This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/No-Difficulty-5985 on 2026-08-05 11:29:33+00:00.

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The game started all the way back in high school. I remember it vividly: I was in my senior year, and getting a book out of my locker for a class that was Geography, but had a more specific name. I was thinking of how one day I'd visit all those places, and so he picked the perfect time, because right then I opened my locker, and a bald smiling man was squatted inside it and he said, "Drat! You found me!"

I slammed it shut.

I was afraid to open the locker again, but also to tell anybody. I thought there was no way this was real. I hallucinate sometimes when I'm severely sleep deprived, you understand.

In any case I went to class without my book that day. Still, I could have sworn, walking away, I faintly heard something like, I'll find you...

Two years later. I was in my college dorm, and I was cramming for an exam, and it was truly hopeless, and a part of my brain was wasting all its energy going over how I was wasting my whole damn future. When I heard a light knock at the window.

It was raining a little, so I thought maybe it could be connected, and I was so easily distracted, so I went to investigate. I didn't see anyone, initially. So I opened it.

"Boo!"

The bald smiling man jumped right in front of my face.

"I found you!"

I closed the window.

If you Google, "smiling bald man", you'll see various stock photos. He looks like those.

And now he was here, across the continent.

Less than a week later I was expelled for something very private, and I was honestly relieved, so desperate to move again after seeing him again.

But there's no way he was the same man, right?

I had been stressed, and severely sleep deprived, and obviously hallucinated something very plainly inspired by a traumatic experience in my past. The locker thing.

Right?

Three years later, I was an overnight stocker at a grocery store. I worked in the Home department, and I was the only person who worked on those aisles overnight. I was allowed to have earbuds in, and I was listening to some crazy microtonal black metal. This could be the reason why I didn't hear anything. For he must have snuck in there somehow. There's no way he was already there, yeah?

I was unpacking a towering pallet. Removing one small rectangular cardboard box after another, and I swear the warehouse people wanted me dead. But, under one box, there was skin. I don't know why, but I just tapped at it with the plastic edge of my box cutter.

"Drat! You found me!"

Boxes collapsed every which way and he ran off.

I left.

Just left the store.

And obviously, for that, I was fired.

After three instances, I was beginning to develop a very nervous disposition that I did not previously have. I don't think.

Four years later.

I had learned the only job I could do, for the foreseeable future, was as a "security" guard.

I went through a few different posts, before I was left to languish at an office building. Some financial institution kind of place, filled with extremely successful people who flaunted it with all the travel photos on their desks. They did something to do with stocks and trading but I never understood.

Overnight, the place had an eeriness to it.

Cellar spiders lived throughout the corners of the ceilings. Lights flickered. During my patrols I would sometimes become lost in a sort of fascinated trance. It seemed as though all of civilization was structured around these ghost people, who worked here by day, going through life all free to fly to Japan, and Korea, and do whatever it was they really did there. And these people were important, and mattered, and I was a guard. Anyone could see that.

"Boo!"

A shadow darted.

From much further away, and receding: "I found you!"

To see him again: I remember it made me sad, more than anything.

This obviously wasn't working.

I moved to a remote place in the far North, to live alone, and afraid.

It had started as a seasonal job. As a cashier at a restaurant that only opens for cruise ship customers. When the season ended, and thus the job, I stayed. No more income, but I could leech off my disappointed, far away parents. What were they going to do, let me freeze?

It was an easy, simple life, breathlessly pervaded by a persistent low-level anxiety.

And at last, in the dead of February, I wandered out into the snow. I was going to die out there.

I found a suitable patch of deep, indifferent snow, powdery tonight, which it was always night here, and I lifted my shovel, and I started digging.

After long enough for this physical sensation to become the Universe, I hit something hard.

"Drat! You found me!"

The bald smiling man shot up. Bounded off into the whiteness.

I threw the shovel down, and went home.

Now. Every day, if it is day, I wake up to fluorescent lights and fake-friendly staff. I like to think there's no way the game can continue here. There's no way he can get me now.

But I'm wrong.

I know.

Sometimes, when it's quiet, I jump. Startled. Thinking I heard that same, agonizing, Boo.

But I imagined it.

This time.

I don't know where I'll go when they let me leave.

What's more, I don't know why he chose me. Why, or how he's looking for me. I tell myself that when he jumps me again, I'll finally fucking ask, Hey, guy, why are we playing this stupid game? What is the meaning of this? Any of this?

But I'll forget. I know.

And he'll hide, and I'll seek.

And whether I want to or not, I'll keep looking.