#creatures

I know why you’re here. You’re here because you have some understanding of the things that go bump in the night and send waves of terror down your spine. You want to hear about the things that haunt the edges of your vision. You want to be scared. But why am I here?

The black light in my hand told me things I should have never known, word by word over a month’s grim fascination.

I live in a pretty small, relatively unknown town. This is the internet, so I won’t divulge too much information but I will tell you it’s in southern Wisconsin. I live on the corner of Lawn and Elm Street, and pretty near to my house is a stretch of road that most people called “Mirror Avenue”. Of course it’s not really technically an avenue, just an extension of Lawn Street, and it’s not the whole road, just a short stretch within the block adjacent to the one my house is on. I’ve lived here…

Tuesday, October 11

I quickly walked through the cabin, making sure everything was nice and tidy, just right. I’ve gotten pretty good at getting the whole cabin clean in less than a day. After a quick alignment of the magazines on the coffee table, the place was perfect. Penny would have been proud.

And I am always with you. I was there from the time you were born. I stood in the delivery room, staring down at you before you could even open your eyes to see me. Your parents, relatives and doctors couldn’t see me there, in the corner, watching you with cloudy eyes, but I was there from the time you were born. And I followed you home.

My story takes place in a backwoods town in south-eastern rural Kentucky. It’s a small town that you’ve likely never heard of – its people sparsely peppering the mountainsides to-and-fro. It’s the type of town where it isn’t exactly uncommon to find neighbors bartering for goods with livestock and services, living off what the land provides, and generally making do with what they’ve got. It was here that my father was raised. It is here that my father raised his family.

Have you ever had an experience that suggested someone else was in your house, and just thought “I don’t wanna know” and left it? Sometimes, fear of the unknown just seems like the preferable option than facing a real, concrete danger. Normally it’s nothing, though. One time, the beeper function of my wireless housephone went off, when I was the only one home. It could only be called from the living room. Another time, I swear someone took some change from my desk. They’re all probably just…

That thing has been there for almost a week. The figure in the window. It looks featureless, only skin on a human frame, and it’s pressing itself against the glass somehow. I don’t know how it got there, and I don’t know how to get rid of it.

Footsteps aren’t an uncommon thing to hear when you’re sitting in a basement, so I think nothing of it when I hear quiet thuds coming from my upstairs hallway. I just assume it’s my brother, and continue doing whatever pointless little thing I was doing at the time. They go on for another couple minutes, and I’m starting to get pissed off. They keep getting louder and louder and I sigh, wondering what the hell my brother’s doing this late at night. I sit there, because it’s impossible to focus…

It was a few weeks ago that the hay bales started creeping slowly away from the house. Every morning when I woke up, each had moved a few hundred feet from where it was before. I assumed it was pranksters with nothing better to do, and I so I ignored it. Within a few days, though, the bales began to approach the boundaries of the farm. I was tired of the whole game by then, and decided to move them back. It took a tedious hour to bring them all from where they were to over near the house again,…

I was home alone for the week, as my family had gone on vacation while I had to stay and work. It was around 2 AM, and I’d stayed up to watch a scary movie in the dark in my basement. I was intent on really scaring myself and seeing how far into terror I could really go – while still knowing I was safe in my own home.

I’ve been lying down for hours now. It’s 5:35AM and there’s not much I can do. You know what the worst part about my situation is? I’m in the same room with my parents. They keep looking at me, and I can’t help but look back and try not to cry or scream. Their eyes are focused on me and their mouths are wide open. There’s the strong scent of blood and I feel so paralyzed with fear.

Day 1: I’ve called myself paranoid for quite some time because of the little things that put me on edge. I can’t stay in the dark. Even when my eyes focus I can feel the gaze of some night dweller following me as I tiptoe to stay unheard and scan with my pathetic, nearsighted eyes. I can feel something, something hidden in the dark that must be there since I can’t see it. I can’t stand the silence either. You’d think the opposite would be true, since at least the silence I can hear if something…

I’m posting this tonight in the hope that it will clear up the misunderstandings surrounding the disappearance of Debra Lindsay Caine, at the risk of my personal ridicule. Sticks and stones and all that. None of it will matter after tonight. Consider this my one pathetic attempt at an apology, if nothing else. It’s sort of my fault what happened.

“Daddy, I had a bad dream.” You blink your eyes and pull up on your elbows. Your clock glows red in the darkness — it’s 3:23. “Do you want to climb into bed and tell me about it?” “No, Daddy.” The oddness of the situation wakes you up more fully. You can barely make out your daughter’s pale form in the darkness of your room. “Why not, sweetie?” “Because in my dream, when I told you about the dream, the thing wearing Mommy’s skin sat up.”

When I was young, I lived on a farm in rural Oregon with my parents. I was the only child. We weren’t a big commercial farm. Just a family-type thing. We had five cows, three horses, a small herd of goats, two dogs, and one chicken coop. We also had some Indian Runner ducks we kept mostly as pets. We didn’t really make any money off the place, just enough to sustain the animals and a little extra for ourselves. Money enough to take a decent vacation every couple of years. Dad had his other job…

A man went to a hotel and walked up to the front desk to check in. The woman at the desk gave him his key and told him that on the way to his room, there was a door with no number that was locked and no one was allowed in there. She explained that it was a storeroom, and that it was out of bounds. She reminded him of this several times before allowing him upstairs. So he followed the instructions of the woman at the front desk, going straight to his room, and going to bed. However the…

During my childhood my family was like a drop of water in a vast river, never remaining in one location for long. We settled in Rhode Island when I was eight, and there we remained until I went to college in Colorado Springs. Most of my memories are rooted in Rhode Island, but there are fragments in the attic of my brain which belong to the various homes we had lived in when I was much younger.

I don’t feel like I’m a nosy person. No more nosy than the next guy. I just have what my Ma would call an unhealthy amount of curiosity. I was the kid who climbed to the top of the big oak in the back yard, just to see what was in the crows’ nest. I was the kid who dug a hole in the back yard so deep that I hit groundwater because I was convinced there was a cave under our house, and I wanted to see it. To see.