What follows has been edited for content and relevance to the ongoing investigation
into events in Sugar Creek, Ohio on the night of September 26-27, 2015.
into events in Sugar Creek, Ohio on the night of September 26-27, 2015.
February 20, 2014
Dearest Dr. V______,
I have been made aware that you are somewhat cross with me. This is fruit borne from your backstabbing betrayal in January, when you interpreted my open and honest narrative of legitimate concerns surrounding events in Sugar Creek as a sign of "increasing paranoia, delusions of grandeur and spiraling depression." ( I peeked at your notebook while you were in the loo.) Since then, I have chosen to maintain a more polite distance from you and your ministrations.This is in spite of your borderline demand for me to schedule more sessions, increase my check-ins with this journal, and - the ultimate insult - to take medication.
I was happy to let you go pound sand. However, you once again managed to get to my lovely wife, who has an unholy power over me that you can only dream of wielding. She gave me an ultimatum, the terms of which I will not share with you. I will only say "well-played, you diabolical turd."
So I would like to present a compromise. I will not submit to your mind-altering drugs. I will return to our previous schedule of visits, no more, no less. And I will check in more often with this journal, if only for the pleasure of telling you to go f___ yourself on a bi-weekly basis.
Are we agreed? If so, feel free to respond after the "go f___ yourself."
March 5, 2014
Go f___ yourself.
March 19, 2014
Go f___ yourself.
April 1, 2014
Okay, Dr. V______, I'm aware of how childish this has been, and I'm ready to be civil and communicate.
April Fools. Go f___ yourself.
April 15, 2014
Tax day. Remember to go f___ yourself before the IRS does it for you.
April 29, 2014
For reference, see "yourself, go f___."
May 13, 2014
Get f____d.
May 18, 2014
May 27, 2014
Shit.
Don't break your arm patting yourself on the back, Dr. V______. This was a mistake. I use this journal for multiple purposes, and I intended to rip this page out before sharing my usual flaming bag of dog poo with you. This is not a "cry for help" or a need to confide in you in any way. But now you've seen it, and god____it, so has Rachel, and she's begging me to actually talk to you, and I can't stand seeing her in pain over this. So I will "confide" for her sake. Don't you dare f___ me again.
This is a map of the area around my house. It's not to scale; there's about five miles of road between me and 62. I don't know if the woods take up as much space here as I've made it look, but it feels like it: they seem vast. Note that Logan Road doesn't cut through but very carefully skirts the perimeter. There are no houses on the woodward side.
I started drawing it a few weeks ago. The library was sending me multiple threatening letters (or as threatening as a librarian can muster) about the mounting fines for "Lovely, Dark and Deep." I figured that after four months I could reasonably slink into town without drawing pitchfork-and-torch-wielding crowds, so I grudgingly sifted through my office until I found it. Because I hadn't really done much beyond cursorily glancing through it before, I made the mistake of sitting down to read it again. Let 'em tack another ten cents onto the bill, right?
As I've said before, most of the titles were "The Lost This" or "The Vanished That," variations on a theme. Not so "The Butchered Plough-Horse." The viscerality of the title had caught my eye the first time, and drew me in again now.
It recounted a strange case from 1882, when a farmer named Andrew Kelley didn't come home one evening after spending the day out in the north forty with his plough-horses. (Need I mention what those forty acres dead-ended into?) This would have been just another missing persons case if not for what his neighbors discovered the next day. As they were driving up the Creek Road (now Logan Road), they discovered a gruesome sight. One of Kelley's horses lay dead on the banks of the creek, stomach ripped open. The rest of it was a bloody mess as well: wounds and claw marks covered the horse nearly head-to-tail. It looked as if the horse had been set upon by a pack of vicious animals and managed to escape, dying of its injuries not long after.
That would have been enough to distinguish it from the others, but the story wasn't done. The Sugar Creek constabulary hauled the dead horse onto a wagon and brought it back to town, where it was laid out in a butcher shop to await autopsy the following day. (The police had no facilities to accommodate it, and it was thought unseemly to bring it to the town mortuary.) However, When they came for it the next morning, the shop was a scene of chaos. Someone had smashed their way into the building and made off with the corpse, and when I say smashed, I mean smashed. The front door lay in a heap of splinters and glass against the far wall. Where the horse had been on the floor in the back room there was nothing but a large red smear. Whatever had taken it had dragged it out the back, through another destroyed door. Deep scratches and grooves covered the floor along its path, along with a dark, ichorous red fluid that initially was thought to have come from the horse until it was noted it was in the front of the store as well. The trail extended fifty yards from the store to a large pool of the ichor, where it stopped. Like the horse was suddenly lifted up into the sky.
Or dragged down into the ground.
Unfortunately, there was no resolution to the case, no other assessment of the break-in in the story. I checked Rachel's news archives, and I wondered how J.L. Preston had been able to find this. There was nothing that I could find on Andrew Kelley but an obituary. He was quite a character: brash, loud, and aggressive, known for carrying both a monogrammed handkerchief and a silver Derringer like some kind of dandy wannabe cowboy. He reminded me a lot of my dickhead neighbor Bill, in that they shared the same confrontational approach to "trespassers": why waste words when high-velocity lead will do?
All of a sudden I felt a familiar tingling at the back of my brain, like I'd felt with the doll four months ago. Something about the story was tugging at my memory. Almost without thinking, I reached over to my desk drawer and opened it. It was the drawer, you recall, that was filled nearly to the top with weird, random crap I pulled out of the creek last fall. I dumped the drawer onto the desk, and immediately saw what I was looking for:
The letters on the fragment of linen were unmistakable. The fragment of the plow harness and the corroded single-shot pistol rested neatly to one side. It couldn't have been clearer if someone had laid it out for me.
I will go further into that idea momentarily. Gotta set it all up for you first.
I began going through the stories, and the items. Wanna see what I found?
- January, 1826: Edna Walcott. Last seen on the Creek Road skirting the woods. Believed to have died of exposure. Identifying characteristic: an ivory Spanish comb she wore constantly.
- May, 1857: Calvin Danvers. Itinerant on his way to Kansas. Last seen fishing(!) near the head of the creek. The story described him showing off the brand-new tin lure he was going to use to "catch a monster trout." Guess no one warned him.
|   |
- December, 1918: Michael Pruitt, WWI veteran, just returned home from France. Didn't even have the chance to change out of uniform before he vanished.
- June, 1940: Sally Baxter, high school junior. Loved to wear saddle shoes.
- October, 1959: Mary Prater, middle school teacher. Her students never saw her without her pearl-inlaid cat's-eye horn rims.
- August, 1968: Arthur Seligman, salesman for IBM.
- March, 1983: Kyle Marston, high school senior.
These are just the highlights, Dr. V______. For every story in that book, I found at least one item that could link to it. Do you know how many stories there were? Almost two hundred. Two hundred people in 170 years, just...gone. The map marks the last place that many of them were seen. Suffice to say, it is unsurprisingly consistent.
I know what you'll say: that none of this is conclusive. There are no clear names on anything. At best, all I have is conjecture and my own confirmation bias connecting this stuff and these people, like with the head.
And what am I trying to say, anyway? That there is an epidemic of murder in Sugar Creek? Stretching over two centuries? How could that be possible? It would be a vast conspiracy, involving dozens of killers over the decades. How could that be kept silent?
If you said that, you'd be right. It would be impossible to hide a conspiracy like that. So I'm not necessarily suggesting that. What I'm suggesting is howling-at-the-moon crazy. And I'm not sure I can explain it in a way that even I understand, other than to say that it is an intuition that sets my hackles standing straight up.
I'm suggesting that there is one single killer in all of these cases. And that I am being shown his trophy case.
I'm telling you this against my better judgment, Dr. V______. I'm asking you again: do not f___ me over this.
I know what you'll say: that none of this is conclusive. There are no clear names on anything. At best, all I have is conjecture and my own confirmation bias connecting this stuff and these people, like with the head.
And what am I trying to say, anyway? That there is an epidemic of murder in Sugar Creek? Stretching over two centuries? How could that be possible? It would be a vast conspiracy, involving dozens of killers over the decades. How could that be kept silent?
If you said that, you'd be right. It would be impossible to hide a conspiracy like that. So I'm not necessarily suggesting that. What I'm suggesting is howling-at-the-moon crazy. And I'm not sure I can explain it in a way that even I understand, other than to say that it is an intuition that sets my hackles standing straight up.
I'm suggesting that there is one single killer in all of these cases. And that I am being shown his trophy case.
I'm telling you this against my better judgment, Dr. V______. I'm asking you again: do not f___ me over this.
RSS Feed