Legends of Sugar Creek: The Journals of Jim Corrie, Part Nine

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. ​​​

June 2, 2014

Okay, Dr. V______. Operation Restoring Trust has begun. Let's see how you roll with this. 

I have spent the past week scouring every source I can to find a scrap of information, public, private or otherwise, that backs up the accounts in J.L. Preston's book. I have found almost nothing. I have no idea where the author found any of these stories, and I suspect, from the briefness of most of these accounts, she didn't have a lot to work with either. 

​Ah! But you may have noticed that I called her she. That's because I can confirm that J.L. Preston is in fact Jennifer Louise Preston. I wish I could say this was some adept sleuthing on my part, but it was sadly inferable from context: the writer was clearly one of poor Angie Weaver's parents, and the article listed both of their names: Carl and Jennifer Weaver, née Preston.

Armed with this mote of knowledge, I set out in search for her. Here, public records were finally my friend. I learned that the Weavers divorced in 1988, and Carl Weaver left Sugar Creek and moved to Dayton. A little cyber-stalking (with the help of my dear daughter Randi, God bless and forgive her for aiding and abetting me in navigating the Interwebs) produced a current address in Huber Heights. 

But.

"But what?" C'mon, Doc. How long have you been reading this? Figure it out. What could I possibly be but-ing about? What haven't I mentioned yet? What realization lit a hot coal of pure dread in my gut?

I couldn't find her. Anywhere. There was no indication that Jennifer Weaver moved out, no forwarding address. The house sold in 1993, but she wasn't listed as the seller. I found no additional titles under her name. The publisher of "Lovely, Dark and Sweet" was a vanity house that went belly-up in 1989. I couldn't find used copies of the book on Amazon, eBay, Craigslist or any of a dozen other pissant book sites. Short of something available on the Dark Web (not sure how or why Randi knows so much about this), I think this copy may be the last or only one in existence. 

I am trying to remain calm about this. I am imagining her just packing up her car and leaving one day, like that guy in Into the Wild (just without poisoning herself at the end). Leaving no forwarding address, abandoning a life of pain and bad memories for a future off the grid, happy and free. 

I am trying so very hard not to imagine the alternative.

So this snipe hunt continues. I'm heading to Dayton tomorrow to talk to Carl Weaver. (Don't worry, I'm not stalking him - I'm meeting him for coffee, not camping out in his bushes!) You'll have to wait with baited breath until then.

(Immediately following this entry, six pages are torn out of the journal. Entries resume over three weeks later.)

June 25, 2014

I'm sorry, Doc. Really, I'm truly sorry. I'm sorry I missed our last three sessions. I'm sorry I had to destroy what I wrote over the last month. But I'm not ready to talk about all of that yet. I wasn't ready to read back the shit I learned, the shit I saw. Please be patient with me, and please, just listen. 

I can't tell you yet what I learned from my trip to Dayton, or what greeted me when I came back. I can tell you that it sent me charging back up the Creek, ready to hack that place to pieces with my shovel.  I felt possessed, enraged, by that place. If I could have physically hurt it, I would. Gasoline and a match popped into my mind more than once. It scared me how hard I had to fight back the impulse.

I wish I could tell you what I was looking for. I mean, I know what I was looking for, that was never a question in my mind. I just can't tell you right now.

It's the whole trust thing, y'know? This is a whole new level of craziness requiring a shit-ton of trust, and you and I just aren't there yet. I'm not entirely there yet with myself.

I don't know if I expected to find what I was looking for. I did expect to find something, though. And I wasn't disappointed. 
​

This is just a sample. In all, I found about fifteen animal bones of all sizes and types. And wouldn't you know they were all just jumbled in a pile together? I'll have you know something else: I've dug in this spot before. I found nothing then. 

So what's the big deal about a bunch of animal remains? That's just the circle of life, no? Nothing nefarious about that. But I'm guessing you can't tell exactly what these are from the scale of the drawing. These skulls are actually quite large. And they belong to creatures that haven't been around since Sugar Creek was covered by glaciers. 

I looked them up online. The one on the far left is a smilodon, a saber-toothed cat. The one on the right is a dire wolf.  i had to search a bit for the one in the middle, as I thought it was a cave bear. I found out they only lived in Europe. I'm almost certain now that it's a short-faced bear. Same time period as the others, at least eleven thousand years ago.

They're sitting on a shelf in my office. I haven't sent them anywhere for analysis, and I don't plan to. 'Cause I get the joke now. Whatever I find, whatever I send, there will be something to debunk it. Lack of solid provenance and plain-old rural skepticism were my foils before: something else would cast the same kind of doubt on these. 

I actually figured out what that something would be fairly quickly. Finds this old you'd expect to be fossils: brittle, yellowed bits of rock masquerading as the bones they used to be. But these were still bones, white and glistening as the day the flesh was first stripped from them. They are real, I know they are. But they look far too new.

​It's hard to mistake the feeling that you're being f___ed with, Doc, even if you don't know why or by what. The skull that emerged from the bottom of this pile drove this feeling home clearer than a middle finger shoved right in my face. 
​

I felt myself shudder with alarm and excitement for the briefest of moments, my body betraying me by suggesting I had found it, the thing I sought, even as my brain told me it was a lie. The skull was badly fractured across the cranium, but otherwise was as smooth as the others. It was also just as old: the tip of an ancient spear point was lodged in the left eye socket. I'm sure if I looked it up I'd find a match to Clovis culture weapons or something equally ancient, but it wouldn't be enough to prove anything to anyone else. However I presented it, no matter what theory I put forth about it to others, it wouldn't be believed. I'm not ashamed to admit it, Doc - I held that skull in my dirty, mud-reddened hands and and I wept.

I wish I could tell you the whole reason why. I wish I could tell someone. Anyone. 

​
June 26, 2014

I can't deny this anymore, Doc. There is something out in those woods, something up to nothing good, and it is trying to tell me something.

I went to bed last night utterly defeated, close to broken. But whatever was messing with me wasn't done with me yet. I found myself in pitch darkness, with the sensation of something hot, pulsing and red all around me. The air was thick and close, and I felt hugely claustrophobic, like I was deep underground. Buried alive. 

The sounds of animals were everywhere, above me, below, right in front of my face: grunting, snorting, little bleats and short squawks. Aggressive noises that seemed to circle me and each other, beasts squaring off for a fight.

Suddenly one sound briefly silenced the rest, a deafening bellow combining the rage of a giant predator with the shriek of a jet turbine. It reminded me of the T. Rex roar from Jurassic Park. This roar exploded into the darkness, and then all the rest rose to match its volume and intensity, a vast, hideous sound of pain and fury that threatened to shatter my skull. The void around me started to churn and boil, and I realized all the creatures these cries were bound to were fighting. No, not fighting - ripping each other to pieces. Abject carnage in pitch black. I could even hear what I am sure were human voices and sounds at this point, though nothing intelligible, nothing sane.  I had started to scream myself at this point.

The volume grew and the voices fused, until we were all screaming together, a ragged, tortured howl that had now become the sound of a single creature, of which we were all now a part. I looked upward and saw we had erupted from the dark place where we were contained, and a red sky ringed by skeletal trees spun madly overhead.

I started up to utter silence in my bedroom. Rachel was dead asleep beside me. I clearly had not screamed aloud, but my throat felt as if I had gargled with battery acid. I felt something salty filling my mouth, so I ran to the bathroom and spat a gout of blood into the sink. 

I'm sitting on the edge of the tub, door locked, desperate for the sun to rise. I just finished madly sketching the last image of this fading dream and I know what it is. It is the view through the canopy looking up from the creek bed.

​I have to know what this thing is, Doc. I have to know why it's tormenting me, what it is planning. I don't have a choice in the matter. It's self-preservation as much as anything else now, preservation of my sanity.