Samantha, if you’re reading this…well, we know how that line goes. I hope I died of natural causes at a ripe old age and you are happy, safe, and surrounded by a large family that loves you as much as I do. But…if this is ever delivered to you, then however happy and full your life may be, you are not safe. Because you receiving this letter can mean only one thing.
The Stranger is still hunting us.
I never got along with your Aunt Becky, even before your mother died, but I don’t think she is a bad person. If I was in her shoes, and my fourteen year-old niece was being raised to defend themselves against some unknown boogeyman, I might try to get custody too. And at the time, I didn’t fight it very hard. Not because I didn’t want you—no, never that. But after watching for the Stranger for years, I was tired, and I convinced myself you’d be safer far away from me. It would give you a break from my constant paranoia and give me a chance to try to finally end this thing without worrying about you getting hurt in the process.
The problem is, I failed. If you’re reading this letter, I never figured out how to stop the Stranger from coming back and either it or the world wound up eventually killing me. And if that’s true, then it means that I’ve failed you too. All I can leave you are some final words of advice in a dead man’s letter, and for that I’m very sorry.
I do hope this letter will be of some use though. It will give you something tangible to look back on when I’m nothing but a memory. Because you cannot afford to ever forget or trick yourself into thinking this was all just something your crazy father made up when he was alive. I don’t think you’d ever do that though, so the last reason is this.
You can’t ever let yourself think its over. Because it is never, ever over. It always comes back.
I know I tried to act hopeful when you were younger, but that was a father leavening the truth with a bit of mercy and optimism. Rounding off the rough-edges. But a rough edge can kill you, and the time for treating you like a child is past. So from here on out, you only get what I know, not what I hope or wish were true.
The thing we call the Stranger started stalking our family back in the early 1800s. There are several theories about how it began that I’ve heard over the years. It was a side effect of some ancestor’s deal with the Devil. It was the result of someone killing the entity’s master or family or pet dog. It was the practical effect of a curse that had been placed on our family for some real or imagined wrong.
This last has a bit more traction in the family than the others, though whether its because people know something I don’t or because it is the version that makes it less likely our ancestors were assholes, I don’t know. I think an equally likely hypothesis is that we don’t know why the Stranger hunts us and we never will. It’s like the surfer asking if the shark that attacked him had some deep and abiding grudge against the company that made his board. Shit, man, probably not. That shark is just sharking, and you had the bad luck to cross its path.
And in the end, does it really matter? The Stranger is still coming whether you understand its motivations or not. So setting that aside, let’s go over again exactly what it hunting us looks like.
First, it takes on the appearance of others. It does this by killing them and then taking their place. While there is usually a fairly short time gap between when it replaces the person and when it tries to get us, I have known it to wait several days between replacing someone and beginning to hunt us in earnest. It is very intelligent, and can pass for the person it is mimicking in most situations, up to and including even having some of their memories and habits.
When I was in my late twenties, before I met your mother, I had a diner I would always go to. Good food and cute waitresses. There was one in particular I always talked to and had known for almost a year. Then one night she jumps me. After its all over and police found the real girl’s body, I learned she had been dead for over four days. The Stranger had waited on me twice since then, chit chatting and seeming perfectly normal. And I had never noticed the difference until she reached for the back of my neck.
The touch is a gift to our family, but an unreliable one. If the Stranger touches you, even for just a second, you will get the worst rotten meat smell in your head for the next several minutes. I say rotten meat, but it is worse than that. Nothing else quite like it. It’s a great warning system, but the major flaw is it doesn’t help you until it’s already touching you. It’s not really a smell at all, you see. That’s just how your mind processes the feeling that something so wrong is so near.
Ideally, the Stranger would never touch you. But nothing is ideal, and the reality is that despite my best efforts, as I write this I still have no idea how to permanently kill this thing. The only things that work temporarily are stabbing it as I taught you or completely obliterating the body. While obliterating the body can be very effective, it does seem to cause less of a delay in the Stranger coming again compared to correctly stabbing all five sites in the proper order.
Which brings me to my second major point—it does not have a set pattern. The most frequent I’ve ever had the Stranger come for me was twice in one day in the same form (I had to run away the first time that day) and twice in the same month in different forms. The least frequent I’ve ever had the Stranger come for me was once in two years. Different bodies then, obviously.
I say obviously because, as you are aware, the Stranger seems unable to keep the same appearance for a long time. I don’t know how long, and its all just educated guesses really, but I’ve never seen it use the same form more than a month apart. When it kills someone to mimic them, it creates a new body. And when you destroy that fake version of them, you aren’t really destroying the Stranger. Whatever it is, it isn’t just a pod person or something. But it is smart enough and powerful enough to create living bodies. Use those bodies to hunt us. And keep coming back no matter how many times we try to kill it.
That’s something to keep in mind. The point of everything we do isn’t to beat it. It is to delay it. Keep sending it back to square one. And the most effective way of doing this, of buying us a few weeks or months of uneasy peace, is the ritual.
The fact that our family knows a ritualistic way for hurting and temporarily thwarting this thing is what makes me wonder which one of its origin stories might be true. I don’t know how we know what we do—only that it was passed down by my mother to me and my sister Maggie, and now I’ve passed it down to you. Not because its easy or safe to do, but because it always seems to work when done correctly, if only for a time.
Whatever abilities that thing might have, it is physically limited to the body it is currently mimicking. That means it likely isn’t as strong if it comes at you as a child or as quick if it tries to throw you off with a sweet-looking little old lady. But it is relentless, clever, and driven with a clarity of purpose that allows for no hesitation or retreat. Once it attacks you, you either destroy it or it takes you.
Sometimes you may get lucky. Have enough forewarning or be able to escape long enough to set up some kind of trap or get a good weapon to kill it with that time. But most of the time it will be on you before you can do much other than react, and again, depending on the person it has replaced, it may be stronger or more agile than you.
So you do like I taught you. You don’t fight it. You aren’t fending off a mugger, and if you waste time fighting with it, you will lose. Instead, you just kill it. You stab your knife into all five of the ritual points: shoulder, shoulder, groin, stomach, heart, in that order. You do it faster than you think you can and perfect every time.
Like I always said, it comes down to knife control. You keep a small, fixed-blade knife on you at all times. All times. You practice knife control every day—fast motion and sure grip, and you only have to go an inch deep every time you hit. Shallower and it may not work, deeper and you’re wasting time and risking blade drag on the wound. You do not vacillate or hesitate. You look at the knife not as a tool or even a part of your hand. You look at it as an extension of your will to stay alive.
And if you do it right and you do it quick, it will be losing its grip after the first puncture. By the third it will be trying to get away. And after the fifth, it’ll just be gone, like it never was at all.
At least until it comes again.
If you still trust me, if you still believe me, no doubt the idea of letting it get close to you terrifies you. It does me too. But it is necessary some of the time. You can’t carry around an axe or a flamethrower in your day to day life, and you can’t rely on others for help, as it always waits until you are alone. You’d think you could just always stay in groups, but that’s not practical long-term, and even if it was, it would be a mistake. It’d just be a different version of going to a cabin and avoiding everybody out of fear one of them could be the Stranger. Either way, you’d be letting it make you a prisoner in your own life.
I’m not saying I was the best father, but despite what Becky might claim, I tried to give you a good and normal life. Yes, I taught you how to be aware and watchful, how to protect yourself—not just from the Stranger, but from all the dangers of the world. But I also tried to teach you to live and enjoy your life rather than just spending all your time worried and afraid. It is not an easy thing to do for anyone, particularly if you have a shadow like this looming over you all of the time, but it is the most important thing I can teach you. Remember, you are fighting for your life, so make sure you live a life worth fighting for.
Finally, I know I’ve always been vague about what happens if the Stranger actually “gets you”. Again, I tried to protect you from the worst of it, and as long as you knew to be afraid of it happening, I thought I could spare you the details until you were older. Now you are, and this appears to be my last chance, so here we go.
Before she died, my mother told me about her older brother Jared. He was apparently a great guy growing up, and when he turned eighteen he joined the Army. Smart and hard-working, he made his way up through the ranks, and for a time he talked about being career military. But when their father, your great-grandfather, suddenly died of pneumonia, Jared took it hard. He started drinking more, and this led to him getting written up, then demoted, and finally dishonorably discharged. Within a year he was back in their hometown, working odd jobs and drinking his way through most nights and weekends.
But even then he wasn’t a bad guy. He was just an alcoholic. A sad alcoholic who had never hurt anybody. At least until he passed out in the wrong bar one night and the Stranger took him.
My mother didn’t know it had happened at first. Jared came around a couple of days later and was actually looking better. He was clean and well-dressed, and the perpetual sour smell of the prior night’s drinking was gone. He talked to her and their mother for a bit and then headed back to town for a job interview.
Within six months he had bought a house on the other side of town and was making good money at the accounting firm he had joined. He didn’t seem to have any friends or be dating anyone, and he didn’t come around as often, but that was all chalked up to him being so busy turning his life around.
At least by most people. To my mother, and perhaps her mother as well, something was wrong. It was hard to put your finger on it, but if you really knew Jared, you could tell the difference.
He was colder somehow. And while he would still laugh and joke on occasion, there was an underlying cruelty in some of the things that he would say. A dark contempt that had never been part of Jared, even at his lowest point. As time went on, I think they began to see the growing infrequency of his visits as something of a blessing.
But still, when they went two weeks without hearing from him at all, my mother finally went to his house to check on him. That’s where she found his body, torn to shreds and defiled, on the living room rug. When the police came, they said he had been dead for several days.
Some of the people in the attic had been dead far longer.
My mother would always get upset at this part, and I never pressed her for more details than she was willing to give. But apparently they found around ten corpses in Jared’s attic—men, women, and children that had gone missing over the last few months across five different states. The bodies had all been dismembered and desecrated. Some had pieces missing that were never found.
She swore to me that her brother would have never done that. That it was the Stranger—warping him or controlling him after it had gotten him. She even traced it back to a particular night and the bar he had passed out in, for all the good it did after the fact. And I trusted her judgment, but also she wasn’t just relying on what circumstantial evidence she had gathered or what she hoped to be true. Because less than a week after Jared was found ripped open, the Stranger tried to take my mother for the first time.
This is another point that I was always vague on. I gave you the impression that the Stranger might come for either of us, both to train you to be ready and because I couldn’t guarantee that it is actually following any set pattern or rules. But as far as I’m aware, it has always gone after only one particular person. When that person has been taken and used, or when that person dies for whatever other reason, it then moves on to the next person. Oldest to youngest in the bloodline.
My mother died when I was seventeen. My sister Maggie killed herself when I was twenty-three. And the day after her funeral was the first time the Stranger tried to take me. That’s the other reason you have to read this. The reason why you may have multiple copies of this same letter, as I had two delivery services and a person I trust all set to get you this letter at all costs if I stopped checking in. This may seem like overkill, but I needed to make sure there were redundancies in place if one of the copies didn’t reach you. Because this last point is the most important.
If I’m dead now, the Stranger is coming for you next.
And I don’t say this to scare you or ruin your life. Just the opposite. But you are the best and most important thing I ever did in this world, and I love you so much and I want you to be safe. I’m sorry I didn’t stop it. But maybe you will. Or if not stop it, at least survive it. You are so smart and strong, and I know you can do it.
Goodbye, sweetheart.
Comments