September 25, 2015

​Randi...my Miranda. My darling girl. When you read this, you are going to be upset. You will want to drop everything and race straight home. I'm begging you to resist this urge, although I fear that, by the time this is all over, I may not need to, as there will likely be no home for you to return to.

It's all happening tomorrow. There will be a ceremony at 4:00* tomorrow afternoon at which the mayor of Sugar Creek will throw a switch and the poison that infests this place will be pumped into every home and public building in the town, after which it will all be too late. I will make my last-ditch attempt to stop it early tomorrow morning. I will go into those woods, dig at the predetermined spot again and fight anything I have to fight to wrench the proof I need free from this monster's claws and deliver it into the mayor's hands. There's a slim chance I may win through with this thing, that I, your mother and this benighted town will still be here come dawn on September 27.

If not...you have to stay away from Sugar Creek. It knows you now, and regardless of what happens to us, I am determined that it will never lay hands, for want of a better term, on you. In order to avoid that, you have to promise never to come back. 

I'm sitting on the porch as I write these final words in my journal. The setting sun has dressed the creek and the woods beyond in an appropriately ghastly combination of blood and shadow. As I stare into that shadow, I continue to ponder the final mystery I have yet to crack even with a hypothesis: why, after all the games, the manipulation and terror, this thing at long last chose to show me the prize I had been searching for, the chink in its armor that may yet lead to its undoing. Hubris? Boredom? One last blown raspberry at the jerk who thought he was so smart, yet got outsmarted by a sentient drainage ditch at every turn? 

I don't know. I have my doubts about that. These final dreams were so very different from the rest. And the way the thing reacted when I followed their direction was in precise opposition to them, as if they were somehow contesting the creature's will, even fighting it.

Fighting for control...

I'm wondering again at the nature of this thing. What is it that makes it "it?" It is, after all, the sum of many, many disparate parts. It consumes and absorbs the physical bodies of its prey, adding them to its own. But what about the minds? Does it eat memories as well, churning them out again and again as bait for unsuspecting nitwits like myself to follow into its trap? This seems plausible. But those minds that held them: are they subsumed as well? Or do they survive, intact and separate, trapped inside its diseased neural net, watching as it uses them to consume more victims?

The dreams that came to me these last few weeks were different. The original dreams felt, in hindsight, like a being imposing its will upon me, impatiently pushing, goading, punishing when I moved to slowly, removing the pain when I complied. Yet while there was insistence with the later dreams, there was no pain. There was urgency, but no force of will pushing me forward. Could it be that, after thousands or even millions of years, enough minds have accumulated within this thing to form an agenda of their own? 

To fight back? 

If I had more time, I'd try to study this. but as it is...maybe later.

Goodbye, Randi. I love you, and I hope to see you on the other side of this. 

I'm having dreams again, Randi. And I've seen this show before. The soldier, with the pistol. The thing that started this whole mess two years ago. 

What the f___ does it want from me now? It's won. I can't stop it. I can't warn anyone. All I can do is sit here and watch the asteroid plow toward us on its way to the extinction event. I haven't made peace with this; I don't think I can make peace with the idea that I can't save Rachel from this. The best I've managed to do is to become numb, which I'm afraid to say has afforded me better sleep, even if it is on the couch.

It must know I'm beaten. So why is it doing this now? It's vicious and it's sadistic, but it's always been with a point before. What part of the plan is this?

I should mention that there are a few differences this time.  It's not the whole dream like before,  just this part, over and over, like a skipping record. It's also not tormenting me like it did before, stealing my sleep and leaving me nauseous and in agony until I did something about it. It's just...insistent. And every time it shows this to me, it seems to focus in, closer and closer, on...something.  The image quality in these dreams is just as bad as before, but I get the sense this will improve like it did previously. I just hope it gets to the point and leaves me with a few days of peace before the end. 
​

September 8, 2015

Randi...I know what it is. And Jesus Christ, I think I know what it means. 

The dream finally let me see it. It focused in on a spot on the soldier's chest, over and over, until I saw something there reflecting the sunlight. It was a crescent of etched silver, hanging around the soldier's neck. I'd seen this decoration before in paintings from the American Revolution. It's an officer's insignia, called a gorget, which British officers mostly wore at the time but which occasionally appeared on American uniforms. 

I'd already surmised that this was proof of the massacre at Sugar Creek following St. Clair's Defeat, but I was never able to locate anything definitive. The gun was a dead end with the Historical Society because it was rusted, undatable junk.

But this last dream...I was able to see the gorget so clearly that I could make out some of the etching. On one side was a barely-legible name. On the other side was a date.
​

Seventeen Ninety-One. 

I woke up with a yelp. I couldn't believe it. This thing, this creature, had finally screwed up. For the first time, it had shown me a hard piece of evidence that the Legend of Sugar Creek was true, and that it was buried somewhere in the woods.  More than that, it had practically shown me where it fell. The gorget chain had broken, and was in the process of dropping from the officer's neck as he entered the woods. This gave me a rough estimate of where to dig. True, this thing seemed to cycle junk to the surface and back like a dumbwaiter, but I had a hunch that this would be there when I dug for it. For bit, I felt like I did at the beginning: energized, excited, optimistic. The stakes of failure had all fallen away. The weight of my life and what it had become evaporated. I was that naive young retiree jumping out of bed, grabbing his tools and his boots, and charging out to the creek in his pajamas.

I plunged into the trees and sank my spade into that nasty red muck.  As it had so many times before, the mud gave way easily to my digging, and if it was too easy, I'd move to a new spot. The first dozen spots I tried were almost like I was shoveling water. Then my I hit a spot so hard that it reverberated up my arms: a material not quite rock, but incredibly dense and, as I discovered, fibrous, like tree roots.

I had expected this. My mind shot back to over a year ago, when I found the student ID. It was the same type of material that had fought me then. My theory was correct, then: there was something here this thing didn't want me to find. Something that, like the ID, would have established its crimes as immutable, unshakeable fact. With facts come consequences, namely a deluge of investigation and excavation that would cut this creature off from its food supply, and possibly its existence. 

Unfortunately, in the excitement of my discovery, I forgot the other tiny detail of how it responded to me that day. I heard a rustling behind me, and caught a glimpse of something large and red out of the corner of my eye right before three red-hot knives slashed across my back and drove me to my hands and knees. 

​I read something a long time ago, an interview where Jim Caviezel talked about actually taking a whip to his back by accident while filming The Passion of the Christ. I'm paraphrasing, but he described the pain as riveting, transfixing, an agony that literally drove the breath out of his body for a moment. Lying there in that muddy water, I finally understood what he meant. It was a solid two minutes before I could unclench my teeth, it hurt so bad. I stood up gingerly, looking about myself like an idiot, as if I actually thought I'd see some sign of what had hit me. Nothing but shadows and that big hole of light at the entrance of the woods, calling me urgently to run through it. I decided to call it a morning and listen to it. 

As I limped back up the lawn, dragging my shovel behind me, I was not surprised to see Rachel on the porch again, watching me. She was keeping her distance, as usual, but look in her eyes was different. The normal balance of fearful contempt had tipped strongly in the direction of fear. Her hands were clasped tightly together, as if holding something, and in spite of the distance, I could see her leaning toward me. Clearly, she wanted to talk. I was in no mood for another fight, having just been on the losing end of one, and I hurried past her toward the door, eyes down. 

Rachel's scream stopped me dead in my tracks.
​

This is what she saw, Randi. I looked like I had been mauled by a bear. The three slashes were deep and bloody, almost deep enough for stitches, but not quite. I imagine that thousands of years of butchery have made this thing quite the surgeon. Besides, it was sending me a message, and you don't do that by putting the recipient in the hospital with crippling wounds that would raise the wrong kinds of questions. 

That said, it was the straw that broke the camel's back for Rachel. She seized me by my shoulders and shook me, hard, tears streaming down her face, and demanded I tell her, once and for all, what the hell has been going on. I just stood there for a moment, looking down, searching for another reasonable-sounding lie I could tell her, but as if she read my mind, she grabbed my face and forced me to look her in the eye. "No more lies," she said. 

What could I say? She was right, I owed her. I'd owed her from the beginning. I wasn't sure if I thought she was to weak to handle the truth or if I was to handle her knowing it. We sat there on the porch as the sun rose as I told her everything, from beginning to end. 

She took it better than I'd thought she would. I mean, she'd been living with the idea that I was going nuts already, so I imagine she was steeled for something ridiculous. She sat behind me the whole time, cleaning and dressing my wounds with gauze, so I was spared having to see her reactions to the insanity I was spouting. I could tell when something hit her differently, though, because every once in awhile, at key moments, her hands would pause in their constant motion across my back, then resume work a few seconds later. Beyond that, she didn't say a word the whole time. By the time I finished, she had finished her work. When I turned to look at her, her arms hung at her sides, and her eyes were fixed on a spot on the porch beyond where I sat. 

"So that day you found my ring..." she muttered. 

"This thing had returned it," I said. "Nearly punched out my passenger side window in the doing of it." 

"That's why you took the Jeep to the shop that day," Rachel said. Her eyes remained fixed on the porch as she struggled to process the information.

"It was a warning," I said. "At a time when I was getting close. If it takes something and gives it back, it was saying it would take you from me if I went any farther."

"But it didn't take me." 

"It didn't need to. I managed to make such a fool of myself that I stopped being a threat. It no doubt plans to take both of us once this is all said and done, but for now, we're harmless."

"No." Her eyes suddenly locked onto mine and she gripped my arm. "It doesn't think you're harmless. Not any more."

I stared at her, my eyes wide at this sudden shift in her behavior. "Because it attacked me," I said.

"Yes, but not just that." Rachel crumpled forward, her hands clutching her head as her face became a mask of pain. "Jesus. Jesus..."

"Rachel?" I said, and my hand reached out to touch her shoulder. "What is it?"

When she looked up at me, her eyes were red, her face streaked with tears.  "Things have been going missing for months," she said. "Little things, from all over the house. One minute I'd be using a pen, or a spoon to stir my tea, and I'd step away and it would be gone when I got back. It was driving me crazy. I thought I was slipping, having senior moments. I even wondered if you were messing with me in some passive-aggressive way. As far as I know, none of it has been returned. Until now."

Rachel reached into her pocket and tossed a small, red-crusted item onto the patio table. 

"I just found this a moment before you came out of the woods," she said. "It went missing months ago, around her last Christmas break. It had been so long I'd forgotten she'd lost it."

This is the point, Randi, that I really hope you are reading this.

The object on the table was nothing remarkable. Just a woman's plastic hair clip, one you might buy in a set at the drug store. But it was unmistakably one of yours, Randi. 
​