Author's Notes: As is usual to state on Literotica, in case it is not clear enough from the story itself, all characters participating in sexual acts occurring in this story are at least 18 years of age.
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"Hey guys, welcome back to my channel," Tony said into his iPhone's camera, with exactly the amount of awkwardness somebody would expect from a content creator as small and inexperienced as he was. "So, uh, today," he continued, relaxing his body against the wooden, antique stair railing next to him, putting his right arm to rest on top of it, "Today, as always, we are going to be doing some urban exploring at creepy locations no one else had discovered yet. At least, I hope," he added, trying not to sound too serious or sincere.
"But, as I've promised, today, we have a really special location. Now, some of y'all have been skeptical of me going to my great aunt's apartment complex, and I'll admit I know why, instead of some super-duper spoopy spooky location to meet some crackheads and squatters who knows where, but, man, just check this out," he said and lifted his iPhone above his head, moving it around to show off as much of everything around him as possible. Rotating the phone slowly, he gave time to the video's future viewers to slowly let what they were looking at sink in and fully understand what he meant.
"Guys, seriously," he said, pulling the phone back to face him and quickly slicking his hair backward from his forehead as he continued, "Tell me that this isn't the creepiest liminal space you've ever seen IRL," he said. After doing so, he quickly looked left and right, his gaze switching between the two things he fully expected his viewers to have noticed and fully "felt", for lack of a better word, through their monitors.
To his left was a wall alternatively covered in old, worn-out, dark colors irregularly interrupted by black and blue patterns somewhat resembling those one could find on Persian carpets, or a rather pathetic attempt at copying such patterns, and garish, newly added ones. The latter, shiny and bright as they were, should've for all intents and purposes made the sight of the wall a more uplifting and easier to look at one, but, because of both their proximity and the fact that whoever had put those new colors in there had taken great care not to paint over the bizarre patterns, the old colors seemed to have almost infected the new ones with their antiqueness, giving those few layers of paint something of an uncanny valley quality.
To his right, meanwhile, was what he would be exploring today. What he will be showing off to the world in the hopes of his viewers rewarding him for his find of it.
A stairwell. An old, and looking like it, stairwell, carrying on its side the antique railing Tony was still resting his body against all the way down to where he couldn't even see anymore. Its stairs were uniformly painted in a sickly green-black color and there seemed to be one with a visible chip on it next to everyone that still seemed undamaged despite all those years of use. In all those years that he had been visiting this place, he had never seen any of the platforms in between the different storeys that didn't have at least a hint of a cobweb somewhere in a corner. It was already dusk and the windows in the corridors were small, but all he could see as he looked over the railing at the bottom was just a small point of pitch-black darkness from which the entire stairwell seemed to be coming out of.
"I mean, even the people who live here avoid using it as much as they can. Especially the lower floors. Everybody uses the elevator as much as they can. Nobody lives on the ground floor, and the one lady who lives on, I think the second floor, she's probably the only person living on the first three floors, she once told my aunt that she saw the stairwell continuing down below the floor and into the ground for who knows how long, who knows where. Maybe even to Hell," he said dramatically, before snickering.
"Man, I couldn't be a drama actor, I'd just be laughing at my lines the entire time," he said, smiling and then suddenly getting more serious again, "But yeah, there's something creepy with that stairwell and I'm going to find out what it is. That lady on the second floor definitely has some stories to tell about it. Maybe I'll interview, get to interview her later, to talk to her, but so far it's just me. As I've said, even the other people there fear it, even the people who don't live on the lower floors, which is everyone except for that old lady there, nobody really uses it. Everyone tries to avoid using it as much as they can. And that's during the day!" he suddenly raised the tone of his voice and brought his face closer to the camera, his explanation reaching its crescendo, "During the night, nobody uses it. At all. My aunt had told me that she had never heard footsteps here during the night. Ever. Sure, some of the others, mostly the old lady down there but not just her, say that they've heard weird voices and such, which I should've probably said more about sooner, typical ghost shit, but never footsteps. Ever,"
Now, the smile from before was back on his face, morphing into a grin.
"Until now. Because today, I'm going to explore every single nook and cranny of this place. I'm going to look at every stair, walk down to the ground and back up here, multiple times if needed, and I'm going to see if there's anything at all to the fables, stories, and superstitions the people living in this building have shared with me, and I myself will share it with you as soon as possible. Bye!" he said, confidently and forcefully, as he stopped recording.
Putting his phone back into his pocket, he thought of the two things he now needed to do. First, uploading this video as soon as possible on Youtube and his various social media accounts, so that his, still quite small, number of followers would get to see it quickly. The second was for him to wait until the first of those followers of his caught on to the fact that, unlike what he had hinted at previously, he won't be livestreaming it but instead will simply upload a video of him doing so later, and try to explain it as soon as those first complaints appear.
After all, could anyone blame him? Here he was, genuinely trying to sell walking down a bunch of stairs in an old, but otherwise normal and, most importantly,
inhabited
building with people all around him, as something not just scary or creepy, but potentially dreadful. It barely even qualified as still being urban exploring. More like an anthropological study, really.
He obviously wasn't about to write off what he had heard about the place. He could see with his own eyes how creepy it was, and he was decently sure that he'd probably catch some random weird noises on camera when he'll be doing this, if only thanks to those people being around him which he was already sure that people will use to explain those no matter what. Regardless of that, there was no way he was letting people have an unfiltered, real-time look into him doing so and effectively almost being there, instead of serving them a recording he had already condensed to show off the highlights and played a bit with its editing.
With his head filled with those problems, he turned around and went back to his great aunt's apartment.
