On my way home from work, I noticed a gas station that shouldn’t be there. I had driven home this way hundreds of times, and there was never a gas station there before. I nudged my best friend, Adam, who I carpooled to work with, and he woke up immediately.

“Huh wha…” he said groggily, and I slowed down the car, pointing my finger.

“That gas station does not belong there,” I said, pointing.

“Yeah, I guess not,” he said, and prepared to go back to sleep. I nudged him again.

“Let’s go check it out! It says ‘24 hours’ on it,” I said. He yawned, then nodded his head.

“OK, sure, if it will make you leave me alone so I can get some sleep, I’ll go check it out with you,” he said, feeling around his pockets for some tobacco. “I’m not sure what your hard-on for it is, though. It’s just a freaking gas station.” He always hand-rolled his own cigarettes on the spot, even putting a little menthol filter into the rolling paper. He lit up the Turkish tobacco, waking up instantly as the sweet smell of it drifted through the car.

“It’s a gas station that wasn’t there yesterday,” I pointed out. “How the hell did it go up so fast? That’s not even physically possible.”

“Clearly it is, because it’s there,” he pointed out.

I pulled into the parking lot, looking at the sign. “Set’s 24 Hour Service,” it read simply. The bright fluorescent lights flickered as we pulled up to a pump and got out, Adam grabbing his nearly empty backpack and putting it on without thinking, then grabbing his keys with a detachable pepper spray canister, his lighter and some tobacco.

Something skittered behind the gas station, just out of reach of the lights. A sudden smell of sulfur and rotting meat wafted over to us, making me gag.

“Oh bro,” Adam said, covering his mouth and nose with his hand, “that is just terrible.” I nodded, putting my face in the crook of my elbow, trying not to breathe the disgusting fumes. We both walked quickly towards the door, opening it up and going inside. Instantly the smell was gone.

As the door closed behind me, I realized this was not a normal gas station. Row after row of mannequin heads were lined up in the aisle in front of me, as if they were all for sale. Some of them looked like they had actual human eyes inserted into the plastic. Bits of blood and gore still dribbled down them from the eyes. One had its mouth open, a bloody tongue inserted into the silently screaming statue.

“Whoa, that is awesome!” Adam said, pointing to the mannequins as if they were Halloween decorations. I grabbed his arm.

“I think we need to get out of here,” I said, a rising sense of trepidation sending off alarm bells in my head.

“It’s just decorations, man,” Adam said, laughing. “Clearly this is some sort of Halloween store or something. Kind of out of season, though.” He shrugged. I shook my head, and tried backing up towards the door. Turning around, I realized it had locked behind us. I tried pulling with all my might, looking for any locks or buttons near it, but there was nothing. It had metal bar after metal bar crisscrossing it vertically and horizontally, as if to keep vandals out- or to keep unwilling hostages in.

“We’re locked in,” I said simply, my voice quavering. “This isn’t right, Adam. We need to get out of here.” The panic in my voice seemed to wake him up to our situation. But he still tried to pretend like this was just a normal store.

“We just need to find someone who works here,” he said calmly. “They probably locked it by mistake.” We both began looking around, and I realized that the store looked much larger on the inside than it did from the outside. “There,” he said, pointing to a glass case on the far side of the store. A man stood there with dark, nearly black eyes, staring at us from inside the bulletproof glass partition. We walked over.

I noticed row after row of horrors on our way. One aisle had what looked like medieval torture devices, all dripping blood or covered in gore. I even saw what looked like intestines wrapped around some metal spikes, with a handle to turn the metal and apparently draw the intestines out of someone’s body.

The next row was taxidermied animals, at least at first. There were foxes, cats, dogs and beavers, all frozen in ferocious positions, their eyes wild and their teeth bared. As I looked farther down, I saw the bodies of children frozen in eternal screams of horror, still wearing their dresses or little suits. The heads of men and women were also taxidermied and set side by side on the aisles, all cast with different expressions- some of them smiling, some shrieking, some just staring blankly ahead with dull eyes. I stopped looking down the aisles after that.

“May I help you?” the clerk said through the holes in the plastic as we neared. His dead eyes stared at Adam before flicking over to me.

“I think we’re locked in,” I said, my voice trembling. The man’s eyes never left mine. I looked down at my hands.

“The only way out,” he said, “is further in.” He pointed to the back of the store. “The way you exit is not the way you enter. It is below.”

“What is this, some sort of riddle?” Adam asked, fuming. “Just let us the fuck out, man. We don’t want to buy any of your weird shit. Who the hell wants to buy a bunch of mannequin heads, taxidermied beavers and cat o’ nine tails?” The clerk just stared at Adam with his black eyes. “Look, if you’re not going to let us out, I’m going to smash my way out.” The clerk smiled at this, but said nothing. Adam shrugged, and went to the medieval torture aisle. I found it odd that they sold all these random, horrifying objects, but I didn’t see any food, snacks or drinks in the entire gas station. Perhaps those were all further ahead in some spot we hadn’t discovered yet.

Adam grabbed a mace, a thick piece of polished wood with a spiked metal ball on the end. He went over to the door we came in through, and with one final glance back at the clerk, he began smashing the mace as hard as he could into the glass panels of the entryway.

He quickly found out that it was made of some sort of shatterproof plexiglass material. The first swing reverberated painfully back into his arm, causing him to nearly drop the mace. Then he moved over to the windows and tried smashing those out, with the same pitiful result.

I checked my phone for service to see if I could call the police, but all of the metal and bulletproof glass apparently affected the signal. I had zero cell reception inside the station. It looked more and more like we had to play the clerk’s little game. We would have to go deeper inside to find a way out, as he had told us. I was quickly regretting ever stepping foot in this bizarre place.

Adam massaged his right arm painfully, the shockwaves from hitting the unbreakable glass having clearly caused some minor aches. But he still held the mace in one hand.

“You better grab a weapon too,” Adam said to me, his eyes serious, his normal joking manner totally dissipated. “We have no idea what this place is, but I think it is better safe than sorry.” I nodded, going to the medieval torture instrument and weapon aisle, picking up a scimitar. The curved sword felt somehow comfortable in my hand, the weight of the metal blade perfectly balanced. I gave it a few practice swings, then turned back to him.

“Well, let’s go,” I said. We began walking down an aisle with books wrapped in some white, leathery substance that looked suspiciously like human skin. I eyed them with distaste as we passed. I saw the Necronomicon, the Shadows of Solomon, the Malleus Maleficarum, the Wiccan Book of Shadows, and many other tomes I didn’t recognize. Some weren’t even written in the Latin alphabet, but looked as if they had Tibetan or Sanskrit titles instead.

Adam stopped, grabbing a random grimoire that had caught his attention. On the front it simply read, ‘The Angel of Death,” in huge silver letters. The book itself was shiny and black, like a poisonous snake. A blood-red eye stared out from the bottom of it, and I saw it dripped blood continuously, as if the book itself was crying. He tucked it into his backpack.

“What are we going to do with that?” I asked nervously. He shrugged.

“My gut told me to take it. I don’t know why. Maybe if we stop I can look at it closer.” As we neared the back of the massive store, which was bigger than any department store I had ever been in, I began to smell rotting meat and sulfur again. I looked around warily.

“You got your game face on, bro?” Adam asked me, also smelling the nauseating mixture. I nodded grimly. We both had our medieval weapons out and ready to swing at anything that came near us. But nothing attacked. Instead, we saw a black silhouette in the back next to a flight of stairs leading downwards.

As we got closer, the features on the silhouette became clearer. It stood over ten feet tall, nearly scraping its head on the ceiling. It had shimmering reptilian skin with dark red claws on its hands and feet, but its most distinctive feature was its eyes. They glowed like embers, brightening and dimming with every passing second as the creature stared down at us. Its hairless face had tiny slits for its nose and ears, and a lipless black mouth that formed a perfectly straight line. Adam went first, looking up at the creature suspiciously.

“This is the way, friends,” it said to us in a guttural, cracking voice, gesturing with a clawed hand to the stairway. “I will see you again further in, in the space where the light grows cold and distant. My name is Set, and I greet all the fighters up above. As above, so below…” As he spoke, he began to walk backwards, and faded into the wall, until only his glowing ember eyes remained, watching our every move.

Adam went first, walking very softly and giving furtive glances to the eyes seemingly embedded into the wall. I walked behind. The stairway smelt musty and ancient, reminding me of the times I had visited the catacombs in Paris. And it descended for what looked like dozens of stories, tiny, cramped steps disappearing into the dark far below. We used our cell phones for light, going slow so as not to slip. It would be a very long, and likely lethal, fall to the bottom.

The lower we went, the colder it became, until I could see my breath in the dim light of the phone. There was no handrail or anything to grab if I slipped. The wall was smooth sandstone, and as we went lower, many of the stairs were crumbling. My fear of heights made me start to hyperventilate, until Adam turned and calmed me down.

“Just focus on one step at a time,” he said. “Don’t look beyond that.” After what felt like an eternity, we reached a long hallway. We sped up, walking through it.

It opened into a huge antechamber, the size of a football stadium. As soon as we stepped foot into it, a stone door slammed shut behind us, keeping us from going back the way we had come. Both of us jumped at the loud slamming sound, turning abruptly.

From behind me a thin hand grabbed my hair, wrenching my head back and putting a cold metal blade to my throat. Adam raised his weapon, but the man behind me simply laughed. His breath smelled like he was rotting from the inside. Combined with the intense odor of sweat, urine and feces that emanated off of him, it made me want to gag. But I knew I couldn’t move a single millimeter with that sharp knife pressing into my jugular.

“Put down your weapon, mate,” the man said in an Australian accent. “Both of you!” I dropped my sword on the floor with a loud, echoing clatter. Adam immediately dropped his mace on the ground, putting his hands up to show they were empty.

“Don’t kill him,” Adam said. “We have done nothing to you.” The man laughed.

“Do you know where you are?” he said. “It doesn’t matter what you have done or not done. This is a place of death. No one leaves here alive.” The tip of the blade pressed into my skin, and I felt a few drops of blood begin to run down my neck. “Both of you, move forward.” We began to walk into the huge chamber. Torches flickered on the walls. Up ahead, I heard the insane laughter of a woman.

“Finger-painting, finger-painting, just like when I was a kid,” she said, also in a deep Aussie accent. The insane rambling echoed back to us, and I could barely tell where it was coming from.

After what felt like an eternity, I saw an emaciated, sickly-looking young female. She appeared to be of mixed race, with tanned skin and long hair. She wore the remnants of rags on her thin body. She reminded me of videos of death camp survivors I had seen. I could count every one of her ribs. Next to her, she had a cooked strip of skin, and occasionally stopped and took a bite out of it, smiling and cooing with pleasure at the taste.

“Long pork,” she whispered, then laughed.

The smell of rotting flesh was overwhelming. It was so thick, I felt like I could taste it. I could see bodies strewn around her. She had cut off their fingers and was using the thick, clotting blood to attach them to the stone walls. I saw dozens of fingers forming random patterns all up and down the wall. Some of them were so old, the skin was falling off, the nails having turned black or purple from the inevitable decay.

“We got some fresh meat, baby girl,” the man said with an insane laugh. The woman turned to look at us, and I could see in her eyes that she was totally insane as well. She barely focused on anything for more than a second. Her eyes flitted around randomly, as if she was seeing things moving all around us that weren’t there.

The bodies around her had been stripped of skin and flesh, and it seemed clear that they had been eating pieces from all of them. The waves of nausea and sickness in my stomach only grew worse.

Then, out of nowhere, what sounded like a tornado siren began to sound. I felt the knife loosen slightly around my throat, and the woman looked up, shrieking in horror.

“No, no, not again!” she said. Adam noticed the distraction, his eyes meeting mine. He nodded, reaching into his pocket.

“Down!” Adam shrieked, and I grabbed the man’s hand, forcing it further away from my throat with all my strength, then fell to the floor. At the same instant, Adam took out the police mace from his pocket and began spraying it in a concentrated stream into the insane Aussie’s face. The lunatic screamed and fell, dropping the knife as I crawled away over the disgusting clotted blood and pieces of gore lining the floor. Within a space of seconds, my clothes and skin were covered. I gagged, trying not to throw up.

The woman ran over to the man, trying to pull him up.

“They’re coming, they’re coming!” she said. But he was in such bad pain that he couldn’t even open his eyes, less likely to run from whatever horrors existed at these lower levels.

Adam wrenched the knife from the man’s hand, kicking him in the face a few times for good measure, then turned to the woman. She barely weighed 100 pounds from the look of her, and it wasn’t hard to overpower her. He put the knife up to her back.

“Lead us out of here, nutjob,” he said to her, and she began screaming.

“No time, no time! We can’t leave my daddy,” she wept, the tears forming lines between the dirt and gore caking her face. Adam stuck the knife into the skin of her back for good measure, and she yelped.

“Lead us out of here, or you’ll be dead,” he said. She nodded, her crying stopping abruptly, then pointed to a small opening in the wall further down, past the pile of bodies that had surrounded her. Adam let her go and she began to run, both of us closely following.

I heard a cacophony of fluttering wings, and saw what looked like huge dragonflies descending from further down the chamber. All three of us ran into the opening just as they passed up by, the swarm focusing on the crying man as he tried to get to his feet and follow us. With a scream like someone being burned alive, I heard them swarm all over his body.

A few of the dragonfly-like beasts followed us down the tunnel, and I felt a stinging sensation, like burning fire, as one bit me on the back of the neck. I slapped at it, feeling a stinger hit my hand directly in the center of my left palm. It began to swell and it took everything I had in me to not scream. I grabbed the thing and pulled it in front of me, and with horror I realized it had a tiny, human-like face on it. The face had no eyebrows or hair, but it was forced into a perpetual scream. I threw it on the ground and stomped on it.

“Run!” I said, and we sprinted away, the screams of the man following us down the tunnel. It split off at various points, but the insane woman seemed to know where she was going, taking a left then the next right. Soon we could see the light of the sun ahead of us.

We emerged in a massive courtyard. The walls stood hundreds of feet tall, and creatures in cages lined the walls. Some of them looked like they had been fused together from multiple emaciated bodies. Others looked like men and women dressed in suits or hiking clothes, but their faces were totally blank, without hair or eyes or ears or a mouth. Their heads turned to watch us as we passed, however. The insane woman started crying.

“Don’t want to be here, don’t want to be here,” she said.

“Shut up,” Adam said to her. He looked at me. “What now?” I pulled out my phone and tried calling the police. There was no ability to call or text, but an open Wifi network came through, reading, “Set’s full service station.” I tried to open up websites for the FBI or police agencies to call for help, but they were all blocked.

Yet I was able to access this site, and so I started writing up my story. I know there’s only one way out, and that’s further in.

That is, if Set wasn’t lying to us. The horrors that await us seem like they’ll only grow worse.

​

Part 2: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/11htasp/i_found_a_gas_station_that_shouldnt_exist_it/