't paying a head out of hope.

32:24 She bought the night of her own funeral so Pauline wouldn't be in the alley. At ten past four the next morning, I was standing in a doorway with a plate in my hand, and there was nobody else out there. She left me the nights. Nick texted me last month. Her surgery got scheduled for August. She asked whether I'd drive down and sit with her after. I haven't answered.

32:57 It's 50 minutes each way, and it'd mean I'd have to give up my night at the door. I've read that text about 40 times. I know what it is, and I know what she's offering me. And I know that a man who couldn't feel anything at all would already be in the car.