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.
On July 12, 2014, Mr. Corrie's journal acknowledges a permanent break with his therapist, Dr. V_______. The therapist's office corroborates this via billing records indicating termination of automatic payments from Mr. Corrie's account dated from Friday, July 11. Dr. V_______'s office has also provided mail correspondence marked "return to sender" and failure responses to his email address, indicating a blocked account. Attempts to correspond with Mr. Corrie's wife were rebuffed in similar fashion, suggesting that Mr. Corrie convinced her to similarly cut off all contact with the therapist or managed to intercept and block messages sent to her from Dr. V_______. Mr. Corrie cites a letter sent to his wife from Dr. V_______ as the reason for severing contact, although no copy of said letter has been found among his belongings. Dr. V_______'s office denies any such letter was sent, and no record of it exists in their files.
From July 13 onward, all entries in the journal are addressed to Mr. Corrie's daughter, Miranda.
July 12, 2014
Randi - Miranda. My sweet, amazing girl. You will never read this. You will never be touched by this shit, my shit. This will not infect your life as it has mine. I just need someone to tell this to, even if it is only in my mind that I am talking to you. I have to imagine how you would respond to this, what you would say. What you would tell me to do. I'm terrified, I'm bursting with this, and there's no one else I can say it to, not your mother, and definitely not that backstabbing traitor Dr. V_______.
I warned the Doc about this. Warned. He promised me he would never betray my trust again. But I guess what happened between me and Bill Pryor made him change his mind.
This isn't making any sense. Let me start over.
I spent the weekend after the 4th practically living in the woods. I was absolutely determined to find something that I could definitively link to one of the disappearances. I mapped and plotted and dug in every inch of that creek right up to its source, a sluggish little spring deep inside the trees. The canopy was so thick and the trees hugged so close to the water there that it was like walking through an underground tunnel or the inside of an old Roman aqueduct. My alert system was at DEFCON-1 at first, making an already laborious task even more exhausting. I expected to be set upon at any moment, with no idea by what, and I was starting at every splash, every rustle of the leaves.
After awhile I was able to relax a bit. Whatever this thing was, it didn't want me dead, or it would have taken me months ago. It was a danger, but clearly not an eminent one; maybe it was getting too much of a kick out of f___ing with me.
That Sunday morning, I had nearly had my fill of frustration. I was pulling up all sorts of crap from all different eras: random animal bones, fragments of stone and metal, more buttons - you'd think this thing had swallowed a godd__n button factory or something! The mud was like runny soft-serve, giving this stuff up easily, and all of it was untraceable junk.
Then my shovel hit a hard spot. Not rock-hard, but noticeably more resistant than anywhere else around it. For some reason, I just started stabbing at it, hacking away at the spot. I was cutting into something tough and fibrous, like underground roots or something, that parted as grudgingly as a tightly-clenched fist. When that fist finally opened, I plunged my hand into the water and pulled out a small, partially-laminated rectangle that made my jaw drop when I realized what it was.
This is how I remember it. I only got a brief look at it, and damn it, I can't remember the name for the life of me, but it was, without a doubt, an identification card. A student ID. With a picture! I could even make out a year: 1991-92. This tempered my excitement a little as I remembered the significance of the date. Nineteen Ninety-One. The anniversary of the Legend that brought the flood of metal detector-wielding yahoos into these woods. It looked like at least one of them never made it out.
I wasn't able to find out who. I'd been so absorbed in my digging that I'd ignored the the lapping of water and snapping of twigs behind me, not realizing someone was there until I felt a cold circle of metal rest against the back of my head.
My piece-of-shit neighbor Bill had put the barrel of a shotgun against my head. I heard him pump a shell into the chamber, and the red water turned a little more yellow where I was kneeling. He snarled something about me "trespassing on his property," a claim that has and always will be utter excrement but not one I was prepared to debate with Yosemite Sam's less-congenial brother. But then he added a new wrinkle to it, actually accusing me of stealing his property and gesturing to the piles of detritus I had spent the weekend dredging up. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him gesture with his gun. He told me to drop everything where it was and stand up. I palmed the card and let my trowel fall, and started to rise.
All of a sudden something - I have no idea what - erupted from the water and lashed me across the hand, slicing my palm like barbed wire. I cried out and lurched forward, dropping the ID into the muck. Bill was startled, and I saw the barrel drift away from my head. Without thinking I grabbed it with both hands and shoved it back and away from myself as hard as I could. Bill fell back into the creek and I held onto the gun.
Bill flopped and floundered in the muddy water, screaming obscenities so loud and so fast they came out like gibberish, filthy baby talk. He was bellowing about his gun, his gun, his property, his woods...
His woods! his f____ing woods! I saw red, red like in one of my nightmares, and then the gun was above my head, raised like a club to cave in Bill's thick skull. I was screaming, a raw, furious scream that shook my whole frame. I was going to do it, Randi. In that moment, I think I was going to do it. But then something pierced through all of that rage straight to the center of my nervous system and stopped me cold.
It was the feeling - no, the certainty - that I was being watched. And that the thing watching me very much wanted me to do this.
Now Bill looked like the one who was going to piss himself. I can't say I blamed him. I was still pretty f___ing angry, though, and I took his gun and bashed it against a tree until it broke in half and threw the pieces at him. I yelled at him to f__ off or I'd make him eat them next. He took the hint and hightailed it into the trees.
My hand was slick with blood and I was shaking pretty badly, but I ignored it all to search for the ID. I didn't find it. I searched all around the place where it fell, but it was gone. It drove me nuts: here I find my proof and lose it practically in the same breath. I couldn't figure what had cut me, either. I'd pulled away all the fibrous material, and there was nothing living in the water that could have created such a wound. I could've taken a guess as to what did, but I just wanted to get out of there as fast as possible.
I gathered up my other finds and hiked back down the creek, emerging from the trees into a wash of blue and red. Chief Talbot was standing on the porch with your mother and that shitbag Pryor, who was pointing at me and yelling something I couldn't make out. Talbot was looking at me with the same look he'd had on his face when I showed him the doll's head. It's a shame they didn't name it Shit Creek, cause I was definitely up it.
That cowardly prick accused me of assaulting him without provocation, "like a crazy man," when he came upon me trespassing on his land. He'd gashed the back of his head when he fell, and he blamed that on me. I threw it back in his face, saying he'd attacked me and held a gun on me, and showed Talbot my hand. (He can lie, I can lie.) Talbot looked for a moment like he was going to just cuff us both and run us into town. But he's a fair man, Randi, and he knows what a shit-stirrer Bill is. He gave us both a warning about fighting, and told us to steer clear of each other in the future, or he would bring us both in for brawling. He told me I needed to compensate Bill for destroying his shotgun, which I wasn't happy about but figured was better than arrest for assault. Bill looked like he was about to shit a brick, but he capitulated.
All's well that ends well, right? Well, no; there were two problems. Problem One: Bill wasn't done with me. He started talking to the neighbors, the postman, folks in town, anyone whose ear he could hang off of about what a crazy f___ing lunatic I am. He even tried to go to Rachel's work to get them to publish an open letter about me! They said no, of course, but that's how I ended up at the newspaper office the next day to be gobsmacked with Problem Two.
A quick chat with Rachel's boss assured me that there was no way they would risk libel charges with Bill's screed. I thanked him and was about to go when he handed me an envelope that had just come in the mail and asked me to give to Rachel. This was weird, because no one ever sent mail to her at work. Then I saw the return address.
It was from Dr. V_______. He had reached out to your mom again, behind my back. In the car I ripped the letter open and read what that Judas had to say about me.
I'd had a session with him a few days earlier, and I'd told him everything I just told you about Bill. Now he was laying it all out for Rachel, that and more, and in nothing resembling charitable terms. Do you know what he said, Randi? He called me a "deeply troubled" man, that I suffered from paranoia bordering on psychosis, from dissociative delusions that "were threatening to overtake me" completely, and that my latest appointment suggested I could even become violent and out-of-control. He said that a "psychological intervention" was advisable, even "against my will if necessary!" Can you guess how much of this shit he said to me?
So I've cut him out, Randi. I'm done with him, and he is done with us. He'll never hear another word from me, or get another word to Rachel, period. You're never going to see this, but I still feel like I need to say it: I am not crazy. I am suffering, but at the hands of something terribly, impossibly real that I can only hope to overcome. And I would never, never do anything to hurt either one of you or put you in harm's way.
Not intentionally.
RSS Feed