The Late-Night Creature Feature in Pompeii, Indiana
There is an almost universal feeling of discomfort and unease that a person experiences when they see a deserted place that their mind tells them should be full of people. A stark feeling of wrongness and creeping dread that is perhaps a holdover from our animalistic ancestors, meant to warn us when danger is fast approaching. I think most people are familiar with the sensation, but few know that it has a name, “Kenopsia.” “Kenopsia” is defined by the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows as “ the eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that is usually bustling with people, but is now abandoned and quiet.” Like a school hallway in the evening long after classes have let out, an unlit office building over the weekend, a store display window after dark or vacant fairgrounds totally devoid of anyone to enjoy them. Basically, it’s a kind of emotional afterimage that creates a feeling of not just emptiness, but hyper-emptiness, the kind that seeps into the soul. In a way, it could be described as a kind of haunting. But rather than being haunted by some lingering supernatural malignancy, one who experiences Kenopsia is haunted by what is not there but should be. I’ve experienced Kenopsia on several occasions throughout my comparatively short life, but the one that most stands out in my memory is the night my older brother Kaleb and I found ourselves in a place called Pompeii, Indiana after a long night of driving aimlessly down some backroads high on psychedelics. Now I am certain that many rational people will use my admission that I was using drugs that night as an excuse to dismiss the entire experience as a simple hallucination brought on by intoxication, and that would be fair. I may have been inclined to do the same were I in their shoes. But one cannot hallucinate the deep scars that now mark my body to this day, and I have yet to find a drug that could cause a person to simply cease to exist in the way I witnessed that night, but I digress. You will not find Pompeii, Indiana on any map and google searches of the town’s name will at best give you the address of a pizza place in Lake County as well as a large serving of disappointment and palpable frustration. Believe me, I’ve tried. My attempts to retrace the journey my brother and I took and to pin down an exact geographic location of the town I very nearly lost my life in have so far proven to be futile. The most I can tell you is that it should be located somewhere about two and half hours south of Indianapolis as far as I could tell. When you’re tripping on acid, it’s hard to keep track of landmarks and road signs amidst the backdrop of ever-shifting, kaleidoscopic hallucinations and euphoric sensations that demand your attention for hours at a time. Honestly, in hindsight, it’s a miracle that we didn’t crash the car. I’d say we were lucky, but knowing where we ended up, that would be a lie. It all started at our parent’s house in Brownsburg, Indiana, around midnight. Our folks had just left for an out of state vacation that Kaleb and I had declined to accompany them on with the somewhat plausible excuse that neither of us could take the time off of work that would have been required to accompany them. In reality, he and I had been strategically planning to embrace the golden opportunity that was their absence to have a drug-fueled night of excitement ever since we had learned that they were going on vacation some months prior. Our parents had barely made it out of the driveway and down the dimly lit street before Kaleb dashed up to his room on the second floor of our three-story house and quickly returned with what looked to be a wad of aluminum foil and a mischievous twinkle in his eyes. “ Oh man bro this is going to be so fucking sweet!” he had said. He then wasted no time placing the wad on the kitchen counter and unwrapping it with care, revealing what looked like neatly cut little paper squares that were small enough to fit on the tip of a finger. I, being the younger of the two of us and at the time woefully inexperienced in the world of controlled substances, felt a mixture of exhilaration and nervousness as Kaleb instructed me to take one of the paper squares from the foil and place it under my tongue, only to be very underwhelmed by the lack of any detectable changes in my perceptions after the first couple of minutes. “ I don’t feel anything Kaleb, are you sure your guy didn’t sell you bullshit?” I had asked him with concern and impatience seeping into my voice. Kaleb chuckled as if I’d said something extremely childish before reassuring me. “ Give it time, the chemicals take a while to reach the brain” “ How will I know when it’s working?” “Trust me, you’ll know.” I took him at his word and we spent the next forty-five minutes or so just hanging out in our spacious living room flipping absentmindedly through channels on the TV waiting for the acid to work its magic when I made the suggestion that I would regret for the rest of my natural life. “ I’m hungry man, why don’t we go down the street real quick and grab something to eat before we’re both too high to function?” Kaleb, being the only one out of the two of us with a license and a car scratched his head, as if weighing the pros and cons of the idea before he conceded with a shrug. “Sure, as long it’s just down the street and back we should be ok.” My vision was starting to vibrate at this point and any notion of how dangerous getting into a car in the state we were in was chased away by the marvelous visions that had begun dancing before my eyes. After a few minutes of fumbling around through the fastly developing wonderland that was forming around us for our coats, shoes, and Kaleb’s keys, both of us somewhat clumsily loaded ourselves into Kaleb’s Silverado, pulled out of the driveway, and proceeded down the street toward a string of local fast-food places at a languid pace. It’s worth mentioning at this part of my story that Kaleb had a terrible sense of direction, one that I and practically everybody that knew him teased him for relentlessly. He would often get lost driving to the houses of friends that lived just a few blocks over. This, coupled with the fact that both of us were now tripping balls on acid, it should come as no surprise that Kaleb somehow managed to completely pass the fast-food joints and steer us onto the highway. We were both so far gone that we must have driven for a good twenty minutes before either of us realized that we were lost. Once we did, we were basically the blind leading the blind. Both of us arguing back and forth about which turn to make and which exit to use, when neither of us really had any idea of where the hell we were going. It wasn’t all bad to tell you the truth, in some ways, it was a lot of fun. Our short trip to get fast food had become an all-out psychedelic adventure through the open fields and winding country roads of our little slice of the Midwest. We laughed, joked, argued, and debated with one another about all manner of things while we looked in awe at the sights and sensations the drug we had both taken was producing for us. Eventually though, as it became clear to us both that we were thoroughly lost with the way back to the house nowhere in sight, we agreed that it would be best to stop somewhere and get our bearings, maybe even get a hotel for the night until we were clear-minded enough to find our way back home, even though the prospect of trying to have normal social interactions with anyone given how high we both were seemed like a herculean task. That was when I first noticed the ashes that fell from the otherwise clear summer sky like snow.I had dismissed it as just another hallucination at first. Gradually though, as it started to collect on the windshield and obstruct our vision to the point where Kaleb had to turn on his windshield wipers so we could drive safely, I realized that it was real. I turned to Kaleb for verification of this on the off chance that I was just hallucinating. “ Hey man, do you see that?” “ Yeah, man… it’s really weird.” “ Yeah… totally weird.” After driving another few miles down the road through the strangest weather phenomenon either of us had ever experienced, we saw a large, weathered old sign in the distance that was all faded paint and rotting wood that read “ Welcome back to Pompeii, Indiana” in big bold letters, overlooking what seemed to be a decent-sized town complete with a motel, a gas station, a town hall, a Diner, a school, a few rows of old-looking houses here and there, and what from that distance looked like an old-school drive-in movie theater, all covered in a slowly growing blanket of ashes. It wasn’t exactly inviting, but any port will do in a storm as the saying goes, so we decided to check it out. If a town could ever be accurately compared to a recently hollowed out corpse, then Pompeii would definitely be the perfect candidate for that comparison. Everywhere we looked we were confronted by a complete and utter lack of any noticeable signs of human life, or any life at all for that matter, despite the fact that in contrast to the weathered old sign that had welcomed us in, nothing we saw looked particularly old or dilapidated at all. In fact, some of the machines and appliances left scattered around the apparently abandoned buildings showed clear signs of recent use. We stopped at the gas station first to fill up and grab some snacks since neither of us had eaten anything since our ill-fated journey had begun, and what we saw once we passed through the open glass double doors and made our way inside was equal parts confusing and unsettling. Directly in front of us was a row of about six or so commercial coffee pots that all still had steam rising out of their tops, as if freshly brewed. Off to the left was the checkout counter where the register drawer stood open and a pack of cigarettes lay on its side next to it, as if whoever had been working the counter had just set them down in the middle of ringing them up and just left without even bothering to close the drawer. The air pump out in the parking lot was running although there were no cars anywhere in sight and since those machines generally tend to run for only about a few minutes at most after someone puts enough quarters in it, logically speaking someone had to have turned it on in the last few minutes. But there were no visible signs of anyone that I could see, nor were there any obvious clues to where the people who had to have lived here had gone, no tracks in the ash that blanketed the ground, no hastily hand-written notes saying “out to lunch” or offering any kind of explanation to where the fuck everyone was at was anywhere to be seen, just deafening silence and a profound feeling of isolation. It wasn’t just the gas station either, everywhere we looked the outcome was the same. The diner was all but abandoned, its retro interior clearly meant to replicate the atmosphere of a 1950’s burger joint was totally barren, no people anywhere to be seen through almost every single table was loaded with at least five or six plates of food apiece, all of which were still warm to the touch, as if the place had been packed with families getting ready to enjoy a hearty evening meal with one another just a few moments earlier before they just left and went somewhere, somehow. Just like at the gas station, we could see no cars in sight. We stopped for a moment to help ourselves to a few plates of the abandoned meals before checking out a few of the other buildings, namely the derelict motel and a few of the houses, only to find more of the same. At this point in our journey, the hallucinogenic effects of the acid we had taken was beginning to work against Kaleb and me. Our feelings of care-free foolishness and euphoria had morphed into unease and steadily growing paranoia, and the acid only amplified that. Everywhere I looked I saw shadows moving in the periphery of my vision, but whenever I turned to confront them, they would be gone. I could feel sweat starting to gather on my forehead and a cold, tingling feeling start to crawl up the small of my back. Kaleb wasn’t doing much better. I could see him shaking visibly and watched his eyes dart from side to side in rapid, panicky movements as he paced back and forth in the empty motel parking lot where both of now stood next to the parked Silverado trying to figure out what to do next. His face had begun to contort and wilt, almost like it was melting off of his head the longer I stood and stared at him. I had to verbally remind myself that his face only looked that way because I was on drugs, but the more I repeated it myself, the more it sounded like a lie. “ Calm down, your tripping. Everything’s fine, everything is fine.” I had repeated to myself like a prayer. “ Where the fuck is everyone?” Kaleb had yelled in transparent frustration, now looking only vaguely recognizable as himself to my eyes. His normally unkempt sandy blond hair now looked blue and tattered, and his head had swelled to at least twice it’s regular size. His mouth was lopsided and only a single glassy eye could be seen on his now horribly distorted face. I must have been gawking at him with wide-eyed terror because he stopped pacing for a minute to see what was up with me. “Hey, you ok? Do I have something on my face?” I bit back the urge to tell him he looked like a fucking alien out of one of those low budget 80’s horror movies and did my best to respond with coherent sentences. “ No, no, you’re fine, I’m just really fucking high and I don’t wanna be here.” “ Well neither do I.” “ Fuck this man, let’s just get the hell outta here. Literally anywhere would be better than here.” “ Agreed.” With that we hopped back into the Silverado and gunned down the road back towards the highway, maintaining a very tense silence between the two of us as we went. Neither of us could really put it into words at that time, but we both felt in our bones that something was very off about that place. The ashes that fell from the sky had ceased gently falling like snow and now whirled around the truck like the winds of a blizzard, devouring the highway in front of us and even after Kaleb had turned his brights on, we could only see maybe a few feet of road in front us. We didn’t care, we just wanted to get out of that place as fast as we could. We didn’t make turns and we sure as shit didn’t turn around, I’m sure of it, and yet after about 15 minutes or so of gunning it down the highway as fast as we could, we were once again face to face with that decrepit, rotting old sign that read “ Welcome back to Pompeii, Indiana.” Without skipping a beat Kaleb whipped the truck around and took off in the opposite direction only to have the same thing happen again, and another time after that. After we found ourselves in front of that goddamn sign for the fifth time I remember pounding my fist against the dash out sheer frustration before I turned and started screaming at my brother. “ What the fuck is wrong with you?! You have one job Kaleb and that’s to get us the fuck out of here! Why is that so fucking hard?!” Kaleb didn’t respond to me right away. He just sat there staring at the eroded, ancient-looking sign with an expression of pure bewilderment. His face looked relatively normal to me now which made no sense given that he told me that the acid we took usually lasted about nine hours on average, and there was simply no way that nine hours had passed already. “ I… I don’t know” That was all he could manage to say. That was when I noticed the drive-in movie theater in the distance, or more specially that there seemed to be a movie playing on the towering projection screen. It was almost impossible to make out what was playing from that distance, but the sight filled me with a desperate kind of hope regardless because after all, If a movie was playing that meant someone had to be down there working the projector, and maybe that someone could tell us what the Hell was going on. “ There’s a movie playing down there,” I said pointing to the drive-in. Kaleb followed my finger with his gaze down to the drive-in and at the movie playing on the screen, before looking back to me with a confused look. “ So?” “ What do you mean so? If there’s a movie playing then there has to be people down there!” “ We can’t be sure of that.” “ Well do you have any better ideas about what we should do?” “ I’ll tell you what we should do, we should stay the fuck away from that town! this is beyond creepy.” “ And do what? Sit here forever? There could be someone down there who could help us!” Kaleb conceded with a frown. “ I don’t like this brother, I don’t like this at all.” He then put the truck back into drive and reluctantly took us back through the deserted streets of Pompeii towards the theater, and since I can say with confidence that I was almost totally clear-minded at this point, I noticed small details here and there that I had totally overlooked before. When we passed by the empty church building, for instance, I saw a rather ominous message scrawled on the sidewalk just outside the main entrance that read “Here we were deceived.” The more I looked around, the more I found that similar messages had been scrawled along the entranceways and sidewalks of several places all around town. One such message, inscribed along the sidewalk that bordered the Diner read “ Here we went unnourished.” Yet another that I saw written outside of Town Hall read “ Here we were betrayed” But the message that was easily the most unsettling out of all the ones I saw was the one scrawled over the faded sign over the entrance to the drive-in itself that read “Here we bore witness” The gate itself hung open and offered an unobstructed path into the theater, which seemed to consist of a large open parking area that unlike virtually anywhere else in town was packed with cars from end to end and what looked like some sort of concession stand located roughly at its center. We could see the dim silver light of the projector as it filled the enormous screen at the northernmost end of the drive-in with what looked like an old fashioned black and white movie that hadn’t seemed to have progressed past its opening credits. Names of actors and companies I had never heard of scrolled slowly down the length of the screen before the movie opened to a scene of an idyllic looking Midwestern town overlooked by a starry night sky that in some ways resembled the one we now found ourselves in. Before I could turn to Kaleb and discuss what we should have done next, the screeching static of the Silverado’s radio pierced the silence that prevailed between the two of us before it morphed into what we assumed was the audio that accompanied the movie. At first, it was this really corny sounding jingle the likes of which you’d expect to see an old commercial, then it abruptly became a loud crashing sound as one of the stars that graced that beautiful night sky on the screen fell to the earth below and made a large crater in the woods just outside of the town. The scene then shifted to a young boy who looked to be around high school age walking through those same woods alone in the daytime. He wandered around aimlessly until he happened upon the crater which had by then filled up to the edges with a strange viscous black liquid. The boy then sat along the edge of the pool regarding it curiously, as if debating with himself about whether or not he wanted to touch it, when a stream of bubbles rose up at the pool’s center and started to pop one after the other, and each popped bubble carried with it a word from a voice that sounded remarkably human, almost like that of a young girl. “He…llo… who…are…you?” the voice asked Each syllable sounded strained and unnatural as if whatever was making them had not quite yet mastered human speech. The boy for his part seemed shocked at first, but his shock quickly changed into rapt fascination and he started talking back. “ Hello, I’m Ronnie.” He said. “ Ron..nie” the voice echoed. “ Who are you?” ‘ I…am… lost.” “Lost?” the boy named Ronnie repeated, sounding confused. “ Lost… I…am..lost… I…want…to…go…home.” “Can I help?” “Small… I’m too small… I must grow.” “ You must grow.” Ronnie repeated, his face suddenly becoming vacant and expressionless. He then turned and walked in the opposite direction back towards town, repeating “ She must grow” to himself like a mantra. The scene then changed again, this time showing Ronnie and another boy who was approximately the same age walking through the same woods toward the pool. “ It’s just this way” Ronnie said, his voice distant and unnatural, which did not seem to be lost on the other boy. “ Sure Ronnie, whatever you say. Are you feeling ok? You sound weird.” “ I’m fine. We’re almost there” The boy did not seem reassured but went along regardless. When the pair finally came upon the pool once again, Ronnie gestured to it with veneration. The other boy seemed to think it was mesmerizing. He knelt by the edge and watched the bubbling black liquid with wide-eyed fascination while Ronnie slowly and subtly maneuvered behind him. “ This is so cool Ronnie! What is it?” The boy was barely able to utter the word “ it.” Before Ronnie pushed him in with all the force he could muster and upon making physical contact with the liquid, the other boy let out a heartbreaking scream. Oily black tendrils reached up from the depths of the pool and constricted around him like pythons, you could hear the sickening sound of his bones snapping as the tendrils began pulling him down slowly but surely. He thrashed around and cried out desperately for his friend to help him, but Ronnie remained still and just watched the horror unfolding in front of him with that same vacant, dispassionate look in his eyes. “ She must grow,” he said Eventually, the other boy vanished beneath the liquid completely and the pool began to expand ever so slightly, the black ooze flowing past its edges. No more words were spoken aloud between Ronnie and the entity inside the pool, But he seemed to be aware of it’s will nonetheless. The next few scenes played out in a similar fashion, Ronnie luring hapless victims to their inevitable fate in the woods, and the pool steadily expanding with each new sacrifice. Before long, the pool had become a large pond and not long after that a small lake. As it grew, it devoured the plant life it came into contact with voraciously. Trees and other vegetation that were unfortunate enough to be in its path withered and died almost before my eyes as I watched that horrible black ooze creep ever closer to the town itself. Though it was never explicitly stated by any of the characters, I got the distinct impression after the pool had expanded past a certain point the entity no longer needed to rely on Ronnie for sustenance. Before long, others began to do its bidding as well. In one scene, a pastor of the local church led his dazed congregation into the dying woods and the edge of the black ooze for “baptism” and then watched them all die in the depths of that murky blackness one after another before walking into the pool himself with the most contented smile across his face as he did. In yet another scene that I could not bring myself to watch all the way through a school bus driver veers off the road with a look of total vacancy in his eyes and puts his foot to the gas as he drives toward the woods with reckless abandon and a busload of terrified kids. The film reached its climax when open conflict broke out between a group of townspeople who seemed to have retained their minds and those that had fallen under the sway of the Voice from the Pool. The conflict had been short and bloody and although the townspeople had fought like cornered animals, they were ultimately subdued and corralled like livestock by their possessed neighbors. I scarcely have the words to describe the cold and detached depravity I witnessed on that screen. I have never considered myself the squeamish type, and I’d seen a lot of documentaries about things like the Holocaust and the Rwandan Genocide in school growing up, so I was not totally unfamiliar with the concept of one group of humans setting out to systematically exterminate another but what I saw on that screen was not like those events at all. There was no anger and no malice in it. No zealous demagogues spewing hateful rhetoric. The dazed servants of the alien entity carried out their atrocity in near-total silence. They did not even speak to each other. One by one, they either bound people they had likely known their whole lives with duct tape and ropes scavenged from around the town and dragged them out into the woods completely oblivious to their pained cries and desperate pleas for mercy, or they simply beat them until they could no longer resist. In one instance, I saw a large man break the legs of a woman who could have easily been in her eighties before he hoisted her over his shoulder and carried her off into the blackness. In another, I saw a woman strangling a small girl that was her spitting image into unconsciousness and then carrying her limp form to the woods. Once everyone had been gathered up and brought to the edge of that liquid abyss that had swelled to far beyond its original size, what I can only describe as a kind of grotesque ritual took place. The elderly and infirm were pushed in first, then came the men, and afterward the women, until only the children remained. I had thought that the children would meet the same awful fate, only to be temporarily relieved when that did not happen. Instead, I witnessed each and every one of the possessed people walk into the ooze and perish with joyous smiles painted on their dazed faces, leaving the children of the town bound and alone for several moments before the boy called Ronnie emerged from the depths of the ooze and walked out onto the land looking simultaneously younger and also ageless. The dark liquid of the pool fell from his eyelids and ran down his cheeks like teardrops and a chillingly warm smile stretched across his freckled face. He spoke to the terrified little ones in a voice that was his own, and at the same time not. “ Hello. Are you lost? Do you want to go home?” He asked. Common sense dictated that he was speaking to the children on the screen, but the angle of the camera made it seem as though he were speaking to me directly, and that made my blood run cold. The children’s response to his question came in the form of gargled cries and terrified whines. “ Don’t be afraid, little ones. We will all go home soon. Look how She has grown!” He said as he turned to the ooze filled crater with his arms outstretched as that… that thing slowly rose out of the pit. I’ve tried so hard to purge the image from my mind over the years with drugs, booze, and even blunt force trauma, but none of it could expel the image of those great black wings that eclipsed the moon and the stars, and no amount of physical trauma could exorcise the sight of it’s ten heads and seven horns each bellowing black ash and fire into the sky. Through Ronnie, I heard it speak each and every one of it’s blasphemous names, each more terrible than the last. I heard It speak of It’s home in the black void beyond the stars where all light goes to die, of the utter apathy of God and the complete meaninglessness of my own existence. At that moment I lost conscious awareness that I was just watching a movie and I heard myself scream. Panic set in and I clawed frantically at the truck’s door only to find that Kaleb had locked it. In the same instant that I realized this, I felt his hand on my shoulder and I whipped around to see a serene, peaceful look on his face as black tears fell down his cheeks. “ It’s alright brother, we are lost no more. It is time to go home” He said in that voice that was not his own as he wrapped his hands around my neck. I struggled against his grip but could not break free. Through the haziness of my oxygen-deprived brain, I could see Kaleb’s skin begin to bubble and blister as if it had been exposed to unimaginably high temperatures before I saw my brother erupt into blue flames all while keeping that same serene expression on his face as he began to burn away. Out of sheer strength brought on by mortal terror, I threw him off me, busted the passenger window with my elbow, and scrambled out and away from the Silverado just as the entire thing burst into flames. I then looked on in horror as my brother burned away into nothingness so that not even a body remained, just the burned-out husk of a vehicle and an empty feeling of despair. The unnatural storm of ashes that had dogged us throughout this ill-fated journey had whipped up to unbelievable speeds at this point, pelting my skin and stinging my eyes though I hardly noticed it. In truth, I felt that I was going to die, and I was ok with it. I didn’t want to be in that awful place alone. I laid on the cold asphalt and gravel waiting for death’s embrace, Only to find myself in an unfamiliar hospital bed when I next opened my eyes. Over the next several days, I would learn that I had been found unconscious on the side of the highway by a passing trucker who had in turn called the police and got me to a hospital. After I was awake and coherent enough to tell the doctors who I was and my family’s contact information, my parents soon rushed over and nearly pulled me out of my bed when they embraced me. I was as grateful to see them as they were to see me, but they brought with them questions I didn’t really know how to answer. Where did you go? What happened to you? Then of course the most painful question of them all, where is Kaleb? I had no words to form an answer, and I doubt they would have believed me if I did anyway. My silence told them enough. I can still hear my mother’s pained sobs that penetrated the thin walls of my room from outside in the hallway, and my father’s softly spoken reassurances that did no real good. Eventually, the police came to ask very similar questions, and they would not take silence for an answer. The detective who I spoke with was a reserved and professional man who was very careful with his words, but I could tell that he did not believe me when I told him that I had no recollection of what had happened to me and Kaleb that night. “ It’d be better for you in the long run if you told the whole truth son” he had told me. I knew that the whole truth would likely just land me in a mental ward or maybe even jail, so I said nothing. Without any concrete evidence of foul play, the police eventually eased off of me. But that didn’t stop the rumors and the gossip around town. Or the cold stares I got from people I passed on the street. In the absence of a true telling of events, it’s human nature to construct your own, and the version of events that ended up circulating around town was that I had murdered Kaleb over drugs, or that maybe he had overdosed on something and I had left him to die. None of that was true, but people believed it, and treated me accordingly. I was effectively a total pariah by the end of the month. That was not the worst of it though. Those things all paled in comparison to the feeling I felt whenever I would walk by Kaleb’s empty room which in the months and years following his death had become a kind of shrine to his memory. Whenever I look at his room now, I know what it is to be haunted. Real hauntings do not come from wraiths or spirits, but from memories, and the knowledge that someone who should be there is not. That detective still comes around every now and again to check on me, and to ask if I’m ready to talk, though I always tell him that I have nothing to say. In a strange way, he has become like my only friend. I think I may tell him everything one day when I have nothing else to lose and I can hold onto this thing no longer. There is no happy ending to my story, only a plea that you cherish those you love because you never know when they will be gone from the world forever and a warning that if you ever find yourself in Pompeii, Indiana for the love of God, stay away from the theater, stay away from the late-night creature feature. Credit : McSinister456 Copyright Statement: Unless explicitly stated, all stories published on Creepypasta.com are the property of (and under copyright to) their respective authors, and may not be narrated or performed under any circumstance.