The Caterpillar

The following story is based on events that happened to me long ago that I am just speaking out about. The pictures I have provided were taken on December 16, 2008 in my sophomore year of high school. I can’t hold back anymore. I have to tell you all what happened.

My Culinary Arts teacher, Mr. G, had us water the gardens where we grew our herbs to use in the kitchen. The garden was attacked by several caterpillars. I did not find this very alarming, as most gardens are attacked by something, whether it’s a pest or nature; however, these caterpillars did not look normal to me. Their eyes glared at me, like if it was about to attack. I got freaked out. My friend Rosaline, who had claimed that the little creatures were “cute” and “harmless,” offered to take them home. However, another friend (Mat) started acting very strangely. It’s almost as if he too noticed the glare given by the little caterpillar.

He started flipping out, his eyes turning bloodshot, yelling at Rosaline to “kill those bastards.” Rosaline began to cry. She put the little bugs in a container and ran off. We never saw her alive again. After the caterpillars were out of the area, Mat returned to normal.

I asked him about what just happened, but he seemed to have lost all memory of yelling at Rosaline. My other fellow students also claimed that nothing happened or they were not paying attention to see it. The only person who “knew” what I was talking about was my friend Nick. Nick, however, refused to comment on the caterpillars.

Luckily, I took a few pictures of the caterpillars before Rosaline ran off. I examined them carefully. After about an hour of examining the same photo, I began to grow queasy, and shut off my laptop. The eyes… I can still see them. The next morning, I woke up to see my laptop was on and viewing the same photo. The photo, however, was opened with GIMP.

When I first viewed the photo, it was opened with the default Gallery viewer that came with Windows 7. I also examined my phone. I only took three photos of the caterpillar. However, my phone gallery had seven photos of the caterpillar. I looked through my recent messages to see if anyone sent me photos that my phone might have “auto-saved” without me knowing about it. I regret doing this.

I received five text messages from Rosaline. Four of them were the extra photos. The first two photos were blurred and I was unable to comprehend them, even when I set to contrast of the photos on high when I tried editing them with GIMP. The third picture was a little blurry, but it was obvious what it was. It was an exact duplicate of the first photo I took of the caterpillar, only instead of the “eyes” being orange; they were a disturbing shade of red.

The fourth picture was the multiple caterpillars in the container that Rosaline had put them in. There was darkened, almost black blood on one of the leaves. There was only a small bit of it, so I just assumed that it was the caterpillars battling for dominance of their enclosed habitat. I was wrong about that. The fifth and final message contained no photos, but only text. The text was a weird language I had never seen before. I copied the characters used in the text. It translated to Latin. Below are the text message contents and the translated text.



"Et veniunt et bruchus. Aliquam lacus.” <span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif"">

<p style="margin:12pt0in;line-height:15.75pt;"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif"">“The caterpillars are coming. Leave town.”

<p style="margin:12pt0in;line-height:15.75pt;"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif"">I wanted to take Rosaline’s warning so badly, but my curiosity got the best of me. I went on Facebook to look at Rosaline’s wall to see if she posting anything. I couldn’t find her name. I even looked in the search bar. Everything about her was gone. I thought maybe the pictures I posted of her and I together were still there. Nothing. The ones that I posted were gone too, as if someone was using my account and personally removing them. I started to get spooked out.

<p style="margin:12pt0in;line-height:15.75pt;"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif"">Two days later, on December 19, 2008, I took another look at the photos that were taken from my phone. The four that Rosie sent to me were gone from both my downloads and gallery folders, however I had uploaded them onto my computer beforehand, so I will still be able to post them for you. When I was done viewing the photos on my computer, I exited out the program. Normally, the wallpaper I had set up (a picture of me and my mother when I was in elementary school) would greet me when my taskbar had no program open. However, it didn’t this time.

<p style="margin:12pt0in;line-height:15.75pt;"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif"">Instead was an enlarged photo of the Caterpillar eyes. Its eyes were glaring at me. I could feel it staring into my soul. I began to get really creeped out by this, so I opened up Google Chrome just to save myself from staring at the eyes too long. I decided to call Rosaline to see if I could ask her about the caterpillars. I dialed her number. The phone rang… The phone rang… The phone rang…

<p style="margin:12pt0in;line-height:15.75pt;"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif"">Someone picked up and there was dead silence as I was listening. The dead silence went on for a minute and a half before I said “Hello? Rosie?” The dead silence continued for another forty-five seconds. I will never forget the rest of the call. A dark demonic voice started whispering in a language that I knew for certain was either Latin or Spanish. I was unsure, because I did not understand what he was saying at all.

<p style="margin:12pt0in;line-height:15.75pt;"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif"">The demonic whispering continued for another minute. I heard Rosaline. Rosaline appeared to have her mouth taped so her screams were muffled. My heart began to race against time. It was beating so fast that I felt as if my heard was about to come to a complete stop eventually, but it just kept going. I can sense that Rosie was about to cry or has already cried. The “demon” kept whispering. The whispering stopped about fifteen seconds later. Then someone ripped off the tape covering Rosaline’s mouth. I will never forget her last words. “Someone! Anyone! Help me! Please!”

<p style="margin:12pt0in;line-height:15.75pt;"><span style="font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif"">My heart sank, but kept racing and beating. The demonic voices got louder and more difficult to understand. After about a minute and a half of the voices plus Rosaline’s screaming over the phone, the worst part of the call began. The voice’s only English word was “die.” I knew what that meant, unfortunately. Then, the voice stopped and there was dead silence, this time for only twenty seconds. Then, I almost lost my mind. Rosaline began screaming at the top of her lungs.

<p style="margin:12pt0in;line-height:15.75pt;"><span style="font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif"">I could tell that the screams were in terror; the screams were in pain. I couldn’t hear what the monster was doing to her, just the bloodcurdling screams. “Help! He’s tearing me apart!”

<p style="margin:12pt0in;line-height:15.75pt;"><span style="font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif"">I finally knew what the monster was doing. The being must have been ripping her limbs off. I couldn’t take anymore. I was close to vomiting. I tried to hang up the phone, but the “End Call” button was nowhere to be found. I even tried to rip out the phone battery. Still, there was nothing.

<p style="margin:12pt0in;line-height:15.75pt;"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif"">My phone screen still displayed the time of the call and it was still calculating it, every second going by. Every second it gets worse. Her screams of those of someone who was living in hell. The screaming went on for another five minutes. Then she stopped, and she started weeping in a lower pitch. The pitch and volume of her weeping got lower as the time went by. Then, it came to a dead silence once more. It was silent for another three minutes. The phone still wouldn’t die, even when I tore out everything. The phone battery, SIM card, and SD card were all removed from the phone. Yet, the seconds were still going by and the call was still being recorded.

<p style="margin:12pt0in;line-height:15.75pt;"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif"">Finally, the dead silence was interrupted by the demonic whispering. The whispering was different from before. It was in English, but the words still haunt me to this day. The monster said “Let us eat! Let us feast! Tamper with us! Release the beast!” I finally decided that looking into the death and the mystery behind the caterpillar would eventually cause my own death. After the demon finished uttering his horrible words, the dead silence came back for about two more minutes. Then the call dropped, according to my cell phone. Then it immediately cut to a black screen, as it would when the battery was suddenly taken out of the device.

<p style="margin:12pt0in;line-height:15.75pt;"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif"">The next day, on December 20, 2008, I took all the files I had recorded on the Caterpillar (pictures, videos, and data I had recorded on MS Word), I put them all into one file. I zipped the file and transferred it to a 2GB USB flash drive. I then drove to the lake in my neighborhood. I had taken a large jar with me. I placed the flash drive inside the jar, along with a note.

<p style="margin:12pt0in;line-height:15.75pt;"><span style="font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif"">On the note, I had written “Let us eat! Let us feast! Tamper with us! Release the beast,” the words that the demon said to me as I sat there, listening to Rosaline’s gruesome death.

<p style="margin:12pt0in;line-height:15.75pt;"><span style="font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif"">I sealed the jar tight, and placed it in the far shallow part of the lake, watching it sail, and eventually sink. Three years has passed since the experience. I don’t know why I am writing about it now, but I just felt that I needed to share this secret. I had told my other culinary graduates about what happened to Rosaline.

<p style="margin:12pt0in;line-height:15.75pt;"><span style="font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif"">However, the news report said she had died from a heart attack. I felt as if I was the only one who knew what had happened, and that the caterpillar tried to cover up its tracks. However, when I told Mat, his eyes got bloodshot again, but he did not say anything to me. He only whispered in my ear.

<p style="margin:12pt0in;line-height:15.75pt;"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif"">“Let us eat! Let us feast! Tamper with us! Release the beast!”

<p style="margin:12pt0in;line-height:15.75pt;"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif"">The next day, Mat left Florida, and never returned.

<p style="margin:12pt0in;line-height:15.75pt;"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif"">Now we have today, roughly three years later. Where did I get the pictures of the caterpillar if I let them sink to the bottom of the lake? They mysteriously got back on my computer on the anniversary of Rosaline's death. They appear on my Download's folder as Rosaline.zip. There’s always a readme.txt file that when I open, says the same thing every year.

<p style="margin:12pt0in;line-height:15.75pt;"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif"">"The caterpillars got me. Don't let them get you."