I apologize for not
writing sooner. I meant to get in contact with you earlier, but other circumstances
have prevented me from doing so. I have much to explain to you, and little time
to explain it in; I pray you read this quickly.
To begin, I never
intended to scare you as badly as I did three months back, but you must
understand that I did it for good reason. You see, I was being chased, and if
we didn’t leave our research site at once…
I’m honestly not sure how
I managed to get back to the campsite alive that night. By all rights, I should
be dead, even maimed beyond comprehension,
yet I survived the night intact, and even more relieving, alive. I can’t imagine how worried you must have been these past
three months, Walter, or how frightened you were that night to find me absent,
lost somewhere to the thick evening fog and vastness of the evergreen forest.
I’m sure you were even more worried when you saw that Darryl, our young intern
(a nice undergraduate ecology major, if unskilled in fieldwork and somewhat
skittish around forests), was also missing in action. Then to see me running
out of the underbrush, screaming at you to get in the jeep immediately…
My friend, I’m truly
sorry. I never should have left the campsite like some neophyte biology
undergraduate, but I had to find Darryl. I did find him, and I’m alright of
course. But unfortunately, Darryl…
I… I don’t quite know how
to put this gently, Walter, but… Darryl is deceased. By the time I found him,
he was… well, there was little chance that his funeral would ever have been
open-casket. His body was never recovered, but anyone who did find the mangled
corpse would have been disturbed and horrified by the mere sight of what was
left. But Walter, there are far more disturbing things than even than in this
world, far worse things than merely discovering a grisly scene of murder.
Things such as actively viewing one…
Yes, Walter, I… I watched
Darryl die! And what’s worse, I was far too late to prevent it from happening.
I even saw his killer’s face, but…
Walter, my old friend, you
must promise me one thing. You must swear on your life that as soon as you finish
reading this letter, you will burn it. Burn it in your fireplace, in a
campfire, by matchbook, it doesn’t matter so long as it is destroyed. The world isn’t ready to learn about the… about what I
saw when I searched for Darryl, about any of what I will tell you here. It will
sound like the ramblings of an absolute lunatic, but you deserve to know the
truth of Darryl’s demise. Besides, I am a man of science, and I do not alter or
change details to what I report, nor do I believe in anything without substantial
experimentation or evidence, such as the so-called “cryptids” some people claim
to exist. But Walter, this time, you must
believe me despite having nothing more than my word, and you must, no
matter what happens to me after you receive it, burn this letter. Don’t contact the authorities, don’t seek me out for
more information, and for the love of God, Walter, don’t go searching for Darryl’s body!
It all began shortly
after midnight, well after we had found our field research site and set up
camp, and long after the makeshift fire pit in the center of our trio of tents
had been extinguished. We were all well asleep by then, save for Darryl, who
never seemed to sleep well on our research trips and who tended to go to sleep
later in the evening anyway. I, however, had been sleeping pleasantly in my
small tent when I was jolted awake by a sudden scream in the distance. I’m not
sure how it didn’t wake you, Walter; then again, you can sleep anywhere and
through anything. Concerned, I threw on my thick jacket and began looking for
the source of the noise.
The first thing amiss
that I noticed upon exiting my tent was the wide-open flap of the tent beside
mine – Darryl’s tent. The sleeping bag had been dragged out head-first, and lay
close to the forest’s edge, coiled on the ground like a fat anaconda.
The second thing I
noticed, and the most chilling by far, was that the ground nearby appeared
scratched, as if something or someone had clawed at it to prevent being dragged
away from safety. The scratches, which I assumed were from Darryl fighting his
attacker’s grip as he was dragged, led into the spruce forest. Darryl himself
was nowhere to be found.
I grew concerned and
began searching the area more defensively. My immediate thought was that a bear
had found the campsite and pulled Darryl from his tent, but the entire scene
was too organized and clean to have been a bear attack, and I saw no blood on
the ground to indicate a mauling. So then, what could have attacked Darryl and
taken him from his tent? There weren’t any known cougar sightings in the area,
and wolves mostly stay well away from human campsites. As for a human attacker,
Darryl had no enemies to my knowledge, and we were miles outside of any sort of
civilization…
Another scream caught my
ears then, a distinct masculine cry of fear that I realized belonged to Darryl.
Lacking any other options and afraid that the young undergraduate might be
hurt, I quickly gathered my pack and flashlight together and began to follow
the scratch marks into the woods. About halfway in, they curved off-trail into
the undergrowth, and so I followed them into the forest proper. It must have
been about twenty meters before they cut off entirely, leaving me with nothing
but Darryl’s screams as a guide.
I searched for what must
have been hours, slowly wandering deeper and deeper into the fog-shrouded
forest as I shouted Darryl’s name into the trees. No response ever came. My
cries echoed off the tall pines and their long, black branches, branches that
seemed to reach arm-like overhead and blacked out the shimmering stars. Had
there been moonlight, it too would have been blocked off, but it was the night
of a new moon, making it all the darker outside. Still, it’s truly incredible
how beautiful and foreboding a forest can be at night, particularly in the
north woods…
At that moment, I heard a
barely audible rustling from behind. Anticipating an animal, I turned around
slowly and stretched my arms out to become as large as possible – if it was a
bear, I didn’t want it thinking I was prey. But what I found was no bear.
In the distance,
half-obscured by eerie, ground-hugging fog, I saw a faintly human figure. It was
tall and black-clad, blending easily into the forest surrounding it, and it
seemed to glide as it moved between the trees, but its footsteps made no noise.
It was holding something in its arms that I couldn’t quite make out. And
something about that distant figure, I couldn’t place what, sparked a faint
nervousness in my heart…
Thinking it was Darryl, I
followed from a distance, shrugging my unease off as I did so. Oh God, Walter,
that was the worst possible mistake I could have made! I should never have
followed, I should have backed away and gotten help. Curse my curiosity; my
zoological knowledge could never have prepared me for what I found out later!
But how could I have known the danger? I was so focused on helping Darryl that
thoughts as to my own personal safety were tossed to the side, and I could not
rest knowing that the poor lad was in trouble.
I followed the figure for
a while, carefully inching closer as I did so. I got within thirty meters of it
before I realized that the figure was not Darryl. It was another man, built
like a stick figure and standing quite tall, with a terribly dark presence… He
was business-suit clad and pale as the moon, with strangely long, skeletal
arms. Arms that clung to a limp human body. Darryl’s
body.
I didn’t dare approach
any closer. The man (I assumed the person was male, since I couldn’t see their
face) made me very anxious, though I still couldn’t place quite why. But my
curiosity drove me to continue following him nonetheless, and follow him I did
until at some point, I lost track of him and stumbled into a small clearing
surrounded by boulder outcroppings, a clearing where I saw… I saw…
… I will try my damndest
to explain what I saw in that clearing. I will try, but I fear it won’t even
begin to scratch the surface of how heinous and disturbing the scene I saw
truly was.
A massacre. That is
truthfully the only way I could possibly put it, the only word I have to
describe the carnage before my eyes that night. Everywhere in that small
clearing lay the bodies of what presumably once were human beings, of all walks
of life – adults, teens, the elderly, children… Oh God, Walter, there were children victims there, all strewn
carelessly across the ground like ragdolls, impaled through tree branches where
blood both fresh and stale congealed in the ridges of the bark. The bodies were
decapitated, eviscerated, torn apart like tissue paper. They were in every
stage of decay, some freshly slaughtered, some bloated and putrid; some little
more than dried out husks. Some of them hung from the limbs of trees by their
slick, slowly liquefying intestines. Others had seemingly dragged what remained
of their savaged bodies towards the forest to die, smearing blood and dragging
their pulped organs behind them in the dirt, but none of them made it quite far
enough. One corpse had its head (I presume that is what it once was) smashed
into a thick pulp of blood and brain matter, bits of crushed skull still
glistening like tiny bits of porcelain as they stuck out jaggedly from the
awful fleshy mass. The iron stench of blood and putrid reek of decay clouded
the cool, misty night air, and the constant buzzing of flies was all I could
hear.
I very nearly became sick
all over the forest floor, but I was even more so horrified and confused. There
had to be at least twenty to thirty different bodies here altogether. Was I
absolutely sure that an animal hadn’t done this to these poor souls, as
horrifying as it was to see such human wreckage?
I hid behind a large
boulder outcropping to get my bearings. I had no desire to see that human
killing field any longer. I looked to the sky, mind racing, begging for any
sort of explanation for what I had seen, and that’s where I found them.
Plastic grocery bags,
opaque white and non-descript, hung by their handles in the trees like bizarre
Christmas ornaments, each one neatly bundled and holding something inside. From
what I could tell, at least thirty or so hung twisting in the breeze on just
the one tree in front of me. Again, blast my curiosity, for I noticed one of
them was nothing more than a scrap of plastic dangling from a thick oak branch,
and my eyes traced the bag’s trajectory downwards to see the fallen remains of
the bag at the base of the tree. Cautiously, I edged towards the bag and pulled
the plastic back, and a sickly cloud of iron stench escaped as I did so.
The bags were filled with
organs, Walter. And I could tell, from the size of the heart to the soft,
spongy, pink lungs and the small, blue-irised eyeballs inside the bag that they
had once belonged to a human being.
I actually did throw up then, shaking as I stumbled
away from the gore before me. No animal did this, nor did a man. The rest of
the bags were too far up for any man to feasibly reach, and there was no
possible way such clean extraction of those organs could have been done by an
animal’s claws. Besides that, this part of the forest was far too much of a
hassle to get to – if even I had trouble clambering over the rocks and through
the underbrush, it would be far too difficult for a killer carrying a body to
bother with taking it here for disposal.
A soft rustle from the
direction of the clearing caught my attention, and I turned towards the
boulders again, trying to ignore the smell of blood surrounding me. There was a
sizeable crack between two of the larger boulders with enough space to peer
through, so I pressed my eye against the crevice, curling up against the
age-worn rock so as not to be seen. Or, worse yet, mistaken for the killer of
these poor people by some fellow discoverer of this… graveyard, for lack of a
better word.
I watched as a figure,
tall and black-clad, strode with rangy strides into the clearing, his arms
still carrying the limp human form. I couldn’t get a clear look at the figure’s
face, but there was no mistaking the sharp suit, the slender build, the awkward
height. This had to be the same man I saw earlier that night, and now that he
was close enough, I could tell easily that the limp figure he carried was an
unconscious Darryl.
Cold sparks shot down my
spine. Had… had this man knocked Darryl out to keep him from screaming, or had
Darryl merely fainted from fear or injury?
I soon got my answer. The
man carefully, without even needing to bend at the waist, set Darryl face up on
the grass, patiently standing over him like a parent over a sleeping child. One
spidery, pale hand reached nimbly down to Darryl’s ankle, gripping it firmly.
In an instant, his hand
twisted at the wrist, and a sickening crack resonated through the air as
Darryl’s ankle snapped like a dry twig.
The horrific truth dawned
on me then. This man… he was the
killer, and he was purposefully debilitating his latest victim so they couldn’t
escape. I couldn’t bear to watch as he broke Darryl’s other ankle, and I shook
as I cowered behind the boulders, far too afraid to move lest I be seen and
captured as well. I felt like a little boy all over again, like a scared child
shaking in the night as he curls beneath the covers to hide from the monster in
the closet.
I remained that way,
cowering and deliberating on my situation and Darryl’s, wondering how on earth
I would get away, and I would have stayed that way if a ghastly scream from the
clearing hadn’t snapped me from my trance, a scream of pain and terror.
Darryl…
My eyes instantly became
glued to the crevice. Darryl was awake now, and clearly in terrible pain, but
more so, afraid. His eyes stared
upwards at his rangy attacker as he desperately tried to drag himself backwards
and away from the tall figure, screaming his final words, words that will haunt
me to my dying days.
“No! No, God, no, not you, please God, no!”
The man gave no response.
He grabbed Darryl’s arm and harshly yanked the poor boy forward with enough
force to dislocate the joint as he pulled his prey to him. I could no longer
tell if Darryl screamed more from agony or panic as the man held his victim
unshakably, letting the poor lad dangle by his dislocated arm, and then… Then
the man pulled Darryl close to him, so close the boy could have touched the
lapels of the man’s suit, and a pale hand wrapped around the boy’s neck.
Another wrapped around a leg in an iron grasp. And in one swift motion, he bent
Darryl’s body back and in half, a gravelly crunch resounding as the spinal cord
snapped and vertebrae ground roughly against each other.
The man laid his now
paralyzed victim on the ground once again, this time with an almost mocking
sort of gentleness as his unseen gaze pinned the whimpering Darryl to the
forest floor. I can’t have possibly imagined what it must have been like,
staring into the face of your killer, knowing you have no chance of escaping
from what you know to be certain death. I can’t even conceive of such a living
nightmare. But I didn’t have to imagine it, because I saw the raw, animal panic
in Darryl’s eyes, flowing out with his tears to the soil that would be his
deathbed, and I saw how his chest heaved in terrified sobs of anguish. I
smelled the pungent stench of urine as he wet himself from the fear. I heard
his pleas for mercy slowly reduce to whimpers of dread as he waited for that
last, final blow that would end his life. And the worst part of it? The man,
his face still obscured by the angle I viewed from, said absolutely nothing.
Not a word, not a grunt or a chuckle, not even a murmur of approval at his
horrific work. The man was entirely, completely, eerily silent.
He remained silent as his
left hand reached down pensively, gently tracing its razor-edge fingertips down
the sobbing man’s face and casually brushing away teardrops.
He remained silent even
as his needle fingers slid into Darryl’s eye sockets, just between the organ
and the bone, and slowly began to carve out the fragile sight organs.
Darryl screamed.
I almost followed his
lead. I wanted so very much to cover my eyes, to run, to forget everything
about the snuff film playing before me, but I couldn’t look away. Out of either
fear or some awful fascination, I forced myself to stay and keep watching as
the man continued his slow, intricate dissection, carefully opening up Darryl’s
torso, slowly slicing the organs and viscera to pull free intestines, kidneys,
the liver, the stomach. Each organ his dexterous hands sliced free he pulled
closer to him, examining with a professional, scientific curiosity despite the
alarming amount of gore he stood in the middle of, even despite the horrific
amount of blood that splashed the ground, coating his hands and arms, staining
his suit even blacker still. Each quivering organ seemed to fascinate him
endlessly, capturing his unshakable interest. He was… intelligent. Clearly,
this man was one of scientific mind, of curious bent, a patient operator working
diligently on a fascinating specimen of animal – mankind.
He seemed the most
intrigued by Darryl’s… by the specimen’s eyes. He spent at least fifteen minutes
turning them over in his agile fingers, and even as he continued his work
amidst Dar- the subject’s cries of anguish, he occasionally seemed to pause to
glance back down at them, as if fascinated by the brilliant little hazel orbs.
The heart… he saved the twitching, dying subject’s rapidly pounding heart for
last. This most precious of organs he removed as easily as a few quick slices
to the arteries and veins, twisting it free of the ribcage with one skeletal
hand. The organ shuddered in his grasp as it pumped nothing but cold air and
fog, the blood dripping uselessly to the ground, and then finally stopped
beating altogether.
The man stood in silence
for a moment as the heavy cloak of death whirled in the misty air, pensive,
reflecting. Then he silently pulled what remained of Darryl from the ground and
strode towards a tall maple with his grim cargo, gliding on soundless feet. I
could now tell his full height from my position behind the rocks; he was easily
tall enough for his hairless head to touch the maple’s higher branches, but his
arms stretched higher as he lifted Darryl’s remains above his head. And in one
swift, alarming motion, he brought the corpse down through the air, slamming it
through a sharp tree limb and leaving the husk to rot there in the soon to rise
morning sun. The organs… these he carefully gathered in a small, neat pile, and
then… then, he simply vanished. Out
of thin air, gone, no sign he had ever existed save the pile of flesh on the
ground that we had once called “Darryl”. I no more than blinked and he had
returned, a shiny, flexible, opaque white object in one hand that I quickly
realized was…
Oh, Christ…
It was a grocery bag. A plastic grocery bag, for
storing the removed… no, harvested organs
in.
I could have escaped
easily if I had just stayed quiet. I could still be safe right now if I had
just waited for the man to leave first. But then he did something that drew all
the breath from my lungs, that dug into my very core to extract a scream. He
paused in his motion as if suddenly realizing that something was amiss in his
hidden slaughterhouse.
And then he turned to
face my hiding spot.
Oh God, Walter… he (?)
was faceless. He (?) had a blank and
awful mask of nothing, a canvas marred by splashes of red. It was staring at
the rocks I hid behind, staring without eyes… And when I screamed in horrified
shock from the same sight that had so terrified Darryl, that eyeless gaze
locked firmly onto me. Not the rocks. Me.
It held me with invisible hooks, tracking me with laser-like precision, and in
an instant every semblance of security I’d ever had disintegrated to ash. And
what happened next, what I saw, he… It…
I’m… sorry, Walter, you
truly must forgive my nerves. This is very difficult for me to write without
shaking at the thought, and it will sound perfectly absurd if my story doesn’t
already, but you must know every detail. You must. And I swear upon my own
life, I saw this with my own eyes, I saw it and it is the truth!
The man… no, no, it
wasn’t a man… the being grew extra
limbs. Branches are the very best that I can describe them as, black, flexible,
sharp branches. They curled out and around from Its back like an organic cage,
the twig-like tips writhing and bending like angry earthworms, flailing,
twitching, vibrating in irritation at my intrusion. Oh yes, Walter, It saw me… and It was very, very angry…
I don’t remember how I
made it back to the campsite that chill, foggy night, and I continue to be
nothing but thankful that you listened to my urgent cries to leave at once.
That creature, that thing that
murdered Darryl… It was following us
the whole way out. I saw It follow our jeep out of the woods, even though you
seemingly couldn’t see It.
It… It followed me home, Walter.
I haven’t left the house
for days now. I can see It waiting outside even now, watching me through the
windows, rapping irritably on the windows and banging angrily on my front door
at night. It’s trying to get inside, Walter, trying to drag me back to that
hellish clearing where Darryl died. If It succeed, Walter… If It succeeds, I
have an awful feeling that my fate will be even worse than his.
Walter, this beast makes
no biological sense! How can any
being see with such precision if It has no eyes? Echolocation?
Vibration-sensing? It has no ears to sense sound with, and Its branches are too
multitask for vibrations. Heat-sensing? There is nothing on Its body to
indicate such a hunting method. Why would any creature have need for so many
extraneous limbs? Why does It have markings that emulate a suit? What kind of
predator is this stubbornly persistent in Its quest just to obtain one
difficult meal?
Do you see now why you
must burn this letter, Walter? I can’t even begin
to explain this being by science or by any sort of logic whatsoever. How could
anyone believe I saw something so horrific and strange if I can’t even give an
explanation, much less any evidence?
It’s tapping at the door
again. Knocking. Angrily pounding. It is furious,
Walter, and It wants in. It’s just a matter of time now before It figures out
how to pick the lock, or pull the door off its hinges, or crack one of the
windows. It’s extremely intelligent,
Walter. It can think. It can learn.
I pray you listen to me.
I hope to God you destroy this letter and never look back on that ill-fated
expedition of ours. You don’t want the fate I am now living. You don’t want to
grab Its attention. You don’t want to end up like Darryl did. Like I will.
I just heard the lock
click open.
"The letter truncates here, unfinished. It was found in the home office
of conservation biologist Dr. David Kampmueller on June 18th, 2012,
discovered by his close friend and colleague, Dr. Walter J. Heartwell. The
letter was tear-stained in several places and the writing was shaky, but otherwise
the letter was unscathed. At Dr. Heartwell’s request, a police investigation of
the area in which both he and Dr. Kampmueller were doing research was
conducted, however, no such clearing as the one described in the letter, let
alone the bodies of 23-year-old Darryl Stringer or Dr. Kampmueller, was
uncovered. The case remains open. - E"
<<end transcript.>>
